Episode 135: Educational Wastelands (Wed., Jan. 31, 2024)
For more than 100 years, the so-called education wars have always been a deliberate attempt to sabotage K-12 in America.
it's much easier to reform our school system if we understand what befell us. Basically, it was a barbarian invasion by people who don't know anything about education but everything about creating wastelands.
Meet Arthur Bestor, a real educator
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◎Barbarian Warband for Frostgrave
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LET'S FIX EDUCATION: OVERVIEW
Recurring themes. Big ideas. Unifying concepts.
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LET'S FIX EDUCATION -- by -- Bruce Deitrick Price
Episode 135 -- Jan., 31, 2024
K-12 Wastelands
I just put an article on X that starts like this:
We Americans are getting dumber — the students, the schools, the whole society. And it's not accidental, not part of some cosmic foul-up.
Year after year, we see the least efficient theories and methods promoted throughout the system. Don’t we have to assume that academic and intellectual decline is exactly what our “experts” prefer.
(Historical note: Educational Wastelands: the retreat from learning in our public schools was a landmark book written by Professor Arthur Bestor in 1953. Bestor was a famous scholar and a leader in the American Historical Association (AHA). He made an heroic effort to stop the Marxists from taking over this professional association. He failed. I mention this book to show you how far down things already were 70 years ago! Our schools had become wastelands.)
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I want everyone to meet Professor Arthur Bestor, a great educator, a real educator, unlike most of the people we’re stuck with now. He started battling “educationists” in the 1940s.
Bestor was way ahead of most intellectuals when he announced that progressive is the same as regressive or repressive. The fascinating thing is that all of modern education was basically a slow motion takeover of very rich targets by a lot of stunted ideologues who don't grasp the big issues that they stumbled into. Their job was to tiptoe through the target, destroying what they could each year without sounding an alarm. The job was to destroy everything that most people called education, and offer as substitute a watered down synthetic manufactured in a Moscow laboratory.
Here are a few good quotes from his book….
The disciplined mind is what education at every level should strive to produce. It is important for the individual. It is even more important for society. It is most important of all for a democratic society. In that terrifying novel of George Orwell, 1984, the party of Big Brother developed the ultimate in ruthless dictatorship precisely because it devised the means of enslaving men's minds. It began by undermining the discipline of history, setting all men adrift in a world where past experience became meaningless. It continued by undermining the discipline of language, debasing speech until it could no longer be the vehicle of independent thought. And the crowning triumph of its torture chambers was the undermining of the discipline of logic and mathematics, the forcing of its victims not only to say, but actually to believe, that two plus two equals five.
Liberal education is the education appropriate to free people. There is thus a reciprocal relation between liberal education and freedom. People cannot be truly free if they are deprived of knowledge. and people cannot be liberally educated if they are deprived of freedom. Particularly the freedom to think for themselves.”
Across the educational world today stretches an iron curtain which the professional educationists are busily fashioning.. Behind it, in slave labor camps, are the classroom teachers, whose only hope of rescue is from without. On the other side lies the free world of science and learning, menaced but not yet conquered. A division into two educational worlds is the great danger that faces us today. American intellectual life is threatened because the first 12 years of formal schooling in the United States are falling more and more completely under the policy-making control of a new breed of educator who has no real place in — who does not respect and who is not respected by – the world of scientists, scholars, and professional leaders.
The typical Department of Education knows very well how to extort every possible advantage from this strategic position. In most institutions it has managed to seize effective control over the placement of teachers. it frequently undertakes to plan all teachers programs for them regardless of their academic interests. It institutes programs of its own leading to a major or even a separate degree in education. It encourages its students to pile up coursework and pedagogy far beyond the legal minimum…. It frequently works to eliminate general graduation requirements that specify work in foreign languages and mathematics. The department of education typically refuses to look upon the university as a community of scholars working to a common goal and attempts to abrogate to itself control over all course offerings relating to educational problems.
https://twitter.com/educatt/status/1752501081358135665
article on X
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Also on Let's Fix Education:
Episode 132: The One Book About Education Everyone Should Read
(Wed. Jan. 10, 2024)