Public schools said goodbye to teaching knowledge, hello to social engineering. Kids grow up ignorant and empty, feeling like foreigners in their own country.
The Education Establishment has managed to separate the country's children from the country. A secret quarantine is in effect; children have been consigned to live in detached bubbles. To a degree rarely seen in history, children are exiles in their own country.
Physically, kids look the same. They are babies in cribs; play in the backyard; have pimples, and become restless teenagers. Little by little, they become adults. You could alter the hairstyle, do a little photo retouching, and all the children would look like the children at the time of the Revolution. Nothing has changed. In appearances, that is.
Inwardly, everything is changed. American children wander forlornly in an alien landscape they know little about and understand less. They have no history, no geography, no math, no science. They've been taught to dislike their country. Instead of knowledge, they've learned detachment and sarcasm, indifference and boredom. They've been systematically deprived of the skills and perspectives that would allow them to enjoy culture or navigate intellectual pursuits.
They are inside the society but curiously outside. Separated from it in the way that a neighborhood's birds and rabbits exist separately from the humans in the neighborhood. They see each other and warily pass; maybe some minor interaction takes place. But birds and rabbits grasp little about what humans are doing or why. Similarly, children stare uncomprehendingly at those strange creatures, adults, living in some parallel life.
The goal for the country's children seems to be the attainment of a pleasant emptiness. White marks on a white wall. It's long been common to say that children's minds are a blank slate, a tabula rasa. But what American public education has achieved is unprecedented: the tabula remains rasa.
How do we describe this state? An intellectual lobotomy? Cognitive cauterization? Certainly not all children are stunted in this way. Perhaps 10% or 20% receive a good education. I'm talking about great majority of average kids. Soon they'll be raising kids themselves. They'll vote. They'll build a country. Or unbuild it.
How in the world did the Education Establishment create this brave new child? In fact, there are four steps, which can be quickly described:
First, every school has to discard as much information as possible, using whatever pretext is handy. Some facts are not relevant; some are not multicultural; some are politically incorrect; some facts are too difficult for a particular group. It doesn't matter how you do it. The goal is that everything be thinned until finally you turn chunky beef soup into watery gruel. All the facts taught anywhere in the entire school should not fill up a small book. Now you're talking.
Second, insist for a hundred reasons that kids not be expected to remember or retain any of this thin fare. Rote memorization is laughed at. Drill and kill is scorned. Teaching to a test is attacked. So, there is little in the school to start with, and little of that ends up in a child's head.
Third, create easy, preferably subjective tests so that almost everyone gets an A or a B. These good grades suggest that children are mastering a great deal of knowledge. Parents are charmed by all the success. Nowadays educators are coming up with even more devious forms of testing, such as scrapbooks, peer review, and authentic assessment. The drift is away from expecting children to actually know anything specifically. Feelings and opinions are quite enough. Explaining how you approach the problem is praised. Correct answers are frowned upon.
Four, everything in the school and in the classroom must be enveloped in a smog of important-sounding, newfangled methods: constructivism, self-esteem, cooperative learning, critical thinking, national standards, 21st-century skills, and dozens more. Gobbledygook is made flesh. Apparent activity is all-important. In many respects the school is theater, show biz, mime. Teachers pretend to teach; students pretend to learn. At the end of the process, the children know nothing.
Everything that occurs in school is like a dream you had last night or the night before. Surely some interesting things happened. But you can't say exactly what. It's all very hazy now. Then even the memory of having a dream is gone. Rasa.
More evilly, what might actually be possible, and even easily achieved, is lost on the wind. In a world where everyone walks with a limp, running is no longer imaginable.
And so children, as never before in history, are turned into eunuchs of the mind. To the degree the Education Establishment can pull it off, children remain knowledge virgins. They are not unhappy. It's all they've ever known, these strangers in a strange land.
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Bruce Deitrick Price writes about education, culture, and language on Improve-Education.org.
#47: Teach One Fact Each Day complements the above article.
