sobrohusfat wrote:sale4u wrote:Very informative article about teachers and the way they are brainwashing our children with their own agenda's.
Like what?
To ascribe all this mischief to one man is, of course, excessive. yet one man undeniably played a role in the social and cultural revolution of America in the twentieth century. True, he was powerfully influenced by others who came before him -- Rousseau, Hobbes, Darwin, Spencer -- and helped by a coterie of like-minded revolutionaries who worked diligently alongside him. As in all revolutions, his message was carried by thousands of disciples who often went beyond anything the original visionary had proposed, though what they were doing was derived directly from what he taught. To most of these, however, he is today little more a name. Very few have actually read what he wrote, let along approved of what he was setting out to do, though they have often strenuously, if unwittingly, helped him do it.
The man in question is the educator and philosopher John Dewey. The bare facts of his curriculum vitae are deceptively unspectacular. From a family of modest income, he graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Vermont in 1879, taught three years in high school and quit, received a doctorate from John Hopkins in 1884, taught at the University of Michigan, then became a faculty member of the University of Chicago in 1894, soon after it opened, and established there experimental elementary and high schools. After a clash with the university administration he left for Columbia University in 1904 where he taught philosophy until his death in 1952.
Creditable enough, but hardly the track record of a man who would more profoundly affect the culture and thinking of Americans than any twentieth-century president. However, that was because he knew something that no president since Thomas Jefferson has ever fully understood, namely that the way to fundamentally reshape a society is not by changing its citizens, but by changing their children -- more specifically, but radically changing those who teach their children. For the teachers could change the children, and the children would become the citizen and voters of tomorrow.
Dewey's agenda was not, in its ultimate goal, educational. It was political. Like the founders of America, indeed of all the Western democracies, he was obsessed with the idea of freedom. But his object was to establish a new kind of freedom. While people were free to vote and many were free to chose paths that could lead them to wealth and comfort, they were not in Dewey's view truly free.
All but a few advanced thinkers were prisoners of traditionalist thought and morality that prevented them from achieving genuine freedom and becoming their "true selves." It was this kind of freedom that he sought for all. He had achieved it himself; he wanted to confer on everyone. He envisioned a new civilization, liberated from its ancient taboos and enslavement to outdated creeds and codes of conduct.
Once delivered from this old morality, humanity would reach through science destinies vastly beyond present human imagination, he said. And the road to this nirvana lay not through some Marxist and Fascist revolution, but through an educational one. To Dewey, you didn't need the politicians. If you could change the way the people thought, the politicians would have no choice bu to go along with the new order. Over his lifetime he published some sixteen books, enunciating convulsive changes in education that would render the new schools unrecognizable to those who had attended the old.
His vision was embraced, indeed devoured, not initially by teachers, but by "educators" -- those who teach teachers -- a species that Dewey's era virtually brought into existence. Decade after decade a torrent of Deweyite disciples poured forth from Columbia University Teachers College, skilfully administered by Dewey's senior lieutenant in the revolution, W.H. Kilpatrick. What could be more impressive than an education degree from Columbia? They rapidly infused his ideas into the new "faculties of education, " themselves largely a product of Deweyism. These gradually supplanted the old and hopelessly hidebound "normal schools." Meanwhile, Dewey himself carried his ideas to the world in what he saw as personal "missions." He favoured such biblical terms, sometimes referring to his message as the "the gospel." It proved a gospel eagerly embraced in the Soviet Union.
Its principles became the foundational assumption of the new educators. The schools, they knew, must be used to work a wholesale rejection of all the old ideas about human nature. The concept of good and evil must be abolished, wrote Dewey. Such qualities as honesty, courage, industry and chastity must no longer be cherished, while things like malice, vindictiveness and irresponsibility need no longer be deplored. Such conduct is merely the response of the individual to the conditions around him. Indeed nothing should be transmitted to students from the legacy of previous generations. Whatever moral conclusions the student may reach, he much reach solely on the basis of his own experience.
Most important, he must not see himself as somehow "judged" by what he does or doesn't do. The idea of individual "blame" must be eradicated. He must regard himself as part of a community, part of "the public." If a crime is committed, the criminal must not be considered responsible. The community as a whole must have somehow failed him. So too must the idea of the "will" be abolished. The concept that he individual "chooses" between good and evil leads only to the defeat of "selfhood." There is no such thing as the human "will," he said, and the old moral boundaries between good and evil have become obsolete and invalid. Moreover, gender stereotyping must be stopped. There must be no such thing as boys' books and girls' book, or boy's games and girls' games, because such distinctions serve to perpetuate the old order. His ideas would "destroy many things once cherished," Dewey allowed, but that was the unfortunate price of human progress.
As the 20th century unfolded, these concepts began taking deep root in the education facilities and appearing in the schools. Gradually, the teacher ceased being an authority figure in the classroom. She must instead become a guild, a counsellor, a friend, said Dewey. Student desks must be rearranged in such a way as to overcome any suggestion of managerial leadership. The students must learn to lead themselves. Any attempt by a teacher to impose structure -- pass/fail, good/ad, right/wrong -- must be viewed as a form of "pedagogical abuse."
Indeed, all semblance of superiority or inferiority must vanish. Report cards must no longer carry grade standing. Anything that suggests standards of performance must not appear. Children must not be criticized for making "mistakes," nor be admonished to "sit still" because this may thwart their inner impulses. Checking those imposes must be considered another form of "abuse," for they are the means by which the child expresses creativity.
No student should be singled out for a distinctly good performance, nor certainly for a distinctly bad one, because the whole idea of good and bad must be removed from the child's mind. "Self-esteem" must be encouraged in every possible way, but never predicated on actual performance. The student must esteem himself because he is a self, not because he has actually accomplished anything. Learning to read must be considered a useful thing, but not primary essential. What ultimately matters is not what skills the child acquires, but whether he is becoming a "social being."
Similarly, in the higher grades, "critical thinking" must be fostered, but it consisted of encouraging the student to question and challenge the assumptions of the old order, especially those of his parents. A young adult who had learned to challenge the qualities and morality revered by his parents was deemed to "thinking critically." One who continued to respect and adhere to them was not thinking critically. His education had plainly failed him.
In the 1940s, an unforeseen development sharply checked the educational revolution, notably the Second World War. Suddenly qualities like honour, courage, duty, tradition and responsibility became not only praiseworthy, but crucial. Without them, the Western democracies would certainly lose. By the 'fifties, however, the war was safely over, and the revolution in the schools resumed with full vigor. Old teachers resisted. Indeed, some courageously continued to battle the Deweyite revolution fro the next half century. But such opposition was soon swept aside by the tens of thousands of young teachers pouring forth from the new faculties of education. These saw themselves as the harbingers of a new kind of society, with a new kind of citizen, that they were commissioned to be bring into being. Entire school systems embraced the new ideas. Dewey himself, before he died, became a hallowed figure, the man who had liberated America from the narrow intolerance and vicious bigotry of its past. At his ninetieth birthday, tributes came in from all over the world, for by now his works had been translated into eight other languages.
As the American public system embraced the new "progressive" aims and methods, Canadian educators were at first nervous. They feared that Canada's natural conservatism would sharply resist such innovations. They soon discovered, however, that Canada's supposed commitment to conservatism was actually a commitment to conformity. Canadians would do whatever respectable authority approved. When it became evident "reputable educators" were urging these changes, that's all they needed to know.