For decades now, Americans have known that our education “system” isn’t working. The history of education in the United States is a history of an entrenched system resistant to changes and reforms. Every few years new ideas are introduced, only to be changed again. This history was highlighted in a 1993 article by John Hood entitled: The Failure of American Public Education.
The history of reform efforts in American public education is replete with half-hearted measures, with almost comical misdiagnoses of education problems, with blame-shifting, and with humbug. Everyone is an expert (most have, of course, suffered through the very system they want to reform). At any one time during the course of school reform, an illusion of debate often obscures a surprising consensus on the heralded “magic bullet” of the decade—be it school centralization or progressive education or preschool education or computerizing the classroom—that will solve America’s education problems. These magic bullets always misfire. But instead of changing their weapon, policy-makers simply put another round in the chamber, foolishly believing that the newest fad will succeed despite the failures of its predecessors.
So those of us who have worked within the system know there must be a total redo.
For some time now I have been searching for a blog or podcast that addresses education. If it were not for the radical Left slowly taking over our schools, colleges, and universities, we would not be where we are today. To say that no one was watching the store would be an understatement. Being who I am and having the knowledge and insights that I truly believe could be the foundation for species-specific learning and personal/social development, I have taken to Substack at this for whom the bell tolls moment.
New and Unforeseen Opportunities to Rewrite Education
As I write this I can hear actor Robin Williams voice shouting “ Carpe Diem” in the 1989 film The Dead Poets Society. An auspicious outcome of the pandemic school lockdowns in the United States beginning in 2020 was that more American parents became aware of what their children were being taught and how school policies were harming them.
In a Washington Post Opinion piece dated July 19, 2021, the writer stated:
A battle has been brewing in the school districts around our nation’s biggest cities for the past year. One side is parents who saw incompetent school boards and administrators harming children by ignoring science and keeping children locked out of schools where they suffered emotionally, physically, and mentally. On the other side are the school board members, superintendents, and their union benefactors who saw parents as a nuisance or uninformed rubes who should have little say in the education of their children.
A week earlier, the Washington Times printed an article by James Varney entitled Parents groups opposed to critical race theory vow not to back down which stated :
Parents groups formed to combat critical race theory in K-12 schools vowed not to back down after teachers’ unions said last week that they would go to court to allow the concept to be taught in the nation’s classrooms. The leaders of the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association have vowed to use their deep pockets and extensive political and lobbying muscle to defend teachers who support curriculums infused with critical race theory, which teaches American laws and systems are inherently racist, and to employ opposition research teams to go after groups hostile to that teaching.
Needless to say, parents and all taxpayers have a right to oppose race-based instruction or the teaching of sexuality and sexually explicit books in their schools. They never signed up for it. Besides, it goes against the moral values of American society.
The response by the teacher’s unions is exactly why we must start all over. The generations of Americans educated in our present system has not only resulted in American education now dropping to 17th in the world from number one, but brought us to no less than civilizational decline. Survey of American attitudes toward key life issues such as community involvement, patriotism, hope and even having children have plummeted.
The awakening of parents about this most important humanizing and socializing tool, the education of our people can now be harnessed to replace how we learn by reawakening who we are in reality and replacing the fake learning that teaches what some imagine we are. biological anthropologists know and prehistoric societies have manifested successful adaptation, cooperation and development way before experiments with complex societies and advanced technologies. Our prehistoric ancestors accomplished things that we have forgotten and in terms of the current call for sustainability were knowledgeable enough not only to recognize the limits we have as humans, but our responsibilities to our living environments.
Critics of modern education make mention of its roots in the industrial revolution and how it resemble the factory as a model. Everything from the school building, the clock, the conformity in grouping, status and timeline is inhuman, inorganic and unnatural. Then there is the sacred curriculum. They emphasis on learning core content (information), sequentially and by age. Despite that we have known for ages that the affective domain drives learning, and that every person learns differently and at a different pace, our educational system ignors all of that by teaching to the cognitive part of the brain only and at a speed that is antithetical to human beings. Ever look of the history of the word curriculum?
curriculum
a course, especially a fixed course of study at a college, University. Or school, “1824, from a Modern Latin
Transferred use of classical Latin curriculum “a running,
Course, career” (also “a fast chariot, racing car”), from
currere “to run” (from PIE root *kers- “to run”.
Join me here on Substack for the conversation some 500 years overdue.
In the weeks and months ahead I will share what I call Essential Learning, a redo of education that recognizes who we are. The Culture Wars are almost over and the victors have their eyes on the spoils. Therefore, we must use what little time remains to turn the course.