Saturday - December 13, 2003
It's All Greek to Me
I wanted to write a rant about the subjects we
learn in school and the ideology of educators. I've always resented not
learning Greek and Latin in my younger days, and I feel like I've been robbed of
a truly good education because of it. Every once in a while I pore through a
Greek primer but I lack the youthful drive and the discipline provided by an
academic environment to really be effective at understanding the
language.
And this is tragic, not just
for me, but for our society and the future of our freedom. It's not
coincidental that the people who formed this nation, and not just the ones in
Philadelphia at the Continental Congress, but all educated Americans had a good
understanding of Greek and its culture and philosophers. If you glance at a map
of the mid Atlantic states and immediately west of them, you will see towns
named Athens, Sparta, Smyrna, Corinth, Marathon, etc. Greek architecture
dominates public buildings, and our political structure is a reflection of the
knowlege gained from studying Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle among many
others. Before the founding of our nation, the Greeks were the only prominent
culture that was democratic, and we learned a lot from them when forming our own
democracy.
But our educators today have
lost that connection. They have forgotten that to keep our freedom, we must be
well taught in how freedom is protected, how it is formed and why it is
important. There has been very little since the Greeks to compare to their
experience, and precious few have had the insight and intelligence that their
culture has left us. The Age of Enlightenment, with Rousseau, Paine, Jefferson,
and Mason was only possible because these men read the ideas of the Greeks from
a millenia and a half before them.
But
American educators have been trying to squash these ideas for the past 120
years. I pulled out a book, Diane Ravitch's "Left Back," to dig up some
background for this rant and was stunned by the quotes I found in just the first
100 pages.
In the 1880's and 1890's a movement began in the
United States. There were many voices with as many opinions, but one of the
persistent arguments was that the education establishment wasn't preparing
students well for the world they were to face. One of the main themes was to
copy the Europeans by earmarking students very early in life as to their future
profession. The student who would become a ditch digger should learn different
things than the student who would be a lawyer or
doctor.
So let's get this right.
Public schools were first justified as a way to ensure that the
demos,
to use the Greek word for "the people," were able to take on the responsibility
of self-governing. If the people were not intelligently educated, it was feared
that our representative republic would devolve into mob rule like most
democracies tend to do. But the education reformers wanted to stop teaching all
the students to be educated and they wanted to teach vocations instead. Ravitch
says, "The goal of many educational reformers was not to make the academic
curriculum accessible to more students but to devise a practical curriculum for
those who would soon be in the workforce, especially students who were poor,
foreign born, and nonwhite."
The
leader of this school of thought was the Teachers College of Columbia, where
Earl Russell wrote in 1906, "How can a nation endure that deliberately seeks to
rouse ambitions and aspirations in the on-coming generations which in the nature
of events cannot possibly be fulfilled? If the chief object of government be to
promote civic order and social stability, how can we justify our practice in
schooling the masses in precisely the same manner as we do those who are to be
our leaders?"
Even worse was John
Dewey, who is best known for creating the Dewey Decimal System. He championed
the idea that students should be only taught, just simply taught. The subject
was irrelevant, it was only important that they be taught something. To him it
was the process of learning that was important, the actual content of the
learning was of no consequence, and for better learning the content should be as
interesting to the student as possible. But his well-meaning idiocy was misused
by his acolytes. "Dewey wanted the schools not to make students into cooks,
seamstresses, or carpenters but to use the occupations to provide insight into
how society evolved and how it functioned. In the public schools, however, many
of those who promulgated the 'new education' simply wanted the schools to train
better cooks, seamstresses, and
carpenters."
These reformers became
very powerful and influential with catastrophic results. Booker T. Washington,
representing the sentiments of the poorest in our nation, believed that studying
and understanding the classics is what created our freedom, and that this is the
best tool to ensure its continuance. He wrote, "the two chief desires of the
colored youth during all the reconstruction period were to hold office and to
study Latin." Yet G. Stanley Hall, one of the reformers wrote in 1902 that it
was his own "lifework for [Booker T. Washington's] race has been directed
against these two evils." Hall knew better what was good for the "colored
youth" than their own parents did.
It's
classic socialist central planning, what we would now label "liberalism," to
insist that some politician or academician knows what's good for people better
than they do themselves. But these educators saw themselves not as protecting
our democratic society, but as "makers of society." This is just another
betrayal of their original purpose. Even Teddy Roosevelt got into the act in
1907 by saying, "Our school system is gravely defective in so far as it puts a
premium upon mere literary training and tends therefore to train the boy away
from the farm and the workshop. Nothing is more needed than the best type of
industrial school, the school for mechanical industries in the city, the school
for practically teaching agriculture in the country." This sounds nice if you
don't try to think about what he's saying. What he's saying is that we no
longer need citizens who can think and can support "government by the people."
Instead, the government needs to pay for industry to get its workers trained.
Industry has training needs, but rather than pay for this training themselves,
they make the tax payers pay for their training program. This is an early form
of industrial socialism, and is a strong hint at why politicians and
industrialists supported this twisted type of anti-intellectual educational
reform. It's also a feature of industrial feudalism and factory
serfs.
In 1916 David Snedden accepted a
chair at Teachers College of Columbia, which sadly is still influential in
educational theory. Snedden thought that "the idea of learning for its own sake
was a luxury, which had no place in the public schools." He also "opposed the
chronological teaching of history, as he opposed the logical organization of any
subject matter, and insisted that the only history worth teaching was about
present social institutions. Any history that was not related to the present,
he asserted, was simply 'the cold storage' theory of education, nothing more
than facts packed away into students' mental storehouse for possible future
use."
Have we any doubt why our high
schools aren't teaching students anymore? A high school education has become
nearly valueless, not because of some recent mistake, but because of relentless
ideological attacks for over a hundred years against the very concept of
learning and teaching.
A primary facet
of the reformers' philosophy was to distinguish which students are to learn
which subjects at as early an age as possible. I remember in my own high school
career that we were all divided into Remedial, Average, and Superior students.
The idea that the teachers, who are notoriously the worst educated college
graduates in the country, are intelligent enough to make wise divisions of the
students is ludicrous. I was initially put into Average English, and only
through my own and my parents' vigorous objections was I allowed to be relocated
to the Superior class, where I spent the next four years trying to live down the
stigma of having initally been misplaced as Average. As an Average English
student, I would have been condemned to never getting into a first rate college.
I recently met an old high school friend who wasn't so fortunate, and she told
me that when she got to college, she was surprised at how easy algebra was, and
was perplexed as to why she was prevented from learning it in high school based
on her arbitrary assignment to a lower tier of math classes.
And that highlights a main feature of
these divisions. They imply to the student that these subjects are too
difficult for them to learn, and that's why they are excluded from learning
them. But the truth is much more sinister. Another denizen of Teachers
College, Ellwood P. Cubberly, wrote in
1911,
From a national
point of view it is always dangerous to educate a boy, and to a certain extent
also a girl, with no reference to vocational ends, and we may well pause and
reflect when we see great numbers of our brighter young people saturating
themselves today with a mass of knowledge that can have little application for
the lives which most of them must inevitably lead. Disappointment and
discontent are almost sure to be the result, and disappointment and discontent
among its educated classes are not good for any
nation.
If that doesn't scare
you, I don't know what else can.
That
these people have succeeded, despite the protests of parents in every generation
can be attributed to only one reason: The government controls schools. As
government increased its controls, more and more radical ideas were tested and
implemented. The goal has been to create docile citizens, not responsible,
well-educated ones. Private schools would never inflict this ideology on its
customers against their will.
A society
that doesn't study the greatest sources of democratic cultural knowledge cannot
seriously expect to maintain its democratic culture. The Greeks weren't
perfect, but they stand alone in presenting a long term example of how
democracies exist, thrive, and at times oppress and fail. Our own experiment in
democracy is too brief to really understand its tendencies. We have robbed
ourselves of another tool to help us succeed by ignoring the works of the most
brilliant men to ever live and write about democratic
governments.
The quote I cited from
Russell hints at how things went wrong. He claimed that the goal of public
education was to promote civil order and social stability, when the goal should
have been to promote understanding of how a free people govern themselves.
Civil order and social stability are most easily promoted with jackbooted
governments and docile citizens, but that is hardly the result we should be
aiming for. The only way to promote freedom and responsible democracy is to
have all people, no matter what their work is, educated in how to think about
philosophy, logic, and history. The brick layer may not need to understand
politics to be a brick layer, but brick layers have a responsibility to think in
order to continue our form of
government.
This rant was a long time
in coming, but was inspired finally by my reading a reference to the phrase
"Thalatta! Thalatta!" on the internet today. It took me a bit to understand
where it came from. I did a search and found some other references to it,
mostly poetry, before I realized it came from a cry made by the ten thousand
hoplites as they finally reached the sea and safety. It is the cry "The sea!
The sea!" made by the battle weary soldiers as they finally reached the safety
of the sea after fighting for thousands of miles out of Persia to the
Hellespont. I have read Xenophon's Anabasis a few times in English translation,
and thrilled to read this scene but I didn't know the Greek phrase. I feel
robbed, and as though I have a deficient education. The most common school boy
in this country 200 years ago read the Anabasis in its original Greek, yet I and
all my peers and neighbors are robbed of the rich literary, intellectual,
philosophical, and political legacy that was used to create this great nation
because of the anti-intellectual educational philosophy that has been foisted on
us against our wills this past
century.
If more people read the
Anabasis, we would have a lot fewer people arguing against our war against
terror. We'd be too educated to suffer these fools. We would know and
understand that freedom is only possible if we are strong and actively protect
ourselves.
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