The biggest problem in education is government control. Government control of the curriculum and government control of who is allow to teach that curriculum. The only way at present in New Zealand to escape this control is to home-school, where there is no requirement that the teacher be registered nor that they follow the NZ curriculum.
A number of people in the Blogosphere that think that the problem with education is leftism infecting the schools. Seriously, leftism is a minor issue. It's only piggy-backed onto a system that was already in place for the purpose of indoctrination of children. If all the leftists were removed from schooling tomorrow, the system that allows the government of the day to indoctrinate would still be in place.
Very few today can imagine a world without compulsory schooling unless they think of some backward, third world country. So I offer the following quote from 19th Century America to show that people back in those times recognised that school controlled by the government based on a system of education imported from Prussia was the real danger.
Related link: Chapter 7: The Prussian Connection (The Underground History of American Education
A number of people in the Blogosphere that think that the problem with education is leftism infecting the schools. Seriously, leftism is a minor issue. It's only piggy-backed onto a system that was already in place for the purpose of indoctrination of children. If all the leftists were removed from schooling tomorrow, the system that allows the government of the day to indoctrinate would still be in place.
Very few today can imagine a world without compulsory schooling unless they think of some backward, third world country. So I offer the following quote from 19th Century America to show that people back in those times recognised that school controlled by the government based on a system of education imported from Prussia was the real danger.
In 1839, thirteen years before the first successful school compulsion law was passed in the United States, a perpetual critic of Boston Whig (Mann’s own party) leadership charged that pro-posals to erect German-style teacher seminaries in this country were a thinly disguised attack on local and popular autonomy. The critic Brownson allowed that state regulation of teaching licenses was a necessary preliminary only if school were intended to serve as a psychological control mechanism for the state and as a screen for a controlled economy. If that was the game truly afoot, said Brownson, it should be reckoned an act of treason.
"Where the whole tendency of education is to create obedience," Brownson said, "all teachers must be pliant tools of government. Such a system of education is not inconsistent with the theory of Prussian society but the thing is wholly inadmissible here." He further argued that "according to our theory the people are wiser than the government. Here the people do not look to the government for light, for instruction, but the government looks to the people. The people give law to the government." He concluded that "to entrust government with the power of determining education which our children shall receive is entrusting our servant with the power of the master. The fundamental difference between the United States and Prussia has been overlooked by the board of education and its supporters."
Related link: Chapter 7: The Prussian Connection (The Underground History of American Education
You will not get rid of government schools until you first get rid of the leftists running them.
ReplyDeleteI don't agree. This is bigger than leftism.
ReplyDeleteThe thesis I venture to submit to you is as follows: That during the past forty or fifty years those who are responsible for education have progressively removed from the curriculum of studies the Western culture which produced the modern democratic state; That the schools and colleges have, therefore, been sending out into the world men who no longer understand the creative principle of the society in which they must live; That deprived of their cultural tradition, the newly educated Western men no longer possess in the form and substance of their own minds and spirits and ideas, the premises, the rationale, the logic, the method, the values of the deposited wisdom which are the genius of the development of Western civilization; That the prevailing education is destined, if it continues, to destroy Western civilization and is in fact destroying it.
I realize quite well that this thesis constitutes a sweeping indictment of modern education. But I believe the indictment is justified and here is a prima facie case for entering this indictment.
— Walter Lippmann, speaking before the Association for the Advancement of Science, December 29, 1940
Chapter 11: The Crunch