Time to Flunk "Deliberate Dumbing Down", give it an "F", Expel it from the School of Life, Give Students Free Access to Unlimited Information

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Posted on 12/05/2024 11:15:15 AM PST by CharlesOConnell

At a time when America was rapidly industrializing, when famers who had done everything themeselves were being forced into factories, students who like Abe Lincoln studying by firelight had to be fitted for factory work, Woodrow Wilson said:

"We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks."

But now students are being cast adrift by a feckless educational establishment which can't even educate or regulate itself. Let's equip students' families with their own educational tax value. Revoke tax exemptions for public schooling. Euthanize it. Put it out of its misery.

Psychology Prof. Edward Lee Thorndyke, at Columbia Teachers’ College, discouraged basic education which serves as a foundation for self-determination, as useless, to be preferred to mass socialization to train young people to be good employees and not to cause any trouble.

“Studies of the capacities and interests of young children indicate the advisability of placing little emphasis before the age of six upon either the acquisition of those intellectual resources known as the formal tools—reading, spelling, arithmetic, writing, etc.—or upon abstract intellectual analysis. Despite rapid progress in the right direction, the program of the average elementary school is too narrow and academic in character. Traditionally the elementary school has been primarily devoted to teaching the fundamental subjects, the three R’s, and closely related disciplines.”

That was more than a century ago, before even the privileged few had sound liberal arts education yanked from them by 1930 so that now it's considered "cultural appropriation" to study "Dead White Males", before 4 Rockefeller Brothers caught Dyslexia from whole-word/look-say (vs Phonics) in John Dewey's "Lincoln School". The rest, "the dumb kids" would be limited to jobs like turning a single nut on Henry Ford's assembly line 12 hours a day 6 days a week, no vacations, few holidays.

It started long ago but firmed up in 1806 when the northern German Prussians lost to Napoleon, who said "every corporal with a Field Marshall's baton in his rucksack" meaning, forget the formalities of the ossified offier corps, local commanders should pivot quickly in battle as local conditions changed. Deliberate Dumbing Down in the Prussian tradition was advocated by Johann Fichte in Addresses to the German Nation (really, to the King of Prussia), advocating choosing 1 student in 200 to be the top dog, the Alpha (Brave New World), supervising 6 admintrative busy-bodies, the Betas (they set educatinonly policy in university psychology departments, "Social-Emotional Learning" and Common Core Math), over the majority in the middle who fear the smart kids and despise "the dumb kids". Psychology department chairmen from every world country flocked to Germany to study this system for ensuring a mass supply of docile factory workers and obedient soldiery, at the beginning, before universal compulsory, police enforced schooling, before 1917 riots in NY over the 1907 "Gary Plan" (Gary Indiana...).

This is supposed to rubber-stamp-out legions of factory workers--but wait, Ronald Reagan shipped off our factories & jobs to China--and myrmidons of mindless consumers breathlessly waiting the next big fashion wave for resolutely conformist, "brave-independent-rebellious" students whose necks are warped into the slightly-declining head angle of desperate cell-phone users so they can receive group instructions from their peer group via social media.

The only problem is, Hebrew University professor Yuval Noah Hurari is telling us that we will have enforced idleness, forget the meaningfulness of jobs and roles, an enforced "living wage" (not to mention eating bug-burger).

The 125 year history of "the Deliberate Dumbing Down of America", by Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, who got the goods on "Change Agents" in Reagan's Education Department, has itself run its full course of planned obsolescence.

Students need to be liberated from dinosaur factory schooling to write their own life script, to find their purpose in self-employment and self-directed community involvement, beyond the university education department deathlock on their thinking and behavior.

A vast economic system irrevocably committed to the current schooling tyranny has an unreleasable deathlock on our children’s future. The arbitrary, capricious schooling policies come down from a vertical pipeline with such ingrained anonymity that school administrators have not the slightest idea from where they originate. A gamut of school unions dedicated to every occupational classification down to aides, crowd out the ostensible, original function of “education”; unions were originally part of the centralized master planning from the turn of the 19th century–compulsory dumbed-down schooling was founded on unions. They constantly diminish the interests of teachers as ever increasing numbers of non-instructional classified personnel, who exercise no direct educational function for students’ benefit, are continually hired, padding school-district employment rolls so that the expense per student continually rises with continually diminishing educational effectiveness, each new hire contributing union dues with no bargaining or interest advantage to the teachers who actually manage children, resulting in continually diminishing compensation. Union bosses comprise the top layer of an elite unable to be overthrown that relegates virtually all children to soul-prison from K-12 and beyond.

Schooling is the largest government public works project in history, the largest business in America and probably in the world. Textbook companies, testing companies, schooling paraphernalia and school-lunch suppliers–to diminish the autonomy of families and make the isolated individual dependent on government–university educational-psychology departments and the federal government, a gobsmacking breadth of interlocking economic and political interest-sectors, together constitute an immovable, self-interested institutional block to improving the prospects for children.

The corporate consumerist and human resources management stakes in schooling have the effect that if children were ever to be taught self-reliance, autonomy and free thinking–public schools and colleges are far more rigidly doctrinaire than parochial-religious schools–if young people were ever to attain independence from the constant requirement of being taught what to think and minute oversight of what they do at all times, in schooling and employment, there would be a terrible crash in the existing, dependency-based economy.

Kids dependent on teachers to set their course for them were abandone during Covid. Homeschooling which had been the norm for centuries in America suddenly became viable again. The next black swan event will finally break the death grip the NEA has on our childrens' intellectual and cultural development.

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