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K-12: Marked for Extinction
Aug 5, 2019 by Bruce Deitrick Price Columnist EducationViews.org
Study education for any amount of time, you will be struck by the disappearance of many things once thought essential and permanent. Such useful features as direct instruction, maps and geography, cursive writing, multiplication tables, phonics, important dates and events, in short, basic skills and foundational knowledge taught in an orderly classroom. Where did they all go? Why did they go?
You’ll start to suspect that a lot of effort must have gone into eliminating these valued practices that most schools around the world still consider essential. Who exerted all this effort?
And these traditional practices, these popular methods, are not simply downplayed. They are exterminated and buried. You can hardly find a trace of what was once commonplace in every school.
You have to be impressed by the thoroughness, the relentless pursuit of extinction. It’s like a Greek tragedy, or a modern Mafia vendetta. It’s not enough to kill Joe the Bookie. You have to kill his associates, maybe his family, perhaps his dog. There must be no trace of Joe left in the world.
Thoroughness, that’s the most striking thing in American public education. All the practices once viewed as normal and desirable are aggressively expunged, erased, obliterated, deleted. It’s a totalitarian sensibility, a fascist sensibility. Mussolini demanded: “Everything in the state. Nothing outside the state.”
For example, roughly in 1931, Whole Word was pushed into public schools almost overnight. Phonics books were not just abandoned but destroyed. They disappeared from public libraries. Very quickly, the only phonics books left were secret possessions hidden away by smart teachers for furtive use. What a remarkable development: real reading was forced underground.
In the American education wars, overkill is clearly a virtue. Shooting something one time doesn’t count. One bomb is nothing. You have to attack the problem, the offender, again and again.
If you really want to destroy something, attack it simultaneously from every direction. Artillery officers call this interlocking fields of fire. “Target neutralization requirements” are simple. Nothing survives.
These terms are aggressively military. That is appropriate. John Dewey and his Progressive followers operated like a smart, disciplined cult. Then circa 1921 came the Comintern (Communist International), the USSR’s gift to the world. These people were worse: nondescript subversives but hard core. They were not playing games. They were at war with everyone who was not in their orbit. Like Khrushchev, they came to America to bury America.
It’s not easy for ordinary Americans now, or 100 years ago, to grasp the nature of the enemy. Americans are easy-going. They say: live and let live. Except in rare cases, they’re not looking for a fight. So they don’t recognize a vicious enemy even though the enemy struts in front of them.
Americans, even now after many decades of declining academic attainments, are surprisingly naïve. They don’t imagine that anyone would want to dumb down public education. They can’t imagine that someone might deliberately use teaching techniques that don’t work.
https://www.educationviews.org/k-12-marked-for-extinction/