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by Bob Cheeks | June 2nd, 2006
In his new book, Henry T. Edmondson argues that the root cause of our national educational dilemma is the pernicious influence of the flawed principles and doctrines of John Dewey. A review of John Dewey and the Decline of American Education.
John Dewey and the Decline of American Education
By Henry T. Edmonson III
ISI Books, Wilmington, Del.
Ppbk, 134 pgs., bibliographical references and notes
ISBN: 1-932236-52-X
“TWENTY YEARS OF SCHOOLIN’ AND THEY PUT YOU ON THE DAYSHIFT.”
– Robert (Dylan) Zimmerman, 1965
The late Richard Weaver, a rhetorician, philosopher, and a University of Chicago English professor, wrote in his essay, "The Role of Education in Shaping Our Society," “One of the great heresies of the followers of John Dewey is that they saw, and still do see, education as primarily political. The evidence of this damning proposition is that they tried to make the schools not the means of handing down the traditional knowledge and wisdom of our civilization but political instrumentalities for the constituting of a different kind of society.”
“The schools,” Weaver continued, “were to be used for the implementing of social democracy…This was to be the paramount aim of education…”
Needless to say Dr. Weaver was correct in his cogent observations of Deweyism. Fifty years ago, when Richard Weaver penned this essay, there were still pockets of what the Fugitive poet, Alan Tate, referred to as “the more homely mystique of Tate’s Creek Pike.” There was, at least, a lingering memory of homes and farms where kith and kin had lived, and lived well, where they raised their families, told their stories, and where they died in their own bedroom replete with ancient, creaking beds, and the smell of worn out bodies and strange elixirs commingling in perfect harmony. And, in those days the education of children was a different matter. It was obliged not only to teach the fundamentals but also to lay the foundation for wisdom and truth; its objective was to develop in the student a sense of freedom and merge with it the concept of virtue.
My father began his education in a one-room schoolhouse where George Armstrong Custer taught before he entered the military; my grandmother learned aesthetics, Greek, and rhetoric at Franklin College, a small liberal arts school in New Athens, Ohio; my great-uncle, Bob, studied his land and his stock, keeping his fields well clipped and his cattle fresh and fat. He was a man respected in the community, quiet in his manners, and wise in his ways.
Such were the descendents of Thomas Dickerson, a man who fought the British and “the Five Nations of Scioto,” with equal tenacity. He claimed his lands in the Ohio territory, as was his right as a soldier of the revolution, and his wife bore him children, first in a log cabin, later in a stone house. I am of his line and I am fortunate in my lineage and in my education, at least the formative years that began in 1952 when I made my acquaintance with the Sisters of Notre Dame.
Strict disciplinarians, the nuns dealt with loud, raucous, and disobedient children immediately. There was no fear that a child disciplined in those days would “tell his parents” because, if he did, he was apt to get it again at home. Lessons were traditional: arithmetic, English, penmanship, spelling, history, reading, and a rather large dose of orthodox Catholicism. The daily Mass, recited in Latin at St. Aloysius Church, gave us not only an understanding of a rich, vibrant, and ancient liturgy but also an awareness of “sacralized” time, a brief glimpse of another age, when the world was in consensus. The Church, its liturgy, and our school were respites from modernity. It was a brief interlude in our lives before we were to face the demon, and whatever truth I have learned in a lifelong search for what is, found its beginning in those years of my childhood.
My generation was the last to receive a “traditional” education. Today, of course, public education has come under severe criticism and no book that I’ve read better explains the root cause of our national educational dilemma then Henry Edmondson’s John Dewey and the Decline of American Education.
Edmondson must first be congratulated for having the tenacity to plow through Dewey’s oeuvre, a task rarely attempted these days even by the educational cognoscenti who continue to clamor for “innovation” in the face of fifty years of failure. The author portrays Dewey as a basilisk, hell bent on achieving a utopian “equality” implemented by government intervention in the private sector, so that men can obtain their “wants” as well as their needs. It was the children Dewey targeted as the means by which to obtain his desideratum.
“Education,” Edmondson writes, “was Dewey’s passion, the field in which his political aspirations, moral philosophy, and psychological innovations found their purpose.” For John Dewey philosophy “was so much wasted time;” he knew that only a truly democratic society, one devoid of cumbersome traditions and mythical religions, would best serve the interests of the burgeoning democrat-socialist. For Dewey, a child’s intellectual and moral well being depended on the eradication of “that belief in objective truth and authoritative notions of good and evil.”
Dewey was heavily influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, and adhered to his rather inchoate observations that human beings are fundamentally good, that human nature can be manipulated, and that traditional and religious education is harmful. But Dewey did the old Frenchman one better, “…education must be a predominantly social experience.” Education was a matter of “progressive experimentation.” The teacher’s primary goal is one of collecting data, forming an hypothesis, and applying it in the classroom. The student was to be set free to inquire, learn at his own pace, and develop his own interest in whatever subjects please him.
Edmondson covers the entire range of Dewey’s addlepated educational pretensions, from “constructivism” to “values clarification,” and then sets about to contrast Deweyism with the educational dictums of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Further, he examines the moral pedagogy of Cardinal Newman and Thomas Aquinas in the penultimate chapter, "A Useful Education," and completes his book by addressing the pernicious effects of educationism and calling for the eradication of Deweyism.
Dr. Weaver, in the previously cited essay, makes the point that mathematics and language are man’s primary symbolic tools, and these subjects are insufficiently addressed in our “progressive” schools. Is it any wonder that our children can’t communicate or make change? He cites the need for literature, in its innate ability to provide different means at “looking at things,” at understanding the concepts of “drama and tragedy.” And, history, Weaver believed, must take its place in a liberal education, for it is the primary means of passing along our shared “cultural consciousness” and provides the student with an understanding of the conflict between “the ideal and the prudential,” offering the possibility of wisdom as opposed to sophistry. In far too many of our schools these subjects are given short shrift. Contemporary education, at its best, has declined into a utilitarian “one size fits all” methodology, to the detriment, not only of children, but also for society as well. To complicate matters, modernity has produced a generation of children raised to believe that they have “rights” that were never guaranteed nor earned, children who exhibit rude behavior, licentiousness, and violence out of habit and inclination.
Teacher’s unions, school administrators, and educational “experts” are locked into a system that is funded by public monies, primarily property taxes. Voters now routinely reject property tax increase initiatives, forced to decide between money for schools and the necessities of life. What then is the solution?
“Public education,” Dr. Weaver writes, “has today become such a shibboleth that to say anything against it is often to invite incomprehension or to provoke the most violent denunciation, as if one had attacked religion. But I will declare my belief on this subject, which is that our situations would be better if not only a considerable part but even a majority of our education were conducted under private auspices.” Many people adhere to Weaver’s advice and send their children to private schools or educate them at home. But there remain the millions attending public schools, being indoctrinated in Dewey’s socialist nonsense, unable to either read, write or think logically.
Edmondson’s book defines a decline in education predicated on John Dewey’s flawed principles and doctrines but Dewey is not the only villain in this drama. Modernity promised to replace God with the New Man, the Heroic Man, and though scientism-technology was able to begin to answer the question How it is, it sat muted before the Platonic query, What is.
Modernity’s quest for a godless society resulted in the loss of virtue, the divorce of freedom from wisdom, the loss of consensus, the collapse of the bourgeois family, the phenomenon of centralization and globalization, and the triumph of nihilism. But modernity is merely the deification of scientism brought about by human beings that made terrible choices, by politicians who banished the philosopher from the city or sent him to Auschwitz or the gulag, and by citizens who ceded their responsibilities to an elite that retired to the suburbs.
In 1576 the Jesuit, Juan Bonifacio wrote, “The education of youth is the renewal of the world.” Obviously, to renew this “world” would be folly. The only world worth “renewing” then is one in which there is a merger between reason and revelation, an incorporation that allows the re-establishment of prudence and virtue, signaling the philosopher’s return to the city.
Our public education institution is like the mushroom farmer. It keeps the students in the dark and feeds the student manure.
When will the parent ever get vouchers? When can we save our children?
A child's mind is a terrible thing to subject to public education. I seems justice to condemn such a system as child abuse.
Comment by J.C.H. | June 2, 2006
Public education stinks (I know, I lived through it), but I'm not sure vouchers are the answer. One of the reasons that Americans supported the establishment of public education in the first place was to ruin the influential Catholic parochical schools. It worked. Vouchers are just more of the problem- do you really think that federal and state money comes with no strings attached? The application of public money to private schools makes them just as bad as the public schools.
Comment by Ted | June 2, 2006
"Dewey’s socialist nonsense, unable to either read, write or think logically"
Is this not what socialism is all about? A populace that can be easily controlled because they cannot make any decisions for themselves? The nanny-welfare state to the rescue!
Secondly, is it not almost funny that the elites that seem to love to foster public education on the rest of us have the means to opt out of that system? I would agree that vouchers are an answer, perhaps not the only one, but certainly one worth investigating.
Comment by Richard | June 2, 2006
Is this the same Dewey of the infamous retarded library organization system?
Comment by parsimonious mom | June 2, 2006
Anyone interested in another very indepth and thorough look at the history of public schooling should also check out the work of John Taylor Gatto, most notably
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/index.htm
Dewey gets considerable attention in this book (which is availible in its entirety online) as well.
Comment by Jake | June 2, 2006
I agree with Ted: vouchers can never be the answer. I became a teacher in midlife (in a public school) because I wanted to make a difference, and I love it. Yet my wife and I have for thirteen years sent our children to nothing but a private school. That is a decision we made and one for which WE bear the financial burden. Other citizens are not obligated, by way of their tax dollars, to assist us in that individual decision. America is not a socialist state; we all must make our own way.
If you were to offer vouchers to any American parent, in a democratic society you'd have to make them equally available to ALL parents, and where the heck is the money going to come from for that? Even if you cut funding to public schools (cheating many kids) to divert that money toward vouchers, and even if the private schools existed to accommodate all those wanting to attend one, you'd still have no solution because tuition in virtually all private schools covers but a portion of the cost to keep those schools running.
Furthermore, the new bureaucracy that would be required to put into existence a nationwide school voucher program would cost millions, and who's going to pay for that?
True, our public education system needs a lot of tweaking, but vouchers can never be the answer. More money toward education can help, but I think even more we need committed teachers, committed administrators, and definitely committed parents. When you have those elements, I think what eventually follows are committed and higher achieving students.
Dan
Comment by Dan Killman | June 2, 2006
Bruce N. Shortt, a Harvard Law graduate, and a Stanford Ph.D. in education, has given us perhaps the best single book on government schooling, "The Harsh Truth about Public Schools" (2004, Chalcedon/Ross House Books). He practices law in Houston, and with his wife homeschools their children.
"Red Cocaine," Joseph Douglass, Ph.D., a careerist in U.S. intelligence, testified before Congress on what he documented in this book (and also in "Betrayed"): torture-by-experimentation upon U.S. POWs by Soviet and other Communist nations, beginning in the 1950s. The documented plans of the Kremlin leadership, put into action, included development of Latin American drug cartels, in order to target and weaken U.S. youth culture, military, and inner city residents. This information was never publically noted by the MSM of the time, as detente was the ambiance of the time. However, it is fascinating history.
Comment by j | June 3, 2006
To Dan-
You are contradicting yourself. Your line "America is not a socialist state, we all must make our way.", is a pipedream. How can anyone, a teacher no less, believe our educational system is not a socialist system. What your argument seems to say is, it is only fair for taxpayers who choose private schools to pay for the choices of those parents who wish to send their children to public schools, not the other way around. What is your definition of socialism when taxpayers are forced into a government program for the welfare of others, in which government directly competes with private ownership.
Your answer, more money, better teachers, administrators, and parents is a false hope.
- The more money we spend the worse our education system has become.
- How do you expect the next generation of teachers and administrators to be "better." This is unrealistic and given the economic forecast of education, highly unlikely.
- The parents who get involved and truly care about the educational system are the ones who first and foremost look to private schools, like you.
You believe no one via tax dollars should help private schools. You believe a better school system than our current one does not deserve or merit vouchers, tax credits, or incentive. Instead you believe that the failing system with no real brighter future merits the tax dollars of which we pay.
The height of your hyprocisy is in your line, "Other citizens are not obligated, by way of tax dollars, to assist us in that individual decision." This by definition defines capitalism and the free market system. What the public education system operates under is the direct opposite. Citizens are obligated by way of tax dollars to assist other individuals decisions. This is Socialism.
As citizens we are pursuaded to believe that governement must keep its hands in our educational system to protect the poor or to ensure fairness. As is always the case, government only muddies the waters and delivers a far inferior product than private enterprise does. We have created a system that begs for mediocrity and ry when it delivers. The path to a great educational system is more private school initiatives. The less government, the better.
Comment by honker | June 5, 2006
Honker: the fact that you're suggesting that I'm a hypocrite says to me that you like to get personal about things, so I don't know if it will do any good to respond to you, with your mind so firmly made up – yet I will. And I'll try my best to avoid being as negative about it.
When I made a decision in my middle-aged years to become a teacher, I had no awareness – and still don't – that, while sending my kids to a private school, I was being a hypocrite. I believed that I could go in and make a difference in kids' lives, which, I'm thankful to say, I have in some ways. And we'r talking about kids who don't have the advantages mine have had. Furthermore, when I look at other teachers around me who are settling for a pay scale far less than what other professions could offer and who give of themselves in untold ways year after year, I know that there is still a great hope for the children whose parents can't afford private school education. But, of course, those wonderful teachers, of which there are many, seldom get much attention in the public arena.
Are there "mediocre" teachers who've simply given up, and are there some pretty deplorable public schools to send one's kids to these days? Unfortunately, yes, there are. Are there dedicated, smart, self-giving teachers and public schools with administrations that are turning things around against all odds? You bet there are. The unfortunate thing is that people tend to look at only one side of a situation and perhaps listen to the media a bit too much, a media that will forever focus on the bad and seldom the good in society. Or maybe they've suffered some hurt personally through an inferior school, which is a very unfortunate thing.
How sad it is that people come to a point of just giving up, not that I don't understand, to some degree. When you look at some of the bad things going on in some school settings, it is hard not to get discouraged. Therefore, choose instead to look at the great things going on, or better yet, get involved in some way to make that bad situation better. One person can make a difference, and one person can get something good started that grows. A person doesn't have to become a teacher as I did; he or she can just volunteer one afternoon a week, as my in-laws have done, to go tutor some kids in reading at a local school. The other possibilites are endless.
In response to Honker's assertions, I'll make these responses;
1. The more money we spend the worse our education system has become. This is both true and untrue. Some money does get misappropriated to things that end up failing or that somebody just plain squanders. But then I've seen what great things can happen when funding finally comes through for new computers in a school, and many other things too numerous to mention.
2. The next generation of teachers and administrators being better is highly unlikely. Maybe, maybe not. I'm seeing great ones come along all the time, ones who care about kids and want to change their lives. And it's a fine thing to see.
3. Caring parents are the [only] ones who look to private schools. Yes and no. I've seen some very dedicated parents at the public school where I teach, though yes, I wish there were more. And where the parents don't care, all the more reason a caring teacher needs to be there for those kids. Many teachers, God bless them, sometimes nurture and act as a sort of surrogate parent to kids from bad homes, and what would those kids do without such teachers?
But we could argue the virtues versus the weaknesses of our public schools forever. I'd prefer to return to the point I was mainly making in my posting: that vouchers are not the answer, and therefore, trust me, they never will come about on a national level. The money simply won't be there to furnish every school-age kid in America a voucher, even by shutting down the public school system. And even if someone found a way to assure the creation of millions of new private schools instantaneously in order to accommodate the kids, private schools are just that: private, and they take who they want; there's no guarantee for anyone.
If you dispense with public schools, you'd almost have to dispense with compulsory education laws for kids. If you're going to require people to see that their kids are educated (which we as a nation must continue doing, like any other civilized nation), you must provide the schools for them to attend. Thus, imperfect as they are, public schools are here to stay. For better or worse, it's the way things are. And if you provide vouchers to any families that wish to make an alternative choice for a private school, you must make vouchers equally available to all Americans, and that's creating a no-win, impossible situation. Why? There can't possibly be enough schools to go around, tuition alone wouldn't keep them running anyway, and the money would have to be taken from public schools which are already suffering.
Since we must accept that public schools are here to stay, there is one very viable prospect that caring parents and teachers can explore, that being charter schools. I won't go into all the details of how charter schools work technically, but they're working very successfully in many places. In a charter school situation, you get the government funds because you are a public school, but it is run the way the people who chartered it decide it is to be run. What such schools require are a lot of dedicated parents and educators who are willing to do the work to get them up and going.
Comment by Dan Killman | June 5, 2006
Intresting discussion for sure. I'd just like to suggest that the public schools can not be "fixed' because they are not in any way malfunctioning. More likely the school system is working exactly as intended and to a degree of precision and sophistication that would have been unimaginable 50 years ago. If you think my suggestion sounds ridiculous stop first to consider and investiage who really sets the policies and priorities of the public school system and how their motivations may just be vastly different than those you and I would hope for. If you think THAT suggestion ludicrous… then read up on the topic of the above book, Mr. Dewey, and check out his opinions on education and whose intrests exactly the school system should serve. Not to mention those of Rockefeller, Ford, B. F. Skinner… and others.
Comment by Jake | June 6, 2006
To Dan- I was not calling you in the least bit hypocritical f0r your profession or for your decision to send your kids to private school. I respect your decision in both regards greatly. I find the hyprocrisy in testifying that funding or having vouchers in private schools would be against our democratic virtues while at the same time supporting the tax supported public shool system. I see nothing within a public school system that suceeds over private school, yet I am forced to support the public school system through wages and taxes. You defended the practice of unwarranted taxes on individuals to support the public schools over private schools based primarily in an effort to save us from socialism. My point, and I believe the hyprocrisy of your argument is that the funding of our current system is socialism. Our education system is based on unilateral taxes to support an industry under government control which the private sector could and have proven to do better. This is the basis of socialism, not the other way around.
Comment by honker | June 7, 2006
More than 1/2 of the public teachers on Long Island, NY earn more than $100,000 per year which is 52% higher than the median income of $66,000. If you build a house on Long Island, the lowest amount of property taxes, from which school taxes are collected, is now over $12,000 per year – that's $1,000 per month.
I know someone who helped initiate a lawsuit on behalf of a student who graduated from Hempstead schools who just plainly couldn't read. Hempstead schools collect higher per student than the median for Long Island so funding wasn't an issue. Apparently it's the parents' fault.
Money just isn't cutting it. Teachers with tenure cannot be fired and the system is resolute in not holding anyone accountable for results.
It seems to me that defending the system as it is now is just insanity. Let the parents put their kids in the best schools they believe they can find with the money that's already being collected. What the anti-voucher people won't tell you is that most of the school tax money is collected from property owners who don't have kids so that large amount of money will continue to remain in control of the public schools.
If I was tenured on Long Island as a school teacher, retiring with an incredible package, earning more than $100,000 per year working 180 days per year (yes, that's 16 weeks off), I'd be inclined to be defensive as well!
If you look at costs from the 1950s and compare them to today, every expense is in line except for one. The cost of owning a home, car ownership, food, even college expenses are in line. The monster child in the budget is texes. I believe one could make the case that taxes are the reason why most families need two incomes to survive, unlike in the 1950s.
It's bad enough – come on, let parents take their money and pick the best schools for their kids.
Comment by Mike | June 7, 2006
"If you’re going to require people to see that their kids are educated (which we as a nation must continue doing, like any other civilized nation), you must provide the schools for them to attend."
Using that logic, where does it stop? Most states require drivers to have insurance on their vehicle, should we have tax-sponsored government car insurance? OSHA requires certain safety apparatus be used by employees in certain fields, is it the government's responsibility to provide them? Our current, federally controlled public school system is worthless. It is accomplishing exactly what it set out to accomplish: it's churned out generations of individuals who are brainwashed into liberal thinking, who begat sons and daughters who were taught the same. The ultimate goal is uniform conformity to the liberal idealogy. Once you get enough generations of parents indoctrinated, their children will be indoctrinated by the school system, and it will be affirmed at home by their parents as well. We shouldn't be paying taxes to support something that we get no say in ("taxation without representation" is one of the fundamental reasons why America was founded). The people who are paying the salaries of school superintendants and teachers don't get to decide who gets hired. They don't get to decide what ideas get imposed upon their children. And when the system is ineffectual and inadequate, they don't get to decide any changes in policy or replacing of school officials. It's a great situation for lazy parents who don't really care what their kids are learning when they're at school 7 hours a day, but not so great if you don't happen to be a maniacal, extreme leftist and want your children to be educated and not brainwashed. Vouchers are a better solution than you think. What a voucher does is gives the money that a parent would ordinarily contribute to the broken down public school system, back to the parent to spend where he pleases to educate his child. This takes money away from the public schools, yes, but it also removes that student, and the subsequent financial burden of the student, from the public school as well. What it does is gives parents a choice as to where the money they give the federal government for the education of their childen, is spent. Charter schools are a lesser evil than the current system, but what really needs to happen is we need to abandon our current system and start from scratch. Schools should be funded by the states, not the central government, and should be subject to the wishes of the parents whose children have to be there.
Comment by Patrick Mulligan | June 7, 2006
My children and grand- children went to public schools. Years I have watch how the democratic adenda tryed to brain-wash our children. Now I'm sending my great-grand- child to a private school. The damage that public schooling has done to her was not teaching the basic's. She is now learning and excelling. No Child Left Behind made it worse for the public schools.
Comment by Catherine Caseber | June 12, 2006