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June 03, 2005
The Long Shadow Of John Dewey
Micheal J. Totten reviews a list of books compiled for Human Events by 15 conservative intellectuals. Topic: The 15 most harmful books of the 19th and 20th centuries. Michael takes particular issue with one of the choices (emphases are mine):
Here’s the complaint against Democracy and Education by John Dewey (a book I admittedly have not read).
John Dewey, who lived from 1859 until 1952, was a “progressive” philosopher and leading advocate for secular humanism in American life, who taught at the University of Chicago and at Columbia. He signed the Humanist Manifesto and rejected traditional religion and moral absolutes. In Democracy and Education, in pompous and opaque prose, he disparaged schooling that focused on traditional character development and endowing children with hard knowledge, and encouraged the teaching of thinking “skills” instead. His views had great influence on the direction of American education--particularly in public schools--and helped nurture the Clinton generation.
Well, Lord help us. Someone wrote a book that “nurtured the Clinton generation.” Better lump that in with Mein Kampf. Bush doesn’t = Hitler. But a Clinton influence apparently ranks with him.
Michael's a smart guy, but he's being led astray here by the Clinton reference (a rather silly one that should have been left out of the critique). John Dewey and his "progressive" ilk have created a huge block of barely-educated Americans who have neither the basic knowledge of our society's important ideas nor the critical reasoning skills necessary to be of any use to either political side.
I haven't read Dewey's book either. But I have read E.D. Hirsch and Diane Ravitch, and I have a six year old starting first grade next year. And I know the damage that "progressive" educational ideas have caused. The "progressives" saw in education the possibility of reforming society (indeed this is also the very same malady afflicting journalism profession--teachers/journalists as instigators of social change); merely imparting the accumulated wisdom of the previous thousands of years of the human race was denigrated and ridiculed.
As the peerless Ms. Ravitch says in her conclusion to Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform:
The three great errors demonstrated in these pages are, first, the belief that schools should be expected to solve all of society's problems; second, the belief that only a portion of children need access to a high-quality academic education; and third, the belief that schools should emphasize students' immediate experiences and minimize (or even ignore) the transmission of knowledge. The first of these assumptions leads to a loss of focus, diverting the schools from their most basic mission; the second contributes to low achievement and anti-democratic policies; the third deprives youngsters of the intellectual power that derives from learning about the experiences of others and prevents them from standing on the shoulders of giants in every field of thought and action.
Diane Ravitch, Left Back, 1st paperback edition, p. 465
Combine this preference for process over hard knowledge with the postmodern rejection of the value of empirical evidence (which makes test results--indeed the very idea of testing itself--unworthy of consideration) and you have the basis for the disaster that is public education.
And one of many crucial points to draw from this is: this should be an apolitical topic. If you call yourself a progressive, and you don't know what the Port Huron statement is; or anything about John L. Lewis; or indeed who John Dewey himself was--how can you successfully argue your position? There are thousands of young Democrats who voted for John Kerry and supported his stance against the Vietnam war who never heard of William Westmoreland or the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
The acquisition of knowledge is vital to both sides of the political spectrum: a knowledge of our history informs our current debates. Yet it is a matter of fact that our colleges of education, taking their cues from their big brothers and sisters in the liberal arts academy proper, have institutionalized the preference of "learning how to learn" over the accumulated knowledge of our civilization.
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Tracked on June 4, 2005 12:21 PM
