Major Principles in the K-12 Revolution, for Mandated Study by Aspiring Superintendents and School Board Members >>>>> Part One of a Multi-Article Series >>>>> The Damage Caused by Those Campus Low-Lifers Known as Education Professors, with Intimations for Undoing the Damage

We will transform the nature of the human experience on this earthly sojourn when we revolutionize K-12 education.  In order to wage the revolution in a practical way, in the way that Saul Alinsky would counsel us to implement plans for on-the-ground change, we must be clear as to our objectives, our definitions, and the details of our plan.

 

Professors of education tend to identify the purpose of education as the development of student “critical thinking skills” and a process of discovery that encourages “lifelong learning.”  Undergirding this approach to education is a “constructivist” ideology that maintains that curriculum should be driven by student experiential frame of reference and current interest, with teachers acting as “facilitators” who guide young learners to sources of information used to pursue individual and group projects.

 

Education reformers who work outside the education establishment, in the world of private enterprise, identify the purpose of education as preparation for the marketplace.  These reformers, either explicitly or implicitly dissatisfied with the public schools, emphasize an educational transformation whereby high school graduates will possess the math, reading, writing, technological, and industrial skills necessary to succeed in college, university, and workplace settings.  They want high school, college, and university graduates to be prepared for performing tasks pertinent to well-paying jobs capable of maintaining economically viable nuclear families. 

 

The purpose of education identified by education professors is intellectually impoverished.  The purpose of education identified by reformers from the world of private enterprise is insufficient. 

 

The approach of education professors is a smokescreen for their own intellectual lassitude and for the insufficient knowledge base of the putative educators whom they produce. 

 

I ask my students in the New Salem Educational Initiative all the time to think analytically about the reasons for Hamlet’s dithering once he vowed to revenge his father’s death;  about the relative claims of the Palestinians and the Israelis to territory that each considers theirs as a matter religious and historical right;  about federal budgetary priorities that must be made when considering outlays for defense, Medicare, Medicaid, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), physical infrastructure;  about the roots of rock and roll in blues, rhythm and blues, jazz, and country;  about the distinguishing elements of classical, romantic, and baroque music;  about whether the goals sought by the African American Northern Migration were fulfilled;  about the comparative styles of Arthur Miller and August Wilson---  and on and on with application of analytical processes to the world of knowledge.  They come alive when I ask them to give their viewpoints about such matters.  They typically have not been asked to give well-reasoned views at school.  By no means have our students generally been asked to “think critically.”

 

And the projects that they have pursued, so as supposedly to follow their passions and prepare themselves for “lifelong learning,” are inevitably done without proper academic context.  Their teachers facilitate their quest for information by pointing them toward websites, on which they yank down information for which they have little background in assessing value and pertinence.   A student may conduct an African American History Month project in February on Frederick McGee (a St. Paul attorney of the early 20^th century who was a colleague of W. E. B. Dubois and others in the Niagara Movement) may have no sense of the people and issues that led to the founding of the NAACP, or of the circumstances in Minneapolis-St. Paul that drove McGee’s own activism.  A student may lunge into a project on the Cold War with no background as to what communism actually means in theory and practice, or how a figure such as Joseph Stalin was an ally against fascism and Nazism but an enemy in the struggle for postwar international influence.  Students may grab books for sessions known as DEAR (Drop Everything And Read), making selections from mediocre volumes available in their classrooms but never gaining fascination with majestic children’s literature such as Winnie the Pooh, “The People Could Fly,” or poetic visions of Dakota origins.

 

The notion that our children are gaining critical thinking skills or that they are being prepared for lifelong learning is a charade.  They lack the knowledge base upon which critical analysis must proceed, and the projects that they pursue under flimsy guidance are done in such haphazard fashion and with such little respect for the requisite body of contextualizing information that they gain no practice in conducting authentic research or in the systematic quest for knowledge that lifelong learning would entail.  This disrespect for research extends through high school.  I have students in the New Salem Educational Initiative at all levels K-12;  rarely has a student at any level learned in classes at her or his school how to do proper citations, whether internal citations, footnotes, or endnotes.

 

The purposes of education lie in cultural enrichment, civic preparation, and professional satisfaction upon receipt of a knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education, imparted by knowledgeable and pedagogically gifted teachers to students of all demographic descriptors.

 

The sentence immediately positioned above packs a book into one line.

 

Details will be observed in the next articles in this series.