Remember as
you read this that I am an activist working for the overhaul of the locally
centralized school district, with the Minneapolis Public Schools as my
focus. I am a practical revolutionary in
the spirit of Mohandas K. Gandhi, Mao Zedong, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X,
Gloria Steinhem, and Saul Alinsky. I
have as little immediate regard for hippy-dippy white liberals as I do for
fascists and white supremacists of the right.
The latter are clearly and obviously repugnant; the former are more surreptitiously and
insidiously so.
Bob Walser is
a putative but falsely proclaimed “progressive” whose inclinations on matters
of educational philosophy are of the kind espoused by education professors in
departments, colleges, and schools of education--- from the second decade of the 20th
Century forward.
Understand
the historical context for this movement:
…………………………………………………………………………
The first
cogent vision of education in the United States came from Thomas Jefferson,
author of the Declaration of Independence,
Secretary of State under George Washington, Vice-President under John Adams, third
president of the United States during 1801-1808 (and a smidgeon of 1809). Jefferson held that he knew of no safe
repository of government but the people themselves and that to exercise the
function of citizenship people must be well-informed on the basis of common
knowledge. Jefferson was famously a
slaveholder with a limited denotation of who constituted the “people,” but the
essential vision of democratic citizenship permeated the United States
Constitution written by fellow Virginian James Madison; the latter also excluded from citizenship
African Americans, Native Americans, women, and those who did not own much
property, but these latter groups (think Frederick Douglass, Ida B.
Wells-Barnett, W.E.B. DuBois, A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X,
Shirley Chisolm) proved adept in utilizing the fundamental democratic ideals
professed in Jefferson’s writings and in the Constitution painstakingly
to extend the definition of the “people.”
Nineteenth
century educator Horace Mann further developed the Jeffersonian vision for
education by extolling the virtue of “common schools” in which all future
citizens, the young people, of the United States, would be the recipients of
commonly held knowledge sets in mathematics, science, history, government, geography,
and verbal literacy. One-room school
houses appeared across the landscape of the nation, wildly varying in subject
area and pedagogical quality but roughly aspiring to the Jefferson-Mann
vision. Late 19th century
intellectuals Lester Frank Ward and William Torrey (W. T.) Harris eloquently
advocated for liberal education, developing compelling arguments for the need
for an informed citizenry.
Professionalization
of teachers began with the establishment of normal schools, which varied in
quality as widely as did local schools.
The assumed philosophy of education, though, closely paralleled that
advanced by Jefferson, Mann, Ward, and Harris.
Most young people attended school no further than grade 6, at the end of
which they could read, write, do basic math, and had a sense of the general
contours of American history, government, and literature as presented
especially in the popular McGuffey
Readers. African American children
were ill-served in most places, but many African American teachers strove
heroically in racially segregated schools to impart an education that generally
followed the premises of Jefferson, Mann, Ward, and Harris.
A number of
trends in the first two decades of the 20th century boded ill for public education in the United
States:
Just as more
people sought public education for their children, as more students
matriculated in high schools, and as junior high schools appeared in some
cities as intermediate institutions of learning between grades 1-6 (grammar
school) and 10-12 (high school) to provide instruction for students at grades
7-9, these events clustered in such a way as to undermine knowledge-intensive
education for all citizens:
>>>>> Immigration
burgeoned, especially as originating in southern (Italy, Greece) and eastern
(Poland, Bohemia [Czech society], Hungary) European nations;
>>>>> African
Americans moved northward in droves to escape the horrors of the Jim Crow
South, so that by 1915 we observe a trend that becomes the Great Northern
Migration;
>>>>> many
normal schools were absorbed into or were eclipsed by teachers colleges located
as part of university campuses;
>>>>> William
Heard Kilpatrick and Harold Rugg defined a new, putatively “progressive”
approach to education more famously associated with the more vacillating and
murky writings of John Dewey; and
>>>>> this
approach was readily embraced by education professors in the new teachers
colleges.
This conglomeration
of events and circumstances became the proverbial perfect storm for the
production of wretched public education in the United States.
Americans
were a virulently racist people in the early 20th century. Most white people, and very much elites such
as Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and university based social scientists
were of the conviction that southern and eastern Europeans, African Americans,
Native Americans, and all manner of brown-skinned people across the globe were
inferior; and that Jews were conversely
dangerous because they were so cunningly successful in business and the
professions. There was widespread
disbelief that the former groups could not learn very much and that as for the
Jews, they were best quarantined via restricted housing covenants in sections
of the city where they could be observed and controlled as necessary.
Education
professors, who possessed so little knowledge by comparison to university based
historians, mathematicians, physicists, and specialists in literature, sought
to make a place for themselves on university campuses by claiming that
pedagogy, vocational courses, and child-centered education trumped the
impartation of liberal arts knowledge in the public schools.
Willliam
Heard Kilpatrick authored in 1918 the essay, “The Project Method,” and followed
with a book of the same name. Harold
Rugg collaborated in 1928 with Ann Shumaker on a book, The Child-Centered
School. Hence, about a century ago
Kilpatrick and Rugg spearheaded the “Progressive Education Movement” in public
education, espousing group projects over teacher-imparted knowledge sets and
asserting that children should be loosed to explore their way to their own
education, with classroom presences transformed from teachers into “guides” or
“facilitators.”
Over the
decades running from the 1920s into the 1960s, the tenets of progressive
education proved a tough sell in most communities, in which parents, whether
native-born white or of immigrant (Italian, Greek, Irish, Polish, Bohemian, Hungarian)
or migrant (African American, Hispanic) of origin sought a knowledge-intensive,
substantive education as a means of becoming contributing, economically
successful citizens advancing up the mythical ladder with boot straps held
firm.
But education
professors were relentless and they had powerful allies in the corporate world
who needed docile workers with rudimentary skills to toil in the factories and
in the less remunerative corners of their offices.
Even as eloquent
proponents (W. E. B. DuBois, Isaac L. Kandel, Robert Maynard Hutchins, and
Arthur Bestor) of the Jefferson-Mann vision persisted in their forceful
advocacy for the well-defined subject area curriculum, the “progressive”
educators at last triumphed from the late 1960s and early 1970s forward with
the Heard-Rugg creed. In the utterances
of education professors from those periods through this very year of 2018, the
assertion became that the mastery of definite knowledge and skill sets did not
matter, that those could always be looked up, that what students needed most
was to “learn how to learn,” to become “critical thinkers” and “lifelong
learners.”
Thus did errantly
dubbed “progressive” education come to ill-serve four decades of students,
falling hardest, with decidedly unprogressive consequences, on those
historically abused populations mired in cyclical poverty at the urban
core.
…………………………………………………………………..
For a time in
the 1990s, political conservatives William Bennett and Chester Finn seemed
ready to join forces with political liberal E. D. Hirsch to superintend a
resurgence of knowledge-intensive education.
But Bennett got caught in moral peccadilloes and Finn drowned intellectually
under myriad attacks from his rightist associates.
But Hirsch
asserted the Jefferson-Mann view forcefully, and walked the talk: His book, The
Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them (1996), coincided with the establishment
of his Core Knowledge Foundation and the launching of Core Knowledge schools
throughout the United States.
Meanwhile, education
professors continue to send forth students who have internalized their
intellectually corrupt and hypocritical creed.
These charlatans do not welcome “critical thinking” from their
opponents; and they themselves are
bereft of knowledge, definitely no models of “lifelong learning.”
Such
intellectual frauds cannot be critical thinkers or lifelong learners, for
actual status in those categories depends on a solid knowledge base and wide
reading of the type that education professors do not do. This is true, too, of the decided majority of
public education superintendents, central office administrators, principals,
and teachers who have been ruined under the tutelage of these trainers of
educators.
You will read
and hear education-professor-speak pouring forth from those who inhabit unions such as Education Minnesota and
the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT).
These are the
political backers of eight of the nine members on the current MPS Board of
Education.
Bob Walser is
the worst lackey for the teachers unions.
He is
dangerous.
He should debate
me under formal rules in a public setting.
Or he should
just go.
Either way,
we must find a way to expel him from a position in which he would do much harm
if he could.
There are
lives in the balance.
The poorest
of the poor are the students I serve;
Walser’s blather potentially harms them the most:
They are the victims of the unprogressive consequences of the preposterous utterances of those who farcically appropriate the term, “progressive.”
We must
reverse the trend begun in the 1920s, that took root in the late 1960s, and continues
today in the blather of Deborah Meyer, Ted Sizer, Jonathon Kozol, and Alfie Kohn.
Read those
authors. Read especially Alfie Kohn’s The Schools Our Children Deserve (1999)
as vacuous attempt to counter Hirsch’s incisive The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them (1996).
Then take stock, become a proponent for knowledge-intensive education, and encourage the exit of anyone who proposes to continue to foist the education professor charade on our children.
Begin with Bob Walser.
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