Sep 11, 2018

The Origins of the Corrupt and Dangerous Ideology of MPS School Board Member Bob Walser

Everyone must understand just how corrupt and dangerous is the ideology espoused by Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Board of Education member Bob Walser, who represents MPS District Number Four.

 

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:

 

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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.   

 

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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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