Article #3 >>>>> Concise Observations on Existence and Education

The Adult Responsibility to Specify Knowledge and Ethical Values for Transmission to Youth

K-12 public education has for four decades now proceeded ideologically on the basis of a degraded approach first generated by William Heard Kilpatrick at Teachers College/Columbia University during the 1920s---  and eventually embraced by education professors at colleges, schools, and departments of education throughout the United States.  The anti-knowledge creed did not gain acceptance until the 1960s but from that time forward came to be increasingly, pervasively dominant in the public schools.  

The essential approach devalues specified knowledge sets in favor of curriculum left to student and teacher whim.  

For those in our locally centralized school districts with curricular decision-making responsibility, this approach constitutes a reprehensible abdication of adult responsibility---  as if those stories had not been told around campfires, wisdom of the elders had not been passed on to youth, and societal knowledge had not been specified for transmission throughout the generations.

We must jettison this anti-knowledge creed and embrace the adult responsibility of deciding the knowledge sets and the ethical values to be passed on to our youth.