Article #6 >>>>> The Origins and Consequences of Wretched Public Education Throughout the United States

Disastrous Timing for the Emerging Dominance of Anti-Knowledge Ideology During the 1970s

The anti-knowledge ideology advanced by education professors at Teachers College/Columbia Univsity and other education schools from the 1920s forward gained unfortunate resonance with public school administrators in the context of the 1960s zeitgeist.

Until the 1960s, leaders at public school districts typically resisted the anti-knowledge creed. Most decision-makers and teachers had themselves attended schools with curriculum featuring clearly specified, logically sequenced knowledge and skill sets.  Elementary school teachers embraced the role of broadly knowledgeable purveyors of academic information, and secondary teachers viewed themselves as field specialists.

School boards were similarly inclined toward academically substantive curriculum.  European immigrant and African American northwardly migrant populations viewed education as their conduit up the ladder of social and economic mobility, attained on the basis of knowledge and skill mastery preparatory to college or university attendance.

From 1954 forward, the United States underwent much dramatically favorable change, induced by the Brown v Board Supreme Court decision (1954), the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-1956), the wrenching aftermath of the Emmitt Till murder (1955), the federalization of troops to protect the Little Rock Nine (1957), the first lunch counter sit-ins (1960), James Meredith's, struggle to attend the University of Mississippi (1962), and the culmination of the first stage of the Civil Rights Movement with the March on Washington (1963), Civil Rights Act (1964), and the Voting Rights Act (1965).

In the late 1960s came fair housing and employment legislstion, the second wave feminist movement, and energized African American, Latina/Latino, and Native American populations advocating more thorough change.  

Despite assertive federal government activity undergirding legislative and judicial change, this was a time of growing distrust in government and authority figures in general, precipitated by Vietnam War policy, generational conflict, racial tension, and gaping ideological divisions.  

Student activists on college and university campuses demanded disinvestment in abusive corporations and governments, and they called for women's and ethnic-specific studies, along with greater student input in curriculum.

Lurking within these favorable developments, though, were notions inimical to K-12 public education.  The legitimate call for curricular change and greater student input gave impetus to one attitudinal strand maintaining that all education should be student driven. 

Thus did a 1960s zeitgeist with so many favorable features for social change harbor ill for knowledge-based K-12 education.  Loving young people, listening to them, incorporating their suggestions, and giving scope for their creativity should not mean denying them the genuine wisdom of adult mentors or the academically substantial knowledge of professors and teachers acquired via many years of disciplined study.

But education professors saw in the zeitgeist of the late 1960s the moment for which they had been waiting. 

The deleterious impact of anti-knowlege ideology on K-12 policy of the 1970s would fall hardest on those mired in poverty at the urban core.