Article #10 >>>>> The Origins and Consequences of Wretched Public Education Throughout the United States

The Manifold Harm Inflicted By Knowledge-Deficient Publlic Education Observable During the 1990s

By the 1990s, multiple occurrences synchronous with education professor ideology could be witnessed across the landscape of the United States.  

In classrooms across the nation, ill-trained teachers of limited knowledge bases were imparting very little information pertinent to mathematics, biology, chemistry, physics, history, government, geography, economics, literature, music, and tbe visual arts.  Curriculum tended to be determined by teacher and student whim.  Group activities typically constituted the pedagogical emphasis, with individual achievement given increasingly less attention.

The middle school movement had largely succeeded in achieving objectives of reconfiguring grade alignment from grades 7, 8, and 9 to 6, 7, and 8;  and moving from the junior high concept emphasizing academic training for high school to the middle school concept deempasizing academics (on the basis of the pseudoscientific notion that preteen and early teen brains had reached an intellectual plateau) in favor of social and psycho-emotional stage development.

There also arose by the 1990s the idea that praise was to be lavished on students, regardless of level of academic achievement and even in the absence of consistent good behavior.  Students were to be made to feel high self-esteem on the basis of praise, ratber than attainment of academic and behavioral objectives that would establish self-esteem on a firm and enduring foundation.

By the 1990s, terminal master's degrees of academic rigor for those in key disciplines who did not intend to study for a Ph.D. gave way to master's degrees of little subject area substance, bestowed by departments, schools, and colleges of of education.  Masters in mathematics gave way to the masters in teaching mathematics;  and the masters in teaching social studies, rather than masters in history, political science, geography, or economics;  and similar phenomena pertinent to other fields.  

Thus did knowledge-deficient high school teachers, charged with the four-year responsibility of giving students all tbe knowledge that they did not get in elementary and middle school, prove increasingly incapable of even approaching fulfillment of that responsibility.  Knowledge-challenged themselves, utilizing whimsical curriculum and employing the inefficient group project methods of their elementary and middle school counterparts, high school teachers and similarly trained administrators sent even those students who managed to graduate across tbe stage to claim a piece of paper that was a diploma in name only.

The 1990s constituted  a particularly bad time for the insidious notions of outrageously mislabeled "progressive" education to become so firmly embedded in public education   >>>>>

>>>>>  At the urban core, community maladies associated with the pervasive peddling and use of crack cocaine became painfully evident.  Gang and criminal activity reached unprecedented levels.  Welfare dependency had become endemic.  Cyclical poverty was a fixture of life.  The contrast in the two realities of African American middle class versus impoverished class life became starker than ever.

In response to the manifest consequences of knowledge-deficient public education, various reform movements developed.  

As we shall see, these movements were as much at odds with each other as with the reactionary pose of the now tragi-comedically.exposed education establishment.

And, despite vigorous advocacy for knowledge and skill based standards, the counter-push from others appropriating the reformist appellation and from the education establishment have bequeathed to us the still wretched quality of public education observable in 2021.