Article #7 >>>>> The Origins and Consequences of Wretched Public Education Throughout the United States

The Disastrous Implementation of Education Professor Ideology from the 1970s Forward

Thus did the very favorable developments during the 1960s, dramatically exposing the racism in United States history and contemporary society;  advancing the position of women;  activating African American, Latina/Latino, and Native American communities in assertion of full citizenship;  and providing enhanced public health care via Medicare and Medicaid---   nevertheless harbor ill for public education.

Truly progressive education at this juncture would have entailed further advancement of teaching as a profession, providing academic rigor in the undergraduate and graduate trainimg of elementary school teachers of broad and deep knowledge, requiring all middle and high school teachers to get master's degrees in legitimate subject area disciplines, and raising teacher emoluments for this professionalized teaching force to a truly professional level of remuneration.

But the distrust that young people harbored  for the adult white establishment found expression in ways that would ironically undercut such progressive development of the teaching profession for the implementation of knowledge-intensive curriculum.  

The knowledge sets that had for many decades been fixtures in the curriculum were essentially sound in mathematics, biology, chemistry, physics, government, economics, and geography.  

Curriculum in history and literature was also fundamentally well-conceived but incomplete, needing expansion to include the objective truth about the experiences and creative works of nonwhite cultures.

But the general distrust of the white male adult establishment induced an attitude that students must be given more voice, and in some formulations even the leading role, in determing curriculum.  Understandable in terms of historical and contemporary grievance, the notion of ill-educated young people deciding curriculum was and is objectively absurd.

The trends of the times, though, provided the perfect opportunity for the decades-long hopes of education professors to implement their falsely labeled "progressive" ideology, which held that curriculum should not be set but rather guided by student interest;  and that those presiding over classrooms should not be knowledge-imparting teachers but rather "guides" for students pursuing their own driving interests.

The anti-knowledge ideology of education professors has a certain facile appeal but in the guise of child-centeredness constitutes an abdication of adult responsibility to provide knowledge, wisdom, and ethical instruction to the genuinely loved child. 

The insidious ideology of education professors fell hardest on young people living at the urban core  >>>>>

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Given fair employment and housing legislation, those from previously dispossessed groups who were positioned to stake their claim on the middle class dream very well might gain a highly remunerstive income and a residence in the suburbs.  

But left behind at the urban core were those mired in cyclical familial poverty.

For young people of the central cities from families facing grave challenges of finances and functionality, the only way to reverse decades of cyclical poverty and associated life circumstances was  the acquisition of knowledge and skill conducive to lives of cultural enrichment, civic participation, and professional satisfaction.

But given imposition of the education professors' anti-knowledge ideology in locally centralized school districts throughout the United States, 

few students would fare as well as they should;

for many the consequences would be grave;

and for young people living at the urban core, doomed to lives on mean streets or in prison, 

the decidedly unprogressive consequences of an errant and misnamed ideology would be disastrous.