Article #8 >>>>> The Origins and of Consequences of Wretched Public Education Throughout the United States

The Lamentable Triumph of Anti-Knowledge Ideology, Circa 1980

Tapping into the zeitgeist of the 1960's, education professors were during the 1970s increasingly successful in gaining adoption of the anti-knowledge creed that they had been advocating ever since the days of Harold Rugg and William Heard Kilpatrick at Teachers College/Columbia University during the 1920s.

Particularly in elementary schools, curriculum became extraordinarily week, knowledge-bereft as to government, history, geography, natural science, and quality literature.  In mathematics, student training in calculation skills for addition, subtraction, and multiplication languished, while long division was on the way to becoming a lost art.  Elementary teachers, many themselves math-phobic, began to introduce calculators as early as Grade 4.  

Math education professors, those intellectual lightweights possessing nowhere close to the mathematic ability and advanced training of professors in university departments of mathematics, were increasingly successful in pushing their insidious ideas, namely that

>>>>>  calculation skills do not matter;

>>>>>  students need to spend large amounts of time in "metacognition" examining their thinking process as they perform mathematicsl tasks;

>>>>>  students should be guided to construct the mathematic context in which their tasks are performed on the basis of their life experiences.

All of this nebulous verbiage, inflicted on students just in grades K-5, emanated from mathematically untalented education professors posing as grand philosophers.  Such insubstantive notions would leave generations unable to add, subtract. multiply, divide, or to work with fractions, decimals, and percentages.

Increasingly elementary teachers also succumbed to the pedagogy of "whole language learning," which deemphasizes explicit instruction in phonics and grammar while stressing natural acquisition of these skills via reading engaging material.  But reading material was typically unchallenging and academically insubstantive---  and little acquisition of English usage, properly advancing vocabulary, or spelling skills (further undermined by the fanciful notion of "invented spelling") occurred.

Concomitant with these developments was the increasing imposition of the ideas of the gadflies in the middle school movement, who advanced absurd notions of preteen brains at intellectual plateaus, in need of social skills more than academic substance---  and for grade realignment at 6-7-8 to replace the 7-8-9 configuration of more academically substantive junior highs. 

Thus did students increasingly arrive at high school needing to acquire 13 years worth of knowledge in just four years, but depending on curriculum and teacher quality incapable of imparting the requisite knowledge and skill sets.

No student fared well as the notions of education professors advanced.

But for those left behind at the urban core circa 1980, confronting midfle clzss flight, crack cocaine, and ascending gang activity, the specter of doom loomed.