Introduction >>>>> Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota, Volume VIII, Number 7, January 2022

 

Introduction

Origin and Consequences of Wretched Public

Education Throughout the United States 

>>>>>The Essential Situation Circa New Year 2022

 

Following from events and processes described in the articles of the November and December 2021 editions of Journal of the K-12 Revolution:  Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota, we see that the knowledgeable citizenry envisioned by Thomas Jefferson and Horace Mann never developed.

The common school movement was enormously promising but even at 19th century peak impact featured schools that varied widely and wildly in quality, as did the normal school programs that trained teachers.  These schools, did, though, feature knowledge and skill-based curriculum that gave many students a sense of United States history, world geography and history, English literary classics, government and civics, and foundational mathematics.

Similarly, high schools and junior high schools developed over the course of the first two decades of the 20th century so as to present knowledge-based curriculum inspired by the instruction long imparted to the privileged.

And despite the best efforts of university-based education professors to promote the vacuous curriculum touted by William Heard Kilpatrick and Harold Rugg and acolytes at Teachers College/Columbia University, most locally centralized school district leaders continued well into the 1960s to deliver foundational skills and subject area knowledge desired by the preponderance of families, very much including immigrant and African American populations seeking ascent on the economic ladder.

But the anti-knowledge creed advanced by education professors resonated with the zeitgeist of the late 1960s and early 1970s, gaining dominance at a most unfortunate historical juncture, at which affluent African Americans chased the national dream into the suburbs, fast upon the heels of whites in flight.  

Left behind at the urban core were the poorest of the poor, victims not only of the degradations wrought by history but victims also of particularly wretched public education.  The standards movement energized in the aftermath of the 1983 publication of A Nation at Risk showed promise but eventually was undermined by forces of both the political right and the political left.

Our students (those who graduate) now walk across the stage at graduation to claim a piece of paper that is a diploma in name only, and our schools give us the ignorant population that we have in the United States today.  

We see the abundantly abominable consequences of wretched public education in the ongoing life of the nation, as presented in the articles to follow in this edition of Journal of the K-12 Revolution:  Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota.