Article #1
The Paramount Importance
of Public Education in the Context of the Psychological Determinants of Human
Behavior
Behavior is entirely a function
of biology and environment. Each individual develops in the context of
genetic inheritance and biological constitution evolved during the first five
years of life, then thereafter in the circumstances of environment:
There is no such phenomenon as
free will.
People become who they are,
then, according to their parentage, siblings, other family, friends, and
antagonists; and in the way that their physical and intellectual
characteristics interact with all manner of experiences--- those provided
by religious institutions, social organizations, and all other aspects of life within
which the person develops from infant to toddler, child, adolescent, young
adult, middle aged adult, through the elder stage.
From the preK through grade 12
years, a large percentage of the human life is spent in school, typically seven
hours a day, 35 hours per week.
Experiences provided at school,
along with those at home and out and about in society, determine who a person
is, who she or he becomes.
Our schools, then, are
instrumental in creating the national citizenry. That citizenry is at
present mired in ignorance, superstition, subjective supposition, and illogic.
But the good news is that via
the overhaul of K-12 education we possess the power to create culturally
enriched, civically engaged, and professionally satisfied citizens--- and
to redirect human experience toward that elevation of knowledge and ethics
promotive of the best Life possible on this one earthly sojourn.
The Adult Responsibility to
Specify Knowledge and Ethical Values for Transmission to Youth
K-12 public education has for
four decades now proceeded ideologically on the basis of a degraded approach
first generated by William Heard Kilpatrick at Teachers College/Columbia
University during the 1920s--- and eventually embraced by education
professors at colleges, schools, and departments of education throughout the
United States. The anti-knowledge creed did not gain acceptance until the
1960s but from that time forward came to be increasingly, pervasively dominant
in the public schools.
The approach promoted by
education professors in the course of the 20th and early 21st
centuries devalues specified knowledge sets in favor of curriculum left to
student and teacher whim.
For those in our locally
centralized school districts with curricular decision-making responsibility,
this approach constitutes a reprehensible abdication of adult
responsibility--- as if those stories had not been told around campfires,
wisdom of the elders had not been passed on to youth, and societal knowledge
had not been specified for transmission throughout the generations.
We must jettison this
anti-knowledge creed and embrace the adult responsibility of deciding the
knowledge sets and the ethical values to be passed on to our youth.
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