Tag / progressive education

by William Brooks

The Lefts’s Long March Through Our Classrooms: Can it ever be reversed?

When I started teaching in the late 1960s there were still unresolved issues between “traditional teachers” and “progressive educators”. Traditional teachers usually held academic degrees in particular disciplines; like history, literature, math or chemistry. Progressives typically held degrees in “education”.

With regard to the curriculum, the two camps differed over the relative importance of “what to teach” and “how to teach.” The traditionalists focused on the content of the lesson. Progressives professed to be interested in how students learn. Traditionalists commonly used direct instruction and Socratic discourse. Progressives sought to organize “cooperative learning experiences” that were to produce “critical thinking” skills.

Over the years, serious academics on both sides of the political spectrum, claimed that progressive teaching practices dumbed down the curriculum and emptied the content of the humanities. For whatever reason, academic standards over the last half century tumbled faster than a Soviet gymnast on steroids and the spirit of open-ended, rational inquiry sunk to an all time low. Over the same period political consciousness among students rose to 18th century revolutionary levels. Teachers’ unions became more radical and more partisan. We aligned with left-wing political parties from which we won higher salaries. We sought graduate degrees from progressive education faculties; which qualified us for even higher salaries and influential positions in the educational establishment. By the end of the 1970s we had transformed teaching from a low-paying, rather prestigious, “vocation” to a relatively well-paid, adversarial “mission”.

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by William Gairdner

On The Radicalism of The Humanist Manifesto

Below, Discourse Online contributor, William Gairdner, provides a Summary of The Humanist Manifesto (Parts I 1933, and II, 1973), with some brief comments of his own in square brackets.

Everyone concerned about the perceived decline of the West, should know what this Manifesto preached – and preaches still.

Although it is a highly self-contradictory document and of low intellectual value, The Humanist Manifesto clearly sums up the entire philosophy of “secular humanism” that is today so much in the air. It has been signed by hundreds of influential intellectual and political figures such as John Dewey, Issac Asimov, Sir Herman Bondi, Sidney Hook, Sir Alfred Ayer, B.F. Skinner, and Sir Julian Huxley; by feminists such as Betty Friedan, by economists such as Gunnar Myrdal, architect of the Swedish Welfare State, and of course by the Sex-Ed Mafia, Professor Lester Kirkendall, Alan Guttmacher, and Canadian abortionist Henry Morgentaler, past President of the Humanist Association of Canada.

I used the word “preaches”, because the signatories refer to themselves as “religious humanists” –  founders of a new “vital, frank, and fearless religion capable of furnishing adequate social goals and personal satisfactions” to the world. The essence of this “religion,” which denies any supernatural reality – is the worship of man himself – the God-man.

What follows is an abbreviated list of their founding beliefs in their own words. Reflect upon them; even though very few teachers have ever heard of this manifesto, many of these values and beliefs are today being transmitted to children in most of the public schools of the land, as matters of fact, through the process of infusion. And of course, they are spread by media and entertainment folk of all sorts. They are especially powerfully communicated via the highly-charged medium of Sex-Ed, if not by intent, then by consensus.

Recall that as early as 1925 there were over 1,000 U.S. schools actively involved in “progressive education”, much of it steered by people in complete sympathy with the views listed below. The thousands of teachers in these schools, and the Teacher’s Colleges that trained them, constituted a vast unofficial network for the promotion of so-called “humanist” values, via the media, the bureaucracy, and the law – even though the vast majority of humans in the Western world have never abandoned their strongly held Judeo-Christian values – ones utterly in conflict with this so-called religious-humanism.

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by William Brooks

Rethinking progressive education again

“That children from poor and illiterate homes tend to remain poor and illiterate is an unacceptable failure of our schools, one which has occurred not because our teachers are inept but chiefly because they are compelled to teach a fragmented curriculum based on faulty educational theories. Some say that our schools by themselves are powerless to change the cycle of poverty and illiteracy. I do not agree. They can break the cycle, but only if they themselves break fundamentally with some of the theories and practices that education professors and school administrators have followed over the past fifty years.” E.D. Hirsch, Jr. Cultural Literacy (1988)

 In the late 1980’s E.D. Hirsch Jr’s poignant observations about the general decline of “cultural literacy” became part of an ongoing debate about the quality, methods and purposes of schools. Hirsch’s controversial book on the subject underscored the fact that generations of contending educational reformers have either looked backward to sounder practices from “the good old days” or forward to what many believed to be liberation from the “dead hand of tradition.”

Most of us who have spent time in the education business, have to acknowledge that so-called “new discoveries” by “best practitioners” in education have beaten back the defenders of form and content in the traditional classroom. For some time, almost every purveyor of one form of “social justice” after another have found willing allies among progressive school teachers. Today, the fragmented curriculum, referred to by Hirsch in the nineteen eighties, remains a collection of disconnected subjects and technocratic skill sets. Unfortunately, people tend to applaud a familiar tune and a persistent culture of approval among unquestioning stakeholders has been supporting educational practices whose value has long since passed. If Canadians are to have any chance of reestablishing schools as serious centers of teaching and learning parents and citizens must first endeavor to understand how schools came to be the way they are.

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by William Brooks

Was Dewey a Marxist?

This article was developed as a proposal for a Ph. D. thesis at the Faculty of Education, McGill University. It was published in Discourse, The St. Lawrence Institute, Winter, 1994.

In 1975 I published an article entitled “Some Reflections on Canadian Education” in the History and Social Science Teacher. I argued then that Canada had never produced an indigenous philosophy of education but had accepted imported ideas, first from Europe and later from the United States.

I pointed out that, by the late nineteenth century, the classical curriculum of the British grammar school, imported in the early years of colonial North America, gave way to the ideas of European social revolutionaries like Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Herbart and Froebels. These philosophers changed our perception of the school’s purpose, slowly eroding the traditional concentration on formal literacy and the acquisition of knowledge, and giving way to an increasing concern with the methods of teaching and the interests of the child.

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