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Politicized Schools Are Radically Transforming Our Nation
h/t Instapundit[TennesseeStar] If somebody wanted to fundamentally transform society to its roots, where would he or she start? The most logical starting point would be education. And if there were one part of the educational system that would produce this transformation most broadly, effectively, and efficiently, it would most likely be at our schools of education that train teachers for the K-12 classroom. That’s where ideas from the rest of academia are inserted into the curriculum for elementary and high school students, and where politically unsophisticated young people are turned into classroom teachers. Control the schools of education, and the education system will eventually be yours to forward your political agenda. Remarkably, that is just what has happened in this country. Over 100 years ago, when our education schools were just starting up or growing from two-year normal schools to university status, Progressive educators set out to transform the nation into one that was based on social science theories, collectivism, and central planning. How successful were they? Several years ago, I started an investigation into how politicized education schools have become. Today, the Martin Center is releasing the results of that investigation in a new report, titled "The Politicization of University Schools of Education." The report’s main conclusion? That schools of education may very well be radicalized beyond anything imagined by the early Progressives. The way I came to that conclusion was through two methods. One was an empirical examination of the syllabi of three major education schools, the Universities of Wisconsin, Michigan, and North Carolina. I looked at 290 total syllabi from the three education schools and tabulated the most frequently assigned authors. Rather than basing popularity on the number of times an author’s works were assigned, I used the number of classes in which their works were assigned; counting every time a book or article is assigned can skew the results if a professor assigns multiple works by the same author. I also counted every author for each article. In the other method, I identified the major strains of radical K-12 education‐Progressive, critical pedagogy, and multicultural education‐and followed their increasing influence in academia. The overall results of the main empirical investigation are in Table 1 below. ...So, who are these authors and what ideas are they promoting? First of all, they are not fringe players, but key members of the education establishment. Most of them have held prestigious positions in the world of education. ...Secondly, every person on my Top Ten list is highly political and holds beliefs far to the left of ordinary liberals. ...My findings were strongly corroborated by the two other studies I found that explore the same topic. Both were conducted by political moderates: Frederick Hess, who is the lead educational expert at the American Enterprise Institute, and David Steiner, the director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy (hardly a hotbed of conservatism). Steiner summarized his findings: In the domain of foundations of education, the books most often required by the programs we reviewed were authored by Anita Woolfolk, Jonathan Kozol, Henry Giroux, Paulo Freire, Joel Spring, Howard Gardner, and John Dewey . . . The rest are well-known works that embrace a constructivist and/or progressive standpoint. Conspicuously absent from almost all such syllabi were works that took a very different approach to teaching, such as those by E. D. Hirsch or Diane Ravitch. I might add that, in my - fairly extensive - experience (in Israel, not USA - our monkeys always imitate yours), the main damage due to these politically indoctrinated teachers is not due to political indoctrination of students but to sheer professional incompetence. That is, math & science teachers who learned their subjects by sheer rote memorization, have no basic understanding and reward their own kind of rote memorizers with top grades while punishing students who ask "awkward" questions. To see how it ends, one only has to look through professional scientific journals Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2019-02-25 |
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