Progressives also abandon the idea of liberal education. Rather than transmitting the basics of the humanities and sciences, teaching the principles of freedom, and cultivating the capacity of students to think for themselves, progressivism supposes that the purpose of education is to mold students who think and act like progressives. They embrace the pedagogical creed of John Dewey, who held that “education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness”; that “every teacher” is properly “a social servant set apart for the maintenance of proper social order and the securing of the right social growth”; and that in instilling a democratic faith, the true teacher serves as “the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of God.”
I think that the goal should be for students to know how to learn and how to search for truth. Am I so out of step with the times?
From what I see, the message to us faculty is, “If it’s not quantifiable and can’t assessed, it must not be important.” On the other side, two main qualities I try impart parallel yours: (1) A hunger for learning, & (2) A reticence to claim certainty for one’s own judgments.
Education has always had pure and noble intents but also been used to control and indoctrinate. This isn’t new. Recently, we’ve seen a recent polarization of political beliefs, and a shift towards more aggressive use of education to indoctrinate. I favor the principle of devolution of power and localized control, particularly for education. That seems to not be very popular.
From anecdotal experience, sometimes it almost seems like a John-Dewey-for-thee, Paul-Goodman-for-me phenomenon. It’s the poor and underprivileged that end up feeling the brunt of progressive education in institutions that resemble prisons more than they do spaces for fostering young minds. Meanwhile, the hip progressives prune their tomato plants at the local urban co-op before they pick up the kids from the private alternative school going on $20,000 a year.
I second Richard H’s goals for his students as it seems like a prescription for critical thinking. Learning criticla thinking is useful regardless of what type of truth you are trying to learn. Critical thinking is distinct from “search for truth” because truth is often framed as either descriptive or normative. The two frames are mutually exclusive.
descriptive truth is learning the “is” of the world and normative is learning the “ought” of how to make trade offs. The latter is not fully rational and is programmed into us as a form of decision making.
The distinction within truth is important because the progressive need to indoctrinate students is understandable as a desire to create a group of like minded individuals that are programmed to behave within a progressive normative framework.
Where could they learn how to create this framework for decision making? In schools. To be more specific, humans learn culture in a manner analogous to osmosis, and it’s easier to choose what they learn and to influence how they shape their norms if you keep them in a room for several hours a day and have control over what they can absorb.
The stability and existence of the framework is only as true as it is shared between individuals who act based upon their understanding of the framework. Of course, this is also what happens when you send kids to bible school or home school.
If you learn to think critically, you can better compare and understand “ought” or “is” propositions within and outside of yourself. Good skill to keep in practice, and distinct from search for truth.
All education is controlled. It doesn’t matter who does it. Centralized, localized, who cares. It is who is doing it and how.
fwiw, home schooling is a good example of centralized control via the parent.
“It’s the poor and underprivileged that end up feeling the brunt of progressive education in institutions that resemble prisons more than they do spaces for fostering young minds. ”
To the extent that schools are “prisons” for poor and underprivileged, it’s not the instruction but the students who create that problem.
Unless you mean ideological prisons. If you do, then it’s certainly not progressives that created “no excuses” schools, but conservatives, who gave birth to the modern education reform movement.
As for progressive lock-step, yes, it exists. I’ve seen English teachers grade papers lower for not having correct views, seen history teachers penalize students who don’t have the right opinions. I don’t like it. I can’t claim it does much damage. It happens much more at suburban schools than urban ones. Certainly, there’s not much indoctrination. If the kids aren’t willing to buy the story, they don’t buy. They just fake it. So there’s a culture of dishonesty, as kids learn to mouth the platitudes in the even their teachers demand it. But I don’t think they’re convincing anyone who doesn’t already believe. (And of course, many English and history teachers demand no such allegiance.)
I actually agree with The Rage. Education is controlled, all the more so these days. Curriculum is restricted so that schools are forced to offer all courses to all students, regardless of ability.
I recently wrote a series of education proposals to demonstrate how completely disconnected political discourse was from beliefs on the ground–that is, all of the proposals would be popular with half or more of the population, but would never be mentioned. One proposal was to allow high schools to teach students at their ability level, rather than prohibiting them from teaching courses for those with middle school skills. Ironically, kids have to wait until college to get remedial courses.
I think a more diverse curriculum could, potentially, enable a more engaged and thus ideological diverse student body.
Is it true? I have never been around three people where at least one didn’t try to hijack the group for their personal agenda. Why wouldn’t it be true? In education how could it not be true?
Didn’t intend that as a reply, but since I’m here, my education was like a prison, it wasn’t because of this student.
Secondly, what if someone suggested that we lead prayers in school and it is not a problem because kids who don’t like it can just fake it? Do we do all education on the assumption that it can’t work?
And lastly, as I think we are finding out with democracy, having one crazy ideological extreme fighting for control of something they didn’t build that is not made okay by having an equally opposite crazy extreme fighting for control of it.
At the very least the opportunity cost is damaging.
It’s hard as an adult to think about the scale of what kids are going through in public school. As a thought experiment at a smaller scale, think about just a single 2-hour session of, say, listening to a time-share presentation.
Is a time-share presentation damaging? Well, it’s just two hours. And most of the people who listen to it don’t end up buying and in fact don’t agree with the presenters at all.
The more credulous attendees are harmed very badly, though. Moreover, even the more sensible attendees end up having completely wasted some of their precious time on earth.
We do this to public school kids for six hours a day, five days a week. I think it’s damaging, and that most people just look the other way because they consider it normal. It’s what they grew up with.
As I always preach, the escape valve for this is engineering or something similar. Not super helpful in secondary education unless you can emphasize pre-technical skills. In engineering (and analogs) you start out with very specific real world topics and then neither the teachers,nor the studemts,have time for ideological axe grinding.
But I hadn’t thought much about the other side. Maybe the squishiness of a “good liberal” education is what opens the door for bored progressives to grind axes.
Oh, that evil liberal education. I see, as the Big Brother would put it, “ignorance is strength”
A better fix is school choice.
Parents lose a massive amount of negotiating power when they submit to putting their kids in a particular school no matter how badly it performs. I’m struggling to even describe what the remedies look like for such a parent.
You can try to vote out the superintendent, but that requires accumulating a majority opinion, and it requires that even the superintended has all that much power. You can sometimes juggle around what teachers they deal with, by things like switching your kid from band to chorus, or from chemistry to biology, but only to the extent your kids has that flexible of interests.
The best remedy is to physically move. I find it weird how many people accept this kind of approach to school funding. It’s hard to see it coming into place if we’d started with vouchers and then someone proposed that we socialize education.
Yes.
Bear in mind the selection effects of who ends up in a teaching role.
We live in a time where anyone with good critical thinking skills can get massively rich, just by learning a trade and then doing it. What kind of person would turn this down and go teach?