Mencken’s words from many decades ago have proven incisively prescient, as have Mitchell’s. The educational establishment is, in the words of E. D. Hirsch, “an impregnable fortress.”
Writer after writer has accurately denounced it, parents have risen in fury against it, special government commissions have critiqued it—all to no avail. The schools of education, and federal and state departments of education, form what Arthur Bestor called an “interlocking directorate,” championing a vision and a philosophy that they will never renounce.
From time to time, to placate outraged parents, the educational establishment claims to make changes. But under new names, they support essentially the same anti-subject-matter policies. The “change” from look-say to whole language is but one example. Hirsch notes that such reforms “have long dominated the schools.” For instance, “the repudiation of the supposedly deleterious ‘overemphasis’ on [academic] subject matter is a reform that has already been victorious for half a century.”
The curriculum designers will die before relinquishing their power to cripple students’ minds.
One striking example of this shameless obstinacy was displayed when Glenn Seaborg, a Nobel laureate in chemistry, two other Nobel laureates, and thirty other scientists offered to design—free of charge—a K–12 science curriculum for the state of California. The state turned them down; instead, it awarded a $178,000 contract for curriculum development to “professional educators” who, of course, were trained not in science but in “education.”
The educational establishment is a monolith that cannot easily be defeated. But it can be circumvented.
There are numerous signs of this possibility in American education, trends that Americans can build on to vastly upgrade the quality of education in this country.
One is the resurgence of interest in Montessori training. Progressive schools eclipsed Montessori schools in America between the world wars. But in the 1950s, as the deleterious effects of Progressive education became glaringly apparent, Montessori schooling regained support, albeit limited. Today, approximately four thousand certified Montessori schools dot the nation.
Creative minds such as Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and numerous others credit a part of their success to early and effective Montessori schooling.
So, one thing we can do is advocate Montessori training and support Montessori schools.
Further, homeschooling is once again legal in every state.
In 2003, approximately 1,096,000 American students were being homeschooled; by 2012, the number had swelled to 1,773,000, approximately 3.4 percent of the country’s students age five to seventeen.
As the nation’s public schools continue to decline, the number of homeschoolers will no doubt increase. Another thing we can do is advocate and support homeschooling initiatives.
As for reading, many parents now realize that phonics opens up the rich world of books to their children, and companies such as Hooked on Phonics offer products that make it easier than ever for parents to teach their children at home.
Another powerful and largely untapped resource that parents can use are the many full-time graduate students working toward advanced degrees, not in “education,” but in math, science, literature, history, and every other academic subject. Generally, these graduate students know their field better than many (if not most) teachers. Many do not yet have full-time jobs, so they tend to need money. Parents can use social media and other online sources to find such graduate students in their area and, at reasonable hourly rates, hire them as tutors for their children. Even if a graduate student is not local, he can conference with students anywhere in the world using Skype, Google Hangouts, FaceTime, and similar free tools.
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