Some 44 million American adults cannot read well enough to read a simple story to a child\u2014and nearly half of adults in the United States are functionally illiterate, unable even to read a drug label. …<\/p>\n
We have been inundated with bad news regarding the American education system for decades. For example, in 1988, a mere 5 percent of seventeen-year-old high school students could read sufficiently to comprehend information disseminated in historical documents, college textbooks, or literary essays. …<\/p>\n
The Educational Testing Service reported in 1994 that 50 percent of college graduates in the United States could not read a bus schedule and \u201cthat only 42 percent could summarize an argument presented in a newspaper article.\u201d<\/p>\n
Why have we allowed this to happen to ourselves? Rather, why have we done this to ourselves? How and why is it that America, historically the most plentiful source of innovative and inventive minds, has established an educational system that cripples the mind? What caused this degradation?<\/p>\n
Toward answering such questions, it is important to understand that American schools have not always been so bad. Indeed, at one time American education was superb.<\/p>\n
SUPERLATIVE EDUCATION IN EARLY AMERICA<\/p>\n
In the Mid-Atlantic colonies during the pre-Revolutionary period, professional educators established numerous schools to satisfy widespread demand for education. Philadelphia, for instance, boasted schools for virtually every subject and interest. <\/p>\n
Between 1740 and 1776, 125 private schoolmasters advertised their services in Philadelphia newspapers\u2014this in a city whose population was miniscule relative to today. Professional educators provided mentoring services for English, contemporary foreign languages, science, and a wide variety of other topics. <\/p>\n
Children who grew to be such brilliant scientists, writers, and statesmen as Benjamin Franklin<\/a>, Thomas Jefferson<\/a>, and George Washington<\/a> were educated at home or in private schools.<\/p>\n Literacy levels of Revolutionary America were remarkably high. <\/p>\n In 1731, Franklin helped start America\u2019s first subscription library, and similar libraries spread throughout the colonies during his life. He later reflected, \u201cThese libraries have improved the general conversation of the Americans, [and] made the common tradesmen and farmers as intelligent as most gentlemen from other countries.\u201d <\/p>\n Thomas Paine<\/a>\u2019s pamphlet Common Sense, written in plain style but enunciating sophisticated political principles, sold 120,000 copies during the colonial period to a (free) population of 2.4 million (akin to selling ten million copies today). <\/p>\n The Federalist essays<\/a>, written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay in support of a constitution for the nascent republic, were published in newspapers\u2014written for and read by the common man.<\/p>\n Sales of books and educational materials in the early- and mid-19th century likewise indicate a high national literacy level. <\/p>\n Between 1818 and 1823, when the population of the United States was less than twenty million, Walter Scott<\/a>\u2019s novels sold five million copies (the equivalent of selling sixty million copies today). Early in the 19th century, The Last of the Mohicans<\/a> by James Fenimore Cooper likewise sold millions of copies. <\/p>\n The McGuffey Readers, first published in 1836, routinely used such terms as \u201cheath\u201d and \u201cbenighted\u201d in third-grade texts. They asked such questions as \u201cWhat is this species of composition called?\u201d and gave such assignments as \u201cRelate the facts of this dialogue.\u201d <\/p>\n The fourth-grade reader included selections from Nathaniel Hawthorne<\/a>, and the fifth-grade text, readings from William Shakespeare<\/a>. <\/p>\n \u201cThese were not the textbooks of the elite but of the masses<\/strong>,\u201d explains Thomas Sowell<\/a>. \u201cFrom 1836 to 1920, McGuffey\u2019s Readers were so widely used that they sold 122 million copies.\u201d …<\/p>\n So, what happened?<\/p>\n THE PUSH TOWARD ILLITERACY: THE PROGRESSIVES\u2019 WAR ON LEARNING<\/p>\n The essence of the Progressive education movement is the notion that the primary goal of education is the \u201csocialization\u201d of the child and that this is more important than academic training\u2014more important than studying literature, history, science, math. The leading Progressive educators differed on some points, but all agreed that a \u201cnarrow focus\u201d on academic training must give way to something that focused on the \u201cwhole child.\u201d<\/p>\n Nor were they vague regarding what this meant. For example, famed social worker Jane Addams (1860\u20131935) was an early Progressive educational reformer who grumbled, \u201cWe are impatient with the schools which lay all stress on reading and writing, suspecting them to rest upon the assumption that all knowledge and interest must be brought to the children through the medium of books.\u201d She wanted the schools to engage students in group activities and prepare them to work in the factories. <\/p>\n Lawrence Cremin, a leading scholar of Progressive education, wrote of Addams\u2019s theory, \u201cIndustry . . . would have to be seized upon and conquered by the educators.\u201d The writer Charles Sykes adds, \u201cIn particular, she [Addams] thought modern man needed to be trained and educated in collective, group activities, which she invoked as the \u2018spirit of teamwork.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n This emphasis on group work was a theme that would be sounded over and again by Progressives and their intellectual descendants.<\/p>\n Progressive educators claimed that their theories and methods were based on science. In particular, they employed and emphasized the importance of IQ testing.<\/p>\n During the early 20th century, researchers in Europe and America developed tests designed to identify not merely a student\u2019s knowledge, but his capacity to learn. In 1916, Lewis Terman<\/a>, a professor of educational psychology at Stanford University, drawing upon the earlier work of French psychologist Alfred Binet<\/a> and other researchers, developed the Stanford-Binet intelligence test (known today as the IQ test<\/a>), which henceforth would be used to measure a student\u2019s intellectual ability. Terman hoped that the intelligence test would \u201cfacilitate progressive reforms in education, especially identification of the feebleminded and the gifted, curricular differentiation, vocational guidance, and grouping based on students\u2019 ability.\u201d<\/p>\n Terman and many others advocating widespread IQ testing in the schools were eugenicists who despaired that \u201cthere is no possibility at present of convincing society that they [so-called feebleminded persons] should not be allowed to reproduce.\u201d <\/p>\n The next best thing was to segment the students to ensure that the intellectually gifted received cognitive training and those of less intelligence were taught vocational skills. <\/p>\n By the mid-1920s, psychologists had developed seventy-five IQ tests to gauge the intellectual ability of students of all ages. Each year during this era, some four million students took an intelligence test. <\/p>\n As educational historian Diane Ravitch<\/a> notes, \u201cthe public schools employed the tests to predict which students were likely to go to college and which should be guided into vocational programs.\u201d However, \u201cthe decision became a self-fulfilling prophecy, since only those in the college track took the courses that would prepare them for college.\u201d<\/p>\n To Progressive educators, the IQ tests provided the cutting edge of a scientific approach to proper schooling and gave the imprimatur of science to those reformers who sought to push millions of students away from academic education and into vocational training.<\/p>\n Related to this, shortly after World War I, several Progressives created the field known as \u201cCurriculum Studies.\u201d <\/p>\n John Franklin Bobbitt<\/a> at the University of Chicago (and others elsewhere) held that curriculum design was a complex field that could be mastered only by experts who were fluent in the new scientific approach to education. <\/p>\n Prior to World War I, a school\u2019s curriculum had been designed by community school boards and educators who knew the local parents and their expectations. At the time, almost all towns and neighborhoods desired their children to learn \u201creading, writing, arithmetic, history, geography, and nature studies in the common [elementary] schools, and they wanted the high schools to teach Latin, a modern foreign language or two, mathematics, literature, grammar, the sciences, ancient history, English history, American history, drawing, [and] music.\u201d This was what parents generally demanded, and this was what the schools provided.<\/p>\n No more, proclaimed Bobbitt and his peers. Local school board members, teachers, and parents had not studied the literature of the new science of education. They were not conversant with the rationale or the methods or the outcomes of IQ testing, and they were clueless regarding techniques for determining children\u2019s future professions and assigning them to the educational track congruent with their intellectual capacities. They were, therefore, as unqualified to design an educational curriculum as they were to critique Einstein\u2019s theory of relativity; both were jobs for trained experts. As Ravitch writes:<\/p>\n The invention of the scientific curriculum expert represented an extraordinary shift in power away from teachers, parents, and local communities to professional experts. . . . In modern school districts, control over curriculum was transferred from educators who had majored in English, history, or mathematics to trained curriculum specialists.<\/em><\/p>\n What was the ultimate goal? What were these so-called scientists trying to accomplish? <\/p>\n Bobbitt and his peers conceived of curriculum designers as educational engineers who could establish the exact criteria for each child\u2019s proper functioning and the optimum profession in which he or she might bring about \u201csocial progress.\u201d The aim was utilitarian advantage to \u201csociety.\u201d <\/p>\n For example, \u201cif agricultural production falls off … the schools must provide better agricultural education. If factory production is inefficient, the schools must teach industrial education. When studies show the cost of ill health, the schools must provide health education.\u201d And so on for any number of other \u201cpractical\u201d activities, including driving techniques and military training. Students would learn the specific skills necessary to their \u201cproper\u201d professions and useful to \u201csociety.\u201d<\/p>\n Of what utilitarian value is it, Bobbitt asked, for students to study the literature of long-gone centuries? How would a 20th-century plumber\u2019s knowledge of Shakespeare\u2019s drama or poetry benefit society? Beyond the basic science training necessary to help a farmer grow crops, how would his understanding of physics or mathematics aid society? For what social purpose should we teach a future factory worker ancient history? Such a field \u201cdeals with a world that is dead, a civilization that is mouldered, with governments that are now obsolete, with manners and customs and languages that are altogether impracticable in this modern age.\u201d<\/p>\n Bobbitt\u2019s 1918 book, Curriculum, was for years the standard textbook on the subject in the teachers\u2019 colleges.<\/p>\n His fellow curriculum designer, W. W. Charters<\/a> at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, shared this view. He disdained the study in schools of \u201cthe works of the masters.\u201d Such \u201cbrilliant products of genius\u201d were of little value to most Americans, he thought. Instead, curriculum designers should discover what was \u201cmost useful to the young in coping with the humble problems of their lives.\u201d The schools should identify a student\u2019s likely future profession and train him for it. <\/p>\n For example, if a student would most likely become a department store clerk specializing in credit applications, the schools should train him in the requisite skills, including \u201cfriendliness,\u201d \u201cability to question tactfully,\u201d \u201cspirit of follow-up,\u201d \u201ckeen judgment in answering credit questions,\u201d and so forth. <\/p>\n The topics taught in the American schools should be calculated neither to bestow upon a student knowledge of academic subjects nor to nurture his intellect, but, rather, to prepare him for the \u201chumble\u201d problems and activities of everyday life as a cog in his community.<\/p>\n Then came the so-called Cardinal Principles, which codified into one small pamphlet the new \u201cscientific\u201d approach to American schooling. <\/p>\n In 1912, the secretary of the interior instructed the U.S. Bureau of Education to thoroughly revamp American schooling. The government agency, in conjunction with the National Education Association (NEA), appointed the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education (CRSE). The CRSE issued the new \u201cCardinal Principles of Secondary Education\u201d in 1918. To this day, a full century later, it remains the foundational document of modern American education. <\/p>\n Moving forward, the report declared, the schools would \u201cconcern themselves less with academic matters than with the preparation for effective living\u201d\u2014that is, for playing one\u2019s part in the scientifically engineered society. This meant curtailing courses that would enable students to reason independently and amplifying those that would imbue students with a passion for pursuing the \u201ccommon good.\u201d<\/p>\n There were seven \u201ccardinal principles\u201d (or \u201cmain objectives\u201d) to be emphasized henceforth in American schools. One was \u201cHealth,\u201d which involved the schools in teaching personal hygiene and emphasizing a \u201clove for clean sport.\u201d<\/p>\n A second was \u201cCommand of Fundamental Processes,\u201d which involved teaching basic cognitive skills. In regard to this objective, Professor Richard Mitchell, the famed \u201cUnderground Grammarian,\u201d comments, \u201cAbout the other \u2018main objectives,\u2019 they have a lot to say… . When they have called for Command of Fundamental Processes, that\u2019s it. They proceed at once to Worthy Home-membership, a main objective much more to their liking.\u201d Because Command of Fundamental Processes was the only objective to refer specifically to academic education, the Progressive educators deemed it insufficiently important to warrant further elaboration.<\/p>\n The third objective, as Mitchell notes above, was \u201cWorthy Home-membership,\u201d which would ensure that every high school girl would be taught the rules of proper family management.<\/p>\n The fourth was \u201cVocation,\u201d later known as \u201cIndustrial Arts\u201d or shop class, which would teach blue-collar employment skills.<\/p>\n Fifth was \u201cCivics,\u201d a field of study to replace history. Herein the CRSE revealed its deepest values. As Charles Sykes notes, the commissioners<\/p>\n who wrote the Cardinal Principles were especially uninterested in the U.S. Constitution and the ideas of the Founding Fathers. Civics [in their view] should concern itself less with constitutional questions and [more] with … the informal activities of daily life that … seek the common good. Such agencies as child welfare organizations … afford specific opportunities for the expression of civic qualities.<\/em><\/p>\n Most telling in regard to the Civics objective was the commission\u2019s exhortation for students to engage in group projects, cooperative solutions, and socialized recitations, all designed to foster \u201ca sense of collective responsibility… . [and] training in collective thinking.\u201d<\/p>\n The sixth objective was \u201cWorthy Use of Leisure,\u201d which assumed that most people, devoid of \u201cproper\u201d schooling, did not know how to enjoy themselves or relax\u2014and that training in leisure activities was a productive use of school time.<\/p>\n The seventh and final objective was \u201cEthical Character,\u201d which raised this terrifying question: Which moral code would government-run schools inculcate in young students? Might the Commission\u2019s emphasis on \u201ccollective responsibility\u201d and \u201ccollective thinking\u201d provide a clue?<\/p>\n Ravitch comments, \u201cThe driving purpose behind the seven objectives was socialization, teaching students to fit into society… . The overriding goal was social efficiency, not the realization of individual desire for self-improvement.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n It is jaw-dropping that in 1918, after Americans had made superlative intellectual advances in literature (Hawthorne<\/a>, Edgar Allan Poe<\/a>, Herman Melville<\/a>, and others), psychology (William James<\/a>), applied science and technology (Thomas Edison<\/a>, Alexander Graham Bell<\/a>, Henry Ford<\/a>, the Wright brothers<\/a>), and numerous other fields, that the leading organization of American educators virtually stripped academic training from the core of the nation\u2019s schooling. <\/p>\n Sykes notes, \u201cThe Cardinal Principles, which are voluble to the point of tedium on every aspect of schooling, dismissed scholarship with a single sentence: \u2018Provisions should be made also for those having distinctly academic interests.\u2019 And that\u2019s it; the commission offered no further comment, suggestions, or guidelines.\u201d <\/p>\n The academic aspect of education was thereby treated as \u201can afterthought.\u201d This philosophy quickly became deeply entrenched\u2014indeed dominant\u2014in the schools of education and teachers\u2019 colleges.<\/p>\n Contrast the Cardinal Principles with the NEA educational guidelines of 1893, a mere twenty-five years earlier. In that year, the Commission of Ten, headed by Harvard\u2019s Charles Eliot, spelled out the reasons for academic training:<\/p>\n As studies in language and in the natural sciences are best adapted to cultivate the habits of observation; as mathematics are the traditional training of the reasoning faculties … so history and its allied branches are better adapted than any other studies to promote the invaluable mental power which we call judgment.<\/em><\/p>\n Presumably, Eliot and other commission members recognized the same truth later expressed by philosopher George Santayana: \u201cThose who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.\u201d<\/p>\n But study of history in American schools was about to be eviscerated. Before the CRSE, most high schools offered (even required) a four-year development in history that covered ancient, European, English, and American history. But now, the CRSE created a new field called \u201cSocial Studies.\u201d History, according to the new curriculum designers, had little if any social purpose. Social Studies would.<\/p>\n The CRSE was composed of sixteen (later seventeen) committees. The Committee on Social Studies was headed by Thomas Jesse Jones, a noted advocate of industrial and trade education and one of the first to use the term \u201csocial studies.\u201d This new field was a farrago of elements, including some history, but focusing on \u201csocial efficiency, or teaching students the skills and attitudes necessary to fit into the social order.\u201d<\/p>\n Civics, ostensibly a study of government, was regarded as a part of this new field, but it was altered to fit the new social activism. It was now not so important for students to know how the president was elected as it was to know the duties of the community dogcatcher. The Committee on Social Studies, which Jones chaired, wrote:<\/p>\n The old chronicler who recorded the deeds of kings and warriors and neglected the labors of the common man is dead. The great palaces and cathedrals and pyramids are often but the empty shells of a parasitic growth on the working group. The elaborate descriptions of these old tombs are but sounding brass and tinkling cymbals compared to the record of the joys and sorrows, the hopes and disappointments of the masses, who are infinitely more important than any arrangement of wood and stone and iron.<\/em><\/p>\n Readers of Ayn Rand\u2019s novel The Fountainhead will recognize in these words the sentiments of archvillain Ellsworth Toohey and his Marxist ideology. Observe the emphasis on the masses or the collective, the disdain for knowledge of the activities of kings and rulers, including, in some cases, their life-giving achievements, and the scorn for knowledge of the great men who have created original arrangements of wood and stone and iron\u2014arrangements that have lifted man from caves to hovels to comfortable homes to skyscrapers. Henceforth, history\u2014to the extent that it was taught at all\u2014would focus on little guys, not great achievers, and would promote a distinctive goal: Fit into the social order\u2014conform, adjust, accept<\/strong>. The teacher was to socialize the child. He was not to nurture a love of learning, of thinking, of independent cognition. Whatever else Progressive educators disagreed on, this was a cardinal principle of their faith: Independent thinking is useless to society, even dangerous<\/strong>. As infamously stated by American philosopher John Dewey (1859\u20131952), \u201cThe mere absorbing of facts and truths is so exclusively individual an affair that it tends very naturally to pass into selfishness. There is no obvious social motive for the acquirement of mere learning, there is no clear social gain in success thereat.\u201d<\/p>\n Dewey was particularly effective in advancing Progressive education because he, in effect, mixed the poison with valid principles of education. <\/p>\n For instance, Dewey held that children learn best by experience, by choosing and engaging in hands-on projects\u2014a principle embraced also by Maria Montessori<\/a> (whom we\u2019ll discuss shortly). He helped popularize the idea that young students should engage in real-life activities that help them to gain practical skills\u2014just as Maria Montessori did. He held that children will learn reading while poring over cookbooks, writing by jotting down a favored recipe, arithmetic by counting eggs and weighing flour, and so forth. There is some truth in all of this.<\/p>\n Dewey, unlike many other Progressives, did not entirely disparage academic training. At the legendary Laboratory School that he and his wife, Alice, founded and ran at the University of Chicago from 1896 to 1904, they integrated a great deal of cognitive subject matter. Katherine Camp Mayhew and Anna Camp Edwards wrote:<\/p>\n They continually experimented with different ways of [teaching] young students about primitive life in the Bronze Age … early Greek civilization … Prince Henry of Portugal, Columbus, and other explorers … Shakespeare\u2019s plays; science; mathematics; algebra and geometry; English, French, and even Latin.<\/em><\/p>\n Further, despite his commitment to an experiential method, Dewey \u201ctaught by standing in front of his class and lecturing.\u201d<\/p>\n But Dewey\u2019s ultimate aims were another matter. He held that all learning is ultimately for the purpose of \u201csaturating [students] with the spirit of service.\u201d In Dewey\u2019s view, the purpose of education is not to convey \u201cbodies of information and skills that have been worked out in the past\u201d; not to teach the child \u201cscience, nor literature, nor history, nor geography\u201d; but rather to prime him for \u201csocial cooperation and community life.\u201d<\/p>\n This was the stated goal of one of America\u2019s most formidable intellectual figures. Dewey was no mere \u201ccurriculum designer\u201d trained in modern educational theories, IQ testing, and best methods of developing differing tracks for students of diverse intellectual capacities. Rather, he held a PhD in philosophy from Johns Hopkins University and taught philosophy for decades at the University of Chicago, Columbia University, and elsewhere. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Immanuel Kant<\/a>, was expert in the history of philosophy, and much of his original writing centered in this field. He was a brilliant mind trained in academic study, and his abstruse writings on technical philosophy gained him a worldwide reputation as a towering intellect. Dewey gave the Progressive movement the sanction of \u201clofty philosophy.\u201d<\/p>\n Thus, Dewey\u2019s educational influence was catastrophic. In addition to setting the goal of Progressive education as socializing the child, saturating him with the spirit of service, and priming him for community life, Dewey lent credibility to a host of virulent opponents of academic training, one of whom was William Heard Kilpatrick<\/a> (1871\u20131965). …<\/p>\n Kilpatrick was the prime mover behind \u201cthe project method\u201d of learning. An avid opponent of academic education, Kilpatrick chaired the Committee on the Problem of Mathematics of the CRSE, where he argued, among other things, that math instruction should be severely curtailed and students should be grouped into segments, so that only future scientists, engineers, and the like would engage in any substantial mathematics. He held that the rest\u2014the overwhelming majority of American students\u2014should be taught little more than basic arithmetic in high school. …<\/p>\n His project method was not about activities that train the individual\u2019s mind, advance his knowledge, and promote independent thinking. That is the essence of the Montessori Method, which we\u2019ll consider below\u2014along with Kilpatrick\u2019s criticism of it. Kilpatrick was interested not in encouraging independence but in engineering social conformity. …<\/p>\n Not surprising, Kilpatrick admired the Soviet Union, and when he visited it in 1929, he was delighted to see his project method in action. For instance, he witnessed groups of students \u201cdisposing of disintegrating carcasses of animals left frozen by the roadside.\u201d And he reported, \u201cno school system in history has been more thoroughly and consistently made to work into the social and political program of the state.\u201d<\/p>\n Dewey also pilgrimaged to the Soviet Union in 1929 and \u201cwas deeply moved by what he saw.\u201d He reported that Soviet educators \u201crealized that the goals of the progressive school were undermined by \u2018the egoistic and private ideals and methods inculcated by the institution of private property, profit and acquisitive possession.\u2019\u201d …<\/p>\n George Counts, another leading Progressive educator at Columbia, was even more fulsome in praise of Communism. Twice he visited the Soviet Union, becoming convinced that American schools must take the lead in transforming the United States from a capitalist into a socialist nation. Counts sought to transform Progressive education into political activism in support of socialism.<\/p>\n Progressive educators had long held a hodgepodge of educational theories. On the one hand, they believed that the child\u2019s impulses should guide his education. On the other, they believed that the purpose of education was to socialize him\u2014to teach him to conform and fit into the social order. These two components were not as contradictory as they seemed. For whether children were encouraged to act on their whims, or taught to conform to the group\u2014or, under differing circumstances, to do both\u2014they were never taught to think independently<\/strong>. <\/p>\n Under the communism admired by the Progressives, what is the political fate of those who know next to nothing and who cannot think? The conformists will obey the state. The whim worshippers, unable to formulate principles\u2014including political ones\u2014will give up in despair or will be crushed by the state. Or they will learn to obey, now following the caprice of the dictator rather than their own.<\/p>\n Counts was explicit about the political goals of the Progressive education movement. In his book Dare the Schools Build a New Social Order?, as Ravitch notes, Counts \u201cforthrightly called for elimination of capitalism, property rights, private profits, and competition, and establishment of collective ownership of natural resources, capital, and the means of production and distribution.\u201d <\/p>\n To indoctrinate children, he called for a consistent socialization of the classroom. He accused the \u201cchild-centered\u201d Progressives of having no social theory \u201cunless it be that of anarchy and extreme individualism,\u201d repudiated the notion that education can \u201cbuild its program out of the interest of the children,\u201d claimed that America must become \u201cless frightened than it is today at the bogeys of imposition and indoctrination,\u201d and openly acknowledged that his socialist vision required indoctrination.<\/p>\n This was the Depression era, and Counts\u2019s message was well received. Ravitch points out, \u201cVirtually every prominent progressive in the 1930s agreed that the traditional academic curriculum reflected the failed capitalist economic order.\u201d<\/p>\n Academic subjects in education and capitalism in economics are inextricably linked. One teaches cognitive independence, the other protects political independence. If one wishes to destroy political independence, it is first necessary to destroy cognitive independence<\/strong>; independent thinkers will govern their own lives and will not live as suckled wards of the state. To build a citizenry obedient to the state requires a classroom that inculcates conformity to the group.<\/p>\n Intelligent Americans often note two seemingly distinct aspects of America\u2019s schools: (1) The teaching of academic subjects is poorly done (if done at all), and (2) the educational system is a hotbed of anticapitalist propaganda. The fact is that the two observations are intimately related.<\/p>\n The Progressives and their intellectual heirs severely dumbed down the schools as a necessary means of inculcating conformity, dependency, and obedience. Their vision is clear: They, the educated, intellectual elite\u2014the educational and social engineers\u2014will govern in the classroom and in the legislature. The people will conform and obey.<\/p>\n Fortunately, this is not a vision shared by all educators.<\/p>\n ADVOCATES OF LITERACY AND LEARNING<\/p>\n The educational ideas and methods of Maria Montessori<\/a> (1870\u20131952) entered United States culture during the early years of Progressive dominance. She was one of the first female medical doctors in Italy, and she developed revolutionary educational techniques that greatly enhanced the cognitive development of her students.<\/p>\n Montessori, recognizing that sensory observation is the foundation of cognition, trained young children to engage their senses, to develop their motor skills, to concentrate for long periods of time, and to learn independently. She scaled down classroom furniture and materials to child size, enabling children to more readily use and manipulate them. <\/p>\n She taught youngsters to read, employing a phonetic method that trained them to sound out letters and words and thus to unlock the worlds of literature, history, and science. She taught them to write and to do basic arithmetic, fractions, decimals, and geometry. <\/p>\n Whereas the Progressives encouraged group projects, social pressure, and social conformity, Montessori encouraged independent activities, independent thinking, independent learning.<\/p>\n In Montessori\u2019s classrooms, the children, using her specially designed materials, usually worked by themselves and with materials of their own choosing. They could team up if they chose to, but the cardinal social principle was in essence: Thou shalt not disrupt a child doing his or her own work.<\/p>\n In the years prior to World War I, her methods caught on in the United States. The first American Montessori school was opened in 1911 in Tarrytown, New York, shortly followed by others. Her book The Montessori Method was translated into English and quickly sold through six editions. Inventor Alexander Graham Bell and his wife publicly supported her methods. In 1913, she traveled to the United States and spoke around the country, generally to large and admiring crowds. McClure\u2019s Magazine, a widely read publication of the day, featured a series of articles on her methods. During this period, a century ago, Montessori schooling held a great deal of promise for the future of cognitive training in this country.<\/p>\n Shortly thereafter, several prominent American intellectuals rejected the antiacademic standpoint of the educational establishment and proposed a new, highly academic program for training the intellect. Among them were Robert Maynard Hutchins<\/a>, the youthful president of the University of Chicago; and Mortimer J. Adler<\/a>, a relentless autodidact and possibly the only person in history to receive a PhD (in psychology from Columbia University) without a high school or college diploma. <\/p>\n Together, these two led a concerted campaign on behalf of a \u201cGreat Books\u201d program. Hutchins and Adler maintained both that \u201ca liberal education was unthinkable without a grounding in the Great Books<\/strong>\u201d\u2014the classic works of Western civilization\u2014and that such academic training was the proper purpose of education.<\/p>\n For students to take on such works in high school and college, they need a solid foundation in reading, writing, math, and science. Adler later published The Paideia Proposal: An Educational Manifesto<\/a> (1982) and The Paideia Program: An Educational Syllabus<\/a> (1984), which called for terminating the Progressives\u2019 segmented educational system. He argued that<\/p>\n a single elementary and secondary school program for all students would ensure the upgrading of the curriculum and the quality of instruction to serve the needs of the brightest and to [educationally] lift the … least advantaged. He proposed that … vocational … training be given only after students had completed a full course of basic education in the humanities, arts, sciences, and language.<\/em><\/p>\n Starting in the late 1920s and continuing through the 1930s, Hutchins and Adler taught a seminar titled \u201cGreat Books of the Western World\u201d at the University of Chicago and elsewhere. The reading list included primary sources from scientists, mathematicians, philosophers, literary figures, and sundry diverse thinkers\u2014such great minds as Plato<\/a>, Euclid<\/a>, Galileo<\/a>, Shakespeare<\/a>, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe<\/a>, Albert Einstein<\/a>, Sigmund Freud<\/a>, and others.<\/p>\n Hutchins decried vocational training in education, arguing that an employer could train a thinking person in vocational skills in a matter of weeks. He claimed that<\/p>\n the object of general education should be \u201cthe training of the mind\u201d… . The kind of educational program that was needed … would teach students to appreciate the importance of ideas, to understand history, the fine arts and literature, and to grasp the principles of science.<\/em><\/p>\n Hutchins was a young, brilliant, eloquent spokesman for intellectual training, and his message received an enthusiastic reception from newspapers, magazines, and the general public.<\/p>\n But not from the schools of education.<\/p>\n THE ENEMIES OF INTELLECTUAL TRAINING ATTACK<\/p>\n William Heard Kilpatrick led the onslaught against the pro-academic educators.<\/p>\n Kilpatrick wasted no time in confronting the Montessori challenge. In his critical 1914 booklet, The Montessori System Examined<\/a>, he dismissed Montessori\u2019s methods as offering nothing in educational theory that was simultaneously novel and correct. Among his numerous criticisms, the most salient was his objection to academic training being introduced at such an early age. He made the narrow criticism that phonics worked well for such a phonetic language as Italian but was ill-suited to \u201cthe unphonetic character of the English language.\u201d <\/p>\n More broadly, he rejected academic training altogether as inappropriate for three- to five-year-olds. He wrote that education \u201cis much more than the acquisition of knowledge from books. And there is reason to fear that the presence of books makes more difficult that other part of education.\u201d He also maintained that \u201creading and writing might better be postponed to a later period.\u201d He argued that such intellectual training \u201ctends to divert the attention of … [a] child from other … possibly more valuable parts of education,\u201d and he agreed \u201cwith those who would exclude these formal school arts from the kindergarten period.\u201d<\/p>\n Further, Kilpatrick, like Dewey and other Progressives, was scathing in his condemnation of the Great Books advocates. Comparing Hutchins with William Bagley, a Progressive educator who was less opposed to academic training, Ravitch writes, \u201cBagley annoyed Progressive educators but Robert Maynard Hutchins drove them into a rage… . Unthinkable, his claim that the fundamental purpose of education was intellectual training.\u201d<\/p>\n Ravitch continues:<\/p>\n William Heard Kilpatrick was … horrified by Hutchins\u2019 views. He fulminated that Hutchins was an authoritarian whose ideas were out of step with \u201cevery intellectual advance of the last 300 years.\u201d Worse, \u201cDr. Hutchins stands near to Hitler. When you have a professed absolute, then you have to have some authority to give it content, and there the dictator comes in.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Dewey also excoriated the Great Books supporters. As a Pragmatist philosopher, Dewey was appalled by Hutchins\u2019s classical commitment to absolute principles or eternal truths. Every belief, Dewey held, is subject to scientific experimentation and ongoing revision. Circumstances continuously change, requiring human minds to discard outmoded explanatory principles and to seek relevant new ones. What was true during ancient or medieval times does not necessarily continue to explain natural or social events under the greatly changed conditions of the modern world. Dewey, too, compared Hutchins to the dictatorial powers of 1930s Europe. As Ravitch writes:<\/p>\n Astonishingly, Dewey went so far as to imply that Hutchins was ideologically linked with the jackbooted thugs who were then brutalizing Europe. \u201cI would not intimate that the author [Hutchins] has any sympathy with fascism. But basically, his idea as to the proper course to be taken is akin to the distrust of freedom and the consequent appeal to some fixed authority that is now over-running the world.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n In their criticisms of the Great Books approach, Dewey and Kilpatrick ignored the fact that Hutchins and Adler encouraged students to read not just the works of a single philosophic figure or tradition, but all of the greatest works of the Western canon. Included were John Locke<\/a>, Isaac Newton<\/a>, Goethe<\/a>, Voltaire<\/a>, Kant<\/a>, Charles Darwin<\/a>, Einstein<\/a>, Freud<\/a>, and other revolutionary thinkers \u201cof the last 300 years\u201d\u2014and of earlier figures, as well. Further, consider the twisted logic and bitter irony of Soviet apologists imputing support for totalitarianism to those seeking to nurture independent cognition.<\/p>\n How did a philosopher such as Dewey come to deeply despise intellectual training rooted in the most important philosophic thought of history? Among the many reasons, Dewey and other Progressives conflated certainty and absolute knowledge with dogmatism and political authority. <\/p>\n Did Progressives truly believe that those who were certain of facts\u2014such as 3 x 3 = 9, George Washington was the first president of the United States, or A is A\u2014would inevitably sic the Gestapo on intellectual opponents? More likely, they understood that independent thinkers\u2014those not reliant on any group or authority for their grasp of reality\u2014would never make for obedient subjects, nor would such thinkers accept the communist dictatorship for which Progressives pined.<\/p>\n The intellectual battle lines between these two groups of educators were clearly drawn. One side, in regard to elementary school, wanted primarily to teach students practical life skills and conformity to the group, with a dollop of cognitive training mixed in. The other side wanted to provide students with practical life skills and foundational knowledge of academic subjects\u2014and, above all, to teach them to think independently. <\/p>\n These differences continued into secondary school. One side sought to socialize students, to provide vocational training for most of them and academic education only for an elite few. The other side strove to continue teaching academic subjects, to teach students to think for themselves, and, in many cases, to prepare them to study the timeless works of Western civilization\u2014works that shed light on history, science, philosophy, and art, and that provide principles and guidance for the present and future.<\/p>\n In short, the goal of the Progressives was to saturate students in the spirit of service and prepare them for community life. On the other hand, the goal of the heroic educators opposing them was to teach students to think, learn, and understand the world.<\/p>\n In order to achieve their ends, Progressives needed to do more than merely attack the ideas of Montessori, Hutchins, and Adler. Their antiacademic campaign would culminate in an assault on the very root of cognitive development. What was the most effective way to bar millions of students from intellectual training? Cripple their ability to read<\/strong>.<\/p>\n THE GREAT READING WARS<\/p>\n In 1955, when the campaign in favor of intellectual training seemed lost, Rudolf Flesch<\/a> fired a shot heard \u2019round the nation with his brilliant book Why Johnny Can\u2019t Read<\/a>. Flesch was an Austrian Jew who fled the Nazis and emigrated to America. He held a doctorate in law from the University of Vienna and earned a PhD in library science from Columbia University. Knowing there was little illiteracy in Austria and in Western Europe more broadly, he was nonplussed by the rampant reading problems he encountered in America.<\/p>\n Flesch wrote to American parents about, among other things, remedial instruction for deficient readers:<\/p>\n There are no remedial reading cases in Austrian schools… . There are no remedial reading cases in Germany, in France, in Italy, in Norway, in Spain\u2014practically anywhere in the world except in the United States… . Did you know that there was no such thing as remedial reading in this country either until about thirty years ago?<\/em><\/p>\n He discovered that from the start of the 20th century, American educators almost uniformly repudiated the tried-and-true phonics method of teaching reading. Phonics makes efficient use of one of the great intellectual achievements of human civilization: the development of the Roman alphabet. This alphabet is the basis of most European languages and is composed of twenty-six letters that give rise, in English, to forty-four sounds. <\/p>\n By the time most children are five, they generally can speak thousands of words in their mother tongue. At this point (and probably earlier), it is possible to teach them the alphabet, the literary symbols that make up the verbal sounds. In a matter of months, children between the ages of five and six can master the written alphabet and begin to sound out words. <\/p>\n For centuries, billions of children in dozens of nations around the world have mastered the all-important art of reading by this method. Even in English, a so-called irregular language, only approximately 13 percent of words are pronounced differently than they are spelled. This means that children trained in phonics can sound out about 87 percent of words in the language. Then, as proficient readers, they learn by experience to match irregular spellings\u2014for example, \u201crough\u201d\u2014with the spoken word that they well know.<\/p>\n But throughout the 20th century and continuing now well into the 21st, the majority of American educators have rejected phonics, opting instead for some variant of the \u201cwhole word\u201d method. <\/p>\n This method teaches children to look at the whole word, to recognize its shape, to examine the context in which it is deployed, and, if necessary, to guess. The first iteration of this method, known as \u201clook-say,\u201d held that children learn to recognize a written word by seeing it repeatedly. The theory was: Students need only master a core group of commonly used words and then employ context cues to decipher the rest. The children cannot be overloaded with thousands of new word shapes at a time. Therefore, the look-say method, starting in the first grade, entails introducing children to only several hundred new words per school year, which are then relentlessly repeated. Here, for instance, is a sentence from the kind of books commonly used: \u201c\u2018We will look,\u2019 said Susan. \u2018Yes, yes,\u2019 said all the children. \u2018We will look and find it.\u2019 So all the boys and girls looked. They looked and looked for it. But they did not find it.\u201d<\/p>\n However, even advocates of look-say highlight its overriding, intractable problem. As one advocate put it, children<\/p>\n should receive praise for a good guess even though it is not completely accurate. For example, if a child reads \u201cI like to eat carrots\u201d as \u201cI like to eat cake,\u201d praise should be given for supplying a word that makes sense and follows at least some of the phonic cues.<\/em><\/p>\n Of course, countless sentences have multiple words that might satisfy the context cues. A reader unable to sound them out can only guess. Indeed, proponents of this method acknowledge the undeniable role of guessing in the process. As Martin Gross<\/a> details in The Conspiracy of Ignorance: The Failure of American Public Schools<\/a>, proponents of the look-say method claim that \u201creading is \u2018a psycholinguistic guessing game.\u2019 Students are encouraged to \u2018create\u2019 and are not marked wrong for guessing wrong.\u201d Philosopher Leonard Peikoff<\/a> writes archly of this method:<\/p>\n How would you like to see, at the head of our army, a general with this kind of schooling? He receives a telegram [today an instant message, if not a tweet] from the president during a crisis ordering him to \u201creject nuclear option,\u201d proceeds to make a good guess, and reads it as \u201crelease nuclear option.\u201d Linguistically, the two are as close as \u201ccarrots\u201d and \u201ccake.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Advocates of the whole word method hold that phonics overloads a child\u2019s mind with too many letters and sounds that must be memorized. So, in place of this, they endorse a system that requires readers to memorize the shape of every word in the language. Memorize not twenty-six letters and forty-four sounds that enable readers to decode untold thousands of words in the English language\u2014but memorize the shape of every word in the entire language. <\/p>\n Phonics is a superb time and mental space saver: a simple method, once mastered, to decipher the vast preponderance of words. The whole word method, on the other hand, is akin to a gigantic warehouse containing millions and millions of items, randomly stored, with no letter-by-letter classification, requiring searchers to memorize the shape of each, later to recall that shape and its meaning as needed. It is no mystery that one method is vastly superior to the other.<\/p>\n Early in this country\u2019s history, phonics had been dominant. Noah Webster\u2019s Blue-Backed Speller, first published in 1783\u2014and later, McGuffey Readers\u2014used phonics to teach reading and then introduced children to literature: real stories that captured the imagination. But by the 1920s, the professional curriculum designers had rejected phonics in favor of look-say. …<\/p>\n By the 1930s, the look-say method had triumphed in the teachers\u2019 colleges, textbooks, and in many schools. The infamous Dick and Jane readers became the dominant textbooks in teaching reading to American children starting in the 1930s and continuing for many years. For decades, children were bombarded with such inane drivel as, \u201c\u2018See Spot run,\u2019 said Jane. \u2018See Spot run to the new house.\u2019 \u2018Come home, Spot,\u2019 said Dick. \u2018Come, Spot, come. Come home.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n It was in this context that Flesch\u2019s book sounded the alarm. It was serialized in newspapers and magazines and quickly became a best seller. It just as quickly became anathema to the educational establishment. For millions of parents and thoughtful Americans, it was eye-opening, and it galvanized them to crusade for phonics. <\/p>\n Flesch devoted an entire chapter to pitting systematic phonics against the whole word method and examining their respective results in every relevant test conducted up to that time. In every test, students trained in phonics read better than students trained using variants of the whole word method. <\/p>\n Additionally, in 1961, the Carnegie Corporation of New York commissioned Jeanne Chall<\/a> of the Harvard Graduate School of Education to research the issue and finally resolve the dispute. In her 1967 book Learning to Read: The Great Debate, she concluded, \u201cFor a beginning reader … knowledge of letter and sounds had more influence on reading achievement than the child\u2019s tested \u2018mental ability\u2019 or IQ.\u201d<\/p>\n Ravitch writes, \u201cFlesch\u2019s polemic set off a national debate about literacy… . Because of its popularity, Flesch\u2019s book had a swift and large effect on the teaching of reading.\u201d As a result, \u201cSeveral publishers issued new reading textbooks that featured phonics.\u201d<\/p>\n Nonetheless, the educational establishment clung to the whole word method; and, by the 1980s, in a new form, it made a sweeping comeback. Its new iteration was known as \u201cwhole language.\u201d Whole language retained the whole word approach and thus the obdurate refusal to teach phonics.<\/p>\n Some advocates of this approach, to their credit, recognize that children introduced to great literary works are impelled by their natural curiosity to read interesting stories. However, whole language advocates continue crippling children\u2019s minds with stultifying guessing games\u2014rather than enlightening them with the proven method of phonics.<\/p>\n One critic of this horror observed the frustration of students during the 1980s and early 1990s and reflected that \u201cin whole language, millions of youngsters nationwide were surrounded by \u2018beautiful pieces of literature that (they) can\u2019t read.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Unfortunately for California children, the state became a testing ground for whole language during the late 1980s and early 1990s. In 1992, after the whole language method had been the modus operandi in schools for several years, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) conducted statewide reading tests. <\/p>\n A jaw-dropping 52 percent of California fourth graders were reading below the baseline established for that grade. When the same test was conducted again in 1994, the number of semiliterate children in California had risen to 56 percent. One teacher in the Los Angeles area gave a heartbreaking report of first graders asked to read. \u201cThe children were in tears… . They look at you with three paragraphs on a page and they say, \u2018What do we do with this?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n When some schools course-corrected and reintroduced phonics, the results were telling. After students taught with whole language repeatedly tested poorly, their elementary school in Texas switched to intensive phonics training. On a subsequent statewide reading test, 98 percent of students from the school scored at or above grade level.<\/p>\n The continued commitment to the whole word method on the part of education professionals would be unfathomable without a grasp of their basic motives. But once we apprehend that their aim is to create \u201cwell-socialized\u201d future citizens obedient to commands for \u201cthe good of humanity,\u201d the Progressive repudiation of phonics becomes readily understandable, even predictable. If you want children to read well, you embrace phonics. If you do not want children to read well\u2014or at all\u2014you reject it. If you want students to master academic subjects, you embrace phonics. If you do not want students to master academic subjects, you reject it.<\/p>\n It\u2019s no wonder that many American students cannot read. The \u201ceducational experts\u201d who train their teachers do not want them to.<\/p>\n DUMBING DOWN THE REST OF THE CURRICULUM<\/p>\n This same horrific tale has been replicated across the entire academic curriculum. In keeping with the principles of the curriculum designers, less and less attention is given to academic subjects. Regarding math, for example, the middle schools are \u201cheavily mired down in simple arithmetic.\u201d By the late 1990s, only three states required more than two years of math to graduate from a public high school. \u201cMost required two years, and others even less.\u201d By then, more than a third of public high school graduates had never taken a full course in basic algebra; 45 percent had never taken intermediate algebra; and trigonometry had all but vanished\u2014only one graduate in eight took an introductory course. The numbers haven\u2019t changed much since then, and high school students still do not learn enough math to prepare them for college.<\/p>\n Regarding science, the story is the same. Although 93 percent of high school students study biology, only 54 percent take a chemistry course, and a mere 24 percent study physics. The writer Martin Gross reports, \u201cOnly 20 percent of public high school graduates\u2014one in five\u2014take all three basic science courses.\u201d<\/p>\n As for history, it has been transformed into \u201csocial studies,\u201d thoroughly eviscerated, and permeated with more political activism than content. <\/p>\n Related, because reading abilities have been severely curtailed, literature classes are severely dumbed down as well. For example, the 1922 Texas state high school reading list for the ninth grade included such works as Cooper\u2019s The Last of the Mohicans and Scott\u2019s Ivanhoe; the estimated grade levels for the list ranged from 8.0 to 12.9. By contrast, the 2015\u201316 ninth grade reading list includes Sandra Cisneros\u2019s The House on Mango Street and Rodman Philbrick\u2019s Freak the Mighty; the estimated grade levels for this list range from 4.5 to 6.7. It is, therefore, appalling but not surprising that, as eminent scholar Richard Pipes reports, applicants for his freshman seminar at Harvard University are \u201calmost totally unfamiliar with the world\u2019s great literature.\u201d<\/p>\n Because academic subjects are sparsely taught, if taught at all, teachers need little mastery of them; instead, they take \u201ceducation\u201d courses. As Gross writes, \u201cHigh school teachers in training typically take fewer credits in their majors than other students majoring in the same subject.\u201d In other words, future math teachers take fewer math courses than do math majors, English teachers take fewer English courses than do English majors, and so on. One telling fact is that, whereas for decades CliffsNotes\u2019 readership consisted largely of high school and college students, by the turn of the 21st century, their prime demographic had shifted to English teachers who had taken few literature courses, had never read the books they were now teaching, and were ill-equipped to interpret them.<\/p>\n The Progressives are winning their war against the academic program and intellectual training.<\/p>\n WHAT WE CAN DO<\/p>\n The war rages on, and advocates of a proper curriculum and corresponding intellectual training have many difficult battles ahead. As Richard Mitchell<\/a> wrote in 1981,<\/p>\n After sober and judicious consideration, and weighing one thing against another in the interest of reasonable compromise, H. L. Mencken concluded that a startling and dramatic improvement in American education required only that we hang all the professors and burn down the schools. His uncharacteristically moderate proposal was not adopted. Those who actually knew more about education than Mencken did could see that his plan was nothing more than cosmetic and would in fact provide only an outward appearance of improvement. Those who knew less, on the other hand, had somewhat more elaborate plans of their own, and they just happened to be in charge of the schools.<\/em><\/p>\n Mencken\u2019s words from many decades ago have proven incisively prescient, as have Mitchell\u2019s. The educational establishment is, in the words of E. D. Hirsch, \u201can impregnable fortress.\u201d <\/p>\n Writer after writer has accurately denounced it, parents have risen in fury against it, special government commissions have critiqued it\u2014all to no avail. The schools of education, and federal and state departments of education, form what Arthur Bestor called an \u201cinterlocking directorate,\u201d championing a vision and a philosophy that they will never renounce. <\/p>\n 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 \u201cchange\u201d from look-say to whole language is but one example. Hirsch notes that such reforms \u201chave long dominated the schools.\u201d For instance, \u201cthe repudiation of the supposedly deleterious \u2018overemphasis\u2019 on [academic] subject matter is a reform that has already been victorious for half a century.\u201d<\/p>\n The curriculum designers will die before relinquishing their power to cripple students\u2019 minds.<\/strong><\/p>\n 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\u2014free of charge\u2014a K\u201312 science curriculum for the state of California. The state turned them down; instead, it awarded a $178,000 contract for curriculum development to \u201cprofessional educators\u201d who, of course, were trained not in science but in \u201ceducation.\u201d<\/p>\n The educational establishment is a monolith that cannot easily be defeated. But it can<\/strong> be circumvented.<\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n So, one thing we can do is advocate Montessori training and support Montessori schools<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Further, homeschooling<\/strong> is once again legal in every state. <\/p>\n 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\u2019s students age five to seventeen. <\/p>\n As the nation\u2019s public schools continue to decline, the number of homeschoolers will no doubt increase. Another thing we can do is advocate and support homeschooling initiatives<\/strong>.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Another powerful and largely untapped resource that parents can use are the many full-time graduate students working toward advanced degrees, not in \u201ceducation,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n At the college level, the influence of Hutchins and Adler has been revived at a few schools. <\/p>\n For example, the Great Books program at St. John\u2019s College provides superb training in the classics of Western civilization at both its Annapolis and Santa Fe campuses. So do the programs at Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula, California, University of Chicago, and several other colleges and universities. There is even a Great Books program dedicated to promoting the foundations of freedom and capitalism\u2014the Lyceum program at the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism.<\/p>\n Although opportunities for and outposts of intellectual training still exist, the dominance of the same failed educational theories remains a travesty. To fight it, we must speak out at whatever level is open to us, public or private, among friends or among strangers, in person or online, via Twitter or letters to congressmen. <\/p>\n We must champion the mind, intellectual training, and a rigorous academic curriculum. For the sake of justice on behalf of the countless minds already stunted, and to protect countless more, we must tell the bitter truth about the American educational establishment.<\/p>\n If we can save even one priceless mind, it will be worth it. With a concerted effort, we can save many.<\/p>\n Some 44 million American adults cannot read well enough to read a simple story to a child\u2014and nearly half of adults in the United States are functionally illiterate, unable even to read a drug label. … We have been inundated with bad news regarding the American education system for decades. For example, in 1988, a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[5,9],"tags":[33,34,228,41,7916,189],"class_list":["post-9745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-europe","tag-communism","tag-culture","tag-learning","tag-schools","tag-soscialism","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9745","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9745"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9745\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}