Is There a Cure for the Collapse of the U.S. Education System?
Author: Bernstein, Andrew
USA Today Magazine. Sep2019, Vol. 148 Issue 2892, p46-47. 2p.
AS FAR BACK as 1983, a commission appointed by the Reagan Administration entitled its report regarding U.S. education: "A Nation at Risk." It concluded ominously: "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves." We still allow it.
We still allow it.
In 1994, the Educational Testing Service reported that a mere 42% of U.S. college graduates could summarize a newspaper article accurately. In 2012, U.S. high school students scored below the mean on the math portion of the Programme for International Student Assessment test, ranking 26th out of 34 nations involved. In 2015, American kids did even worse, scoring near the bottom on the same exam.
It was not always this way. Literacy in 18th- and 19th-century America was high. For instance, the essays of The Federalist, articulating sophisticated political theory, were written largely as newspaper editorials read by the common man. Thomas Paine's Common Sense sold 120,000 copies to a free population of 2,400,000 (analogous to selling 10,000,000 copies today).
"The invention of the scientific curriculum expert represented an extraordinary shift in pow er away from teachers, parents, and local communities. . . ."
In the early 19th century, when the U.S. population was 20,000,000, the novels of Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper each sold millions of copies. The McGuffey Readers, which sold more than 120,000,000 copies between 1836-1920, presented selections from Nathaniel Hawthorne in the fourth-grade text and from William Shakespeare in the fifth. The term "benighted" was deployed in the third-grade reader.
So, what happened? What killed American education? Why do U.S. students score so low on academic tests? Why are so many Americans semi-illiterate? The succinct answer is that the theories of John Dewey and other progressive educationists came to dominate U.S. schools of education-and did not in other nations.
Progressives thought only an elite few should go to college and become society's leaders. These bright kids would receive the full academic program-literature, math, history, and science. The rest of us would learn practical life skills-vocational training, hygiene, driver's ed, and so forth. The educated intellectual elite would govern in the legislature and classroom; the rest of us would be good worker ants, doing our jobs competently and uncritically obeying the government's wise rulers.
They put this theory into practice in numerous ways. During the early 20th century, such researchers as Lewis Terman developed the Stanford-Binet intelligence test. Educational historian Diane Ravitch of New York University points out that "the public schools employed the tests to predict which students were likely to go to college and which should be guided into vocational programs."
Shortly after World War I, several progressives-including John Franklin Bobbit at the University of Chicago-developed the field known as Curriculum Studies. Prior to this, school curricula had been designed by community school boards and teachers who knew the expectations of local parents. Because most parents desired their children to receive academic training, this is what the schools provided.
No more, said the curriculum designers. School board members, teachers, and parents were fluent in neither IQ testing nor methods of tracking students into subjects that would train them for their future professions. This was a task for the trained experts of Curriculum Studies.
Ravitch notes: "The invention of the scientific curriculum expert represented an extraordinary shift in power away from teachers, parents, and local communities to professional experts. . . . In modem school districts, control over curriculum was transferred from educators who had majored in English, history, or mathematics to trained cuiriculum specialists."
The educational goal for these thinkers was not personal fulfillment, but social utility. Of what use to society was it, for example, for a plumber to master Shakespeare's dramas, or calculus, or Greco/Roman history? This last field, Bobbit wrote, "deals with a world that is dead . . . with manners . . . and languages that are altogether impracticable in this modem age."
Rather, curriculum designers claimed, if agricultural production declines, the schools should improve agricultural training; if industrial output falls, the schools must do better at teaching industrial education; and so forth.
Then came the so-called Cardinal Principles, which delivered a death blow to academic training as the centerpiece of American schooling. In 1912, the Bureau of Education, working with the National Educational Association, established the Commission to Reorganize Secondary Education (CRSE). In 1918, CRSE presented its Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education.
There were seven objectives: Health (mandating that schools teach hygiene and encourage athletics); Worthy Home Membership (meaning the schools would teach household management to teenage girls); Vocation (requiring the schools to teach shop classes); Civics (soon to be Social Studies, which largely replaced History, and, in Ravitch's terms, focused on "social efficiency, or teaching students the skills and attitudes necessary to fit into the social order"); Worthy Use of Leisure (to train people how to enjoy themselves properly); and Ethical Character (which assumed that a government-run institution should teach proper moral principles to children). About these six, CRSE had much to say.
As for the remaining objective, Command of Fundamental Principles, the sole objective dealing with academics, the commission wrote little. "Provisions should be made also for those having distinctly academic interests"- and that is it. In Ravitch's words, academic training became "an afterthought."
This approach soon dominated American schools of education. Its basic philosophy still does. Why such hostility on the part of professional "educationists" toward intellectual training? Dewey, professor of philosophy at Columbia University, answered: "The 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."
Dewey held that schooling's purpose was not to teach the child "science, nor literature, nor history, nor geography"-but to prepare him or her for "social cooperation and community life." A world-renowned thinker, Dewey gave the progressive movement an imprimatur of lofty philosophy.
Whether or not contemporary educationists accept the idea that the purpose of schooling is to train compliant subjects dutifully to perform their roles in a scientifically-engineered society, they do retain the anti-academic bias.
Consequently, over the years, our schools enormously have devalued academic training. For example, today, in most states, only two years of math are required for high school graduation. Regarding science, most high school students take a biology course, just over half take chemistry, and roughly one-quarter study physics. Merely 20% of U.S. high school graduates take all three basic science classes.
Regarding reading, educationists for a century have attacked phonics-the historically effective method of teaching reading- and sought to replace it with look-say or whole language, methods dismally less successful.
Rudolf Flesch pointed out in his 1955 classic, Why Johnny Can't Read, that the U.S.'s illiteracy problem stemmed from its rejection of phonics for other methods-and that Europe's lack of literacy difficulties was based in its commitment to phonics. It therefore is no mystery as to why so many Americans are semi-illiterate. To a significant degree, many of our schools have devalued-or abandoned-the most-effective method to teach reading.
Since many Americans struggle to read, literature reading lists have been dumbed down. For example, the 1922 Texas statewide high school reading list for the ninth grade ranged, in estimated grade levels, from 8.0 to 12.9. By contrast, its 2015-16 ninth-grade counterpart ranged from grade levels 4.5 to 6.7.
It is not surprising, then, that historian Richard Pipes stated that applicants for his freshman seminar at Harvard were "almost totally unfamiliar with the world's great literature."
History, of course, has been replaced by Social Studies and taught only sparingly. For decades now, at the colleges at which I have taught, the ignorance of history-including the U.S.'s-on the part of most students is appalling.
Teacher training reflects the anti-academic bias. Future teachers, required to take education courses, take fewer content courses. Therefore, future math teachers take fewer math courses than do math majors; future English teachers take fewer literature courses than do English majors; and so on.
We have arrived at this disastrous state of education for one fundamental reason: schools of education, state departments of education, and the Federal Department of Education form what historian Arthur Bestor called an "Interlocking Directorate" of professional educationists militantly opposed to academic training as the proper foundation of schooling.
This is why the proposed Common Core solution to the U.S.'s educational problems is not merely mistaken, it is risible. One of Common Core's many problems is that it would deliver control of all American education-both public and private-to the Federal Department of Education; that is, to a certified member of the Interlocking Directorate that, in the first place, is responsible for the problem.
The means to improve U.S. education are apparent. We need to do three things:
- Deploy phonics as the exclusive method of teaching reading.
- Focus schooling entirely on academic subjects. Recognize that such practical skills as vocational training, driver's ed, sex ed, and so forth are valuable practical tools that should be left to parents, after-school activities, vocational schools, and employers who provide on-the-job training. School should be the one place in society that specializes in disseminating knowledge of history, science, mathematics, and literature. By training students to read, write, and do mathematical calculation, we are teaching them basic thinking skills.
- Teach academic subjects in the proper order. For instance, science teaching today often requires students to memorize high-level abstractions with little understanding of what the concepts mean. However, science education should be taught historically, starting with the observations and the simple experiments that enabled early scientists to identify basic truths of nature. Then teachers build gradually from say, Archimedes to Copernicus, to Galileo, to Newton, and so forth, teaching science in the order humanity learned it, always focused on the real-world observations and the experiments performed.
The goal is to identify each principle, to observe the facts that support it, and to perform the experiments that corroborate it. In this way, the principles are tied to observable facts and to the principles that they build on. Similarly, all academic subjects have a proper logical order in which they should be taught.
The contrast between our alternative educational futures is stark. We can make the changes necessary to produce a nation of literate, knowledgeable citizens, or continue on our current course, the one that has resulted in a nation chock-full of semi-illiterates.
icons on the left to see existing comments.
0 General Document comments
0 Sentence and Paragraph comments
0 Image and Video comments
Reagan says that the US education is a national risk
New Conversation
Hide Full Comment
In 1994 college graduates were sucessful though in 2015 kids were becoming worse
New Conversation
Hide Full Comment
John Dewey ideas came to dominate US schools and not other countries.
New Conversation
Hide Full Comment
progressives thought that only a few elites should lead to society.
Few would receive a full academic program of literature, math, history, and science. Everyone else would learn basic skills such as hygiene and others needed in life. The elite will governor while the rest are working ants
New Conversation
Hide Full Comment
in the 20th century, researchers developed the Stanford Binet intelligence test to predict which students were likely to go to college and which should be guided into vocational programs.
New Conversation
Hide Full Comment
Curriculum studies were designed by school boards that knew the expectations of local parents.
New Conversation
Hide Full Comment
The main goal is social utility, theres no use for a plumber to master calculus, history or other subjects.
New Conversation
Hide Full Comment
" if a certain production declines then schools should improve that field of training
New Conversation
Hide Full Comment
Learning has become less important, people are becoming selfish.
New Conversation
Hide Full Comment
the purpose of schooling is not to teach scince but to prepare students for social and community life
New Conversation
Hide Full Comment
many schools have abandoned the most effective methods to teaching reading.
New Conversation
Hide Full Comment
2015-2016
New Conversation
Hide Full Comment
Fewer math teachers take fewer math courses than do math majors..etc.
New Conversation
Hide Full Comment
3 solutions
New Conversation
Hide Full Comment
General Document Comments 0
