The assault on education has been the Left’s primary means of stupidifying the population since the 1930s. If you do not know anything, but hold politically-correct opinions, you are perfectly suited to your task of expanding the state and obeying your superiors in the mainstream media.
So it is with a measure of happiness that I report that the idea of a curriculum-based education is making a comeback, the type of education where you actually learn something, such as facts and the means to assess evidence.
Sol Stern reports in City Journal:
“During the past quarter-century, Hirsch has warned over and over that something is dangerously amiss in the nation’s classrooms. His diagnosis could be summed up with the admonition It’s the curriculum, stupid. For the first 150 years of the republic, according to Hirsch, most schools followed a shared curriculum emphasizing the explicit content knowledge that children had to acquire in order to grow into literate adults and good citizens. As Hirsch writes in his most recent book, The Making of Americans, the country had “no official national curriculum, but it had the equivalent: a benign conspiracy among the writers of schoolbooks to ensure that all students would learn many of the same facts, myths, and values and so would grow to be competent, loyal Americans.” America’s public schools were the envy of the world during this period.
“Starting in the 1930s, however, the progressive-education movement began a long march toward taking over the country’s teacher-training schools and professional teacher organizations. One of the progressives’ goals was undermining the idea of a prescribed curriculum, which they regarded as oppressive and out of sync with children’s natural learning styles. This abandonment of a common curriculum by the schools, Hirsch argues, was largely responsible for the precipitous decline in student academic achievement that began in the 1960s. Academic stagnation set in, both absolutely and relative to achievement in the leading industrialized nations.”
The principles advanced by Hirsch are being taken up by many states in the US. It is not all gloom and doom today, people. The link to Stern’s article City Journal is worth following.