 |
The Destruction of American Education
|
| |
The Destruction of American Education
|
|
It might seem that the word "destruction" in the title of this essay is a bit over the top. But it's the only accurate description of what's happening in America today. The demonic cabal that now controls the U.S. has systematically destroyed American education in general and is currently attacking each academic discipline.
"The basic idea is to force state governments to compete for $4.35 billion in federal assistance, with the money going to those states which do the most to promote charter schools, utilize standardized testing, and weaken workplace rules for teachers. Essentially, the scheme sets up a bidding war among the states for desperately needed funds on the basis of an anti-public education agenda that has been promoted for decades by the right wing. 
"Pairing the Democratic Party demagogue Sharpton with Gingrich is aimed at suggesting that a broad coalition has formed behind Obama’s education agenda."Sharpton’s role is to defuse opposition in largely African-American urban schools that will be particularly devastated by Obama’s policies. Citing the 'achievement gap' that remains between black and white students, Sharpton now champions the same policies he opposed when they were put forward by the Bush administration." 1
Under Bush II, the social sciences were attacked. Jeb Bush, during his tenure as Governor, turned Florida into a totalitarian state, perpetrating a monstrous vote-rigging fraud in 2000 which resulted in his brother being criminally appointed President by the Supreme Court.
Next, Jeb extended his dictatorship into the realm of education. Jeb and his henchmen assaulted the entire discipline of history by redefining it as the teaching of "fact," not "construction." In other words, history in Florida was what Jeb and his cronies said it was, and any disagreement with their "facts" was not to be tolerated.
With an illiterate, uneducated American citizenry, unable to understand what's happening in the world, it's no wonder that a fascist cabal has been able to take over the United States.
It's no accident that America's schools have slowly eroded and that the intelligence of the average American has become so debilitated. American learning has plummeted and public school performance has nose-dived ever since the middle of the twentieth century because it was planned that way. Thinking American citizens must always be aware that what goes on in this society is the result of the planning of its rulers; they create precisely the social, psychological, economic, and ideological conditions which will realize their goal of excessive wealth for themselves and impoverishment for the working class. Education, the development of understanding, must be distinguished from training, the development of skill. Education occurs through learning:
 The history of education began with the evolutionary appearance of homo sapiens, the first creatures who, through their development of language, were capable of understanding. Prior to homo sapiens, members of the homo habilis and homo erectus strains had trained themselves in such skills as fire-making, hunting, shelter-building, and food gathering. But to them, human experience was merely a series of events without long-term significance.
 When homo sapiens tribes invented language, they represented events and objects by written and spoken signs and gestures, which they understood to have meaning, that is, they signified some entity such as a person, animal, plant, place, thing, substance, quality, idea, action, or state.A sign, such as the word, "fire," could be communicated from one person to another. Now humans could not only see, feel, and make fire, for example, but understand its significance: warmth, cooking, protection from predators, sterilization, and destruction. With the development of language, the communication of meaning began. Now, meanings could be transmitted from one person to another, one generation to another.
As a young blind and deaf child, Helen lived much like an animal, rushing from one sensation to another. Within a month after becoming Helen's teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan was able to impart the gift of language to her. The awakening to meaning, as demonstrated in the film, was the event which made it possible for Helen to begin understanding instead of simply repeating what Anne was teaching her. Helen had been trained to repeat the word "water," but it wasn't until she combined the experience of feeling water and trying to communicate the word "water" simultaneously, that Helen gained the magical gift of meaning--and hence language and understanding. Up to that point, Helen had been like a well-trained animal, memorizing words, speaking them, and receiving praise from Anne. But now, suddenly, it came to her! The word "water" actually referred to, pointed to, meant this marvelous liquid reality that ran through her fingers.
In each culture, the public meanings, ideas, and skills transmitted through educational institutions (schools, academies, monasteries, universities) and through the media (newspapers, magazines, radio, TV, Internet) have always been determined by the small ruling elite (politicians, financiers, warriors, priests, scholars, scientists, corporations).
Vested, moneyed interests have constantly sought to demolish the American traditions of democracy, plotting to destroy the enlightening "diffusion of knowledge and the free exercise of reason." Their method of rule is not by "consent of the governed" or rational discourse, but by arbitrary dictate of a tyrant's fascistic tactics.
Beginning in the early part of the twentieth century, American ruling groups began to create a pseudo-educational system which produces students no longer capable of understanding such key concepts and factors as "freedom," "government of the people," "critical thinking," etc.
This ruler-imposed system, enhanced by anti-intellectual activities such as minority-group studies and multiculturalism, produces uneducated and programmed students who understand almost nothing of what occurs beyond the propaganda and mythology of the political-financial leaders.
Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt had been a professor in philosophy and later rector at the University of Leipzig, in Germany, until his death in 1920. At the time, many Americans trained in Europe before returning to the United States to work in universities.
In 1892 Hall played a leading role in founding the American Psychological Association. Hall became known for his studies of child development and in 1904 published his two-volume Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relation to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education, welding experimental psychology to child education. We can get a clear idea of the new meaning of Wundtian-defined American education by examining Hall's definition of educational practice.
"We must overcome the fetishism of the alphabet, of the multiplication tables, of grammars, of scales, and of bibliolatry . . . it would be no serious loss if a child never learned to read." (emphasis added)
Testing adults who already knew how to read, Cattell "discovered" they could recognize words without having to sound out the letters. "Eureka!" he said to himself. "Words are not understood by a recognition of the image or the sound of letters, but are perceived as 'total word pictures.'" He jumped to the conclusion that you shouldn't teach a child the sounds of letters and phrases as the first step to being able to read. You teach children how to read by showing them words, and telling them what the words are. This "breakthrough" of Cattell's led to the adoption of a sight-reading method in many school systems throughout the United States. The result ever since has been increased illiteracy, which has now become a national crisis. Somewhat effective teaching occurred in the first half of the twentieth century in America, primarily because the nation was rapidly moving from an agricultural to an industrial culture and citizens respected and valued education. The Enlightenment ideal of an informed citizenry was still a powerful incentive, so high school civics classes taught the rudiments of what the American political system was supposed to be according to the federal and state constitutions.
Beginning in the second half of the twentieth century, American education began its rapid and almost total decline. In the latter half of the twentieth and now the twenty-first century, "education" has almost entirely been turned into mere training. The very definition of "education" has been twisted to make it appear to be training. For example,
By 1968, John Goodlad, one of the educational establishment's best known spokespersons, made it clear just what was important in "education."
"The most controversial issues of the twenty-first century will pertain to the ends and means of modifying human behavior and who shall determine them. The first educational question will not be 'what knowledge is of the most worth?' but 'what kinds of human beings do we wish to produce?' The possibilities virtually defy our imagination."
(journal of the National Education Association)
"Technological society turns out to work in the opposite way from that usually supposed: namely, by actually requiring less rather than more education of its workers. This is because modern industry depends on reducing human error, which means reducing dependence on the individual worker's expertise and judgment. In building or maintaining electronic devices, workers who once installed or rewired electrical circuits now plug in modular components consisting of machine-printed circuit boards. . . 
Because of this twisting of "education" into training, as a university instructor I was faced with students who had never learned to read, write, or think. They were the wounded, deformed casualties of the criminal cabal's war against the mind. But the educational establishment doesn't even recognize the devastated condition of American education. Many university professors, even full professors, cannot write or speak sound English. A department chair in a state university in California recently wrote a book, which he forced all students in the introductory class to buy, which contained over one hundred grammatical errors!Quota hiring is rampant in higher education. Unfortunately, the ability to speak intelligible English is no longer required, and students suffer the consequences.
Since people are encouraged to pursue their own interests, there is no feeling of solidarity and hence no possibility of concerted effort to overcome the oppressive conditions. It seems perfectly normal that a two-class society is rapidly developing, with new billionaires being created every year while millions of workers are laid off, denied welfare, and their tax money stolen by wealthy looters in such scams as the Enron/Anderson swindle, the savings and loan fraud, the Mexican "loan" scandal, and the IMF repayment to wealthy investors who suffered from the Asian stockmarket crash. We must begin to awaken ourselves to what's happening in the world and taking action to overcome the oppressive conditions. And here Freire's books are exceptionally helpful.
As oppressed people we must become aware of what has happened to us and develop our own sense of what it means to be truly human.
As we begin to struggle against oppressive conditions, we must retain an optimistic attitude, with assurance that the struggle for freedom will ultimately succeed. | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| "In order for the oppressed to be able to wage the struggle for their liberation, they must perceive the reality of oppression not as a closed world from which there is no exit , but as a limiting situation which they can transform." |
We need to struggle against all the different forms of oppression:
The cabal attacked American learning through the Education Bill signed into law by President Bush in January, 2002. The bill essentially equates education with training for high test scores. Those who benefit most from this new law are not students or teachers but the publishers of textbooks and companies that carry out testing: one of whom is Neil Bush, Dubya's brother. To see how these benefiting companies are directly tied to the Bush family, see below.
That's the difficulty; we've lost any effective understanding of what American values are. So now the fascist cabal is going to destroy any unity among Americans through this new educational anarchy. Obama and his controllers are funding primarily, if not exclusively, private Roman Catholic and Protestant fundamentalist schools that teach unthinking obedience to authoritarian leaders. That's their primary purpose for this catastrophic blow to American education. How they're going to disallow public funds for the extremist schools--the Islamic fundamentalist madrasa, the Jewish anti-Islamic school, the right wing militia school, or any other ideologically-based fanatical school--remains to be seen.
In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where the Supreme Court in a 1998 ruling allowed their voucher system to stand, some 6,000 students make use of the vouchers, worth about $5,000 apiece. This results in $30 million being funneled from the budget of the Milwaukee school district into the coffers of the Catholic Church and other private schools. With this new ruling, the program can now be fully utilized, so that 15,000 students can leave the system, cutting the funding of the public schools by $75 million.
Republican supporters of the voucher hide the fact from the public that the crisis in the schools is largely the product of decades of federal, state and local spending cuts, tax breaks to big business and attacks on teachers' and other school employees' wages and working conditions.
The newly-sanctioned voucher system will intensify class and social distinctions. The top schools will be reserved for the wealthiest layers of society who can pay to send their children to elite private schools and academies. Next below on the totem pole will be the private and for-profit schools for middle-class and working class children, whose parents will have to work longer hours and go further into debt to scrape together thousands of dollars to pay tuition costs.
Beginning at the time of the American revolution, part of the genius of the nation has been the right to public education, based on the idea that all children, regardless of economic or social status, race, religion or ethnic background, be guaranteed government-paid, quality education. Founding fathers such as Jefferson favored the establishment of government-funded “free schools” in opposition to the aristocratic system in Europe, where education was limited to the wealthiest layers of society and largely overseen by the Church.
In the early part of the twentieth century, the working class took up the fight for public education, which was inseparable from the campaign against child labor. However it was only through the civil rights struggles, from the 1930s through 1960s, that universal access to the public schools was fully achieved.
Now, in the twenty-first century the right to sound public education for the working class has come into collision with the plans of the criminal cabal for a society primarily for the benefit of the wealthy. The rampant growth of class inequality has produced a state of affairs that is fundamentally incompatible with democratic principles, which are based on the equal rights of all citizens.
The whole issue of public money for ideologically-based schools will prove extremely divisive throughout the nation. The Republicans, the majority of whom support vouchers, will use the issue as a way to attack any Democrat who opposes vouchers as a tool of the teacher unions.
Americans must now awaken to this horror and once again, if possible, create a public education system which will become the means to transmit to future generations an understanding of the hidden meaning of events and lost democratic concepts. If the ravages that the fascist cabal have wreaked on the public school system are so fundamental that we cannot rejuvenate it, we may have to create our own private "democracy schools" to help us regain our sense, our ability to see what's happening, our intelligence. When our nation was founded, education was carried on primarily through just such private home schools where Americans learned the values of a democratic way of life.
As some are warning, any government system--public schools or voucher-based private schools--carries government control with it. Since the demonic cabal is using the voucher system to gain total ideological control of private schools, we must create private "democracy schools" within cooperative communities without resorting to vouchers.
Education must become the transmission of true human understanding to future generations. This will require a group of people assisting others to see that current "politics" and "education" are actually counterfeits of real social values, and developing
cooperative communities which will create genuine educational institutions that will provide students insight into what is actually occurring in the world.
1 Obama’s public education race to the bottom
Recommended Reading
Oppressors, persons who have become possessed (literally) with the idea that "having" is the ultimate value, lose the ability to think rationally over time. At present, the plutocratic elite is blind to anything but their own frenzy to gain more wealth and fame. They are unaware that they are creating the very circumstances of their defeat: a society in which larger numbers of people are falling into poverty, where people of all ethnic, gender, and religious groupings are beginning to see that their common enemy is the plutocratic, corporate-based plunderer class.
America today is a combat zone where the War Against Intelligence is constantly being waged. Unfortunately, the rulers are currently winning: Americans are progressively losing their ability to understand what is happening in the world around them. Americans are unable to see that the cabal is using the pretext of the war against terrorism to destroy essential constitutional liberties. Billions of dollars have been stolen by the wealthy in the bailout scam, while the working class is devastated through unemployment and home foreclosures. A poor person is jailed for a $20 theft, but a plutocrat is allowed to steal the pension fund of thousands of workers without penalty.
Now the cabal-aligned Supreme Court has delivered the coup de grace to American education. Our tax dollars can now be used to fund training in any religious or political ideology imaginable. Granted, public funds since the 1950s have been used exclusively to dumb down America, but tax dollars did not go to support ideologically-based schools that were totally inimical to American values. 
Supreme Court Justice Breyer, who dissented from the 5-4 ruling, predicted that the decision would prove highly divisive in a country with "more then 55 different religious groups." He foresees many struggles, asking, "How will the public react to government funding for schools that take controversial religious positions on topics that are of current popular interest--say, the conflict in the Middle East or the war on terrorism?" Precisely!
Justice John Paul Stevens, another one who dissented from the majority called the recent ruling "profoundly misguided." He wrote, "Whenever we remove a brick from the wall that was designed to separate religion and government, we increase the risk of religious strife and weaken the foundation of our democracy."
Privately-run schools will continue to screen applicants and reject any student they deem unacceptable. While the language of most voucher programs prohibits discrimination based on race or national origin, these schools can reject students based on gender, sexual orientation, religion, language, ability to pay, behavioral issues or academic or physical ability. They would be under no financial pressure to provide help for students with special needs, since it is more costly to provide care for special education children, and most private schools are not staffed to handle them.
At the very bottom will be the public schools, left for the poorest and most disadvantaged working class students. Unable to do little to help working class youth develop learning skills, the role of these schools will be little more than training lower-class students for low-paying jobs.
In the nineteenth century these democratic principles were advanced by such reformers as Horace Mann, who wrote in 1848: “If one class possesses all the wealth and the education, while the residue of society is ignorant and poor, it matters not by what name the relation between them may be called; the latter, in fact and in truth, will be the servile dependents and subjects of the former.”
"[The Republican-dominated] Texas State Board
of Education . . . filtered conservative ideology into many lessons, downplaying the importance of the civil rights movement while touting Newt Gingrich's 'Contract With America'; citing the "conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s"; recognizing the roles played by Phyllis Schlafly, The Heritage Foundation, Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association; requiring students to read the speeches of Confederate President Jefferson Davis along with those of Abraham Lincoln; and recognizing country music as a significant cultural movement . . ."
Americans are rapidly losing a sense of the traditional American values. Anti-intellectual, racist or
right-wing multiculturalism has replaced education, bought-and-paid-for-politics has replaced democracy, funneling billions to the fat-cats has replaced statesmanship, and attacks on constitutional liberties has replaced political and judicial oversight.
Obama, the cabal puppet, has continued the Bush onslaught against public education and initiated a new attack through what he calls his "Race to the Top" initiative. Actually, it constitutes a race to the bottom for American students.
On June 27, 2002, the Supreme Court ruled that the government may give financial aid to parents so they can send their children to religious or private schools. Before we examine the results of that decision, let's review the historical demise of the American educational system.
Meaning is truly a magical element. Perhaps the best way to grasp the mystery of meaning is by thoughtfully viewing the movie "The Miracle Worker," the story of the early life of Helen Keller.
In most cultures, the "ruling ideas" have fostered violence and class warfare. In only a few instances in history, have the "ruling ideas" fostered the betterment of common people and society at large. One example of such a benevolent era was the eighteenth century Enlightenment, which encouraged humans to develop broad understanding in all fields of knowledge. Highly educated, intelligent groups in Europe and America developed toward a democratic way of life, created constitutions, and founded institutions for public education.
Predictably, the very people who place American presidents, senators, and representatives in power, through the use of their multi-billion dollar fortunes, are the same moneyed interests that have deliberately destroyed American education. The Rockefellers, Fords, Morgans, Browns, Harrimans, Du Ponts, and other ruling families want obedient, efficient workers, not thinkers. 
Democracy requires an electorate that understands what is actually happening in the world, beyond what the ruler-owned media tell us is happening. If American citizens receive an effective education we learn to inform ourselves and can see through the propaganda, the dictatorial actions, and the outcomes of the non-constitutional acts of our rulers.
G. Stanley Hall was the first of Wundt's disciples to return from Leipzig in 1883. Hall joined the faculty of Baltimore's new Johns Hopkins University, which was being established after the model of the German universities. Hall organized the psychology laboratory at Johns Hopkins and, in 1887, established the American Journal of Psychology. In 1889, when Clark University was established in Worcester, Massachusetts, Hall was chosen to be its first president.
J. McKeen Cattell served for three years as Wundt's lab assistant in Leipzig, receiving final approval for his Ph.D. from Wundt in 1886. Cattell's primary interests lay in mental testing and in individual differences in ability. While at Leipzig, Cattell carried out a series of experiments examining the manner in which a person sees the words he is reading.
However, except in a few instances, American students were never made aware of what was really going on in the world--in terms of the machinations of the predatory cabal. For example, the exposés of writers such as George Seldes or I. F. Stone would have been beyond the pale for most American schools. So Americans fought World War II ignorant of 
This reduction of "education" to training, neuron connection, and behavior modification has now been completed by the most recent crippling of "education" as "work/study." An article defining this destruction of education
appeared in National Review in 1993, with a revealing title: "The Competitiveness Illusion: Does our Country Need to Be Literate in Order to Be competitive? If Not, Why Read."
The future role of literacy in the workplace has been succinctly stated by Pierre Dogan, the president of Granite Communications, a company that is now 'developing software for hotel housekeeping.' It seems that 'so long as maids can read room numbers, they will be able to check off tasks completed or order supplies by simply touching pictures on the screen." Dogan points out that 'you can create a work program with prompting including iconic [picture] messages.' In fact, he logically concludes, 'you can use an illiterate workforce.'"
We only gain awareness of the oppressive nature of contemporary society when we become the victim of unemployment or a mugging or some other mishap. Trained to be oblivious to the plight of others, we fail to see the hundreds of thousands who suffer from homelessness, lack of medical care, and wage slavery.