Aim of the Progressive-Educational Complex

[PoliticalChic]

1. Since No Child Left Behing (NCLB) on January 8, 2002, by President Bush, test scores for students have risen nationally. Female students have parity with males, in mathematics, for the first time in our history. Gender, culture, and mathematics performance

a. NCLB implemented standards-based education and required states that received federal funds to use statewide standardized tests.





2. Now for the uh-oh! The Progressive-educational complex realized that NCLB was actually aimed at reforming the bureaucracy that was created by Progressives in the early 20th century! And they wanted to keep it!

3. One of the motivations for the nascent Progressive movement was the general recognition of the sorry state of education, late 19th century. Intentions were good…theories and strategies designed to combat inequity. It was only later that Progressivism became what it is today: creator of inequity.





4. Mid-1800’s, Friedrich Froebel came up with the idea of educating the “whole child," reducing the importance of subject matter in favor of a focus on the interests of the child.

a. Inveterate socialist/communist John Dewey latched on to the idea, and saw it as a vehicle for minimizing individualism and having all march in lock-step; social acclimation based on politics and pop psychology.

b. He had no intention of keeping what was good and improving what wasn’t, he set out to reshape education from the bottom up! The “I know what’s best” attitude so prevalent among his ilk.

5. The result was the union control of the education industry. It is a hierarchy largely based on a male superintendency supervising employees, mostly women, and an elected school board consisting of elites making pedagogical decisions.





6. The strategy used by Progressives to attack NCLB is the oft-heard complaint that the standards provisions lead to “teaching to the test” rather than toward critical thinking. This is the teaching methodology over facts mind-set so central to Progressives. This is the legacy of Dewey contemporary E.L. Thorndike

a. In his book “Troublemaker,” Chester E. Finn, Jr. Former Assistant Secretary of Education under President Reagan, responds to the complaint: ‘ “Teaching to the test” is deplored in education circles, although that complaint is easily answered: if the test faithfully mirrors the skills and knowledge set out in the standards, then preparing one’s pupils to ace such a test is an honorable mission!’

b. Thorndike created a stimulus-response definition of intelligence in the 1920’s. “His work on animal behavior and the learning process led to the theory of connectionism and helped lay the scientific foundation for modern educational psychology.” Edward Thorndike - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia






7. In this connection, pun intended, his theory suggested a way of recognizing future elites, the ones who could most quickly make connection. (Remember, these were the folks who endorsed eugenics.) This was a perfect complement to Dewey’s beliefs: Progressives: the nurturing of elites and meeting the labor demands of America’s burgeoning industrial society.

a. In “Brave New World,” Aldous Huxley answers that view: “All conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable social destiny.” Brave New World Suffering Quotes Page 1

 

[Flanders]

a. Inveterate socialist/communist John Dewey latched on to the idea, and saw it as a vehicle for minimizing individualism and having all march in lock-step; social acclimation based on politics and pop psychology.

b. He had no intention of keeping what was good and improving what wasn’t, he set out to reshape education from the bottom up! The “I know what’s best” attitude so prevalent among his ilk.

5. The result was the union control of the education industry. It is a hierarchy largely based on a male superintendency supervising employees, mostly women, and an elected school board consisting of elites making pedagogical decisions.

To Political Chic: I’m so happy you named John Dewey. Unidentified political villains are like Torquemada’s assistants; everybody knows what they did while few know their names.

The anonymity of political villains who do incalculable harm always fascinated me because they do it to everybody. One villain beats all others in anonymity. His name is John Dewey (1859 - 1952); his face all but unknown:

Here’s another small sampling of Dewey’s villainy:

In considering modern liberal plagues, are there any worse than America’s debased “free” education system? John Dewey, patron saint of American education, ruined our school curriculum while adamantly rejecting religion yet touting of secular humanism. In fact, not only did the atheistic Dewey sign the Humanist Manifesto I, but the prolific writer probably authored much of it, as well.

XXXXX​

In America’s intellectual coming of age, no person has played a more important role than John Dewey. There is hardly a phase of American thought to which he has not made some contribution, hardly an aspect of American life which he has left uninterpreted. His influence has extended to the schools, the courts, the laboratories, the labor movement, and the politics of the nation.

But what has been the impact of Dewey’s ideas? As Dewey was not so much interested in individual student learning, but instead the child’s adaptation to a state-dominated society, we can well-guess the effect has been catastrophic.

John Dewey: Bosom Serpent of American Education
Kelly OConnell Sunday, February 24, 2013

John Dewey: Bosom Serpent of American Education

The complete article is well-worth reading.

 

[Nika2013]

Standardized tests assess facts not critical thinking skills. We want kids to THINK not regurgitate facts. Teach kids how to learn, not what to learn. You consistently address topics of which you have no knowledge and cite conservatives as references. Not only do you do this, one-half the time you do not even know what your sources are saying...This is the problem that I have with conservatives in my own town...They do not even know that they are clueless and one cannot debate with a person that has no knowledge of the topic about which he/she is speaking...I would change Ann Coulter's quote to: "Conservatives are most passionate about subjects in which they have no knowledge." Sorry...normally I do not speak this way to people, but you absolutely do not know what you are talking about...

 

[PoliticalChic]

Standardized tests assess facts not critical thinking skills. We want kids to THINK not regurgitate facts. Teach kids how to learn, not what to learn. You consistently address topics of which you have no knowledge and cite conservatives as references. Not only do you do this, one-half the time you do not even know what your sources are saying...This is the problem that I have with conservatives in my own town...They do not even know that they are clueless and one cannot debate with a person that has no knowledge of the topic about which he/she is speaking...I would change Ann Coulter's quote to: "Conservatives are most passionate about subjects in which they have no knowledge." Sorry...normally I do not speak this way to people, but you absolutely do not know what you are talking about...

Yours is, of course, the Left-wing pap that has saddled society with the resultant scores our students achieve when compared internationally.

For your edification:

1. "Arne Duncan succinctly summarized the Obama administration’s approach to education reform: “We must build upon what works. We must stop doing what doesn’t work.” Since becoming education secretary, Duncan has launched a $4.3 billion federal “Race to the Top” initiative that encourages states to experiment with various accountability reforms. Yet he has ignored the education thinker is E. D. Hirsch, Jr.

2. The “Massachusetts miracle,” in which Bay State students’ soaring test scores broke records, was the direct consequence of the state legislature’s passage of the 1993 Education Reform Act, which established knowledge-based standards for all grades and a rigorous testing system linked to the new standards. And those standards, Massachusetts reformers have acknowledged, are Hirsch’s legacy.

2a. In the new millennium, Massachusetts students have surged upward on the biennial National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—“the nation’s report card,” as education scholars call it. On the 2005 NAEP tests, Massachusetts ranked first in the nation in fourth- and eighth-grade reading and fourth- and eighth-grade math. It then repeated the feat in 2007. No state had ever scored first in both grades and both subjects in a single year—let alone for two consecutive test cycles. On another reliable test, the Trends in International Math and Science Studies, the state’s fourth-graders last year ranked second globally in science and third in math, while the eighth-graders tied for first in science and placed sixth in math. (States can volunteer, as Massachusetts did, to have their students compared with national averages.) The United States as a whole finished tenth.

3. “I came to see that the text alone is not enough,” Hirsch said to me recently at his Charlottesville, Virginia, home. “The unspoken—that is, relevant background knowledge—is absolutely crucial in reading a text.”… he received an endowed professorship and became chairman of the English department at the University of Virginia.[He found that] the reading and writing skills of many incoming students were poor, sure to handicap them in their future academic work. In trying to figure out how to close this “literacy gap,” Hirsch conducted an experiment on reading comprehension, using two groups of college students. Members of the first group possessed broad background knowledge in subjects like history, geography, civics, the arts, and basic science; members of the second, often from disadvantaged homes, lacked such knowledge. The knowledgeable students, it turned out, could far more easily comprehend and analyze difficult college-level texts (both fiction and nonfiction) than their poorly informed brethren could. Hirsch had discovered “a way to measure the variations in reading skill attributable to variations in the relevant background knowledge of audiences.”

4. Hirsch was also convinced that the problem of inadequate background knowledge began in the early grades. Elementary school teachers thus had to be more explicit about imparting such knowledge to students—indeed, this was even more important than teaching the “skills” of reading and writing, Hirsch believed. Hirsch’s insight contravened the conventional wisdom in the nation’s education schools: that teaching facts was unimportant, and that students instead should learn “how to” skills. …expanded the argument in a 1983 article, titled “Cultural Literacy,” in The American Scholar."
E. D. Hirsch’s Curriculum for Democracy by Sol Stern, City Journal Autumn 2009



Sadly, you haven't learned that empirical evidence should be the basis for public policy.
That's known as science.

Perhaps if you had attended better schools......