This link has been bookmarked by 4 people . It was first bookmarked on 29 Jan 2008, by Wisely.
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10 Jan 14
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14 Mar 12
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29 Jan 08
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Children know a great deal about many things, but about public affairs they know virtually nothing.
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Yet of all forms of political power, the power to teach history to children is the only one Americans have handed over without a struggle to a remote and unaccountable few, commonly known as the educational establishment. America Revised, by Frances FitzGerald, [subtitled "History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century." 240 pages. Atlantic/Little, Brown, $9.95] is an attempt to describe what the educational establishment has done with that power through the years.
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The crisis was this: the public secondary schools, which had catered chiefly to the well-to-do and successful, adhered to a traditional liberal arts curriculum of "history, language, and literature--the "arts that liberate," as Montaigne has called them. With the children of ordinary people attending high school, American educators found themselves face to face with a specter that had haunted Europe for a century: the danger of educating people beyond their station, or, as the National Education Association preferred to put it, leading them "away from the pursuits for which they are adapted." The danger was largely political. By teaching the liberal arts to commoners, the new secondary schools might well become the spawning ground for popular tribunes, politically ambitious guttersnipes, and similar dangerous malcontents. As J. E. Russell, head of Columbia University Teachers College, put it in 1905: "How can we justify our practice in schooling the masses in precisely the same manner as we do those who are to be their leaders?"
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The "Realistic" Education of John Dewey
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a few of his salient principles. Suitably adapted, they have supplied educational leaders with the lasting framework for a pedagogical system designed to prevent "the masses" from ever learning in a classroom what a free people ought to know.
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Dewey's most important contribution was his conviction that democracy has little to do with politics and government. Democracy, according to Dewey, was "primarily a mode of associated living," which for most Americans chiefly meant working together in factories. Having stripped democracy of its political character, Dewey and his colleagues, who prided themselves on their "realism," went on to redefine it as "industrial cooperation."
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The schools were to be adapted instead, Dewey wrote in 1897, "to the circumstances, needs, and opportunities of industrial civilization."
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The new "realistic" definition of democracy even stripped public education of its theoretical republican objective, which was, as Jefferson had said, to teach future citizens "how to judge for themselves what will secure or endanger their freedom."
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To Dewey, on the other hand, political history was "undemocratic" (and FitzGerald wholeheartedly agrees with him) precisely because it deals with the deeds and intentions of ambitious men.
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To the purblind Deweyites political history was elitist; to the powerful few it was politically dangerous--then and always. "Throughout history," as FitzGerald rightly notes (though, alas, only in a passing remark), "the managers of states have with remarkable consistency defined good citizenship as a rather small degree of knowledge of, and participation in, public affairs." To replace political history with Deweyite social studies was the perfect means of meeting the educational requirements of the powerful. In social studies, American youngsters would learn that America was chiefly an industrial system and not a republic at all, that a "good citizen" is a worker who gets up when the alarm clock rings and speeds to his job on time. In social studies, too, they would learn that the "real" history of America is the "development" of American industry--history without politics in it, which teaches the most corrupt of political lessons, that politics does not matter. Pedagogical wit could scarcely devise a better instrument for ensuring "a rather small degree of, and participation in, public affairs. To replace political history with social studies has been the abiding goal of America's educational leaders since ordinary Americans began attending high school. Interestingly enough, it took them more than half a century to register a complete triumph.
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Today, a quite small number of educators have virtually unchecked sway over the curriculum of America's public schools, which have become, as one educator put it in 1962, "a monolith under oligarchic control."
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Local control of the common schools, though waning, had not yet become a sham. To a degree, it could still meet the purpose for which it was originally intended: preventing the "managers of states" from teaching a republic's children that "good citizenship" consists in "a rather small degree of knowledge of, and participation in, public affairs." The usurpation of local control in the years after World War I was to be an essential element in the corrupting of a venerable republic.
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Then, quite suddenly, middle-class Americans awoke from their slumber and discovered that they were as powerless as everybody else. To the shock and dismay of Lodge--who thought it the end of civilization as he knew it--middle-class Americans, a complacent bourgeoisie for decades, began pouring into the public arena, determined to overthrow "the machine," to curb monopoly and bring the "money power" to heel. Just when the leading educators were urging the schools to look on America as an "industrial society," middle-class Americans who did the teaching, served on the school boards, and voted in the school board elections--had suddenly remembered that America was a republic, and an endangered one at that.
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