Sunday, 6 February 2011

Having three children in the state primary system, I’ve seen the results of New Labour’s Brave New World anti-intellectualism up close. Academic work has been largely dropped. Times tables, spelling, grammar and good handwriting are not taught. One teacher told us that correcting spelling might interrupt “the creative flow”. In the playground, age-old games such as conkers and It are banned, as they might upset someone. The local authority, we are told, has also banned the ancient game of football, because it encourages competitive behaviour. Instead, pupils are treated to lavish praise, sex education and colouring in, plus a big dose of television via the whiteboards. The place is awash with laptops. There is a therapeutic ethos, and in “circle time”, pupils are encouraged to talk about their problems at home. Cleverness is frowned upon: yesterday my daughter said she didn’t like being clever and was considering doing bad work so she would be moved down a set.

As it gradually dawned on my wife and me that there was very little of what we would call teaching going on, we decided to step in and fill the gaps ourselves. (Mr Gove has promised a return to a more traditional agenda, but how long will it take?) So now at home we drill the children in times tables, teach them the rudiments of grammar, and we all learn Latin together with a tutor via Skype. We play competitive games and do wrestling. We tell them off. We praise them for good work, but tick them off for bad work. And in a sense this is all the wrong way round: schools are doing the parenting and the parents are doing the schooling.

The upside, it’s true, is that children enjoy school. Our kids react with horror when we threaten them with home education. The downside is that parents are forced to take on the burden of educating their children properly, as the state has shrugged it off.

Full story

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Of course to learn how and why this came about, see Charlotte Iserbyt’s Deliberate Dumbing Down of America and John Gatto’s Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling

Gennady Stolyarov II

The dismal and declining student performance at America’s public schools is no accident. Nor is the pervasive bullying by peers and repression by teachers that the brightest, best-mannered, and most accomplished students encounter in public schools today. Both are the direct results of the educational philosophy promulgated by John Dewey (1859-1952), the originator of “Progressive” education and a self-proclaimed advocate of collectivism and opponent of teaching objective knowledge in the schools. Dewey’s ideas have largely shaped the ways in which today’s American public education system works—or, more accurately, does not work.

To call John Dewey a socialist is no exaggeration or derogatory epithet. It is the literal truth. Dewey read and greatly admired Edward Bellamy’s 1887 novel, Looking Backward, which described an egalitarian utopia in which private property was abolished and the capitalist system was a relic of the past. In the 1920s, Dewey wrote extensively in praise of the Soviet education system—so much that he was invited to visit the Soviet Union in 1928 and observe schools in the USSR. He based many of his recommendations for American education on the Soviet model.

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