INTRODUCTION

 

A Paradox: A Miserable Education in A Great Political System

 

        American Democracy, with its constitutional framework, with its liberties, and consequently with its once smoothly functioning society, has been a great inspiration to every intelligent observer around the world. Nations have been adopting American political principles to their great advantage. Today, the effectiveness of its political system could not even be equalled yet by any other country -despite several recent decades of erosion in the hands of demagogues.

        Amazingly though, American society in general and American youth in particular is one of the most problem-ridden in the civilized world today.

        American youth of every background is troubled -disadvantaged and advantaged alike. Problems of an adult person can have many sources -social, professional, financial. Barring accidents of fate, what may trouble a youth who has almost no responsibility in life but to himself?

        Any inquirer of human conditions would attest to the fact that the source of an individual's misery, in absence of any external source that is significant, is a faulty mind. Which office in society is designated for the task of empowering youth with a functioning mind? Education.         

        Today, if an observer from any civilized part of the world, with some interest, perceptiveness, and intelligence had come to the United States for the purpose of understanding and drawing out lessons on American Education, he would have found nothing but a wreckage, he would have found nothing to learn from but the sad lessons of a failed experiment called Modern American Education.

 

                                Indicators of Educational Problems

 

        It is now common knowledge that American Education and its product, American Youth are plagued with problems. How bad is the problem?

        "Our Nation is at risk. . . The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people. . . If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves."

        These words were the verdict of the report titled A Nation at Risk written by the National Commission on Excellence in Education in 1983, a government commission charged to assess the state of American Education. (See Appendix C for a summary of the report.) These extreme words for normally bland government commissioners reflect the truth with no exaggeration. Other many recent private or government reports also conclude that American Education is in a process of continual deterioration.

         In international competitions, compared to their peers in other industrialized nations, American students rank at or near the bottom in almost every subject they are tested.

        Parents, educators, researchers attest to the fact that American students, especially in their teens, are deficient in knowledge, confused, irresponsible, lack purpose and motivation, ill-tempered, and, in alarmingly increased rates, absent from classes, prone to use alcohol and drugs, suicidal, indulgent into teenage parenthood, engage in gang activities, drop out of school. (See Appendix A for a recent list of test/research results.)

        The recent verdict on education of a major stake-holder is also a candid confession. Albert Shanker, President of the American Federation of Teachers, laments:

        "There is substantial agreement that other industrialized democracies are doing a better job of educating their students than we are. This holds true not only for their highest achievers but for their middle and lowest tracks as well. Many of these countries differ as much from each other as they do from us. Also, with few exceptions, they are now quite diverse in their student populations. Why do we not see what these many different education systems have in common? Why do we not try to learn from their successes? Why do we not translate their textbooks, their examinations, and samples of their students' work? Why, instead, do we constantly try 'new,' 'creative,' and 'promising' -but totally unproven- programs?"¹

        These words from the leader of the most powerful teachers organization, which organization, until recently, was not known to be easily admitting that there are very serious problems in education with the exception of insufficient funds, amount to nothing but an unequivocal declaration of bankruptcy.

   

   The Curious Phenomenon of Many a Very Intelligent Child's Dropping out of School

           As an Indicator of Utter Irrationality of American Education

 

        In a civilized country, one would expect a very intelligent child to graduate -even if sometimes after frictions with some mediocre educators, but usually with honors- from any school he wishes to attend. This is the case in European schools. In America, one can not but wonder about a curious phenomenon: Many men who have been extraordinarily successful in some professions demanding exceptional mental gifts had dropped out of school. Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, Steven Jobs, co-founder of Apple, Woody Allen, writer and director of films, Rush Limbaugh, broadcaster and political pundit are but few of them.

        They usually explain away their dislike of schools. They talk about their dislike almost with regret, and usually don't even attempt to explain the reason. Some try to explain their eventual dropping out of school as their way of youthful rebellion to their parents.

        There can not be a better indicator of the utter irrationality of American schools than the dislike of schools by the best minds.

        The problem with modern American schools is usually stated as that they do a poor job; that is an extreme understatement. Education has two main purposes: the developing of the powers of man (Culture) and the furnishing of the mind with knowledge (Instruction). The primary purpose of education is to afford culture; and culture, with principles derived from the nature of mind, gives the power to acquire and originate knowledge. So, instruction presupposes culture.

        In the realm of instruction, it would be somewhat proper to say that modern American schools do a poor job. But, in the realm of culture they accomplish just the opposite of culture's goal. Let alone bringing out the powers of Mind and training them to their highest activity and fullest development, modern American schools, by selecting wrong purposes for education, by misassessing the nature of Mind, and consequently by their viciously wrong methods of teaching, blur the mind in the elementary years, drives it toward apathy and virtual paralysis during secondary years, and attempt to destroy even common sense in college years.

        The fact that an American student does not learn enough is the least of his problems; his sanity is at jeopardy if he is taking school too seriously. The irrational nature of schools would be so revolting to an extraordinarily intelligent child, who, by definition, is a constant rationality seeker, that, by throwing in the towel, he is, unconsciously, holding to the sovereignty of his own judgement against the terrifying pressure of everybody around him, parents and educators.

        After having examined the principles and methods of education as they ought to be, which is the purpose of this treatise, one can reach but one conclusion: intelligent drop-outs are not betraying their parents by hating schools, and are not rebelling by dropping out of them. Just the opposite; they are obeying, in the most profound sense, the dictates of life their parents gave them: they are protecting their mind, which is the essence of human life, from further damage.

        Some will ask, "Why, then, other people, intelligent people for that matter, do not do the same thing?" Because, the one who drops out despite genius-grade mental attributes is not just any intelligent person. A person of exceptional intelligence can not integrate wrong material into his mind, he can not integrate even right material if this material is given him through wrong methods, in inappropriate forms, without proper order. These wrongdoings are what American schools are doing in increasingly vicious manners since the 1950s. They would and should be hated by the best.

        If an institution's designed function changes from "the perfection of mind," which ought to be the aim of education, to "the disintegration of mind," some of those who have been delivered to the care of such an institution, those whose minds have a capacity for perfection and whose characters have enough integrity to rebel to tyranny, rightfully deinstitutionalize themselves.

        While heroically independent exceptions are possible, today, nobody who has insisted to remain in school through college can remain fully rational in this country due to the schooling they have had. It is plausible that the unconscious decision of those afore-mentioned individuals not to continue to subject themselves to mind‑crippling effects of American Education have helped their later success. However, their childhood and their youth were stolen from them by the years they struggled through schools, as they carried an undeserved guilt before their parents. What is worse, their full confidence in their intellectual capacity was stolen from them by the undeserved embarrassment of the fact that they do not possess a college degree.

        This is the story of youthful rebellion of many a talented man of this country. Rebellion, yes; to their parents, no! But, an exceptional mind, more than others, hungers for education, a true one; so, this is also the sad story of many Americans born with great talent who have not been able to develop them to full maturity.

         Every school age child, his parents through him, and everybody in this country have been victimized by one of the most unspeakable crimes of this century: anti-mind modern American Education. The forced-labor fields are classrooms, the camp dormitories are homes with children -in a state of civil war once children reach their teens.

What is at Stake in America Due to Its Bankrupt Education: Freedom

 

        As Aristotle said: "All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind, have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth." This country, by being deprived of true contributions of the intellects of would-be geniuses, by being deprived of true contributions of other modest but productive millions, and, as a result, by being unable to check the destructive irrationality of other millions of fools, got transformed from being the greatest country on earth to an uncohesive conglomerate of individuals. It has become a crowd with little left from that great decency, cleverness, industriousness, charm, and common sense that characterized the generations before the 1950s.

        Education is the root cause of this country's ills. Some could rather argue that the root cause is in politics, some in philosophy. Of course, philosophy, in general, is what moves the world around. And, politics (concrete form of political philosophy) is the mechanism by which principles of a country's dominant philosophy are implemented in social structures; this mechanism can be a fertile ground for progress, or a straight‑jacket of stagnation first, downfall next. Politics to be implemented needs people; and people are the product of education. Philosophy of Education, a product of the dominant philosophy, is the mechanism by which principles of that philosophy are engraved in the minds of generations.

        America's founding principles are the culmination of the greatest political thoughts of two millennia. As true with any profound thought, the value of some of those principles are not self-evident; such principles need to be validated and understood by every generation. Therefore, their observance and maintenance require properly educated citizens. Otherwise, every one of those great principles would be at the mercy of demagogues. If the decline of education is allowed to continue, the ongoing trend of the erosion of the American Revolution's heritage  would lead to nothing but total loss of freedom. "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free," wrote Thomas Jefferson, "it expects that never was and never will be."

 

                     Futile Efforts to Remedy Problems of Education

 

        After the fact that U.S. schools are doing a dismal job became public knowledge by A Nation at Risk and sundry other studies in the early 1980s, some new experiments of education reform emerged.

        Some proposals are in the line of the same bankrupt philosophy of education, and they will make things even worse -for example, giving students more choice on what they should learn, yet another step away from the core needs of human mind.

        Some are total absurdities, such as abolishing standard subject areas such as English, math, and science in favor of subjects such as exploration, food, machines and tools, energy. (See Appendix D for other examples.)

        Some are necessary but not sufficient measures, such as more discipline, more school hours, etc.

        Some are purely political, and they include:

        "Choice" policies under which families could select any public school in their community, even their state;

        The advent of privately funded (and, in Milwaukee, publicly supported) "voucher" projects enabling poor children to choose non‑government schools, widening acceptance of "charter" schools, now enacted by seven states;

        "Break the mold" designs for novel schools, including those supported by the New American Schools Development Corporation and conceived by Christopher Whittle's Edison Project;

        Alternative certification so that teachers could get public‑school posts without passing through colleges of education;

        Devolution of decision‑making from downtown bureaucracies to school‑site councils;

        Standards, assessment, and accountability programs with teeth; even the management of some public schools (notably in Miami and Baltimore) by private firms.

        If the specifics of these reform policies are examined, one would discover that they revolve around non-central aspects of education. Mostly related with politics of education, they are issues of what we will later call School Economy, a peripheral aspect of education. As the American Education ails not only in its peripheries but also in its core, such remedies can be no panacea for educational malady.

        It is true that when production is regulated by politicians and bureaucrats rather than by competition for customers -i.e., free-markets- producers will cater more to political officials and less to their customers. This is what caused socialist economies' collapse. However, just like the mere inauguration of free-markets did not bring material prosperity to former Soviet republics, the mere emancipation of schools from politics will not bring right practices of education. What is truly needed is much more than that.

        The mere fact that everybody related with education know the indictment that American Education has fallen behind the rest of the industrialized world could not and will not bring about the solution. The solution against this downfall still begs true causes. American thinkers have given many kinds of reasons: from the collapse of the family to the violence on the media to the failure of educators, politicians, parents. What they seldom touch is how was it that this country was managing to do an excellent job of teaching its children until the first few decades of this century? What were we doing differently in the classrooms. What were our teaching methods? What was the curriculum? With the exception of philosopher Ayn Rand and her collaborator Leonard Peikoff both of who could identify and validate the true philosophical causes of this bankruptcy, American thinkers are seldom philosophical, and fill volumes on particular problems of education -usually politics of education- without any attempt to a systematic understanding.  

 

                               Deceptions: Lake Wobegon Children

 

        As American Education has decayed, the expenditure on it has constantly increased. (See Appendix B for some data on the enormity of expenditures.) How was it that the buyers of an expensive commodity did not object to its low quality? No such transaction can occur without fraud.

        On the individual level, parents have been deceived by inflated grades on report cards. They did not realize that there was a problem with schools until their straight-A or honor-roll child reached his teens and turned into a school-hating misfit, at once ignoramus and filled with illusions of omniscience.

        On the local level, as the nation was receiving glum reports about its overall educational performance, some living in particular states and localities throughout the same nation were flooded with good news about the achievement of their own children -the whole seemingly bearing no resemblance to the sum of its parts.

        In fact, the deception was in such degrees that, in 1987, Dr. John James Cannell, a previously obscure West Virginia physician, shocked everyone related with the education community when he issued a report asserting that he "had surveyed all fifty states and discovered that no state is below average at the elementary level on any of the six major nationally normed, commercially available tests." He also announced that 90 percent of local school districts claim that their averages exceed the national average and that "more than 70 percent of the students tested nationwide are told they are performing above the national average."

        Cannell's study quickly became known as the "Lake Wobegon" report, after the mythical Minnesota town popularized by radio humorist Garrison Keillor, in which "all the children are above average."²

        Unsuspecting American parents of younger children still keep moving their households from place to place in search of one of many school districts that claim to be "the best" in their region.

        And new vehicles of deception keep being invented. Prompted by intense public pressure brought by parents who were made aware of the decline of their children's achievement, educators and politicians responded by demanding their national test makers to dumb down their tests to reflect a restructured -usually a euphemism for watered down- curriculum. Even the highly regarded Scholastics Aptitude Test (SAT) has been renamed the Scholastic Assessment Test and has been "recentered" (a/k/a dumbed down).³

 

The Root Cause of American Educational Crisis: A Certain Philosophy

 

        Today's American Education is the reductio ad absurdum of the philosophy of Progressive Education which has roots in the thoughts of many philosophers, notably Jean Jacques Rousseau's (1712-1778), who believed that the patterns for development are inherent in our nature because man is created in the image of God, and the desires of children are the expressions of this divine image and therefore not subject to regulation of any kind. The Lenin of the progressive education movement has been John Dewey (1859-1952), a pragmatist philosopher whose voluminous works contained, if sometimes as embryo, almost everything that is being done today in America in the name of education. Other countries have recently been coming under his unmistakable influence as well.

        The reasons for almost every problem of American Education today can be traced back to the implementation of a proposition that was included in one of Dewey's works. The sad irony of today's American reformers is that the remedy they come up with is usually also taken from his works. A true pragmatist, his works lacked any system, and therefore could harbor conflicting theories.

        The philosophy of Progressive Education is the virtual denial of principles in education. Its favorite motto is "Let Nature take its course." However, since it misasseses the nature of Nature, the nature of mind, the nature of knowledge, the nature of teaching, it can arrive only at quasi-principles or pseudo-principles. And, since notions that are not true principles are precarious, and may or may not work, unpredictably, the progressive educators, having frequently been failed by what they thought "principles," end up dispensing with principles altogether.

        Not much will be said in this Introduction about central tenets of the philosophy of Progressive Education. However, the American reader may safely assume that what they hear in the name of educational theory in America today are, almost always, the products of this philosophy. Ironically, both proponents and opponents of present American educational establishment have subscribed to this philosophy explicitly or implicitly. The reader may also assume that every principle and method of education defended by the authors of this treatise will be diametrically opposed to those of the progressive education in all their essential aspects.

         In the nineteenth century, even before Dewey, some American educators had rebelled against what they thought "excessive formalism" of traditional education. They thought there was too much emphasis on strict discipline, and pointless detail was filled into the minds of children who were expected to learn passively. As far back as the 1870s Francis W. Parker was advocating school reforms in the line of what later became progressivism. But, under the intellectual leadership of John Dewey, started as experiments in private schools during early parts of this century, progressive schools became the norm after the 1950s, public and private alike.

        The progressive movement has burst upon the educational scene with such revolutionary force and has replaced time‑honored practices by shapeless, non-sensical rituals so swiftly that a system of education that once was the envy of the world has turned into an object of ridicule in a few decades.

        Progressivism attracted some criticism during the days of amazement and humiliation that followed the launching of the first Soviet Sputnik in 1957. By then, Americans had been convinced that education must be democratic and unauthoritarian. But, how was it that a country like Russia, with undemocratic and authoritarian schools, could be so successful in science and technology? Americans had started thinking that they might be paying too much attention to immediate desires of the children they taught and too little to the subjects they taught them.

        This awakening was followed by a flood of core science courses with little, if any, structure or coherence. To expect success from any experiment so long as main educational theory remains to be progressivism is to believe in alchemy. Just as alchemists had attempted an impossibility by trying to convert base metals into gold, American educators keep trying an impossibility: to achieve results while remaining ignorant of the principles governing their profession.

        Principles are self-existent; they belong to the very nature of the subjects. Without knowing the true nature of a subject, principles governing that subject can not be determined. Without knowing the principles, right methods can not be derived, as they are the outgrowth of principles.

        The subject of an educator is the child -his body and mind- and knowledge. In his endless trials-and-errors, progressive American educator, having pragmatism as progressivism's parent philosophy, and pragmatism being the philosophy of unprincipledness on principle, does not even attempt to discover the nature of his subject, which attempt would give way to principles, and keeps finding himself in the shoes of the proverbial blind man who has been assigned the task of describing an elephant by touching it without having ever seen one. So, while a group of progressive educators see the child almost as a full-fledged philosopher to be awakened, somehow, from a state of temporary amnesia; another group of progressive educators see him as someone on the verge of a mental breakdown to be protected from any undue stress.

        Lacking right principles and methods, schools and curricula have now turned into a destructive arena of confusion and chaos, and students, unless utterly conformist or stupid, have run away from them for their lives -their rational faculty- in search of meaning and order. The one who could endure this torture through college graduated in a state of man-made stupidity, hardened into a permanent skeptic or a brash cynic.

 

          A Revolution in Education as the Only Feasible Alternative

 

        For the intelligent prosecution of any enterprise, two kinds of knowledge are necessary, theoretical and practical.

        Theoretical knowledge may be defined as knowledge of what ought to be done and the reasons why. No great and permanent success is possible without some understanding of the laws and natural conditions which determine the outcome of the enterprise.

        By practical knowledge is meant familiarity with the actual processes of the undertaking, the knowledge of how to do it, how to apply effort. This is acquired only by personal experience, though this experience may be directed by instruction.

        In some cases, this personal experience is acquired first, and often through expensive failures. The story is told of a great ophthalmologist, that when complimented on his skill in eye-surgery he answered sadly, "Yes, but it has cost a whole bushel of eyes." If he had known, at the first, the whole theory of the eye, most of that bushel of eyes need not have been sacrificed.

        After decades-long nihilist attacks of John Dewey school of philosophers of education, not much of educational theory has been left in America; and ominously, every country with traditionally vigorous educational systems has been undergoing a similar process. Practical mistakes are possible even in the guidance of best principles. But, in lack of any true principles -i.e., principles derived from the nature of the elements of the enterprise, not arbitrary assertions of mad-scientists of education- the schools have turned into slaughterhouses of the mind where brains are starved to death. In the "anything goes" or "almost nothing truly educational happens" atmosphere of today's schools, even vessels of brains sacrificed in the educational practice every year can not compensate for the absolute absence of right principles, and can not teach any educator anything. Nothing right can be done by trial-and-error in so complex an enterprise as education.

        Even in the examples regarded best by consumers, today's American schools are places where "educators" experiment on their unsuspecting subjects with every whimsical theory they hear to be in vogue. The only difference between those so-called best schools and worse ones is that the former can produce graduates who are capable of being accepted to Ivy League Colleges in lack of effective foreign competition due to linguistic and financial barriers. Even some of those pupils are no longer learned enough to be able to cope with those colleges' traditional curricula without having to cheat. While the best pupils of the beginning of this century could find, in their leisure time, excitement and joy in the investigation of the works of the great minds of Science and Arts, today not few of the best find shelter in mind-altering drugs to escape the terror of the feeling that they are not equipped to deal with the mountain of facts of life before them despite the pomp their college names carry.

        Their best included, American schools are so corrupt in their spirit, and so depraved in their organizations that there is nothing that can be accomplished by reform. Revolution, the total abolishment and reconstitution, is the only affordable action about them.

        No lasting and benevolent revolution is possible without a systematized theoretical foundation of the new structure it is proposing. It is hoped that what follows in this work will be a contribution to this end.