Why bother with opening the schools, if all that you’ll have is the same uneducated blowhards filling the minds of children with the same monstrous mush that is conjured by these same blowhards who want to be paid for sitting on their butts in the first place? Teachers go on vacation while telling students to “zoom’’ in on their “home” work. And parents are demanding, even pleading that this ilk returns to teach.
Stop begging! Let them stay on vacation—forever. Most have been on vacation since they started “teaching” in the first place.
More @ The Abbeville Institute
On Thursday, February 8, 1917, Senator Chamberlain from Oregon, addressed the Senate on the influence of the Rockefeller Foundation and Carnegie Foundation on education.
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This was before Standard Oil turned education into what it is. Yes, there were people at the time who paid attention; unfortunately they were powerless.
He quotes the New York Times, which in 1917 was obviously a different paper.
The General Education Board announces that it will give its support to "an experiment in the education of youth in this country which, if successful, will mean practically the complete modernization of elementary and secondary schools."
The theories which will be applied and worked out in the experiment at Teachers' College [of Columbia] are those set forth in Abraham Flexner's "A Modern School" and in President Emeritus, Charles Eliot's "Changes Needed in Secondary Education". The guiding principle is that education is to be "better adapted to the needs of common life than is the curriculum now in common use." Latin and Greek, of course, disappear. "The school will frankly discard that theory of education known as 'formal discipline.'" Doctor Flexner has said that "the modern school will drop the study of the subject of grammar." We suppose there will be no grammar at Teachers' College. The study of literature and history, it appears, will not be totally abolished, but "new methods of teaching" them, together with "civics," will be tried.
---[In a year or two Abraham Flexner will be the father of medical education.]
This is bread-and-butter education, and nothing else. In the general board's program and in the indicated course of study there is not a trace of anything tending to the development of character. There is nothing that would lead us to suppose that the graduate of the "modern school" would have in his mind any ideas, any general ideas, any ideas at all, above or outside the realm of his daily tasks. One who uses the word "culture" in discussing these modern theories of education must take heed to himself, for when that word is spoken the educational modernist becomes dangerous ---habet foenum in cornu. But we make bold to say that young men and women trained in this manner would be as destitute of culture as a Hottentot. Imagination will be cramped and stunted, knowledge and enlightenment abridged and shorn of those intellectual pleasures and satisfactions which make them a rich possession. The modern scholar, if these theories prevail, will be a man profoundly versed in automobiles, steamship construction, bridge building, microscopic analysis, chemical reactions, hydraulics and hydrostatics, and the uses of electricity for lighting and heating; while the young woman who enjoys these priceless early advantages will be able to build and operate a creamery, run a sewing machine, direct the installation of a domestic heating plant, and preside over parlor meetings of ladies ardently pursuing the study of "civics." Neither of them will have an idea or be able to form an intelligent opinion upon subjects not directly related to gainful pursuits.
Unblushing materialism finds its crowning triumph in the theory of the modern school. In the whole plan there is not a spiritual thought, not an idea that rises above the need of finding money for the pocket and food for the belly. There is nothing that would implant in the mind of ingenuous youth the thought that there was anything worth while outside the shop, the market, and the laboratory; that of the vast accumulations of human thought any part is worth preserving save that which directly relates to making a living.
Interesting. Thanks.
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