PC DESTROYS AMERICAN EDUCATION

“The deterioration of public school education is most prominently observed in social studies, where, as education scholar Chester E. Finn, Jr. observes, "the lunatics have taken over the asylum."

The attitudes of elite educationists have reduced education to ideology, and a venomous ideology it is: America's contribution to humanity is an odious conspiracy of dead white males. The pedagogues worry that attentiveness to the details of democracy might cause children to discover that the ideology is false, that democracy actually is the best way mankind has found to organize a government of the people, by the people, for the people.

J. Martin Rochester, a professor of social studies at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, in an essay in the book "Where Did Social Studies Go Wrong," turns up the heat on those responsible for dumbing down education and collapsing discipline. "Co-operative learning" is the euphemism for reducing learning to something only the least among us can master, something like making it up to a crippled child by breaking the legs of everyone else. "Co-operative learning" draws on the free labor of smarter students to bring up low achievers, which reduces average learning abilities for everybody. "Constructivism," the theory that children can "construct" their own meaning from personal experience, is pushed on youngsters who can't construct a proper sentence.

"Multiple intelligences theory" searches for "the specific genius" within each child, equating the skill of slam-dunking a basketball, for example, with the ability to perform open-heart surgery. The reliance on fun-filled, action-packed, visual media over fact-filled textbooks and lectures treats whole classes as though suffering attention deficit disorder.

Textbooks, such as they are, make matters worse. They not only give the visual equal space with the words, but lack authority and we pretend that uninformed students can think critically, with informed judgments, when they have no stored knowledge.

One textbook directives instructs teachers: "We must stop exhorting students to be 'good citizens' according to our own unquestioned view of good and help them instead to ask 'good questions' about their own values and those of others. Controversies, rather than fixed knowledge and values, will play a central role in the structure of social studies education."

This is an education theory from Alice in Wonderland: "Verdict first, trial later." How can students create "controversy" when they haven't learned what to criticize?”

More here