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It’s Magnificent, But It’s Not Education
Thanks to David Harris for sending me a copy of an old (1961) book The Schools which exposes the follies of “progressivism” in education, a trend which the author dates back to the beginning of the 20th century. Here’s a passage from the book which follows a description of an experimental progressive school which was getting good results (p. 53).
“No one should be surprised that progressivism, or any other philosophy of education, works well when the teachers are people of the quality of the Bradts. The question is whether or not any philosophy is capable of fragmentation into specific techniques which can be acquired by teachers who aer not remarkably gifted. Unfortunately, progressivism in America was always more interested in creating proper attitudes than in developing effective techniques. In England, partly under the prodduing of Bertrand Russell, the agitators for ‘activity methods’ concentrated their fire on the elementary school, where the matter to be taught is more easily represented by objects and actions. In the United States, the notion that ‘anybody can teach elementary school’ was too deeply ingrained in the community. And the failures of the elementary school, then as now, were less blatant than the failures of the rapidly emerging high school.
“Having established a beachhead of ideas in the elementary schools, the progressive movement charged on to conquer secondary education leaving behind the booby traps which always clutter a mental countryside conquered by ideas without techniques. ‘Look-see’ methods of teaching reading, ‘social learnings’ in arithmetic, the trivialities of elementary ‘social studies’ and the half-baked literary approach to ‘scientific method’ - all these remained on the field to injure two generations of teachers, while the reformers poured forward to the new attack along the broadest imaginable front.
“In historical perspective, it is easy to see that the progressives rode to certain destruction when they attempted the conquest of the entrenched ‘subject matter’ of secondary education. Like the Light Brigade at Balaklava, they were ill advised. Perspective on this battle has been hard to achieve, however, and even today most commentators on one side can see only the gallantry and idealism of the charge, while commentators on the other side can see only its stupidity. What was needed, but never supplied, was a comment of the sort made by the French artillery observer who watched Tennyson’s Six Hundred launch themselves into the cannon’s mouth: ‘C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre.‘“
The author’s attack on “‘look-see’ methods of teaching reading” marks it as a reactive work of the early 1960s. Such a method of teaching reading works fine for over three-quarters of students (as do most methods); after all, this is how most people learned to read before the radical experiment of mass compulsory public education. The passage betrays a touching faith in a “method” or a “technique” that teachers can be taught and that will work for the variety of students they encounter.
The author is more credible in his reference to “the trivialities of elementary ‘social studies’“ and points to one of the major problems of curricula and classroom practices: that they are indeed trivial, and fundamentally not serious. They focus on different topics than my school did in the 1950s, in part because what is “politically correct” in 2010 is different from what qualified as such in 1959, but in both eras there was an overemphasis on inculcating attitudes, committing to memory discrete and unrelated facts, and “playing school”.
In the faddish devotion to “interdisciplinarity” students never really learn the disciplines that are supposed to be integrated, how different disciplines approach problems or organize knowledge nor how to think and reason as practitioners of those disciplines would do.
No, what we see in too many schools is not education, but it is likely neither more nor less education than most North Americans received 50 years ago.