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The Great Dumbing Down
I’ve been thinking a lot about where we went wrong as a society. What happened to America, how could so many possibly view the Founders on Mt. Rushmore in the way that this CNN reporter did, and why wasn’t there a greater outcry about her slander?
CNN: "President Trump will be at Mount Rushmore, where he’ll be standing in front of a monument of two slave owners and on land wrestled away from Native Americans.” pic.twitter.com/UYjzEiUkU9
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) July 3, 2020
It wasn’t just one CNN reporter, either:
SUPERCUT!
Media: It’s Time to Topple Mt. Rushmore pic.twitter.com/A1Cj95paoc
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) July 5, 2020
There is something deeply amiss, and it’s not an easy to reverse trend. This hatred of everything our country stands for and was built on started in schools, but it’s more than that. We didn’t just teach that hatred, we also just stopped teaching.
I’m reading Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton (I learned sickeningly little about the Founders in my own well-rated public schools) and this paragraph stuck out at me:
Because the Elizabethtown Academy supplied many students to Princeton, we can deduce something about Hamilton’s prepatory studies from that college’s requirements. Princeton applicants had to know Virgil, Cicero’s orations, and Latin grammar and also had to be “so well acquainted with the Greek as to render part of the four Evangelists in that language into Latin or English.
Could a present-day Princeton Ph.D. graduate be expected to know what a Princeton undergraduate applicant was expected to know then?
Over and over in my reading about the Founders, I come upon Plutarch, a topic of study that I only learned about in following the philosophy of Charlotte Mason in our homeschool. My children will be expected to start learning Plutarch in fourth grade; meanwhile, it took me three decades to learn about the existence of Plutarch, let alone to begin studying it.
How can we break this cycle we’re witnessing in our schools, where less and less actual education is happening every year? I hate to be that homeschooler, but this from Weapons of Mass Instruction written by a former school teacher about the ills of traditional and compulsory schooling stood out:
Do we really need school? I don’t mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don’t hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn’t, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Something taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one graduated from a secondary school.
Teacher’s unions this year, more than most, are punting on their responsibility to actually teach; opting instead for more “distance learning,” and this is an opportunity for those of us who still desperately want the American experiment to survive to throw the current model of mass education on its head. This means promoting school choice and homeschooling not just as a stop-gap to keep kids engaged and learning this year, but in future years as well.
This summer I’m spending some time introducing homeschooling to Jewish audiences on YouTube because there isn’t much reference material out there for Jews (there is quite a lot for Christians, though!). I released my first video yesterday, and it’s a great way to answer the question “Why homeschool?” for those unfamiliar with the concept and what it looks like in day-to-day life. It’s made for Jews but speaks to universal reasons why a great many homeschoolers have chosen the path that they did.
Here’s hoping we can raise a generation of kids learning Plutarch again.
Published in General
We really won’t know until November whether the Silent Majority has been biding its time until the election or no longer exists.
But we’re #1 in self-esteem!
It doesn’t make any difference what the industry is, when government sets minimum standards that will become the ceiling, not the floor. The stated goals among educators and politicians alike has been to get graduation rates up, not raising the expectations from the students.
My first wife taught elementary school in east Los Angeles while I was a medical student. That was before teachers’ unions. She stopped teaching after our first child was born but remained an advocate for public schools. Many years later, she was laid off in a bank merger where she had been a vice president. She still had a lifetime teaching credential so she decided to go back to teaching while she looked for another bank job. She had not taught in 30 years. California was in a campaign to reduce class size and was hiring more teachers so she applied as a substitute. Applicants were required to take a test called “CBEST.” She described it as 8th grade level. There were of course many complaints that it was “racist.”
She got the temp job in a lower middle class school in an eastern LA suburb. She was shocked and appalled at what she found. The teachers showed little interest in the kids and often mocked them in the teachers’ room. She mentioned to one teacher of second grade (she was teaching third) that the woman had done a good job getting the kids ready for reading. The woman burst into tears. No one had ever complimented her on her teaching. The Principal told my ex-wife that she was his “best teacher” even though she had been out of teaching 30 years. After about 6 months she got another job and left teaching. That principal lived not far from her and she would sometimes see him in the market. He would come over to say hello and try to interest her in returning to teaching.
She told me that if she were doing it again, she would home school our kids. After our divorce, I had moved the kids from public to private schools.
Eh. Once in awhile you’ll see these turn-of-the-century high school exit exams make the rounds on Facebook. A great deal of it is still relevant – at least in the sense that you would expect an educated person to be able to logically work through some unit conversions (assuming the units are in common usage) – but much of it is anachronistic.
There is a very different set of requirements and expectations if one is applying to a modern STEM school for instance, than 100 years ago.
But the bottom line I think is that based upon results we’re seeing in modern life, liberal arts are about as useful as teats on a male bovine, given that it is the devil’s playpen for neo-Marxists.
Thank you. People need this encouragement to feel free to choose.
Thanks for the video. My daughter-in-law is embarking on homeschooling (oldest grandchild is 3+) and using Charlotte Mason as a base. We are Roman Catholic so there are more support and resources for her. I’m so glad you are doing this for the Jewish homeschooling community.
One thing utterly missing in public schools is the cultivation of curiosity. Teachers have to cover a prescribed amount of material in order for students to pass the tests that are based on rote regurgitation of facts. No time for deviating from the script to explore side roads of interest, to find out where a child’s true vocation might be.
Educational reform is the most thankless job in all of punditry and think-tankery.
A thoughtful realist will soon be driven to H. L. Mencken’s solution: Burn down all the schools and hang all the teachers.
What’s truly amazing, is that with most of the world’s people holding the Universal Library in their hands, they manage to know less than midwestern farmers in 1858 (read Lincoln-Douglas Debates).
Instead, Americans seem stuck with an educational pedagogy (progressivism) so bad that even the Soviet Union dropped it.
I just saw this headline: “Jefferson’s family calls for memorial to be removed”
“Lucian K. Truscott IV says his ancestor’s former estate at Monticello is enough of a tribute and that the Jefferson Memorial, located next to the Tidal Basin in the nation’s capital, should be replaced with a statue honoring the abolitionist hero Harriet Tubman.”
The grandson of the guy from the Patton movie, General Lucian King Truscott Jr. (1895–1965).
He’s a West Point graduate and a columnist for Salon.
What happened to America?
Teacher’s unions.
My stepson in Oregon builds custom homes in the “wine country” of the Willamette Valley. We were up there visiting a couple of years ago and he showed me a home he was building. It was big but had an entire wing for the grandmother that included a classroom as she was going to homeschool the kids.
I used to think we should graduate students after completing 8th grade, instead of 12th. No more. I’d prefer public schools be shuttered rather than allowed to indoctrinate kids the way they are.
My kids attended an E.D. Hirsch Core Knowledge classical charter for elementary and middle school and then moved on to a top-ranked charter high school teaching Hillsdale’s curriculum. They’ve read Herodotus, Homer, the Bible, had a taste of the great books of western lit, studied Latin, art and music history, the sciences and mathematics.
I still haven’t read nearly as many great thinkers of the West as they have. Quality education can be done in a public school setting, but only by people who know and love our western heritage. That ain’t the case in regular public ed. It’s agenda education, and the agenda is radical leftism.
I repeat, better to be uneducated than maleducated. I’m hoping the “second wave” will keep the schools closed and people will learn how live without sending their kids off to left wing seminaries every day.
My son enters high school this August, but we’re only sending him to seminary (Latter Day Saint religious instruction during school hours.) He will be doing the rest of his learning at home. The school system is relentless on children who don’t function like everyone else. I’m sick of dealing with attendance issues and homework.
Huh.
Bethany on June 29.
Also Bethany: this post.
I’m honestly not trying to be a troll. I am just very confused.
The Wall Street Journal, about 30 years ago, had a front page story about the changes in high school education in the early 20th century. It was so good, I wish I could find it again. It pointed out that high school, which was kind of a new concept anyway, was adapting to the need for educated workmen. Less Latin and Greek and more Math and Geometry. I’ve been reading about 19th century England and “Oxbridge” was useless for anything but an aristocratic finishing school or Latin and Greek scholars. Tolkein’s biography tells much about it. If some one wanted a science education there was nowhere but Edinburgh. The same was true of Medicine.
Even though I teach public school, I am incredibly glad I was homeschooled. There are just so many benefits – being with your family more, having time to explore your interests, etc.
More people need to understand calculus, specifically calculating the area under a curve.
Monty Python graduated from Cambridge. So did Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson.
I believe Adam Smith wrote Wealth of Nations in Edinburgh not Oxford or Cambridge
good observation
I believe Ricardo coined the theory of comparative advantage, something that was missed in wealth of nations. Smith spoke about absolute advantage not comparative advantage. Minor omission.
I contend that wealth of nations is the most important book since 1776
It was actually published that year.
I meant >= 1776 lol