In this piece, I reflect on how decades of progressive schooling may have led to a generation of adults who, despite their age, exhibit emotional and intellectual immaturity. Drawing inspiration from Ayn Rand's The Comprachicos, I explore how modern education's emphasis on social conformity over critical thinking has resulted in individuals ill-equipped to handle the responsibilities of adulthood.
This essay caught my attention as I've been grappling with what I see as a constant nudge at the university where I teach to 'be on the lookout for depressed students' (let's say), get into their business, begging the question to ensure that they agree that they are depressed, then in mother hen fashion, take them under a wing down to the health center, where SSRI's will be prescribed. At a recent faculty meeting, one colleague bragged about how "grateful" the student was whom she pushed into the health center.
I find this invasive, and reaping the effect expressed here. The students are not allowed to get over their depression on their own. They are taught that they have to get medication and counseling for it. They will have little idea, based on this, that abject states are not necessarily static, that a traumatic experience can, indeed, fade with time.
Some years ago, a student in one of my classes witnessed someone jump from a high window on campus to their death. Granted, this would be a horrible thing to see, and it would haunt the witness for a while. The notice sent by the school emphasized feeling traumatized and seeking counseling. On the one hand, perhaps the decedent would not have killed herself if she'd had counseling, but I'm not sure about that. In my own experience, therapy kept my attention fixed on feeling sad, and I found myself dependent on this paid stranger to make me feel better, which made me feel worse. I realized that my spirits generally lifted on the walk home, so I thought Hey, maybe I just need to walk around and look at things...?
On the other side, why not appeal to the value of friends and family, and to our inner strength, and wish aloud in that announcement that the decedent had trusted that time might heal her wounds, but she took that opportunity away from herself?
The student who witnessed it told me that the therapist just sat there with a piteous look on her face that made her feel worse. Her Korean parents told her not to take the medications that were prescribed. She asked what I thought. I tried to wriggle out of it (not my place). She kept at it. So finally I said, Well, these terrible feelings do go away. It might take time, but you'll feel better.
The director then called to take me to task for that. The student came in the following week with an SSRI prescription that would deny her the experience of seeing that indeed, she would have moved on, on her own.
They are so quick on the draw to prescribe a long term medication for a short term problem that does not reach the bar for clinical depression.
A few days of ativan is probably more appropriate for someone with a traumatic blip yet they are always pushing something that takes weeks to even get in your system.
It is normal to be upset for a short time about something upsetting, and SSRI’s are not meant to be for life, just a few months to cope while learning tools to cope on their own.
The drugs themselves increase risk of suicidal ideation, especially in younger people.
Instead of providing that sort counseling, they do 15 minute med checks.
Are universities a place of learning or a place to hawk pharmaceuticals?
I am increasingly convinced EVERYPLACE is a place to hawk pharmaceuticals at this point. What better way to subdue a people than to persuade them they are disordered enough to require medications, for which they must pay, and which dull their impulses and appetites?
Now would be an excellent time for people to pick up a copy of This Perfect Day, by Ira Levin. It's sci-fi, but prescient in my view.
If people are told that “time heals all things,” then how can we create emotionally stunted, life-long pharmaceutical customers? I lost my mother to homicide. A big part of my healing from the trauma came through enjoying nature and music. Sounds strange, but that’s what my doctor told me to do when I thought I might be clinically depressed. I went to Lake Tahoe for several days and it opened my heart. Healed me a little. God did the rest with his Word, which I began to study, usually through tears. Time passed, and I found that it helped each time I was able to get out of bed and read my Bible and listen to my music. Never took a pill.
As your story illustrates, people need distraction into life not away from it. Nature is so healing, scripture, poetry, music, art, all the beauty of creation is healing to those who truly want to heal. I think by offering up drugs all the time we imply that people have no agency and in so doing, we dull their desire to heal, and instead give them the expectation they should be healed by someone or something else.
'People taught to express, not to reason. Taught to adjust, not to understand. Taught to conform, not to conceptualize.'
I urge you to take care with the 'progressive' vs 'traditional' dichotomy. Similar to the flaw in viewing political reality in a tired old left vs. right wing polarity, the reality in education is far more complex than simply attributing everything that's wrong to so-called progressive ideology.
Less than a year ago, I may have been inclined to agree with your argument. However, I'm an Australian high school English teacher who's just come out of a deeply disappointing experience where I believed I was finally 'at home' within a school celebrated for its successful approach to evidence informed explicit teaching (often equated with 'back-to-basics' traditionalism). I had every reason to believe that there, after a decade in the constructivist wilderness, I would at last find a bulwark against progressivism and the outcomes you've summarised above.
I was wrong. The school's approach to explicit teaching produced *exactly the same outcomes*.
I’m using her terminology, and in this case “progressive” is not a political term, it’s literal. What I mean is, the affective model of education (which can certainly be done, and indeed was done from the days of Dewey), using traditional methods. It has nothing to do with ideology (except insofar as one believes education is for social engineering rather than the development of the mind. In fact, her essay goes on to extol the virtues of Montessori method, which is hardly “traditional.”
'It has nothing to do with ideology (except insofar as one believes education is for social engineering rather than the development of the mind.)'
Ah, you see, this is where it gets murky. One could argue that, historically speaking, the origins of the purpose for mass education is indeed social engineering. As an educator, I conclude that the purpose of contemporary education is to transfer both procedural and declarative knowledge to children. Would you consider this a 'traditional' or 'progressive' conclusion?
I've said many times the purpose of mass schooling historically was social engineering, and everything I've read in the past three years (the period during which I've been intensively researching modern pedagogy and methods, the research and theory behind them, and the people pushing them into the schools, at least here in the US) suggests this is still very much the case.
I would say the purpose of *education* is the development of the *individual* mind and the pursuit of truth. The purpose of SCHOOLING is another thing entirely, and I don't use false dichotomies like "traditional" or "progressive" in that way. Progressive in the realm of education is both a philosophy (about the purpose of education) and a cluster of pedagogies (developed to achieve that purpose).
I use the term "traditional" mostly to refer to praxis (direct instruction, drills, flash-cards, socratic seminars, for example), not content or theory, and only because I haven't found a better word to describe these methods.
But as you point out, traditional praxis can be and was used for almost a century to teach "progressive" pedagogies. Progressive praxis would be group activities in place of individual assignments, discovery-based, project-based, and student-led learning; a "guide-on-the-side" approach to instruction (rather than direct instruction or lecture).
Montessori is not "traditional" in the above sense, but it's also. not "progressive" because --as Rand points out -- it absolutely IS concerned with the development of the rational MIND, and encourages individual agency and autonomy rather than social conformity.
I guess I should correct myself -- it COULD have something to do with ideology, but doesn't necessarily. I'm using it here as Rand did -- solely to refer to the philosophy that education serves the collective, not the individual, and SCHOOLING is the means by which that kind of education is delivered.
This is a compelling dichotomy to focus on. Looks like everyone from OP to Ayn Rand to me agrees that some social conformity of education is beneficial for kids and society. Montessori in particular believes in a certain set of abilities or dexterity that children should emerge from childhood with. Then most of us will agree that too much social conformity ends in a lack of an ingredient we need in a healthy society (like an ability to resist immoral instruction).
Then, everyone from me to OP to Rand believes that some play is beneficial to learn at a young age and helps form a sense of self, and that too much of that ends in a lack of an ingredient we need in a healthy society: that is, a predictable social framework in which to live and relate to one another.
then that leads me to two other questions: can there ever be an effectively balanced approach, and can a nationalized system of education be reasonably expected to achieve it?
No, nor should there be such a thing. The greatest horror of all is the compulsory education system. It is by definition a violation of the 4th and 5th amendments (for parents and their children), and I believe it's a gross violation of the 1st A for all of us b/c we're forced into association and to hear speech (and to speak ideas) chosen by the state.
It's as wrong as wrong gets.
Instead just as we are responsible to feed our own children, and just as we got along just fine without compulsory gov't education for the first 150 years of our existence, we should be responsible to educate our own children privately in a FREE market of education.
No, we are not forced. I homeschooled my kiddo for a year, when I could. The regulations are surprisingly flexible. It had value for us so that we could travel, yet, it is not for everyone or possible for many. There are private and parochial schools available and no requirement that one chooses a state-run school. Obviously, a purely market-based solution is under no obligation to be available in all locations.
If you’re saying that we should have a choice about IF we educate our children, or for how long, I’ll gladly disagree. What a pedantic issue to focus on in the face of improving the way we teach, improving options and support for parents and guardians, and giving children a reasonable baseline for adult life.
I don't think it's "pedantic" to say that parents should have a right to raise their children as they see fit. Children need to EAT too, we don't have a public feeding system that dictates when, where, how much, and at what cost, parents should feed their kids, so why do we have this? You're assuming parents would not educate their kids. Your'e presuming guilt without due process, and pronouncing sentence upon millions.
I never suggested everyone should "homeschool," I said education should be free-market and 100% funded by the parents themselves.
Except any regulation is a violation of liberty. Period. Full stop.
Yes, actually, you should have a choice on how and what you’ll educate your children with, because in reality you educate them every single day, from before they’re even born.
My children are none of your business, and yours are none of mine. There is no “we,” there is YOU, and there is ME, and YOU and others like you (including the government) have no right to tell me how I’m going to take care of my family.
Society collectively regulating “education” is the same as saying every child has to eat lunch at 12pm, every day, and they all have to eat hot dogs with buns, no ketchup, with sauerkraut, onions, and chili. No opt outs or menu changes, and you’re paying for it (whether you eat it or not), and if you don’t do what we’re telling you then we’re going to take you kids away for the “good of the government.”
The lack of understanding about liberty and the constitution, educational principles, parenting, it all reeks of government education at its best. I was homeschooled, maybe that’s why I’m not a sheeple.
It’s funny because of the casual implication that Jews are … I’m not exactly sure here. Responsible for the destruction of western civilization, I guess.
The only countries currently without any school requirements are Sudan, Somalia and Liberia. Is that the kind of freedom from the state you’re looking for?
Countries with very low levels of compulsory education, five or six years, are Haiti, Equitorial Guineau, Angola, Cambodia, Burma, Mozambique, South Sudan ....
The Taliban in Afghanistan require girls and boys to attend school - through year eight, I think.
What are you so salty about here? Every kind of political system in the world requires some education for all. Or are you longing for the freedom of 1880 USA (1850 in woke Mass.)?
It's bad for society to have illiterate, innumerate citizens. And you can home school. You're arguing for your right to produce offspring that will not be able to function in society.
I would love to not pay the portion of my state and property taxes going towards education - more than half of it.
Tell you what, I’ll respond to this in an article next week. Congrats. I don’t usually give a comment that much attention, but this deserves a full exposition.
Short and sweet? We are not Sudan, Somalia, or Liberia, and if you genuinely think we are, I would suggest you are living, breathing evidence that compulsory education has failed to produce a thinking population.
Recently I've been struggling with what to think about current methods for teaching math in primary schools. My wife is a teacher, and when she explains the way that they are now teaching kids how to understand mathematical principles at a deeper level, that seemed like a great idea. When I was a kid I learned how to use certain formulas but it wasn't until college that I came to understand why they worked. But with NAEP scores declining, and declining fastest at the bottom, I'm starting to wonder if the old-school way of just doing lots of worksheets and drilling in how to perform an algorithm to get the right answer might have been better, because it took significantly less instruction time which freed up time for other subjects that have since had to be cut. Ironically, that seems like the opposite of what the author proposes, that we should embrace teaching them how instead of why.
On the other hand, we should be careful extrapolating too far from declining scores in the US, because educational outcomes are declining all over the world. It's probably just kids spending all their time on phones instead of playing outside or reading. Also, IQs worldwide seem to be declining.
There is a certain amount of rote memorization that is being lost that REALLY helps set you up to have the recall to not disrupt your thinking by needing to look something up. Helps you build on ideas. I agree.
When I’ve done math with my kiddo, we are also getting, like, 4 or 5 approaches to learn in a short period of time. So I like the idea, generally, but I think given we still allocate the same amount of time to learn translation, say, having to cram 4 different approaches in is overall more confusing, harder to recall, and frustrating when one or two methods work well for your thinker and the others don’t.
This is certainly more prevalent nowadays with the twenty somethings. However these perpetual adolescents exist into their sixties at least. The root cause is the same: lack of accountability and unearned entitlement.
I would say its a lack of progression in life... People grew up because they were forced to. This includes young women who had to quickly adapt to being mothers.
A generation ago by 25 you had a career, mortgage, wife and kids/soon/on-the-way. In many countries most young men had been through military service. Today they (as did I) still live at home likely w/o full time job.
Now a new hurdle has come with housing affordability making you dwell with your parents even IF you have attained a decent career.
It’s also about setting one’s goals as the child, and modeling self sufficiency as the parent. As a father of a 25 year old, I was willing to add on an apartment for her, but she demanded to do it on her own. Moved halfway across the world to a major city for a role with a multinational and now lives a lifestyle the envy of most. An outlier these days, to be sure, but charting her own path was always expected.
Not sure I agree with everything you say here- as an educator, I believe developmental play in the early school years is very important to the development of agency and independence and I think the fact that we have gotten away from it in the last 15 years or so is actually contributing to the problem rather than the opposite - but I do agree that we are damaging kids and that we are training them to be helpless. I also think many educators would agree with you but the problem is bigger than schools, it is also parenting. It is parents who go with their children on job interviews and who send their five year olds to school not toilet trained and yell at teachers when their kids don’t turn in their homework. It is our current culture that doesn’t allow children to even go outside on their own for five minutes. It is a very complex issue. And we are long overdue to fix it. But the problem is bigger than schools.
If you notice, she (and I) are criticizing early childhood experiences that are strictly about play that satisfies impulses." She extols the virtues of Montessori, and to the casual observer, that looks like "play," but it's play that does what you correctly suggest it should: stimulate development.
Today's parents are the progeny of the people educated in the very schools she observed in 1970, literally. They are products of those schools as much as their parents, that's how this works. When schools are organized around the premise that mass education primarily serves SOCIETY, rather than the individual, and that schools should therefore be organized to impress upon the individual that he or she has certain "social obligations," such that conformity and acceptance are vital, and "success" depends upon a very specific set of success metrics, you get hover-parents. They've been well-trained to believe that individual agency is dangerous. The've been conditioned to believe it's their job to ensure their children "turn out" a certain way, and if they don't, it's their fault.
The irony in what you're saying is you're proving them right. "It's the parents" rings pretty hollow when the parents were educated in the same schools, they didn't sprout from the ground fully-formed like cabbages. They got the message early and often "YOU WILL BE EVALUATED BY THE COLLECTIVE, and if you are found wanting, bad things will happen, and p.s., individual responsibility is racist/unfair/a privilege, all of which are BAD, and just like their children, they spent the majority of their waking hours during their formative years, in the care of, and subject to the evaluation of people pushing this kind of "social awareness" and social conditioning on them.
When I was in public school in the U.S. from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, we all worked individually all the time. I worked at various jobs for a couple of decades before I went to college in the 1990s, where I was constantly assigned to work in groups and "teams". I found it to be a burden. I wanted to do my own research, studying, and writing. To be responsible for myself, without having to carry others who were less conscientious about their work. Forced collaboration on everything is not a good way to teach or be taught.
Because -- notwithstanding that "there is no I in 'team'" -- I have found that I do most of the work while the team reaps most of the benefit.
Of course team members love that!
I do not.
Also I do not love any self-designated 'leader' of a team who doles out tasks as the spirit moves.
I could go on.
I am quite happy to do my own work, raise questions as needed, but mostly try to figure it out for myself. I have no desire to manage others, including "up-management." I have the desire to deliver high quality work in a timely fashion, but that is not necessarily in vogue at this time.
Its a way to force talented and hard working kids to carry those less so. In an era of forced retention till Yr12.
The school system started going downhill as soon as kids who should have left to get jobs were made to hang around "studying" instead of leaving for apprenticeships.
Its also a way for teachers to carry many kids across testing minima they otherwise would have failed to pass - and hence made the staff look bad.
Not recoiling in the least, it's spot on. Moreover, arguably it's an unavoidable outcome of the system of education becoming, well, a system, one that is mandatory and serves the state.
Radical reforms can have radical results. Every year is a new opportunity to change the way the incoming generations learn. Right now I’m excited by something we’ve instituted at our small (45 students k-8) private school where the kids learn together on building projects, on raising farm animals and gardening, and how to problem solve in the real world with a spirit of play. If states would institute a voucher system, these kinds of schools would spread quickly.
Another thought: children of our ancestors needed to learn to be good factory machines because farm machinery eliminated the value of labor. Children of our future will need to be farmers because robotic machinery will replace them in the factories. We’ve come full circle!
I oppose vouchers. They'd grown and change into what the state wants them to be. They'd grown are great now bc they're private. Separate school and state and you'll see schools like yours prosper. School choice is a a scam.
The essay is not about how "play" is the enemy. The essay is about how making "play" essentially be "follow-your-impulses" play, rather than play with purpose (think Montessori) or play geared around the child using their five senses to experience and experiment with reality, as an individual, or as a group, but voluntarily, not arbitrarily in some "assigned" way. "Play" isn't just one thing, and if you read the essay, she makes that very clear.
I was thinking Montessori also. And Waldorf. There are some good alternative schools if you can afford them. Which is why I’d like to see vouchers helping people who can’t afford them.
Please consider reading my content about school choice before supporting that. Once upon a time people wanted to help people afford healthcare with Obamacare too… How did that work out?
Hmmm. I see your point but, I disagree. I think you’re being far too radical in eliminating mandatory schooling completely. Our society is just built around parents having someone trusted and reliable watch their kids every day. Our economy is intertwined with that fact. If we’re going to move forward, it’s going to have to be in evolutionary steps with new programs being tried and tested and adopted or rejected. And some sort of plan to weaken and eventually eliminate teacher’s unions.
It appears clear that a transition in education to Classical Education is due. Over 100 years ago, that was the standard in the US prior to the progressives of the day removing most of the goodness and beauty in learning. Why not immerse students in adventure and hands on learning while exploring nature, what better way to have a student take ownership while being enthusiastic for more. This is how the founding fathers became keen on what they needed to do for the genesis a country, and birth it to last.
Logic is a skill lost on so many, but the Classics in all their tragedies and triumphs usher reasoning and then some back, better than ever combined with civics, grammar, rhetoric, penmanship, classical languages, religion, and philosophy.
This Classical Renaissance has already begun, probably in a school nearby. For future sake, may it overtake common bore education, the sooner, the better.
I notice this when I try to walk people through some relatively obvious relationships; for instance, recently with MAGA Conservatives.
Many of them would consider themselves patriots and rally to the idea, at least in theory, of individual rights, limited Constitutional government, Washington, Jefferson, Madison, 1776 etc.
But when you make the comparison between what those Founders were seeking to do; the reason they split the Federal Government into three seperate branches with historical roots in the British Civil War and Magna Carta- that these historical events were driven by taxes - TARIFFS- imposed by the King in contravention of due process, by the economic philosophy of Mercantilism being revived by Trump which these people were explicitly willing to fight over, risk jail and death for - total blank out.
That was 1640. That was 1776. I cant tell you how many people have told me, that is history, those ideas have nothing to do with the events happening now. There is no bridge to the gap between immutable moral principles; everything is broken down into seperate, specific events happening with no conceptual links to prior events from which one could reasonably draw principles from.
That is what a Progressive education does. That is the "cashing in" of decades spent cramming for tests, on random subjects seemingly drawn from a hat with no obvious connection. They are not trained to look on knowledge as a process for perception, of integration, so what do they do?
Well - what do my friends say? Who are you to question the President? To question everyone else? After all, those other people were wrong, so these other people just be right. It's all second-handed. The very idea of looking at first hand data and coming to logical conclusions does not exist. Hence conspiracy theory thinking and tribalism on both Left and Right.
Sadly? We kind of all do. We owed it to them as their parents to guard their minds like treasure and too many of us trusted what we were told about schools and about our lack of “expertise” to judge them.
I agree with the diagnosis, that children are growing up into helpless adults, but the causes discussed seem reversed to me. Play and teaching by play is the way to develop independent thinkers who can assert themselves and get along with others. Endless exams, memorization, and grading are the things that turn children into automatons. The child who thinks their job is done once they've figured out what combination of words and numbers the teacher wants will grow up into the adult who thinks they just need to fill out the right forms to get the government to give them what they want.
It is not progressive preschools that turn children into helpless adults. That comes later with the endless series of exams that reward regurgitation instead of thought, because the former is easier to grade than the latter.
I think the issue is that Rand is an intellectual, and like most intellectuals, found joy and achievement in ideas. To her, the progressive preachools probably looked like they were teaching emotionality, while the more rigorous traditional education was teaching ideas. Really though, the traditional education does not have that effect on most people. Some unusual people like Rand might be capable of getting something out of such a curriculum, but it teaches most people to be helpless stochastic parrots.
Read her essay. She adores Maria Montessori. There's nothing "rigorous" or "traditional" about Montessori. "Progressive" neither means "not traditional" or "not conservative," it has a very specific meaning in education.
I'm not quite sure that I agree about exams and memorization any more. I think that one problem with school today may be that we don't have enough memorization. They used to focus on it much more heavily, whereas today they spend more time trying to teach how to think. The problem is that once you need to solve more difficult problems, memorization ends up being a crucial component. If you can quickly calculate something in your head, that dramatically speeds things up rather than needing to fumble around with a calculator. And if you can quickly memorize words and phrases, that makes it much faster to think and write without constantly having to look things up. I don't have any hard evidence for this idea though, it's just a theory.
I had college engineering classes with Asian students who had been brought up with much more rigid schooling, been pressured more to achieve by their parents, and spent many more hours than I on school and tutoring. Granted that English was not their first language, but when it came time to come up with ideas for research projects they had little to contribute, though I tried very hard to get them to express any ideas they had. It's anecdotal evidence of course, but I think you are probably right about too much focus on exams turning people into automatons.
I agree - rote learning has its limitations but it is simply non-replaceable in some fields. Recall is a necessary ability and many professions need a memory bank skill base. Additionally there are many kids who actively THRIVE using that learning mode, especially the asbergish leaning ones.
I’m a bit confused about this post. Progressive education is not about authority. There is tons of evidence about the importance of play from educators, anthropologists, play experts, biologists, and, and, and. In fact, play supports independence, critical thinking, and problem solving. Your points are interesting but not caused by progressivism. In fact, evidence shows the opposite. I can’t help but wonder what “progressive education” you are referring to. I haven’t seen any in public education for decades, thanks to the 1980 publication of “a nation at risk”….a report FULL of flaws that was the genesis for the real culprit, standardization of education.
This essay caught my attention as I've been grappling with what I see as a constant nudge at the university where I teach to 'be on the lookout for depressed students' (let's say), get into their business, begging the question to ensure that they agree that they are depressed, then in mother hen fashion, take them under a wing down to the health center, where SSRI's will be prescribed. At a recent faculty meeting, one colleague bragged about how "grateful" the student was whom she pushed into the health center.
I find this invasive, and reaping the effect expressed here. The students are not allowed to get over their depression on their own. They are taught that they have to get medication and counseling for it. They will have little idea, based on this, that abject states are not necessarily static, that a traumatic experience can, indeed, fade with time.
Some years ago, a student in one of my classes witnessed someone jump from a high window on campus to their death. Granted, this would be a horrible thing to see, and it would haunt the witness for a while. The notice sent by the school emphasized feeling traumatized and seeking counseling. On the one hand, perhaps the decedent would not have killed herself if she'd had counseling, but I'm not sure about that. In my own experience, therapy kept my attention fixed on feeling sad, and I found myself dependent on this paid stranger to make me feel better, which made me feel worse. I realized that my spirits generally lifted on the walk home, so I thought Hey, maybe I just need to walk around and look at things...?
On the other side, why not appeal to the value of friends and family, and to our inner strength, and wish aloud in that announcement that the decedent had trusted that time might heal her wounds, but she took that opportunity away from herself?
The student who witnessed it told me that the therapist just sat there with a piteous look on her face that made her feel worse. Her Korean parents told her not to take the medications that were prescribed. She asked what I thought. I tried to wriggle out of it (not my place). She kept at it. So finally I said, Well, these terrible feelings do go away. It might take time, but you'll feel better.
The director then called to take me to task for that. The student came in the following week with an SSRI prescription that would deny her the experience of seeing that indeed, she would have moved on, on her own.
They are so quick on the draw to prescribe a long term medication for a short term problem that does not reach the bar for clinical depression.
A few days of ativan is probably more appropriate for someone with a traumatic blip yet they are always pushing something that takes weeks to even get in your system.
It is normal to be upset for a short time about something upsetting, and SSRI’s are not meant to be for life, just a few months to cope while learning tools to cope on their own.
The drugs themselves increase risk of suicidal ideation, especially in younger people.
Instead of providing that sort counseling, they do 15 minute med checks.
Are universities a place of learning or a place to hawk pharmaceuticals?
I am increasingly convinced EVERYPLACE is a place to hawk pharmaceuticals at this point. What better way to subdue a people than to persuade them they are disordered enough to require medications, for which they must pay, and which dull their impulses and appetites?
Now would be an excellent time for people to pick up a copy of This Perfect Day, by Ira Levin. It's sci-fi, but prescient in my view.
If people are told that “time heals all things,” then how can we create emotionally stunted, life-long pharmaceutical customers? I lost my mother to homicide. A big part of my healing from the trauma came through enjoying nature and music. Sounds strange, but that’s what my doctor told me to do when I thought I might be clinically depressed. I went to Lake Tahoe for several days and it opened my heart. Healed me a little. God did the rest with his Word, which I began to study, usually through tears. Time passed, and I found that it helped each time I was able to get out of bed and read my Bible and listen to my music. Never took a pill.
As your story illustrates, people need distraction into life not away from it. Nature is so healing, scripture, poetry, music, art, all the beauty of creation is healing to those who truly want to heal. I think by offering up drugs all the time we imply that people have no agency and in so doing, we dull their desire to heal, and instead give them the expectation they should be healed by someone or something else.
So true.
Because they don’t want people to have agency, or even to believe they do. Narcissism is the perfect gateway to communism.
'People taught to express, not to reason. Taught to adjust, not to understand. Taught to conform, not to conceptualize.'
I urge you to take care with the 'progressive' vs 'traditional' dichotomy. Similar to the flaw in viewing political reality in a tired old left vs. right wing polarity, the reality in education is far more complex than simply attributing everything that's wrong to so-called progressive ideology.
Less than a year ago, I may have been inclined to agree with your argument. However, I'm an Australian high school English teacher who's just come out of a deeply disappointing experience where I believed I was finally 'at home' within a school celebrated for its successful approach to evidence informed explicit teaching (often equated with 'back-to-basics' traditionalism). I had every reason to believe that there, after a decade in the constructivist wilderness, I would at last find a bulwark against progressivism and the outcomes you've summarised above.
I was wrong. The school's approach to explicit teaching produced *exactly the same outcomes*.
I’m using her terminology, and in this case “progressive” is not a political term, it’s literal. What I mean is, the affective model of education (which can certainly be done, and indeed was done from the days of Dewey), using traditional methods. It has nothing to do with ideology (except insofar as one believes education is for social engineering rather than the development of the mind. In fact, her essay goes on to extol the virtues of Montessori method, which is hardly “traditional.”
'It has nothing to do with ideology (except insofar as one believes education is for social engineering rather than the development of the mind.)'
Ah, you see, this is where it gets murky. One could argue that, historically speaking, the origins of the purpose for mass education is indeed social engineering. As an educator, I conclude that the purpose of contemporary education is to transfer both procedural and declarative knowledge to children. Would you consider this a 'traditional' or 'progressive' conclusion?
I've said many times the purpose of mass schooling historically was social engineering, and everything I've read in the past three years (the period during which I've been intensively researching modern pedagogy and methods, the research and theory behind them, and the people pushing them into the schools, at least here in the US) suggests this is still very much the case.
I would say the purpose of *education* is the development of the *individual* mind and the pursuit of truth. The purpose of SCHOOLING is another thing entirely, and I don't use false dichotomies like "traditional" or "progressive" in that way. Progressive in the realm of education is both a philosophy (about the purpose of education) and a cluster of pedagogies (developed to achieve that purpose).
I use the term "traditional" mostly to refer to praxis (direct instruction, drills, flash-cards, socratic seminars, for example), not content or theory, and only because I haven't found a better word to describe these methods.
But as you point out, traditional praxis can be and was used for almost a century to teach "progressive" pedagogies. Progressive praxis would be group activities in place of individual assignments, discovery-based, project-based, and student-led learning; a "guide-on-the-side" approach to instruction (rather than direct instruction or lecture).
Montessori is not "traditional" in the above sense, but it's also. not "progressive" because --as Rand points out -- it absolutely IS concerned with the development of the rational MIND, and encourages individual agency and autonomy rather than social conformity.
I guess I should correct myself -- it COULD have something to do with ideology, but doesn't necessarily. I'm using it here as Rand did -- solely to refer to the philosophy that education serves the collective, not the individual, and SCHOOLING is the means by which that kind of education is delivered.
This is a compelling dichotomy to focus on. Looks like everyone from OP to Ayn Rand to me agrees that some social conformity of education is beneficial for kids and society. Montessori in particular believes in a certain set of abilities or dexterity that children should emerge from childhood with. Then most of us will agree that too much social conformity ends in a lack of an ingredient we need in a healthy society (like an ability to resist immoral instruction).
Then, everyone from me to OP to Rand believes that some play is beneficial to learn at a young age and helps form a sense of self, and that too much of that ends in a lack of an ingredient we need in a healthy society: that is, a predictable social framework in which to live and relate to one another.
then that leads me to two other questions: can there ever be an effectively balanced approach, and can a nationalized system of education be reasonably expected to achieve it?
No, nor should there be such a thing. The greatest horror of all is the compulsory education system. It is by definition a violation of the 4th and 5th amendments (for parents and their children), and I believe it's a gross violation of the 1st A for all of us b/c we're forced into association and to hear speech (and to speak ideas) chosen by the state.
It's as wrong as wrong gets.
Instead just as we are responsible to feed our own children, and just as we got along just fine without compulsory gov't education for the first 150 years of our existence, we should be responsible to educate our own children privately in a FREE market of education.
No, we are not forced. I homeschooled my kiddo for a year, when I could. The regulations are surprisingly flexible. It had value for us so that we could travel, yet, it is not for everyone or possible for many. There are private and parochial schools available and no requirement that one chooses a state-run school. Obviously, a purely market-based solution is under no obligation to be available in all locations.
If you’re saying that we should have a choice about IF we educate our children, or for how long, I’ll gladly disagree. What a pedantic issue to focus on in the face of improving the way we teach, improving options and support for parents and guardians, and giving children a reasonable baseline for adult life.
I don't think it's "pedantic" to say that parents should have a right to raise their children as they see fit. Children need to EAT too, we don't have a public feeding system that dictates when, where, how much, and at what cost, parents should feed their kids, so why do we have this? You're assuming parents would not educate their kids. Your'e presuming guilt without due process, and pronouncing sentence upon millions.
I never suggested everyone should "homeschool," I said education should be free-market and 100% funded by the parents themselves.
"The regulations [on homeschooling] are surprisingly flexible" 😂 as if the government has the right to regulate my parental liberty AT ALL 🤣
Except any regulation is a violation of liberty. Period. Full stop.
Yes, actually, you should have a choice on how and what you’ll educate your children with, because in reality you educate them every single day, from before they’re even born.
My children are none of your business, and yours are none of mine. There is no “we,” there is YOU, and there is ME, and YOU and others like you (including the government) have no right to tell me how I’m going to take care of my family.
Society collectively regulating “education” is the same as saying every child has to eat lunch at 12pm, every day, and they all have to eat hot dogs with buns, no ketchup, with sauerkraut, onions, and chili. No opt outs or menu changes, and you’re paying for it (whether you eat it or not), and if you don’t do what we’re telling you then we’re going to take you kids away for the “good of the government.”
The lack of understanding about liberty and the constitution, educational principles, parenting, it all reeks of government education at its best. I was homeschooled, maybe that’s why I’m not a sheeple.
Dave, have you considered asking is the Author of this article is Jewish?
No.
I’m going to ask you a very simple question: is the author of this article Jewish?
Feel free to do some research / googling / sleuthing and answer when you’re ready
Why would you want to know that? Who cares?
This is funny but what are you getting at?
Why is it funny? Sincere question.
It’s funny because of the casual implication that Jews are … I’m not exactly sure here. Responsible for the destruction of western civilization, I guess.
The only countries currently without any school requirements are Sudan, Somalia and Liberia. Is that the kind of freedom from the state you’re looking for?
Countries with very low levels of compulsory education, five or six years, are Haiti, Equitorial Guineau, Angola, Cambodia, Burma, Mozambique, South Sudan ....
The Taliban in Afghanistan require girls and boys to attend school - through year eight, I think.
What are you so salty about here? Every kind of political system in the world requires some education for all. Or are you longing for the freedom of 1880 USA (1850 in woke Mass.)?
It's bad for society to have illiterate, innumerate citizens. And you can home school. You're arguing for your right to produce offspring that will not be able to function in society.
I would love to not pay the portion of my state and property taxes going towards education - more than half of it.
In the meantime, seems to me you should read/watch my post here: https://open.substack.com/pub/thereasonwelearn/p/educated-into-compliance-the-constitutional?r=73wvt&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
Tell you what, I’ll respond to this in an article next week. Congrats. I don’t usually give a comment that much attention, but this deserves a full exposition.
Short and sweet? We are not Sudan, Somalia, or Liberia, and if you genuinely think we are, I would suggest you are living, breathing evidence that compulsory education has failed to produce a thinking population.
High school is too late to change anything.
Recently I've been struggling with what to think about current methods for teaching math in primary schools. My wife is a teacher, and when she explains the way that they are now teaching kids how to understand mathematical principles at a deeper level, that seemed like a great idea. When I was a kid I learned how to use certain formulas but it wasn't until college that I came to understand why they worked. But with NAEP scores declining, and declining fastest at the bottom, I'm starting to wonder if the old-school way of just doing lots of worksheets and drilling in how to perform an algorithm to get the right answer might have been better, because it took significantly less instruction time which freed up time for other subjects that have since had to be cut. Ironically, that seems like the opposite of what the author proposes, that we should embrace teaching them how instead of why.
On the other hand, we should be careful extrapolating too far from declining scores in the US, because educational outcomes are declining all over the world. It's probably just kids spending all their time on phones instead of playing outside or reading. Also, IQs worldwide seem to be declining.
There is a certain amount of rote memorization that is being lost that REALLY helps set you up to have the recall to not disrupt your thinking by needing to look something up. Helps you build on ideas. I agree.
When I’ve done math with my kiddo, we are also getting, like, 4 or 5 approaches to learn in a short period of time. So I like the idea, generally, but I think given we still allocate the same amount of time to learn translation, say, having to cram 4 different approaches in is overall more confusing, harder to recall, and frustrating when one or two methods work well for your thinker and the others don’t.
This is certainly more prevalent nowadays with the twenty somethings. However these perpetual adolescents exist into their sixties at least. The root cause is the same: lack of accountability and unearned entitlement.
I would say its a lack of progression in life... People grew up because they were forced to. This includes young women who had to quickly adapt to being mothers.
A generation ago by 25 you had a career, mortgage, wife and kids/soon/on-the-way. In many countries most young men had been through military service. Today they (as did I) still live at home likely w/o full time job.
Now a new hurdle has come with housing affordability making you dwell with your parents even IF you have attained a decent career.
It’s also about setting one’s goals as the child, and modeling self sufficiency as the parent. As a father of a 25 year old, I was willing to add on an apartment for her, but she demanded to do it on her own. Moved halfway across the world to a major city for a role with a multinational and now lives a lifestyle the envy of most. An outlier these days, to be sure, but charting her own path was always expected.
Not sure I agree with everything you say here- as an educator, I believe developmental play in the early school years is very important to the development of agency and independence and I think the fact that we have gotten away from it in the last 15 years or so is actually contributing to the problem rather than the opposite - but I do agree that we are damaging kids and that we are training them to be helpless. I also think many educators would agree with you but the problem is bigger than schools, it is also parenting. It is parents who go with their children on job interviews and who send their five year olds to school not toilet trained and yell at teachers when their kids don’t turn in their homework. It is our current culture that doesn’t allow children to even go outside on their own for five minutes. It is a very complex issue. And we are long overdue to fix it. But the problem is bigger than schools.
If you notice, she (and I) are criticizing early childhood experiences that are strictly about play that satisfies impulses." She extols the virtues of Montessori, and to the casual observer, that looks like "play," but it's play that does what you correctly suggest it should: stimulate development.
Today's parents are the progeny of the people educated in the very schools she observed in 1970, literally. They are products of those schools as much as their parents, that's how this works. When schools are organized around the premise that mass education primarily serves SOCIETY, rather than the individual, and that schools should therefore be organized to impress upon the individual that he or she has certain "social obligations," such that conformity and acceptance are vital, and "success" depends upon a very specific set of success metrics, you get hover-parents. They've been well-trained to believe that individual agency is dangerous. The've been conditioned to believe it's their job to ensure their children "turn out" a certain way, and if they don't, it's their fault.
The irony in what you're saying is you're proving them right. "It's the parents" rings pretty hollow when the parents were educated in the same schools, they didn't sprout from the ground fully-formed like cabbages. They got the message early and often "YOU WILL BE EVALUATED BY THE COLLECTIVE, and if you are found wanting, bad things will happen, and p.s., individual responsibility is racist/unfair/a privilege, all of which are BAD, and just like their children, they spent the majority of their waking hours during their formative years, in the care of, and subject to the evaluation of people pushing this kind of "social awareness" and social conditioning on them.
TLDR version: garbage in, garbage out.
When I was in public school in the U.S. from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, we all worked individually all the time. I worked at various jobs for a couple of decades before I went to college in the 1990s, where I was constantly assigned to work in groups and "teams". I found it to be a burden. I wanted to do my own research, studying, and writing. To be responsible for myself, without having to carry others who were less conscientious about their work. Forced collaboration on everything is not a good way to teach or be taught.
A lot of people love the "team" approach.
I loathe and despise "teamwork."
Why?
Because -- notwithstanding that "there is no I in 'team'" -- I have found that I do most of the work while the team reaps most of the benefit.
Of course team members love that!
I do not.
Also I do not love any self-designated 'leader' of a team who doles out tasks as the spirit moves.
I could go on.
I am quite happy to do my own work, raise questions as needed, but mostly try to figure it out for myself. I have no desire to manage others, including "up-management." I have the desire to deliver high quality work in a timely fashion, but that is not necessarily in vogue at this time.
Its a way to force talented and hard working kids to carry those less so. In an era of forced retention till Yr12.
The school system started going downhill as soon as kids who should have left to get jobs were made to hang around "studying" instead of leaving for apprenticeships.
Its also a way for teachers to carry many kids across testing minima they otherwise would have failed to pass - and hence made the staff look bad.
"before you recoil at the analogy she’s making "
Not recoiling in the least, it's spot on. Moreover, arguably it's an unavoidable outcome of the system of education becoming, well, a system, one that is mandatory and serves the state.
Name a country you would like to live in that doesn't have mandatory education? The more years of education, the richer a nation's people becomes. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-years-of-schooling-vs-gdp-per-capita
The last three words in my comment are there for a reason.
Read the coddling of the American mind by Haidt and lukianoff for a very similar critique of US education
Radical reforms can have radical results. Every year is a new opportunity to change the way the incoming generations learn. Right now I’m excited by something we’ve instituted at our small (45 students k-8) private school where the kids learn together on building projects, on raising farm animals and gardening, and how to problem solve in the real world with a spirit of play. If states would institute a voucher system, these kinds of schools would spread quickly.
Another thought: children of our ancestors needed to learn to be good factory machines because farm machinery eliminated the value of labor. Children of our future will need to be farmers because robotic machinery will replace them in the factories. We’ve come full circle!
I oppose vouchers. They'd grown and change into what the state wants them to be. They'd grown are great now bc they're private. Separate school and state and you'll see schools like yours prosper. School choice is a a scam.
Isn't that the opposite of what the author proposes? The whole essay was about how collaboration and play are the enemy.
The essay is not about how "play" is the enemy. The essay is about how making "play" essentially be "follow-your-impulses" play, rather than play with purpose (think Montessori) or play geared around the child using their five senses to experience and experiment with reality, as an individual, or as a group, but voluntarily, not arbitrarily in some "assigned" way. "Play" isn't just one thing, and if you read the essay, she makes that very clear.
I was thinking Montessori also. And Waldorf. There are some good alternative schools if you can afford them. Which is why I’d like to see vouchers helping people who can’t afford them.
Please consider reading my content about school choice before supporting that. Once upon a time people wanted to help people afford healthcare with Obamacare too… How did that work out?
Hmmm. I see your point but, I disagree. I think you’re being far too radical in eliminating mandatory schooling completely. Our society is just built around parents having someone trusted and reliable watch their kids every day. Our economy is intertwined with that fact. If we’re going to move forward, it’s going to have to be in evolutionary steps with new programs being tried and tested and adopted or rejected. And some sort of plan to weaken and eventually eliminate teacher’s unions.
The government never evolves itself smaller. That's idealistic. My suggestion is the only thing that would actually work.
It appears clear that a transition in education to Classical Education is due. Over 100 years ago, that was the standard in the US prior to the progressives of the day removing most of the goodness and beauty in learning. Why not immerse students in adventure and hands on learning while exploring nature, what better way to have a student take ownership while being enthusiastic for more. This is how the founding fathers became keen on what they needed to do for the genesis a country, and birth it to last.
Logic is a skill lost on so many, but the Classics in all their tragedies and triumphs usher reasoning and then some back, better than ever combined with civics, grammar, rhetoric, penmanship, classical languages, religion, and philosophy.
This Classical Renaissance has already begun, probably in a school nearby. For future sake, may it overtake common bore education, the sooner, the better.
Newsom and Harris being two very prominent examples.
I have my differences with Ayn Rand, but I have always liked that particular essay.
I notice this when I try to walk people through some relatively obvious relationships; for instance, recently with MAGA Conservatives.
Many of them would consider themselves patriots and rally to the idea, at least in theory, of individual rights, limited Constitutional government, Washington, Jefferson, Madison, 1776 etc.
But when you make the comparison between what those Founders were seeking to do; the reason they split the Federal Government into three seperate branches with historical roots in the British Civil War and Magna Carta- that these historical events were driven by taxes - TARIFFS- imposed by the King in contravention of due process, by the economic philosophy of Mercantilism being revived by Trump which these people were explicitly willing to fight over, risk jail and death for - total blank out.
That was 1640. That was 1776. I cant tell you how many people have told me, that is history, those ideas have nothing to do with the events happening now. There is no bridge to the gap between immutable moral principles; everything is broken down into seperate, specific events happening with no conceptual links to prior events from which one could reasonably draw principles from.
That is what a Progressive education does. That is the "cashing in" of decades spent cramming for tests, on random subjects seemingly drawn from a hat with no obvious connection. They are not trained to look on knowledge as a process for perception, of integration, so what do they do?
Well - what do my friends say? Who are you to question the President? To question everyone else? After all, those other people were wrong, so these other people just be right. It's all second-handed. The very idea of looking at first hand data and coming to logical conclusions does not exist. Hence conspiracy theory thinking and tribalism on both Left and Right.
Nailed it.
Woke people owe children an apology.
Sadly? We kind of all do. We owed it to them as their parents to guard their minds like treasure and too many of us trusted what we were told about schools and about our lack of “expertise” to judge them.
It’s been happening for a ling time.
Rand was a fucking loon
I take it you've not read the essay, or likely anything else she ever wrote. She was a freakin' oracle.
The opinion of a Rand fan is suspect, as is the opinion of anyone who favors conservatism over being progressive.
Nice dodge. You've never read her, clearly. Run along. Nothing I have to say here is of interest to you--it's all "suspect" after all.
I agree with the diagnosis, that children are growing up into helpless adults, but the causes discussed seem reversed to me. Play and teaching by play is the way to develop independent thinkers who can assert themselves and get along with others. Endless exams, memorization, and grading are the things that turn children into automatons. The child who thinks their job is done once they've figured out what combination of words and numbers the teacher wants will grow up into the adult who thinks they just need to fill out the right forms to get the government to give them what they want.
It is not progressive preschools that turn children into helpless adults. That comes later with the endless series of exams that reward regurgitation instead of thought, because the former is easier to grade than the latter.
I think the issue is that Rand is an intellectual, and like most intellectuals, found joy and achievement in ideas. To her, the progressive preachools probably looked like they were teaching emotionality, while the more rigorous traditional education was teaching ideas. Really though, the traditional education does not have that effect on most people. Some unusual people like Rand might be capable of getting something out of such a curriculum, but it teaches most people to be helpless stochastic parrots.
Read her essay. She adores Maria Montessori. There's nothing "rigorous" or "traditional" about Montessori. "Progressive" neither means "not traditional" or "not conservative," it has a very specific meaning in education.
I'm not quite sure that I agree about exams and memorization any more. I think that one problem with school today may be that we don't have enough memorization. They used to focus on it much more heavily, whereas today they spend more time trying to teach how to think. The problem is that once you need to solve more difficult problems, memorization ends up being a crucial component. If you can quickly calculate something in your head, that dramatically speeds things up rather than needing to fumble around with a calculator. And if you can quickly memorize words and phrases, that makes it much faster to think and write without constantly having to look things up. I don't have any hard evidence for this idea though, it's just a theory.
I had college engineering classes with Asian students who had been brought up with much more rigid schooling, been pressured more to achieve by their parents, and spent many more hours than I on school and tutoring. Granted that English was not their first language, but when it came time to come up with ideas for research projects they had little to contribute, though I tried very hard to get them to express any ideas they had. It's anecdotal evidence of course, but I think you are probably right about too much focus on exams turning people into automatons.
I agree - rote learning has its limitations but it is simply non-replaceable in some fields. Recall is a necessary ability and many professions need a memory bank skill base. Additionally there are many kids who actively THRIVE using that learning mode, especially the asbergish leaning ones.
I’m a bit confused about this post. Progressive education is not about authority. There is tons of evidence about the importance of play from educators, anthropologists, play experts, biologists, and, and, and. In fact, play supports independence, critical thinking, and problem solving. Your points are interesting but not caused by progressivism. In fact, evidence shows the opposite. I can’t help but wonder what “progressive education” you are referring to. I haven’t seen any in public education for decades, thanks to the 1980 publication of “a nation at risk”….a report FULL of flaws that was the genesis for the real culprit, standardization of education.