Outcomes-Based Education
Why does there always have to be an “outcome”?…I can decide for myself what sort of outcome, if any, I want to have for my experience. More important, I can wait until the outcome reveals itself to me.
– John Holt, Instead of Education.
Most of us know that there is something terribly wrong with education today. The signs are inescapable: a diluted curriculum, underperforming students, befuddled teachers, lack of historical grounding and civic responsibility, in short, the degradation of a noble institution and the dumbing-down of an entire generation. And many of us have rushed into the breach to propose one or another “solution” to the crisis which, nevertheless, stubbornly refuses to go away. I believe, however, that we are obliged not merely to react to but to understand the crisis as it unfolds in practice, both in the classroom and the halls of administration, as well as to ascertain the wider context of which it is both a part and a symptom. Otherwise we find ourselves, as is now the case, facing a multitude of competing schemes and paradigms that clutter the educational marketplace with increasing clangor and futility.
If we are to engage in responsible debate, we may agree that our predicament is to some extent explained by nearly a century of what is called Progressivist or student-centered pedagogy and the attendant ills with which it is associated. These latter include the erosion of academic scrupulousness, the exalting of the student’s impulses and desires over the civilizing mandate of the scholarly tradition, the privileging of unearned self-esteem over hard-won accomplishment, the invidious dismissal of intellectual merit as the propaganda of an elitist conspiracy presumably bent on polarizing society into the haves and the have nots, and a host of incremental “reforms” which, in their clumsy and unreflected application, have left a considerable part of a generation incapable of the most elementary alphanumeric operations, let alone thinking clearly. As Paul Fussell points out in BAD, or The Dumbing of America, programmatic reform in education, occurring within the Progressivist framework, aims at creating the conditions for “living a life untroubled by thought.”
Regrettably, “the teaching of the humanities and social sciences in the public schools,” argues Charles Murray in his recent Real Education, “continues to reflect a mindset that took hold as part of the progressive education movement” — a movement that should be scrapped a.s.a.p. Easier said than done, obviously, given the prevailing mentality addicted to superficial novelty while continuing to malinger in an obsolete conceptual schema. Meaningful change would require a new breed of educational thinkers, practitioners and functionaries whose emergence is a slow and difficult process, dependent on a gradual shift in the cultural zeitgeist. This will take time, assuming its possibility. “It is a tough sell,” says Murray; still, there is no doubt that “educational success needs to be redefined.” The issue should be constantly pressed in the tenuous hope that repetition may eventually break through the shell of ignorance and sloth beneath which our educators cower.
But for the present, the Progressivist mindset remains largely in place, though it has been inflected and supplemented by a new performance model that focuses on the production of prepackaged results. It conceptualizes the classroom as a sort of cybernetic black box and envisages teachers and students as an army of obedient game sprites marching in a mainframe universe according to an inflexible set of rules or instructions. In this way, the latest innovation offers a computational model of learning whose systematicity leaves no room for ambiguity, sensitivity to context, or the unforeseeable contingencies associated with human knowing and discovery. It has, in effect, embarked on what Sven Birkerts in The Gutenberg Elegies denounces as “the campaign against literate inwardness.”
Unfortunately, it is no longer possible ” to engage in reasonable debate.” Your scholarly observations and insider analysis of Outcome systems are beyond the understanding or interest of non-academic “cohorts.” {New “in” word along with “sustainable.”} Marxist ideology and deconstructionism are so entrenched after four generations, particularly in administrative ranks and journalism, that reason can no longer gain traction. Our “education system” is a demonstration of irrationality.
Political Correctness has destroyed one of the greatest assets of our Exceptionalism: sound schooling. Emphasis on making education “fun.” Dismissing of instruction in literature, art, geography, history as irrelevant. Elimination of grading as disrespectful and demeaning. Banishing of “failure.” Advancement on racial quota. Total abandonment of discipline. Commitment to the philosophy of letting the inmates run the asylum. No evaluation of teacher performance – effectively lifetime tenure. One counsellor” per teacher. Admiinstrative costs 50% of budget.
Compound that with a decadent culture, embracing the lowest common denominator in culture and morality, gross, witless, and frantic, and you have the situation of our education system today. THAT’s the Outcome.
Those of us who benefitted from our white european {but not particularly male} schooling, and cherish its memories, are filled with despair of any prospect of restoring one of factors that made our nation great. I would hope you might address this core problem rather than embroil us in academic angst.
I don’t agree that Progressive education was about fun: it was about compassion and competence, with an emphasis on discarding selfish individualism for immersion in “the public interest.” This would take the form of social studies and such literature as elevated the significance and suffering of “the common man.” Such a [sob sister] view dominates the mass media and schools alike. I wrote about the damage done to young minds here: http://clarespark.com/2012/06/16/the-social-history-racket/. The problem is populism, social democracy and all the thuggery that accompanied the implementation of this grand utopian project; one that lassoed the masses in order to stave off servile revolt and red revolution.
I don’t think that Stuart Williamson’s account of the demolition of the humanities in his comment is fair to the record. All the subjects he mentions are taught, but with an emphasis that is anti-Western civilization. One must make a turning point with the rise of the New Left, that was sympathetic to Maoism and all other Third World interests. I have studied how Progressives formulated their own project, and it was “moderation” in all things that was uppermost in their minds. For a piece of my research see http://clarespark.com/2009/09/23/progressives-and-the-teaching-of-american-literature/. Their reasoning was anti-woman and expressed the fear of a Democracy that might dislodge them as upper-class Protestant males from dominance. They feared the Enlightenment, which could take the student to intolerable irreverence toward the past. I say that the past deserved everything it got from the dread “progressives.” And if you are uncomfortable with that judgment, tell me how you would construct mass education in way that does justice to all our children.
Clare-The current pressure coming out of the AACU with the accreditors as the enforcers is to move away from the disciplines completely.
Take a look at this troubling report from January released to great fanfare at the White House.http://www.aacu.org/civic_learning/crucible/documents/Crucible_FINAL_web.pdf
It is also consistent with the Lumina Foundation’s agenda and they are given jurisdiction in that report to start piloting a Diploma Qualification Protocol that appears attitudinal.
I have also been tracking AACU’s Making Excellence Inclusive Initiative that argues any disproportionality in outcomes triggers scrutiny that the content offered and the methods used must be changed.
There really is a desire to make the focus of all education behavior modification more than transmission of knowledge. It’s not new but it certainly is overt now.
Outcomes Based Education has always been about using the school to change the values, attitudes, and beliefs of the child and promote reflexive responses from emotion until it’s a habit. I wrote a post about a month ago comparing today’s outcomes based education under the Common Core to what Ralph Tyler developed in the 1930s using the term objectives to obscure that what was being pushed was not knowledge.http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/if-standardsoutcomesobjectives-what-is-the-real-common-core/
You are right David these objectives to move away from facts and knowledge were part of the 8 Year study pushed by the Progressive Education Association to finally implement John Dewey’s dream for education.
We will never fix education until we start to understand all the conflicts built into how it works now. Did you know the colleges of education, higher ed, AND K-12 are now called the Triumvirate by insiders? Because accreditation agencies now get to prescribe what goes on substantively at all 3. That’s the worst of the poison delivery now in education. Having your accreditation threatened unless you agree to move away from the transmission of knowledge model.
Instead of “I think therefore I am” the new model is literally “I am because we are”. I have seen that on numerous powerpoints. It’s even supposed to be the new definition of economic prosperity.
For the 21st century.
Yes, for 30 years I watched the development of Outcome ideology infect schools with all the ills (and then some) described by Solway. Commenter Williamson is right about the Marxist/desconstructionist take-over. While most teachers took off to enjoy the night after a day of in-servicing, the progressivist cabal remained behind to vote each other and their agendas into office. Couched in the right language, this agenda easily found willing fools enough to dedicate themselves to the regime’s edicts. The horror, indeed.
Student-centered learning meant the chance to banish the great pantheon of writers from the curriculum. Subject-centered learning, the proper starting point, invited sneering. The first question of education – “what is worth teaching” – disappeared from the conversation. However, my experience with teaching masterworks to ignorant students always led to the unexpected, and often the profound, in ways I could not have predicted. It was the experience of the infinite power of great art, not just any “text”, that delivered the magic. This could be true also of a more mundane activity, like teaching grammar. Knowing how sentences fit together to make meaning, is powerful knowing, and such knowing has the power to fascinate and enlighten.
Unfortunately, I share Williamson’s bleak outlook. As Solway says, it will take a generational shift to move things to the proper center again.
Love your remark about the infinite power of great art. A few decades ago in my student teaching I read Great Expectations to a class of barely literate 9th graders and saw the class and these students transformed because they couldn’t wait to hear what happened next to Pip. Thank you Charles Dickens. I wonder what Dickens would make of our schools today.
The year of Dickens. It wasn’t until I taught Great Expectations that I gave Dickens the respect he deserved. That’s the beauty of school: it makes you pay attention to things you wouldn’t otherwise think to on your own, teachers included. Of course, I taught the book amidst a lot of noise claiming it was too difficult for high school. In a sense, it was all too true for many students. Just a few decades before, in that same school system, the book had been on the grade 9 curriculum.
That link above was the first part of what was really a two-part story. None of this dysfunction is accidental. Nor is the fact that the names or at least the troubling functions keep coming back. Education can change culture. It can change the essence of a people and what they are capable of becoming. Whether they view themselves as independent individuals responsible for their own destiny. Or part of a group that someone else will guide and take care of.
Everything I write is to change our mindset from thinking of education as necessarily a public good or even advantageous for a given individual. It has been weaponized and we need to start recognizing that if we are to have any chance of turning this around. Plus learn to recognize conflicts of interest. Right now our own money is being used, for example, so that the colleges of education are getting huge research grants to sell off what will then be pushed in K-12. Since they have the monopoly on who can teach, how, and what.
http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/is-common-core-a-catalyst-to-dramatically-alter-system/ is the subsequent post on the desired political, social, and economic transformations consistently sought through education for decades.
The book I took that Boyd Bode quote from was laying out the vision for the 21st century to finally achieve Dewey’s dream of education. Which has always meant destroying the America we cherish and the entire Western concept of the primacy of the individual. And if Dewey did not know the horrors that his social vision would foster, we do now. A century later.
Yet still they try. No one has ever told them utopia means nowhere.
Hi, all. As a voyeur dropping in on this insiders chat, I smile. What bunkum. You take yourselves so seriously, forgetting that people have been teaching their offspring for 5-10 thousand years, more or less successfully, and within the needs of their time and place.
You gloss over the differences between education and training, confusing one for the other. The Armed Forces of the United States are the singular best trainers, using the best techniques, the world has seen. The American education system is the worst.
Education is a function of reading and math skills. Period.
ta
Georgia Institute of Technology, ’71 (Skills, baby, skills!)
“Regrettably, “the teaching of the humanities and social sciences in the public schools,” argues Charles Murray in his recent Real Education, “continues to reflect a mindset that took hold as part of the progressive education movement” — a movement that should be scrapped a.s.a.p.”
Tell me about it. When kids today can’t place the Civil War in the right century, when they don’t know who the United States won its independence from, when they don’t know who fought in World War II (and let’s not even think about World War I), when they know nothing about the Cold War or WHY any of these wars were fought, then you have some real problems with how we are raising our kids. And let’s not even talk about kids knowing the difference between democracy, socialism, communism, and fascism. Trust me, folks, it’s a lot more important having kids know this stuff rather than algebra or geometry. Algebra or geometry will not help kids become good citizens or great leaders. Knowing how our government works and why our Constitutional Republic is the best in the world WILL make them better citizens and it WILL make them great leaders as well.
But I think it’s a liberal plot continuing to focus just on math and english. Keep the kids dumb about our past, make them know nothing about why this nation is so great, and make them totally ignorant about analyzing the different political parties and how they govern, and you have a nice, big, fat dumb electorate that can be convinced to do just about anything. Just look at how Obama got elected. Here was a man with no experience in anything except running for office and a political campaign managed to make Americans believe that he was the messiah, able to cure all of our ills and be a tremendous leader. Instead he was an utter disaster. Perhaps if more Americans knew their history they would have known that what Obama was selling was nothing more than tired old progressive ideas hatched in the 1930s. There was absolutely nothing new with Obama. Any clear thinking individual with a good understanding of history knew that what Obama was selling was nothing more than a bunch of socialist programs that the progressives live for. But Americans do NOT know their history and this is what we ended up with, an American public that will buy just about anything a politician and his minions have to say. If Americans are going to allow their politics to be formed on the basis of television commercials, then we really do have problems.
So if the public schools are not going to teach our kids about American and world history, then it’s up to the parents to do something about it. Yes, I said THE PARENTS. Make the time to discuss with your kids the wonders of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and what an amazing achievment it was for 13 tiny colonies to beat the greatest military power in the world at that time. Tell them how we picked ourselves up from the terrible defeat at Pearl Harbor to eventually defeat some of the worst dictatorships the world has ever seen. Tell them how we stood up against Communism and drew a line in the sand and told the Soviet Union that they would NOT win on the battlefield of ideas. And show them how a united America rose up after the horror of 9/11 to show radical Islamists that we were still a nation NOT to be trifled with. These are important lessons our kids need to know about along with many, many, others.
Don’t know a lot about history? There are tons of good books out there to help you out. Read a few. Take the time to brush up on a little history. Your kids will become better informed citizens and they will thank you for it one day.
A good source to start would be the federalist and anti-federalist papers.
Knowing that stuff but not algebra will result in a good citizen who can’t tell when he’s being lied to. Without a good foundation in math and basic science, people won’t be able to discern whether or not an idea is coherent with reality, and believe all sorts of nonsense.
I heartily agree with all the above (left margin) comments, but I caution all on underestimating the magnitude of the problem as well as solutions, if indeed there are any at all.
David, you refer to “the dumbing-down of an entire generation”. It isn’t. It’s the willful indoctrination of SEVERAL generations. It began in the 1950s as I personally experienced in the 4th best rated Faculty of Education among 100 in the country (cit. NEA, NTA, AAUP ratings).
While the thrust for de-Amercanizing America began with the 1930s communist movements, and before them the unionists and eugenicists and radical feminists, it went to escape velocity with the Soviet cold war “misinformation” campaigns which included the promotion of drugs, sexual promiscuity/perversity, civic dereliction and civil disorder (cf. Congressional hearings, post cold war defector affadavits, etc.).
As a major Latino industrialist (formerly Cuban) assured me about Cuba’s future, “It took them 50 years to get down to where they are. It will take them a hundred to climb back up to where they were”.
“… a generation”? No. Several generations. It will take hundreds of years to crawl back!
Ain’t gonna happen. Go Galt!
DS: “Most of us know that there is something terribly wrong with education today. The signs are inescapable: a diluted curriculum, underperforming students, befuddled teachers, lack of historical grounding and civic responsibility, in short, the degradation of a noble institution and the dumbing-down of an entire generation.”
“Crimestop…includes the power of not grasping analogies; of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc [Socialist Principles of Oceania], and of being bored or rebelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop in short means protective stupidity… The world view of the Party imposed its self most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm because it left no residue behind; just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird… What opinions the masses hold or do not hold is looked on as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect… In the long run a hierarchical society was only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance.” George Orwell – 1984
Professor Reynolds documents The Higher Education Bubble but there’s also a Lower Education Bubble that’s equally unsustainable. In many areas it can cost $10k per year to Publicly School a kid, which means the community is investing $120k for each kid’s primary education… are we getting a satisfactory return on that investment? Relax, there’s no math involved – just look at the crumbling infrastructure of each metropolitan area and you’ll see that the kids aren’t generating enough tax money to repay the investment we made for their education. And how can they? They’re taking out a first mortgage to get through primary school, a second mortgage to get through college, perhaps a third mortgage for graduate school, and there’s no money left to actually buy a house, a car, pay for my Medicare and Social Security, and chase the American Dream. The kids’ lives are over before they graduate High School.
But what the author talks about is really just a symptom, the real causes are (1) most jobs are boring and (2) a bureaucracy only exists to serve the bureaucracy. All of the “new methods” evolved, not because the “old methods” didn’t work, but because they bored the teachers almost to death. It was repetition followed by more repetition so the bureaucracy created more enjoyable activities for itself. And, of course, those new activities weren’t free but it’s for “the kids” so money wasn’t an issue until you get to the point that the model is financially unsound – which occurred some 25 years ago.
Parents have abdicated their primary responsibility of raising their own children by foisting them off to a cadre of professionals who may not have the kids best interests at heart. My partial solution: always vote against school millages. Ironically to some, less money and time spent on schooling would improve society.
Brian ” Student-centered learning meant the chance to banish the great pantheon of writers from the curriculum.”
Libertyship46 “When kids today can’t place the Civil War in the right century….”
David, I like your topic but I have to say the writing is pedantic to the extreme. I suppose Hemingway is not amongst your favorite authors.
Brian, Being 64, I remember the student protests in the 60’s, 64-65 to be exact, with the Free Speech movement centered in California. It was the culmination of frustration by many our age with the never ending wars. Then there was fear of nuclear Armageddon that many thought was imminent from our country’s policy of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). As a result many young adults rejected the collective wisdom of their parents and the authority figures of the society. They demanded to teach themselves and many of the universities let them. (disclaimer: I was never in sympathy with the movement) I would submit that our problem today is those youth from the 60’s threw away the collective wisdom of the ages but never replaced it with anything better or anything at all except perhaps with hedonism. Since the 60’s to today, far too many Americans have assimilated this hedonism unthinkingly. I doubt it is a conspiracy of evil doers bent on the myth of utopianism that makes our schools so awful. I do think that the solution requires the same courage and passion that the Free Speech Movement had when they threw down the education establishment but in reverse. Leaders in this hypothetical movement must publically challenge their peers to abandon amorality and hedonism and seek to learn and take what is good from the wisdom of the ages. They must learn to live for something besides just themselves or we are doomed as a society. Like the Monks hiding and preserving Western Literature during the Dark Ages, waiting for the Renaissance, I have to hope our future salvation as a society resides with those who are home schooling their children today.
Libertyship46, Agree with your observations but I partially disagree with your assessment of cause. Kids learn what THEY think is important, not what the teachers think is important. Obviously if kids aren’t retaining Civil War facts or math skills, etc., then we aren’t convincing them that it is important or something else is interfering, i.e. see Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Instead of throwing more money and teachers/administrators/technology at the school system, we should be researching what is motivating or not motivating learning today. Most of the educational literature and research I see today is focused on anything but the students. While I have great respect for some teachers and their efforts on behalf of students, the educational system has transformed itself into a self serving bureaucracy that has lost sight of its mission and how to achieve it.
Kids in the 60′s were no more angst-ridden than any other generation at that age. Kids were empty vessels who were encouraged by their professors (commie plants who had infiltrated the university system) to riot. So they did as they were told. Those same little monsters are now the teachers and they are doing just as their professors did efore them – encouraging a new generation of empty vessels to go out and riot.
I remember them when they first populated my schools when they were right out of college. My generation had started with old-school teachers and we actually knew stuff. This new batch were morons. I remember when they went out on strike. We students surrounded them and forced their asses back to class. I hated those people then and I still hate them to this day.
…the dumbing-down of an entire generation.
Quite a few generations by now.
As Paul Fussell points out in BAD, or The Dumbing of America, programmatic reform in education, occurring within the Progressivist framework, aims at creating the conditions for “living a life untroubled by thought.”…It has, in effect, embarked on what Sven Birkerts in The Gutenberg Elegies denounces as “the campaign against literate inwardness.”
If you’re going to create generations of lockstep robots, if you’re going to successfully create a Brave New World and generations of Julias, these are your objectives.
Outcomes-based or Competency-based education…This menu-oriented pedagogy states that fixed purposes must rigorously and necessarily precede activities and that criterion levels of competency must be strictly specified in advance…Outcomes further asserts that learning occurs in discrete units that are readily quantifiable and replicable…Outcomes places obsessive measurement before real learning…there is a sense in which the Outcomes blueprint is nothing more than a backward pedagogical catechism intended to restrain inquiry and to legislate and control response.
Progressives are insecure in the face of anything unpredictable and unmeasurable.
Well, at least we’ll never have to face a shortage of social workers.
It’s an important topic. Too bad the comments are far more cogent than the article. Less jargon please.
Exactly!
A good communicator puts the candy on a shelf that most people will be able to reach.
Ironically, a slog through that morass of prose aptly demonstrates much of what is wrong with education generally and education education specifically; it’s all about learning a particular set of spells and incantations to mark you as one of the cognoscenti.
I don’t think the change is nearly so difficult and it is predicated on ending the monopoly of the government schools and reducing the demand for “higher” education in education. Vouchers and similar strategies will effectively end the monopoly of the government schools and the communist educrats. Next is use the appointment and elective authority in the states we sane people still control to take control of university boards of regents and administration away from the educrats and the teachers’ unions. My state is now into its 10th year of a Republican governor and nigh on to thirty years of a Republican legislature and the university system is still a vipers’ nest of former Democrat officeholders and apparatchiks.
Then, we need to reduce the demand for post-graduate education in education. It’s a dirty little secret that most “educators” only have a subject matter education at the college sophomore level, many only at the high school level. Combine that limited subject matter education with the fact that the best and brightest students rarely become Ed Majors, and you arrive at the conclusion that teachers ain’t usually intellectuals. Now, you don’t have to be an intellectual to teach a third grader to add and subtract, in fact it doesn’t even help, and maybe hurts, to be an intellectual; imagine the author of this article trying to talk to an eight year old. But, on most teacher pay scales, more education gets you more money, so you have third grade teachers with Masters and Doctorate degrees – in pedagogy. They can get a Doctorate and still have only a high school education in subject matter; the rest of the “education” is in how to teach stuff they don’t know. There is absolutely no reason for the advanced degree other than it gets the teacher more pay on the step and column pay scales most districts have adopted.
There’s an article up on MSNBC’s site today about the schools with the worst graduation rates in the US – and the US has the worst college graduation rate in the developed world. The one conclusion that one can draw about most of these schools is that they shouldn’t be four-year or more universities and most of the people going to them should be working or going to a trade school. These 1 – 3000 student campuses in far-flung towns, usually as satellite campi of the big state schools exist for two reasons: to give teachers the credits in Underwater Basket Weaving that get them paid more and to suck up Pell Grants and other government aid money handed out to people who shouldn’t get near a college except as a maintenance person or a delivery driver. Further, these university campi are a pestilence in their community and its surrounds. My dirt-poor little home town has a university campus so the teachers and Pell grant students don’t have to drive the 35 miles to the bigger school – which really only exists for the same reasons and to provide a place for students who can’t cut it academically at the big SEC and ACC state schools to play football and get on TV once in awhile and maybe be seen by a pro scout. Those evah so civilized and sophistocated perfessers at the little campus just have to have all sorts of arts centers and performing arts programs and all sorts of fancy stuff that a bunch of tradespeople, farmers, chainstore workers and such really can’t affort the taxes to support, so they form a cadre of malcontents in the body politic in every town that has a college campus.
In sum, Republican governors and legislators really need to start paying attention to who they appoint or confirm to state boards of regents and state boards of education, and where these people are elected rather than appointed, we the electorate need to pay as much, maybe more, attention to them as we do to the more prominent offices. To my mind, a good rule is if the educrats and teachers unions support somebody, that’s all the reason any Republican needs to never let that person near authority.
No Art. “In sum, Republican governors and legislators really need to start…”
… firing every sniveling servant involved even remotely with education at all government levels, and go back to parent paid school marms.
The rot is too deep and too infectious.
Another brilliant idea by another “true conservative” genius. You guys can never accept a practical and attainable action when there’s some pie in the sky forlorn hope destined only for pure, glorious failure, can you?
Well, ok. What about learning outside the Young People’s State Prison system? Which now exists, in part, as holding cells so that some parents may pursue their dreams unencumbered. They do pay for that. So…
One learns 80% (an estimate) of what one knows by acting in the real world (not an artificially contrived environment created to please several people’s needs), with real world outcomes.
Most of “higher” education is setup to keep people as long as possible, and then recycle to them into that system, not to release them to do their own bidding. Prisons are like that too. It suits both state systems needs quite well.
You will never “teach” a dog to fly.
“Most of “higher” education is setup to keep people as long as possible”
This! A thousand times THIS!
There’s no reason in the world someone going to school to become an archetech needs the nonsense of women’s studies. Or, for that matter, the dozens of other useless classes that only exist because some moron went to college and majored in women’s studies, thus rendering them unemployable in anything other than teaching women’s studies.
As someone with a Master’s Degree, I have to agree with the bit about being set up to keep people indefinitely. I felt like a dropout starting graduate school and leaving with only a Master’s degree, despite the fact that I only went to graduate school at all because it was the only place I could find a job the year before.
As others here have already pointed out, this Marxist, Gramscian attack and takeover of our educational system was no accident.
As pre-WWII Italian Communist Party member and Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci and his followers and acolytes surmised, change Education—teacher education and standards, what is taught and how it is taught, expectations and standards for students in terms of discipline, effort, and reward, curriculums–things covered and not, religious, ethical, or moral lessons taught or banished, a basic, a unifying, positive, historical American “narrative” taught, or a divisive, Balkanizing, adversarial one–and you can effect major changes in the “zeitgeist,” and the general level of knowledge, competence, alertness, and morality of the entire society and, as we have all seen, it turns out rather quickly, in just a few generations.
Infect the teachers, then the students, and convince the teachers that, rather than trying to do the ancient, hard, unglamorous work of shaping and “civilizing” their students (“uncivilized” when they first enter kindergarten) and, if necessary, pounding into them the basic information, tools, techniques, discipline, morality, interpersonal skills, and attitudes necessary for them to become useful, civilized, productive, ethical/moral, inner-directed, informed citizens, teachers should, instead, follow the latest, much less taxing and boring theory out of our thoroughly compromised –thanks largely in part to the work of people like “educator” Bill Ayers–teachers colleges. And, as well, insulate teachers and grant them immunity from the consequences of their poor preparation and teaching by unionizing them and making them virtually “un-fireable”–see New York City’s infamous “Rubber Rooms.”
Take from the curriculum all the historical background, information, and analytical tools (and the civilizing subjects and discipline, too) that a well- informed citizen needs to be an “American,” grounded, functional, somewhat cultured, and able to make sound judgments in our democratic Republic—History—Ancient (especially Greece and Rome), Modern, and American, Logic and Rhetoric, Philosophy, Mathematics and Economics, Ethics and Religion, Geography, Government and Political Science, Art and Music –and replace them with a dark view of America as the author of virtually everything wrong, and fill up the rest with leftist propaganda, twaddle, perversity, and nonsense.
Then, voila, increasingly an electorate much more easily fooled and led, many “graduates” of our trendy, “feel good” K-12 schools, colleges, and universities virtually functionally illiterate, innumerate, a-historical, and Balkanized along racial, ethnic, and sexual lines; and more and more of them somewhat defensive about/ashamed to be an American.
Result, exhibit number one–the election of demagogue Barack Hussein Obama, a man who won election based on a phony biography that was pushed as the glorious truth of the “Light Worker” but never seriously questioned by the Left’s captive ally, the MSM, and on the vacuous slogans of “Hope” and “Change” and by intoning nonsense like “we are the people we have been waiting for, ” an Obama about whom the increasingly dumbed down and, therefore, insufficiently alert, knowledgeable, and suspicious electorate knew, and still knows today, virtually nothing, and the few things they do “know” are pretty likely false.
It is surprising that this is the first reference to Bombing Bill Ayers, the wealthy self-acknowledged Communist, internationally celebrated as the leading exponent of Marxist educational programs, revered by Hugo Chavez. Having failed badly as an armed revolutionist and concluded that he would accomplish little for the cause by getting killed or spending a couple of decades in prison, he selected childhood education as the best course for spreading the faith, and went to work. Well educated, and well-connected to the Chicago Machine, he got an immediate professorship. He is an excellent writer and has published a steady stream of books, and is widely considered to be the actual author of “Dreams From My Daddy.”
He’s a savvy pragmatist for the cause and I doubt he was was motivated by Gramcian rhetoric. Rather, he observed that the Holy Roman Catholic Church sustained its centuries of dominance through education, with particular emphasis on infancyThat is Ayers’ specialty, the foundation of his world-wide a claim in Socialist circles. Obama probably was first lured to Chicgo by Ayers. Certainly Ayers became his patron, gave him his only managerial job with the Chicago Annenberg Challenge in early education, and was active in his campaign planing. He is the Poster Guy for Communist schooling.
You can cut and quibble, parse and dissect the whole higher education mess but Ayers is right: “You’veGot To Be Carefully Taught.” And he’s got two generations of American voters to prove it.
http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Left-Anti-Industrial-Revolution/dp/0452011256 = the prophecy
the main article above + comments = current situation and intel
where is the coherent, convincing battle plan for victory, not just raising the info level of the readers of PJ Media ?
GBUSA
On the being set up to keep you in school indefinitely, absolutely. The insider phrase is no longer K-12 pr even P-16. It is P-20. It includes graduate degrees. Because I track by how things function whatever its current name, I can track these bad ideas all over the world. It is a bit like having a crystal ball. You can see what is coming and what the consequences have been.
What is coming are Qualifications Frameworks where you have to have the desired certificate or credential to get the job. It’s like an annuity to higher ed and allows workplace regulation. Hard on small employers and easy for existing bureaucracies. Essentially creates barriers to entry. It is all based on competencies. More skill based and generic than knowledge. The researchers will point to government agencies or the BBC to “prove” it is workable.
On those suspicious of a broadbased machination to achieve utopia. First, it’s not especially broadbased. One generation’s pushers are usually the former students of a previous generation’s primary bad idea pushers. Ralph Tyler, for example, was very busy.
Secondly, there’s a lot of research grant money available here. It’s considered the easiest to obtain in research u world. When we hear of something as being a National Science Foundation research grant, most of us would assume it is designed to teach math or science better. No, frequently it is coming out of the behavioral sciences division. The grant will be designed to change what counts as math or science in order to eliminate any disparities in which groups are successful at math and science.
You eliminate the achievement gap. You also eliminate much knowledge unless it comes from home. It also encourages paper credentials and a government directed economy. Green growth usually means no growth unless you are politically connected.
19 comments and no one has as yet mentioned that religious schools (Catholic, Lutheran, Episcopal, Jewish, etc.) still appear to provide a well rounded, traditional education. Vouchers please and the situation will solve itself.
Robert- I have seen agreements involving the accreditors and private schools where they forced them to imbibe deeply on every bad idea out there as the price of that accreditation decal. One in particular involved the association of Catholic schools in California and included accreditors with no formal jurisdiction there. That suggests the agreement is becoming a national template.
In other countries vouchers get used as the means for regulating what goes on in private schools. Right now the accreditors have close to absolute power and their push is to use the schools to meet the Dewey/ Bode/ UNESCO vision. Vouchers are fixable but the legislatures and Congress need to rein in the accreditors. They are a primary driver of the education poison all over the world.
I’ve sent two boys through twelve years of parochial and Jesuit schools. While they’re better than the alternative, they are frequently drinking the kool-aid too. While I’m not privy to the internal politics of those schools, I have to think that the accreditation process is corrupting them too.
“The basic assumption underlying this approach is that educational improvement depends upon a shift in focus from inputs to outcomes. Once desirable student outcomes are identified, all educational practices are keyed to these outcomes, and educators are held accountable for achieving them.” Dianne Bateman
This is an example of the un-scientific method for acquiring knowledge and truth, which of course leads to discovery of un-truth. The scientific method requires observation of the way things actually are (inputs); followed by reason, analysis and comprehension; followed by theory; followed by testing, and finally ending in scientific outcomes. When inputs lead to outcomes one is using inductive reasoning to form logical conclusions about the world based on the initial inputs. When one starts with a pre-conceived (usually utopian) outcome and works backwards to force inputs into compliance, one has abandoned science and arrived at totalitarianism.
“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others… We are different from all the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we’re doing… Power is not a means, it is an end… the object of power is power… Always there will be the intoxication of power… We are the priests of power. .. Power is power over human beings, over the body; but above all over the mind… There will be no loyalty except loyalty toward the Party. There will be no love except the love of Big Brother… There will be no heart, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science.” George Orwell – 1984
A generation?
When was the last time the gurus/experts/professionals in public information media and the schools from nursery through university graduate taught their students. Acting less as educators to the full man than as spokespersons and managers for a particular type of full man, or else. Role models in “elite” universities in history, various “social sciences” AND literature as the primary guides to a “good education” or at least a sale-able one.
Within the past half century deconstructing, read damaging, the base of the American, Western, identity. Major instruments/tactics their emphasising worst case scenarios and pitting citizens against citizens. To TRANSFORM, to CHANGE the American identity to their designs
On this Fathers’ Day it is fitting to honour the genesis from our Founding Fathers in their gift to us of the double helix, the DNA in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the USA that makes us Americans.
.
And to go further to insist, require, demand those we elect to represent us honour their oath to “Uphold and Defend” those genetic bases.
Time to come home to independence from control by self-elected, self propagating, manipulative and damaging “betters/elites”.
Americans CAN DO/Have done enough to have beome, before these elites took control with our permission, the most respected AND envied citizens in the world. Unluckily since accepting these deconstructors, these transformers as our representatives America/Americans are in many instances now laughing stock.
Time to come home to our birthright. Not world citizens. Not citizens of a multicultural nation. Not internationalists. Melting pot AMERICANS – with a Capital A.
JoJo-that was wonderful. Very eloquent and not unique to the US. Although it is especially galling here where sovereignty remains with the people.
When talk with people in other countries about the fact that what is going on in education is a global machination, it really gets them stirred up. This really is not about how to teach and what to teach.
Even though the individual teacher or prof or administrator may not be familiar with the broader political agenda, everything has been designed to ensure they adopt it nevertheless.
And implement with fidelity.
Today I wrote about something called the Future Earth Alliance slatted to be operational in 2013. It really does take the idea of US national sovereignty and individual sovereignty and a free market economy and completely gut them.
And if this is the future our leaders are consenting to and planning for and funding, what was the Cold War really about? Some victory with this future.
I wrote a long response more thanntwenty four hours ago, but it seems to have gotten lost in cyber-space or been snipped. Usually, that does not happen here.
My respect for teachers is tempered by the following factoid: I in 27 years in the Army, I would absolutely not promote a troop to Sergeant(E-5)unless he had one skill above all others: he/she had to be able to teach. Now higher ranking non-commissioned officers have to display more advanced skills, for example, the annual training of an entire battalion of 600 persons was largely planned by our Sergeant-Major. That is about what it takes to run an entire school district, with fewer students, but far more complexity and, of course, far higher standards.
Teachers are important, but they are far from some type of rare subspecies of intellectual(OK in 1750, they well might have been). The skills required to teach effectively are not that rare and, with some external support, almost anybody could accomplish it – and many do, by home schooling.
Also, note that in the military, teaching (and training management) is a task all competent leaders must perform. We do not have a self-selected elite that believes it is indispensable to society for performing a single service.
Did you learn to read in the military? The author specifically states that outcome-based methods DO apply to certain types of teaching:
“[The c]ompetency template … which is differentially suited to certain arenas of endeavor — for example, the early phase of literacy and arithmetic training in the primary grades (as opposed to “whole language” theory), sports, the technical subjects (including computer training), or the initial stages of science education in which the acquisition of “skills,” techniques, and facts prevails — is resolutely misapplied to another set of disciplines with which it has little in common….”
.
I think most military skills fall “within that arena of endeavor.”
I, for one, enjoyed the article. Unfortunately for most who commented, the issue doesn’t align neatly with the current “schools are dumbed-down, we just need to get liberals out and hold teacher’s accountable” mantra.
.
While schools are dumbed down, the liberals are messing it up, and we do need to hold more people accountable, the problem Solway addresses relates more to how we teach than what we teach. I have first-hand experience with “standards based instruction,” the current iteration of the “outcomes” model. It promotes a soul-destroying pedagogy that indeed “places obsessive measurement before real learning.”
.
This fixation on data has ironically made it much easier for progressive-minded educrats to APPEAR to be responding to calls for education reform. There’s a false accountability because it places heavy emphasis on the mastery of discrete “competencies” rather than any real scholarship.
Our schools have been dumbed down because leftists/progressives are continually striving to make society more equal. This is in vain because human beings are inherently unequal. We’re not lab rats whose genetics have been manipulated to be as consistent as possible. We vary from one another tremendously in our talents, temperaments, and inclinations. Yet progressives refuse to see this and ascribe human differences to environmental or social factors whose role is minor.
What the progressives tried to do was literally find a way to teach dumb kids to be smart, which is impossible. It is possible to make a normal person less intelligent through malnutrition or other assaults on their well-being, but the converse is not true. It is not possible to take someone who is healthy and well-nourished and magically make them smarter.
This did not stop them from trying however, and if you’ll look back to the early days of intelligence testing, there were those who believed that intelligence could be increased through intervention and schooling. This of course, did not work. This is part of why they hate intelligence testing so much, it reveals the inherent inequality of mankind. In the end, their efforts to magically raise IQ through instruction decayed into striving to increase school attendance, first at the primary and secondary level, and ultimately at the university level.
But what happens when millions of people who are not college material are presented to our universities to be educated? The results are as predictable as they are pathetic: Compromised standards. Entire degree programs cut from whole cloth to make busy work for the not-so-bright until graduation day. The emergence of the hyphenated studies programs whose sole purpose is indoctrination can be traced to the explosion of students attending college who lacked the smarts to successfully complete a traditionally rigorous college education.
At one time our universities would have flunked them out. Weed-out courses were the terror of many a freshman in those days. Nowadays such courses are used to channel students into useless majors. It is as Tim Groseclose recently quipped:
No one in the history of mankind has ever said, “Darn, I made a D in Chicano studies. I guess now I’ll have to major in chemistry.” In contrast, lots of people have said the opposite.
The universities do this because they covet the financial aid money those students represent. Free money (to the schools at least) from the state have turned our universities into diploma mills.
Only now employers have gotten wise to this. They know that graduates from gutted and watered down degree programs have nothing to offer, and have stopped hiring them. The New York Times had a story a couple of years back about a young woman who had graduated, from Yale no less, with a degree in “Womens Studies.” She could not find a job and was $100,000 in debt. She was working at Starbucks at the time and could not understand her misfortune.
I can. If she wasn’t smart enough to get a real education at the university level, she should have pursued other options. Vocational training being the most obvious alternative. The world needs plumbers, and they make very good money. Being 100k in the hole with nothing to show for it except a pretty piece of paper is almost as bad a deal as the Indians selling Manhattan for some beads and trinkets.
Outcomes based pedagogy, to the extent that it is backed up by high-stakes testing is more conservative than liberal. It was a response to teachers (to overstate) teaching what they liked, or felt like teaching and avoiding the things they didn’t like or that were hard to teach.
What we need are teachers who can teach something like the War of 1812, and, recognizing that there are major conflicting value systems in our culture today, demonstrate how you can derive many lefty AND many righty talking points, core values from that War. The left can point to the bad and bungled war, the screwing of the Indians, the land-grabbing War Hawks. The right can show the need for a professional army, the effectiveness of angry strong military men like Harrison and Jackson, and tweak New Englanders about their coming close to seceding, and this is just scrtching the surface.
Then we have the irony of the Founding (but now Republican) Madison both looking weak and being blamed by the New England Federalists. We have the rise and fall and rise of American manufacturing. etc. A good teacher should teach it it a way that had righty and lefty parents saying, “your teacher said WHAT!?” on alternate days or weeks.
But alas, there may not be much time for the War of 1812 when you have to also do the Federalist Papers and the “Know nothings,” and Harriet Tubman.
Dwight, when you find a standards-based program that teaches this and tests this let us all know. What’s actually happened is that high-stakes testing has shoved history or any kind of rigorous humanities instruction to the the back burner in most secondary school programs. Most of the efforts of departments and administrators is spent dreaming up some miraculous means to turn indifferent students into scholars who can somehow pass the state competencies test.
If you want to call that “conservative,” go ahead.
In my high school, the upper level classes were not greatly affected by the high stakes tests. Yes, the lower curricula were significantly affected, but that was not a bad thing.
The problem with getting history standards is that they are so politically charged that it takes forever to get them approved, at least in our state. How many days you spend on the Federalist Papers vs Rosa Parks is a lot harder to resolve than whether or not Shakespeare gets taught instead of young adult novel number five.
Your attack on outcome-based education has two enormoust flaws.
1) You assume that the teachers have something of greater benefit than a course syllabus given from on high to impart to their students.
Reality: Today’s teachers are the mediocre students of yesterday. There are fewer than 1 in 50 elementary teachers even competant in elementary mathematics, for example, and the reading level of many teachers is just short of horrific. Elementay school teachers teach because they enjoyed school, which means (in elementary school) they liked gluing macaroni on paper and playing with their friends, plus they like little kids. This does not make good teacher material. High school teachers mostly teach because they really liked high school or they couldn’t come up with anything else to do with their degree. This also does not make for inspiried teachers.
2) You assume that students are intellectually curious and are, frankly, the type of people who may desire and benefit from a true eduction. This is true of less than 2% of adults. For the vast majority of people, eduction is simple a misnomer. It should not be the goal because eduction is a two-way street, and if the other way is closed for business, it’ll never happen. Competency should be the goal, not education. Competency should be measured as skill-sets that directly correlate to job skills or as familiarity with the basic facts and concepts surrounding something–such as the most important events in American history.
What will that do to the maybe 2% who are both capable of and interested in being educated? Done right, it will give them more time to educate themselves and seek out the few people capable of helping them gain an education. They’ll be freed from the myth of a one-size-fits-all learning experience. They’ll achieve their comptencies–and move on.
595772 970985Wow, cool post. I