When Education Went Primitive

The Return of the Primitive was the title of an Ayn Rand book on the post-McGovern left. I borrowed it to use for my category on some of the more extreme examples of the flight from reason that’s an ongoing part of much of today’s society.

There’s a review of Henry T. Edmondson III’s John Dewey & the Decline of American Education by M.D. Aeschliman, professor of education at Boston University in the new “dead tree” edition of National Review (subscription required, sadly). Aeschliman explains how mass education itself was made primitivist in the early decades of the 20th century, rather ironically by a movement that dubbed itself “progressive”:

Quentin Anderson has described Dewey