Interestingly, much of Public Education holds exactly these same values. A paper by John Taylor Gotto articulates his view that Public Education has far less to do with providing students with critical thinking skills and much more to do with fostering passive acceptance of societally defined adult behavior.
“H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. . . . Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim.. . is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States . . . and that is its aim everywhere else.”
He continues, taking the view that another outcome of education is the extension of childhood in the service of advanced and enhanced consumerism:
Maturity has by now been banished from nearly every aspect of our lives. Easy divorce laws have removed the need to work at relationships; easy credit has removed the need for fiscal self-control; easy entertainment has removed the need to learn to entertain oneself; easy answers have removed the need to ask questions. We have become a nation of children, happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments that would insult actual adults. We buy televisions, and then we buy the things we see on the television. We buy computers, and then we buy the things we see on the computer. We buy $150 sneakers whether we need them or not, and when they fall apart too soon we buy another pair. We drive SUVs and believe the lie that they constitute a kind of life insurance, even when we're upside-down in them. And, worst of all, we don't bat an eye when Ari Fleischer tells us to "be careful what you say," even if we remember having been told somewhere back in school that America is the land of the free. We simply buy that one too. Our schooling, as intended, has seen to it.
It is, after all, more difficult to be an adult than a child; it is far more difficult to be a critical thinker than an empty bowl into which unrelated facts are stored. In the end, we have become a nation of children in adult bodies, putty in the hands of those who hold the keys to manipulation of emotions and ideas.
For several years we have been hearing of the difficulties in finding U.S. scientists, engineers, and technologists. Employers find it increasingly necessary to recruit for these positions from foreign countries. Even more than this necessity of seeking foreign private sector employee brain power, is the total and complete incompetence demonstrated by all areas of government.
We have increasingly seen the results of this incompetence. That 9/11 could not be prevented, that we are in a war from which no one can offer a plan to extricate ourselves, that hundreds of thousands of citizens are still unable to return to their homes in New Orleans, are but three of the most evident demonstrations of this incompetence. While we, as a nation are well aware of the depth of the problems we face, worse yet is the lack of leaders who we can confidently expect to reverse these trends.
If this assessment is accurate, does it imply that we as a nation are doomed? Solutions will be difficult, at best. But, they can be achieved. In considering an approach to the dumbing of America, the following elements seem appropriate to consider.
· Change must come from outside the existing educational infrastructure.
· The guiding principals for implementing change originate from the disciplines of cognitive and neuroscience.
· Central themes which must be rewarded are that “Curiosity is good,” and “All knowledge is dynamic, changing, and never ‘settled.’”
· Students must be publicly, tangibly rewarded for demonstration of intellectual achievement to the same degree as are those who demonstrate athletic achievement. Such rewards must become institutionalized through the existing educational infrastructure.
· The technologies of the Internet, Distance Learning, and the knowledge discipline of Instructional Design, will constitute the delivery system.
The theory, and delivery technologies are all available today. The most demanding challenge will come in securing governmental and public commitment to change. Currently, we see far more voter concern directed at immediate, or potentially short-term problems; the war, health care, poverty, immigration, global warming. The question is whether this issue can be moved forward on the list of public priorities.
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