"If education enables men at all times to defend their independence, this is most especially true in democratic times. When all men are alike, it is easy to found a sole and all-powerful government by the aid of mere instinct. But men require much intelligence, knowledge, and art to organize and to maintain secondary powers under similar circumstances and to create, amid the independence and individual weakness of the citizens, such free associations as may be able to struggle against tyranny without destroying public order...Hence the concentration of power and the subjection of individuals will increase among democratic nations, not only in the same proportion as their equality, but in the same proportion as their ignorance." [Democracy in America, 1832; emphasis mine]

When Torqueville wrote these words in the mid-19th century, he was prescient. For, if there is one path through which a country can be brought to democratic despotism (also Torqueville’s phrase), it is the course being advanced in this country over the past century. By depriving its citizens of an adequate education and, further, by legislating what education that society can dispense, government can control its citizenry best.

Can anyone assert that our children are being educated as well as they were 100 years ago? 50 years ago? 25 years ago? I would guess the only one who would dare advance this notion are the card-carrying members of the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). They, through their protectionism, propaganda and political power, in collusion with the government’s dictates, have thoroughly negated local control of school curricula and nullified individual thought among students. Parents have, effectively, been removed from the equation.

Now, it would be Conspiracy Theory 101-thinking to suggest that the federal government and the teacher’s unions sat down and hatched a grand scheme for controlling generations of the American citizenry through deficient or, even more lethal, skewed and prejudiced education. But, whether it was planned or merely a fortuitous confluence of events is unimportant. The fact remains that we now are well-along the perilous path to cultural ignorance. And there seems to be no relief from the inevitable endpoint in sight.

One could trace, historically, the beginnings of The Troubles to that paragon of American education, John Dewey (directly preceded onto the stage by Francis Wayland Parker) and the rise of "progressive" education ideology during their period of influence. Until the late 19^th century, American education had been based on the transmission of a body of wisdom and standardized principles hardened in the furnace of American experience. After the rise to power of these two Jacobins, the "grand experimentation" into children’s minds began. It has not ceased to this day. Instead of demanding excellence and challenging minds to learn, our schools are now "child-based" and centered on encouraging self-esteem and innovation. The result has been an ceaseless cavalcade of quarter-schooled graduates taught by half-educated instructors. Neither group knowing much and both groups accomplishing less. The students being churned out may perform pitifully on national tests (particularly if compared with international students) but they "feel good" about the effort they expended. In the words of Thomas Sowell, we are producing "confident incompetents."

One has only to examine the dogma of Dewey to see where the problems lie. In his Pedagogic Creed (1897), Dewey states the following:

"Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth. In this way the teacher is always the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of heaven."

Well.

We can see that, in the view of Dr. Dewey, school is both a political tool and a religion. Dewey was greatly influenced bu Rousseau’s Emile, one of the first books which suggested education of the youth for political purposes. Dewey nurtured the Rousseau’s concept to its full flower. He saw the manipulation of what children are exposed to in mandatory schooling as a way to finally achieve what Rousseau, Marx and others had only dreamed of: a thoroughly leveled Utopia. In its religious formulation, the cloaks of Dewey’s clerisy are the robes of the teachers and the gospel they adhere to is the exultation of the role as the molder of the young mind. It is with this dogma that much mischief has been wrought.

American education - both at the public and the university level - has been transmogrified from instruction to indoctrination. Instruction, the goal of education when universal schooling first rose among the New Englanders in the 18^th century, was meant to be the process of conveying to younger generation a body of knowledge that would serve them and their communities as they grew to be adults. It was to give them a sense of tradition and common heritage that they shared with those dead and those yet born.

Linking to the past - vital for the continuance of society - was the purpose of instruction in the eyes of those ancients. In America, the instructions was predominantly based on the experiential wisdom rooted in Greek and Roman philosophy and subsequently percolated through the filter of centuries of European society. Ultimately, it was interpreted through American eyes and assimilated into our educational system. To view American education through most of the 19^th century is to understand how this sagacity had woven, thread by precious thread, into the fabric of American life. It was the very nature of this shared knowledge that was essential to accomplish the arduous task of creating e pluribus unum.

"What then is the American, this new man?...He is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He has become an American by being received in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater. Here individuals of all races are melted into a new race of man, whose labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world. Americans are the western pilgrims." (De Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, 1782)

But, in the late 19^th century, the apostasy began to cut through this sturdy cloth that had bound generations of immigrants who called themselves "Americans" into Crèvecoeur "new man." The coup d’etat began when the states formed"boards of education" which began dictating lines of teaching and to certify those who were qualified to undertake the effort. This was followed, shortly thereafter, by universities (spurred forward by Dewey and his disciples and funded, initially, by the Rockefella family) inventing courses on educational dogma that shifted the emphasis of the role of teachers from instructors to educators. Despite the colloquial similarity of the words instruction and education, this was - in truth - a seismic shift in the American school system. The resultant fault line forms a yawning chasm between what parents expect from their investment in schools and what the educational "elites" are content with providing.

To allow an expert to summarize, these are the principle ideas put forth by Dewey and the successive generations of "educators" eructated from "Schools of Education" with "Degrees in Education."

Knowledge, which had been the traditional reason for instituting schools, does not exists in any absolute or binding sense. The truths of yesterday are the falsehoods of today and the truths of today are the falsehoods of tomorrow. Thus, teachers should not teach facts but should "mold minds."

The mind, which has always been regarded as the distinguishing possession of the human race, is now viewed as a tyrant which has been denying the rights of the body as a whole. It (the mind) is to be "democratized" or reduced to an equality with the rest.

Discipline, that great shaper of mind and body, is to be discarded because it carries elements of fear and compulsion. The student is to be prepared not to save his soul, or to inherit the wisdom and usages of past civilizations, or even get ahead in life, but to become a member of a utopia resting on a false view of both nature and man.

[This summary of Dewey and "progressive education" is from Richard Weaver’s "Visions of Order: The Cultural Crisis of Our Time" and should be required reading of all. But, regrettably, one can see why it remains obscure and alien.]

Instead of teaching the fundamentals of clear and concise thought and giving the young mind the tools (language and mathematics) to express these thoughts, the modern American school concerns itself with civics and politics, racial sensitivity and intercultural awareness, sex education and reproduction, environmental policy studies, and similar indoctrination designed for influencing opinion and changing many young minds to think as one. E pluribus unum has, in the hands of these heretics, taken on an entirely new and sinister tone.

When one dare (and one does not do so lightly) confront these Deweyites with the grim statistics relating to the decline of test scores and overall performance of this generations’ high school graduates, there is a predictable feigning of outrage. Once that has passed, the recitation of the liturgy of causes for the glaring academic shortcomings commences. As listed by Dr. Sowell in his searing indictment "Inside American Education," these responses are, predictably:

1. Secrecy - "Confidentiality" policies maintain secrecy
2. Camouflage - inflated grades and a policy of not recording failing grades
3. Denial - with camouflage, optimistic public statements can effectively deny reality
4. Shifting the blame - when facts are revealed, fingers point to causes outside the system
5. Demanding more money - one touchstone of blame is "inadequate funding"

The final fallback position of the professional educators is, therefore, to claim that schools are underfunded. Implicit in the argument of course is the totally unproven and quite probably false dogma that more money leads to better education. Comparisons between states or nations consistently show absolutely no correlation between funding and productivity. Indeed, a study from Brookings Institute concluded: "When other relevant factors are taken into account, economic resources are unrelated to student achievement." ("Politics, Markets, and American Schools," p. 126; 1990) In the final analysis, the catastrophic failure must be placed squarely where it rightly belongs: on a overreaching government and flawed educational dogma. And the damage that was begun with Dewey has become a wrecking ball, gathering momentum and destroying what was once the envy of the world: the American educational system.

What edge we once had in the education of our citizenry compared with the rest of the world - the very source of our fleeting greatness as a nation - is slipping away like water through a sieve. We stand today as a world power only because of past excellence; we shall probably not stand long. The facts tell the tale. For example, the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) was a 22-country initiative conducted between 1994 and 1998. In every country, nationally representative samples of adults aged between 16-65 were interviewed and tested at home, using the same literacy test. The main purpose of the survey was to find out how well adults use information to function in society. Another aim was to investigate the factors that influence literacy proficiency and to compare these among countries. The results are reported in three scales, each ranging from 0-500: a prose scale, a document scale, and a quantitative scale. Each scale is then divided into five levels: Level 1 (0-225), Level 2 (226-275), Level 3 (276-325), Level 4 (326-375), and Level 5 (376-500). Those educated in the 1950s ranked 2^nd; those educated in the 1970s fell to 11^th out of 19 countries.

• 26-35 year olds was 275 (Level 2), which ranked them 11th (tie) out of 19 countries
• 36-45 year olds was 284 (Level 3), which ranked them 5^th
• 46-55 year olds was 277 (Level 3), which ranked them 3rd
• 56-65 year olds was 266 (Level 2), which ranked them 2nd.

So, as the supply of sufficiently educated citizens begins to dwindle and are replaced by the quarter-schooled of the current generation, where will that leave America? I think we are already beginning to see the fruits of our folly. My parents, now in their late 70s, find great amusement in the "Jay Walking" segment of the Jay Leno Late Night Show. In this shtick, Leno randomly asks common folks about historical facts of American culture. Typical questions include such things as "Who is buried in Grant’s tomb?" and "Who was the President during the Civil War?" or, simply, "What are the names of men sculpted onto Mount Rushmore?" [For video examples of the segment, click here]. My parents constantly remark that the routine simple must be a ruse as the questions are too simple to answer incorrectly. For them, it is great entertainment even if it remains, even to them, a somewhat disquieting exhibition of cultural ignorance.

The time has long since arrived when the American people, if there remains a thought of the future of this nation, to start making demands for a complete revision of the current school system and the dogma under which they operate. I will have further, more specifics thoughts on steps to be taken soon.

The education of our youth is the testimony of what we valued in our lives sent forth - our "message in a bottle" - to the future in which we will not be a part. Let it be the message that our past was beloved and cherished and we desire to see it continued.