Back in 2010, Diane Ravitch, an Education Historian, wrote an article exposing the 21st-Century-Skills movement in public education. In her article, A Century of Skills Movement, she explains where this need to redesign public education from a liberal arts model to a workforce training model originated.
Public education is currently being redesigned into a model that was once promoted in 1911 by Ellwood P. Cubberley while working as dean of the education school at Stanford. Cubberley warned that it was dangerous for society to educate boys—and even girls—without reference to vocational ends. He went on to say, “Whatever they learned, he insisted, should be relevant to their future lives and work. He thought it foolish to saturate them with “a mass of knowledge that can have little application for the lives which most of them must inevitably lead.”
In other words, literacy was not the goal; a trained individual was.
Remember when we used to say knowledge was power? What happened to that? What happened to a focus on literacy in the core academic subjects?
Ravitch explained how, in 1916, the federal government issued a report on black students. The report authored by Thomas Jesse Jones scoffed at an education that did not have relevance to the lives of black students. Jones wanted students to learn by doing.
It was not knowledge of the printed page that black students needed, wrote Jones, but “knowledge of gardening, small farming, and the simple industries required in farming communities.” Jones admired schools that were teaching black students how to sew, cook, garden, milk cows, lay bricks, harvest crops, and raise poultry. This was a prescription for locking the South’s African American population into menial roles for the foreseeable future. As Jones acknowledged in his report, the parents of black children wanted them to have an academic education, but he thought he knew better.
One might say that this attitude is clearly racist since this kind of dumbing down of education was aimed at black students. Remember, this was 1916, not long after the landmark case Plessy vs. Ferguson was decided in 1896. (Separate but Equal)
After that came other fads like the Project Method of education in the 20s and 30s, where students were encouraged to build on projects that interested them. This would engage students in… decision-making, critical thinking, and cooperative group learning, all were integral parts of the activity movement. Much of the learning became more personalized, and core classes were merged together. Science, Social Studies, and English became interdisciplinary.
Parents began to see that their children weren’t learning the basics, “But there were occasional parent protests. In Roslyn, New York, parents were incensed because their children couldn’t read but spent an entire day baking nut bread. The Roslyn superintendent assured them that baking nut bread was an excellent way to learn mathematics.”
This approach to educating, or rather dumbing down education for black children, began to extend to public schools that educated white children, too.
In 1990, the same dumbed-down approach to education was given a new name, 21st Century Skills. This was the standards-based education model that wouldn’t go away. Ravitch goes on to say that when she was working at the U.S. Department of Education, “ I recall hearing the director of SCANS say that students didn’t need to know anything about the Civil War or how to write a book report; these were obsolete kinds of knowledge and skills.”
You can see the pattern of elitist education reformers. Their goal was not to provide an excellent quality public education for students but instead dumb it down for those who did not have the means to attend elite private schools. The same racist attitude was now being employed, and targeted towards all children in public schools.
This is the model that Bill Gates has desperately tried to saddle our public schools with while his children attend private elite schools.
In New Hampshire, we call this Competency-Based Education. CBE requires all teachers at every grade level to replace academic instruction with skills-based learning. It’s sold as a way for children not just to learn academic content but to be able to “do something.”
Some of this sounds good; after all, who doesn’t want their children to be able to find a job after completing high school? But is public education just about finding a job? Or is it about what C.S. Lewis describes as a way to preserve civilization? While we are dumbing down public education to this standards-based model, we know that children are losing time learning the academic content.
Just this past session, there was a Bill aimed towards Civics education. Several teachers in our public schools testified that they are shocked by what students do not know when it comes to Civics.
Knowledge is constantly downplayed by many people involved in public education in New Hampshire. I’ve heard State Representatives like Mel Myler say that kids do not need knowledge because they can now look up information on the internet. You will hear that same attitude from the people who are bringing your kid’s Social and Emotional Learning into the classroom:
This is a recipe for illiteracy.
The Heritage Foundation reported on the Standards Based movement back in 2001. This is different from a two-year vocational education. Competency Based Education starts in kindergarten and goes all the way through 12th grade.
Research shows that education oriented to specific workplace skills and job training produces graduates who are less versatile and unable to change occupations without substantial retraining. By contrast, graduates of a rigorous liberal arts education can readily learn new skills and adjust to new jobs. There is lifelong value in gaining knowledge of history, literature, science, mathematics, and the arts far beyond the world of work. The most important purpose of schools is to educate Americans to be vigilant guardians of their freedom and to be able to take advantage of the social and economic opportunities that a free society affords.
You can see that the standards-based education model doesn’t elevate learning in our public schools. Parents who want a better education have been finding other ways to make sure their children do not fall victim to this fad. Those who are stuck in this model may be denied a future that could have been very different for them had they been given the knowledge to access top colleges. As the culture continues to crumble around us, illiteracy does not help society.
C.S. Lewis made the case for a quality academic education through the Liberal Arts model by saying,
The ability to rule ourselves frees us from the tyranny of our appetites, and the liberal arts disciplines this self-rule. In other words, this sort of education teaches us to be most fully human and, thereby, to fulfill our human duties, both public and private.
Lewis contrasts liberal arts education with what he calls “vocational training,” the sort that prepares one for employment. Such training, he writes, “aims at making not a good man but a good banker, a good electrician, . . . or a good surgeon.” Lewis does admit the importance of such training–for we cannot do without bankers and electricians and surgeons–but the danger, as he sees it, is the pursuit of training at the expense of education. “If education is beaten by training, civilization dies,” he writes, for “the lesson of history” is that “civilization is a rarity, attained with difficulty and easily lost.” It is the liberal arts, not vocational training, that preserves civilization by producing reasonable men and responsible citizens.
This isn’t progress. This is the deliberate dumbing down of public education in America. It used to be aimed at black children. Now, it is aimed at all children in public schools.
