Why Johnny Can’t Think – Pt. 6
Dr. Thomas Sowell, renowned UCLA economics professor, said that the reason Johnnie can’t think is because, “progressively,” the exclusive mission to educate, with all that that means, has been abandoned.
During his years at the prestigious university, a school that represented an above-average sample of California high school students, he encountered a recurring experience:
“I was amazed,” he said, “that so many of the students had no conception of logic and no sense of how to use the English language, much less any serious knowledge of basic information that was once taken for granted.
“More than once,” he continued, “as I went over a student’s ungrammatical writing and confused reasoning, I found myself asking ‘What were you doing for 12 years before you got here?’”
Only later when he began doing research on American education did he realize why high school graduates were so poorly educated. His discovery was that much of the agenda of so many schools across the country was a social or ideological one.
Cheri Pierson Yeeke, former Teacher of the Year in Virginia, echoed his findings: “Precious time is being diverted away from academics in order to socialize students.”
Even the respected National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reported that “large proportions, perhaps more than half of our elementary, middle school and high school students are unable to demonstrate competency in challenging subject matter in English, mathematics, science, history and geography. Further, even fewer appear to be able to use their minds well.”
To try and sell political ideology or the therapeutic domain on the grounds of seeking to “replace rote learning with higher-order thinking” is quite a stretch at best and utterly deceitful at worst – a veritable smoke-and-mirrors campaign.
As Sowell contended, “Ignorance plus emotions do not equal thinking. The fact that such claims are blindly repeated in the media is only another symptom of how few people still think, after decades of mush being taught in our schools.”
Education is about reading and writing, math and science, history and civics, logic and rhetoric. And if educators are serious about producing thinkers, these core disciplines have always been the best way to do that.
Moreover, in education, less is more. There is enough to dig into these essential core courses to last a lifetime, much less 12 short years. Bringing in all kinds of fluff only dilutes substantive learning which heavily compromises in-depth thinking. Classical education is a time-tested approach that does this far better than its antithesis, which fails to deliver year after year after year.
Which is why Albert Shanker, former president of the American Federation of Teachers, as one of the leaders of the public school world, jolted that community when he said, “Ninety-five percent of the kids who go to college in the United States would not be admitted to college anywhere else in the world.”
It’s an incontrovertible law: when the focus is blurred, the distinctives are always compromised. Ideological engineering, values clarification, the affective domain — none of this is education, no matter how many times it is declared to be.
Abraham Lincoln was once asked how many legs a dog has, if you count the tail as a leg. “Four,” was his reply. The fact that you call the tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.
The more our society redefines education – what John Dewey’s progressive model has been doing in this country since the early 1900’s – the less educated our young people become.
The more “We the People” fall in line, the deeper the hole we’re digging gets. Coping with ignorance then not only becomes our inevitable intellectual legacy, but Johnny’s interminable inheritance as well.
Brian Schroeder is the former Wyoming Superintendent of Public Instruction, an ordained minister and founder/president of The ChrisCorps Commission (bschroeder081858@gmail.com)