Sleepwalking to disaster:

an appraisal of modern progressive teaching methods and their effects on children.

“The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge: but fools despise wisdom and instruction. My son, hear the instruction of thy father, and forsake not the law of thy mother.” (Proverbs 1:7-8)

he foremost concern of most caring parents with children at school will be that their offspring learn to read and write competently, and be proficient in basic arithmetic. Such parents will avoid schools that fail in these areas and will be prepared even to move house to ensure their children will be allotted a place at a school they see as being successful. Recently, there has been much reported in the British press about the extent to which some parents will go in order to secure such a place and, on the other side, the extraordinary measures local authorities will use – including the ‘snooping’ provisions in anti-terrorism legislation -–, often against innocent parties, should they suspect anyone is cheating. Articulate parents demanding the best for their offspring are an ever-present nightmare for many head teachers and local education authorities – and who can blame them for creating a fuss? Parents are naturally surprised and suspicious when they see good schools being closed or amalgamated, grammar schools talked-down and abolished, and a perpetual war being waged against faith schools and the independent sector, sometimes with a threat of eventual closure.

A motion put to the annual conference of Britain’s largest teachers’ union, the National Union of Teachers in March 2008 proposed

“The long term aim of the union should be the establishment of a single, secular comprehensive state education system.” [1]

Everyone’s child is to be condemned to the same mediocrity.

At the same conference, the leader of the union called for the abolition of all private education. All schools, he said, should be run by the state. These sentiments are often attributed to the vindictiveness of those on the left wing of politics still engaged in class warfare, many of whom among them have themselves enjoyed the privileges of a public school[2] education. This may be true to some extent, but it is more likely that such blind prejudice is used as a pretext in the cause of a wider agenda. The reason for disquiet in the educational establishment will often be that those schools right-thinking parents consider to be successful are the very ones the establishment believes are failing to reach the objectives they have set for them. The best schools will invariably obtain their good results using teaching methods frowned upon and even ridiculed by progressive educationalists.

When so many of our children leave school unable to read anything much more demanding than the primitive headlines of the tabloid newspapers, then something is seriously amiss in the world of education. Alongside this, many leave school unable perform arithmetical tasks at even a basic level and the weasel words of politicians do nothing to reassure anyone that everything is as it should be.

As a direct consequence of the teaching methods currently used in schools and colleges across the country and enforced by an army of government inspectors, our youngsters are being denied a valid basic education. These so-called progressive methods cannot provide the education most parents expect, nor, it would appear, are they intended to do so.

The understanding of educationalists in the western world as to what constitutes an appropriate education for children is generally very different from that of most parents. Harvard Professor, Anthony Oettinger:

“The present ‘traditional’ concept of literacy has to do with the ability to read and write. But the real question that confronts us today is: How do we help citizens function well in their society? How can they acquire the skills necessary to solve their problems?

Do we, for example, really want to teach people to do a lot of sums or write in a ‘fine round hand’ when they have a five-dollar a hand-held calculator or a word processor to work with? Or, do we really have to have everyone literate ­– writing and reading in the traditional sense – when we have the means through our technology to achieve a new flowering of oral communication?” [3]

If this really is a widely held view, then all talk by government ministers of combating illiteracy in schools is a total sham. It also means that we can strike an effective blow against those who are misusing our schools in the cause of social reconstruction by making sure that our own children learn to read and write well.

Ruling elites will do what ever is necessary to ensure that as much power, wealth, and privilege accrues to themselves as possible. To this end a ‘dumbed down’ general population that cares only for soaps, football, and multiple cans of strong lager is likely to cause them few problems. Slightly above this, we have a middle class, many of whom have had their heads pumped full of politically correct garbage at school and university, whose indebtedness through student loans, extravagant mortgages and unsecured loans is sufficiently high to make them fear unemployment. Their philosophy of life is so thoroughly materialistic that they too will also be supine even malleable and do nothing likely to threaten their standard of living. 

Many British companies have in recent years moved operations to countries with a cheap, relatively poor and uneducated workforce in order to maximise profits. Or where the work cannot be moved overseas, low-paid immigrant workers have been preferred to the indigenous population. A useful home-grown workforce just does not exist in some of our towns and cities. What we have instead is a semi-literate, state-educated mass of unemployable welfare-dependent deadbeats, who would not know one end of a shovel from another were they handed one – and certainly they could not spell the word.

What is demanded by employers is not a well-educated workforce in any conventional sense, but a dependable one, one with useful ‘skills’ they can mould, manage and train. Education is manipulated to this end. Schools are required to turn out employable fodder with low aspirations able to perform menial and mind-numbing work without complaining in order to serve the global economy. To serve this purpose, ending discrimination and ‘changing values’ are far more important to the economy than providing a good conventional education.

The purpose of education has little to do with ‘learning things’. Benjamin Bloom, father of ‘Mastery Learning’, one of the main strands of progressive methodology, maintained

“…the purpose of education is to change the thoughts, feelings and actions of students” [4]

The pedagogic guru, John Dewey, wrote:

“I believe that education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness is the only sure method of social reconstruction.” [5]

According to Dewey, education has social reconstruction as its purpose. To permit a well-educated population to develop, in any traditional sense, is a high-risk strategy for any modern government

Firstly then, modern teaching methodology amounts to a system of behavioural modification impacting upon every sphere of knowledge and it is mediated through every subject in the curriculum, so there is no opting out.

Government changes to the National Curriculum over the last ten years here in the UK show that the purpose of state education has indeed gradually shifted from teaching knowledge of a wide variety of subjects to a much narrower skills-based curriculum with ‘citizenship’ at its heart.

“Certain skills and aptitudes are appropriate to citizenship education. Pupils should have opportunities to develop and apply these skills and aptitudes within pluralist contexts. These contexts should be carefully chosen in order to allow pupils to reinforce and further deepen their understanding, think critically, develop their own ideas, respond in different ways to a diversity of views, defend or change an opinion, and recognise the contribution of others.” [6]

Integrated within this curriculum are procedures intended to create a malleable population by changing personal attitudes and values, securing an overall ‘politically correct’ society.

“It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that, underlying the apparent confusion, there is a long-term strategy on the part of the educational establishment to replace (both nationally and internationally) religious and family values with ‘community’ values specified by the state to accord with a new world order.” [7]

 ‘Citizenship’ is taught combined within other subjects. There is no escape where there is a ‘whole school’ approach.

 “Schools need to consider to what extent their ethos, organisation and daily practices of schools have a considerable impact on the effectiveness of citizenship education.” [8]

Education for citizenship is nothing new. It can be traced all the way back to the Greeks in Aristotle. We have more recently: John Locke, David Hume and John Stuart Mill, all of whom wrote of the need for practical and factual knowledge to enable the participation of citizens in political life.

The opening words of the Introduction to the ‘Final report of the Advisory Group on Citizenship’, published in September 1998, argues that the teaching of citizenship is too important to be left to ordinary vagaries of school life and needs statutory compulsion.

“We unanimously advise the Secretary of State that citizenship and the teaching of democracy, construed in a broad sense that we will define, is so important both for schools and the life of the nation that there must be a statutory requirement on schools to ensure that it is part of the entitlement of all pupils. It can no longer sensibly be left as uncoordinated local initiatives which vary greatly in number, content and method. This is an inadequate basis for animating the idea of a common citizenship with democratic values.” [9]

There is nothing new in compulsory school attendance in state institutions designed to achieve a compliant populace. Such laws have been enacted since Sparta and Rome and are characteristic of all militaristic dictatorships including modern China, North Korea, the GDR, Stalin’s Russia, and many others, not forgetting Hitler’s Third Reich. In Germany, Hitler’s education laws remain on the statute book to this day much as they were. Germany is the only country in Europe where homeschooling is totally outlawed. In a recent case, a mother and father who attempted to remove their children from the bad influences at school and teach them at home were fined, imprisoned, and the children forcibly removed into care. All this in ‘free’ Europe!

The purpose of State education was well stated by John Stuart Mill.

“A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another: and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the existing generation in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body.” [10]

A somewhat surprising critic of a blatantly utilitarian view of education, writing in the sober context of the First World War, was the economic historian, R. H. Tawney, who warns in a newspaper article:

“And the task of educationalists is not to flatter those who would pick over the treasures of earth and heaven for a piece they can put in their purses – though they may toss them something glittering to play with now and then – but to persuade them that education is to be practised, like other spiritual activities, for itself, ‘for the glory of God and the relief of man’s state,’[11], and that without education, rich men are really poor.”[12]

Secondly, at a deeper level, the new progressive pedagogy is also an alternative epistemology. It is a theory of knowledge challenging traditional didactic, memory-orientated teaching. The teaching methods used in today’s schools have flowed together from a number of different sources. Developments and changes have taken place through the years, but they all retain essentially the same emphases.

Previously, the approach to learning in most schools was rationalist, empiricist and reductionist. The teacher filled the students with deposits of information deemed by the teacher to be true knowledge. These deposits were then stored away in the mind by the student until required. Defenders of the new methodology tend to be highly dismissive of the old ways and generally speak scornfully about traditionalists.

Progressive education was well summarised recently by Dr Mary Bousted at the annual conference of yet another teachers’ union, the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, of which she is general secretary. Children, she maintained, needed to be taught ‘life skills’ instead of key historical dates such as the Battle of Hastings. Somewhat facetiously, she went on to ask, “Is the world going to collapse if they don’t know ‘To be, or not to be’? Her claim is that it is more important for children to learn how to find knowledge and assess it for bias and accuracy rather than memorise facts.

 “A skills-based curriculum demands that you make connections between different subject domains. That requires thought. Too much learning today is rote learning. That is not what is needed in the 21^st century.” [13] Note the unbelievable arrogance in the implied insult that traditional methodology is intellectually inferior – it requires less thought. Frequently, the expression ‘in the 21^st century’ seems to be used now as the last throw in a desperate argument.

Progressives are not without their critics on the traditionalist side. The former chief inspector of schools, now professor of education at the independent Buckingham University[14], Chris Woodhead, said in response to Dr Bousted:

“When will the teaching unions realise that education is about passing on knowledge and understanding worth having?”[15]

In the ‘progressive’ approach students create their own ‘knowledge’ or ‘understanding’ by doing, hence the emphasis on ‘skills’. According to Dewey, all human knowledge is made up of actions and the consequences of actions where men and women interact with each other, with animals, plants and all that is in their environment. They will then present these acts and their consequences in language. The acquisition of knowledge comes through an involvement with the content rather than through imitation or repetition. Students engage with what they already know, using ‘critical thinking’, problem solving techniques, group work, amongst other things. The learning environment is ‘democratic’. The teacher is not someone standing above the student as a dispenser of knowledge, but is instead a co-explorer, a facilitator encouraging students to question and challenge the ideas they have brought with them from home, Church, or elsewhere. In true Hegelian dialectic style former views are reformulated into new ideas, opinions, and conclusions. No ‘correct’ answer or any single interpretation is decisive. An unwillingness or perceived inability to learn in this way will sometimes be diagnosed as a ‘learning disability’ of some kind.

Experience is the great teacher. According the John Dewey, human experience involves growth, progression. Some experience, it is said, hinders growth and so is ‘miseducative’.

“…any experience is miseducative that has the effect of arresting or distorting the growth of further experience.” [16]

Direction in growth can be encouraged by the teacher by helping the pupil

“…select the kind of present experiences that live thoughtfully and creatively in subsequent experience.”[17]

This ‘experiential continuum’ is broken by any attempt by the teacher to convey beliefs, emotions, or knowledge to the student. Essential to growth is a purification of the environment. This means weeding out influences from home and Church.

 “It is the business of the school environment to eliminate, so far as possible, the unworthy features of the existing environment… Selection aims not only at simplifying but at weeding out what is undesirable. Every society gets encumbered with what is trivial, with dead wood from the past, and with what is positively perverse. The school has a duty of omitting such things from the environment which it supplies, and thereby doing what it can to counteract their influence in the ordinary social environment. By selecting the best for its exclusive us, it strives to re-enforce the power of the best. As a society becomes more enlightened, it realises that it is responsible not to transmit and conserve the whole of its existing achievements, but only such as make for a better future society. The school is its chief agency for the accomplishment of this end.”[18]

Harmful influences must be kept at bay. Particularly dangerous are those separating men from other men. Religion, and in particular the Christian religion with its concept of the saved and the lost, the elect and the reprobate, must come near the top of this list. Anything not universally attainable must be excluded.

Those who come from traditional backgrounds must be shown in some way that what they have brought with them from home, from church, from their culture is harmful. The doctrine of a self-existent God, of creation out of nothing, of the salvation only of those who believe, all this is miseducative. Teachers must protect their charges from such harmful things. It is quite impossible for any transcendental religious belief to be true; there can be no final judgement before God after death. All that can be said of the future must grow out of what is known of the present. Anyone who claims to know anything about God is mistaken.

When applied to ethics and morals much the same methodology is used and is known as ‘values clarification’. In school, a child will be encouraged to discard what may have been taught at home as being right or wrong. There is no absolute standard of right and wrong. No two people are said to share the same set of values. With time, values change in response to changing life experiences. The purpose of values clarification is to recognise and understand this and how they affect actions and behaviour. A given situation will be appraised and a number of different options examined. A value must be freely chosen from this list of alternatives after the consequences of each have been examined. Valuing is considered a process of self-actualisation. Often this process takes place in conjunction with ‘group work’ so that peer pressure to conform can be considerable. The value must then be translated into personal behaviour consistent with the value chosen. This whole process is said to be a means to discover one’s own individual values rather than to have them dictated by someone else. The appalling consequences of this moral relativism can be seen in the young and not-so-young all around us.