Sane Schools: Pillar I

Pillar I: Traditionalism, Not Progressivism

I don't know of a single country in the world that wants to emulate the urban public schools of America. They all want to emulate our universities, but none want to emulate our inner-city schools.

—Steven B. Sample
President, University of Southern California

Progressive education has been a dominant force in U.S. schools since roughly the 1920’s, when the “science” of pedagogy emerged as the focus of teacher-training, largely as a result of John Dewey’s pragmatic philosophy. It was manifested by two lasting trends: the anointing of a few eastern graduate schools of education as the defining authorities on teacher professionalism, and the introduction of education psychology as the primary feature of teacher preparation.

There is no single definition of Progressivism or Traditionalism; since the 1920’s, both sides have been defining themselves by reacting against each other, much like Republicans and Democrats. But generally, Progressives have advocated (and usually won) school reforms that departed from academic subject-matter in favor of larger social concerns. Traditionalists have fought (and usually lost) the battle to protect academic standards. The current testing craze is partly an unfortunate result of Traditionalism, but it’s also sadly indicative of how far Progressives have come in their efforts to undermine any and all respect for the hard content areas of English, math, science, and history. The call for standardized tests would never have erupted if it weren’t widely apparent that our schools are failing to educate our kids across the board.

Traditionalism, therefore, is simply the idea that schools should be substance-centered, not “student-centered” as most Progressive educrats would have them. It may seem incongruous to oppose student-centered schools, but that’s only because Progressives routinely employ the phrases “student-centered” and “learner-centered” to further their absurd Dystopian ends. One of the many challenges Traditionalists face is overcoming the slippery jargon of Progressives, who’ve done an excellent job, if nothing else, of controlling education rhetoric. We at School Sanity hope to take a step in the right direction by refusing to legitimize the silly vocabulary of educrats, and by advocating these Ten Pillars of Sane Schools on our own terms.

Sane Schools teach knowledge—not “meaningless facts,” as educrats call it, but a substantive core of knowledge as advocated by such noteworthy figures as E.D. Hirsch[1] and the late Jeanne Chall[2]. Progressives stress “discovery,” “problem-solving,” and “higher-order thinking skills” over subject knowledge; they are uniformly obsessed with teaching kids “how to think” while denying or trivializing the information they need for thinking to occur. Worse, they’ve incorporated so much psychology into teacher training and evaluation programs that teachers are forced to pay it heed to some extent. We believe schools should get out of the psychology business and focus on academics.

The academic curriculum, the acquisition of knowledge and skills through close study of language, math, science, and history, is the nucleus of traditional schooling, and is therefore at the heart of Sane Schools. That seems like an obvious notion, but Progressives have long ridiculed the academic curriculum as elitist, impractical, and (of all things), racist. They’ve pressed for “real-world,” “experiential” schools that disavow fixed knowledge in favor of practical, universal skills (a natural consequence of Dewey’s pragmatism). They invoke democracy as their prime mover, claiming that diversity and “social intelligence” (the ability to work well with others) are essential to democracy’s survival—and are therefore more important than any particular academic discipline. Traditionalists believe democracy requires literate, competent, and well-informed citizens in order to survive.

The purpose here is not to demonize Progressivism but to oppose it on (we hope) reasonable philosophical grounds. Progressive reforms, Progressive rhetoric, and Progressive ideals have dominated American education—through the influence of the educrat class—for half a century or more, resulting in an almost constant decline in achievement among U.S. students, as measured by SAT scores, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), and other indicators[3]. They’ve done this before our very eyes, using seductive rhetoric that idolizes the above-mentioned “student-centered” vision of education. Many Progressives, of course, claim just the opposite: American schools have always been bastions of conformity, they say. They’ve enforced the status quo while valiant Progressives fought the good fight for children against overwhelming odds and oppressive government policies. But no objective study of public-education history in the United States supports this[4]. Progressive educrats established their top-down philosophical control over the teaching profession in this country long ago, starting with John Dewey and ending with their control over the schools of education, through which they control entry to the profession itself. They may bicker among themselves as to how much they’ve accomplished, or how faithful they’ve been to the democratic dream Dewey articulated, but there’s no denying the intellectual supremacy they wield. And American kids have regressed because of it.

We believe that Progressive education, and all its later derivatives, is a misguided philosophy, because of its backward priorities. American education must serve democracy, but it must do so by educating. Social priorities should be subordinated in the classroom to meaningful, substance-centered teaching that builds intellect and challenges students to think for themselves by exploring what the great minds of the human race have thought and written. Schools should teach a common core of knowledge in as much depth as possible to all students before the inevitable sorting into their various career, college, and vocational paths. It is that common core of traditional human knowledge on which our democracy depends…and it’s up to teachers to provide it to our children.

If only the educrats would let them do it.

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[1] Hirsch, E.D. The Knowledge Deficit: Closing the Shocking Education Gap for American Children. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.

[2] Chall, Jeanne S. The Academic Achievement Challenge. New York: Guilford Press, 2000.

[3] Sykes, Charles J. Dumbing Down Our Kids. New York: St. Martin’s, 1995. See “The Legacy of Dumbness,” pp.20-23.

[4] See Ravitch, Diane. Left Back: A Century of Battles over School Reform. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000. Probably the best, most comprehensive history of the intellectual movements that have dominated U.S. schools, and especially teacher-training, in the last century.