The general idea in all my education work is that we can do better. Trying to understand why some people don’t actually want us to do better is a constant theme in this work.

Here’s my guess. Two kinds of people don’t stress improvement….1) You have people that might be called Rousseau’s Children, permissive hippies, soft-hearted liberals and such, and their attitude is, “Hey, leave the kids alone, they’ll learn what they need to learn when they need to learn it.” I’m not sure that’s true, but I can agree that these are attitudes which a reasonable person might have. You just hope they won’t push these views too far.

2) Then we have people who move into the field of education precisely so they can serve a subversive or destructive role. I just wrote a piece for Artisticnetwork.net called “Malevolence at the top,” dealing with this thought. Basically, there just seems to be too much inefficiency in education to explain it away as an accident.

If you’d like more discussion along this line, please see Essays #6 and #13 on Improve-Education.org, my main site. I’m also working on an article about Rudolph Flesch, which asks the question: why did we use teaching methods that don’t work?? It really does seem that many top educators, going back to Dewey, wanted to slow down the learning process. They wanted children sitting in a communal circle, none doing too badly, BUT NONE DOING TOO WELL EITHER. Dewey was especially offended by the sight of a child sitting alone enjoying a book! Look-say was designed to make sure that Dewey and his ilk weren’t offended by such distasteful sights.