Progressive Propaganda Replaces Foundational Knowledge

The whole point of American education is or was preparing students to pursue their interests and their version of the American Dream. This blueprint has unfortunately faded. Many kids today don’t learn enough to have vivid, inspiring aspirations; nor do they master abilities needed to fulfill dreams, if they have any.

For one of his his show’s segments, TV host Jimmy Kimmel sent a camera crew to the street with a map of the world and the challenge, “Point to a country and name it.” Many people could not identify even one country, even though the USA was in the middle of this map.

At Notre Dame, Professor Patrick Deneen concluded in a 2016 essay that many of his students were “know-nothings.” He realized with a shock that a lot of them were even unaware who won the Civil War. Less educated than that is hard to imagine.

What, in this Age of Ignorance, is reality like for most people? Is it a sort of sleepy gray fog you drift through? Or is it like the exploding world in the movie Inception, hyperactive and vivid but incomprehensible? Either way, how do you make smart plans in a world where their is so little coherence? Lots of people give up trying. That seems to be the new normal in K-12 education.

Years ago, public schools had a clear mandate to ensure that kids learn basic skills and foundational knowledge. Reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, history, and science — that’s where it needs to start. News flash from the education sector: American students today don’t learn much about any of those subjects. Apparently our education establishment has figuratively walked off the job. Why?

Education officials are obsessed with propaganda but indifferent to knowledge.

If candid, members of the establishment would tell you they have a bigger job, a higher calling. Their new responsibility involves creating a different country and new kinds of citizens. The establishment believes it can accomplish all that by reinventing the schools. The formula now is simply stated: Teach as little as possible; indoctrinate as much as possible.

Our education officials are obsessed with propaganda but indifferent to knowledge. This inversion is killing us.

Knowledge is No Longer a K-12 Priority

If teenagers don’t know how to locate Japan or China on map, for example, what sort of conversations can they have about current events, modern history, new movies from the Far East, weird weather in the Pacific, economic upheaval, or threats of war?

Once upon a time, students learned enough to think for themselves. Doesn’t that sound quaint? There seems to be more going on than ever before, but people understand less. How can they think for themselves? They don’t know enough.

According to our education establishment, there are new rules. You don’t need to learn facts because they are all on Google. Plus, because everything in the digital world is fast-changing and ever-new, why bother?

Amnesia by Design

Meanwhile, in the absence of any commitment to learning academic content, schools offer a smorgasbord of fluff. Instead of history and science, students supposedly learn collaboration and creativity. We have amnesia by design. People know so little; it’s just faint background noise.

YouTube has dozens of videos extolling the wonders of 21st century education. Kids today are said to need heavy doses of critical thinking, communication, collaboration, creativity, and innovation. Other subjects include interdisciplinary themes, global awareness, financial, civic, health, and global literacy, plus life and career skills, and higher order thinking, and invariably a complex project where third-graders solve a problem that local experts cannot handle.

The truth is that Progressives always loved scenarios where children pretend to be engineers, scientists, inventors, government officials, and so on. What valid information do children take away from these make-believe worlds? Wouldn’t it be more constructive if children learn something real, historical, or factual? But then, students would be acquiring actual knowledge. And that’s no longer desired.

An Intervention Is Needed

The country needs to stage an intervention on itself. Our public schools are the equivalent of an overweight alcoholic who cannot do a push-up. What is the appropriate advice in that scenario? Stop drinking, don’t eat so much, and start exercising. Let’s return to vistas that work. Facts are fun; knowledge is power.

Grappling with reality should be education’s main focus. What is real, what is true: Aren’t these the big questions? Look at what our education establishment does to kids in public school. They know very little about the world. They struggle to do basic arithmetic without a calculator. They can hardly read a real newspaper.

Consider our roots: Rome, Greece, European Renaissance, the flowering of sciences, and tapping into knowledge from around the world. This is the mother lode. Isn’t it curious that our education establishment is so fixated on ignoring what came before? Professor Deneen speaks of our schools deliberately producing amnesia.

The Cure for Educational Amnesia

What about solipsism? Much of what children learn today ultimately refers back to themselves. If they never grapple with reality, they retreat into the unreality called solipsism. It’s a kind of a mental illness. The cure is learning about the world that was there before they were born, will be there after they die, and is there now if they will but look.

That is the great sin of our Progressive educators. They encourage children to focus on the ephemeral and to remain permanently childish.

Never forget that none of these developments are accidental or inevitable. Progressive educators want to control the country. The first step is to make everyone ignorant. And so the public schools fail and flail.