Jean Jacques Rousseau’s (1712-1778) mantra “Man was born
free, but everywhere he is in chains” overlooks its own logical trap: who
chained man?
Is the chaining man bad and the chained man good?
Or are they the same?
History evidences their interchangeability. The Bible says that also the Jews
massacred entire populations of towns and territories they conquered.
Men are born with coexisting good and dark sides. Education should develop the
good and restrain the bad with reward and punishment.
You don’t tell a baby that
he is deprived of a stock option, or give him a lecture about Kant's categorical
imperatives, when he misbehaves: you punish with an unpleasant physical
or other experience he understands.
Yet, fashionable psychology has outlawed “corporal
restraints”, which ends up equating a slap on the wrist with inhuman torture.
Knowledge is also dispensed on successive levels of corresponding
responsibility.
Just as you don’t teach calculus to one who doesn’t know
algebra, you don’t give condoms or guns to children who cannot
yet control their instincts and emotions.
And if you think that sex can not hurt
as much, and more than guns, you should not educate anyone.
The opposite and equally valid perspective is that sex is vitally necessary in
creating life.
Yet, eating saves life by killing another life.
The Chinese combined this symbiosis of opposites in the inseparable symbol of
"Yin/Yang " (negative/positive, woman/man, etc.) many centuries ago.
The greatest achievement of mankind, Western Culture, is so high that it
requires disciplined learning, like most great developments.
Fittingly, mankind
has a longer evolving childhood than other forms of life.
The learning
required to master Western culture is proportionately demanding according to the
level one wants to achieve in it.
It is a hierarchical process that places
persons on the level of responsibility corresponding to their sophistication.
It
might be elitistic, but existentially correct.
Social structure, consequently, must be up to par; but it is not, in the
present ideological stages of socialism and liberalism.
In both, there is the
reluctance against having to learn self-discipline.
The different levels
are there, real, but both democracy
and Socialism homogenize them into an inextricable morality/politics/culture blend.
Democracy mutates into ochlocracy, or mob rule (made respectable with contrived
polls), and Socialism into cynical despotism (helped by the morally lobotomized mob).
In both systems, the
tendency leads to leadership based on a majority of mediocre people supporting
them by force or by vote.
In both cases, knowledge of the past and reality
exerts an uncomfortable restraint on the class that rules by propaganda, votes
and/or force.
Solution? Overcome an atmosphere of bowing to instant knowledge, ad h
statistics and interpretations, distortions of reality that facilitate ruling propaganda,
“deconstruction” of Western Culture that hollows truth and its morality as
“social constructs”, and history as distortion of reality.
Call it relativism,
postmodernism or liberalism, to package it "competently?, but throw it into the
trash.
Glib interpretations of Rousseau-inspired John Dewey’s (1859-1952) pragmatism
induced the decay of American education.
Theories that children should follow
their own interests uncontaminated by teachers’ or parents’ guidance are
responsible for our loss of coherent education.
The first I read about
full applications of his theories was a book describing a "Summerhill" boarding
school in England of the 1950s, where children in primary and high school chose their
classes, subjects and attendance times with little or no teachers
guidance.
Applying those systems in my home was unrealistic, also because we
had to distort them for the 3 languages our children were learning at home,
which required
memorized and shared knowledge.
The deconstructionist theories came later, and they are more
damaging yet, considering their concepts that truth and morality are
only what we wish to interpret of them.
They have positioned “postmodern” educators
against shared reality, morality and constructive concepts.
Consequently, most official teaching establishments are unable to fixate agreed
levels of shared learning and communication as necessary for human progress.
Even if they wanted, they were not trained to do it.
Furthermore, trainers to train them
are extremely hard to find and to un-train.
Since communication, social harmony and culture depend on shared agreed
knowledge and symbols, it would be liberating to agree that all American children should know at least
the multiplication table at a certain grade level, or, say, the data of some
historical events, algebra, chemistry, government structure, rivers and
mountains, locations, populations and languages of countries, and plenty of
other non politicized cultural subjects, each as minimum requirement at any
particular level, like fifth, 10th grade, high school diploma, etc.
Individual schools should be free to go beyond and higher yet.
Instead of such concerns, media, school boards, politicians only mention
teachers’ salaries, building improvements, classroom size, school board
elections, hiring special education unionized teachers, and all kinds of subjects
without focus on contents and quality of programs or any curriculum.
Just as witchdoctors used magic words to cure ailments, many modern educators
pretend to remedy problems by enveloping them in competent sounding definitions, instead of
formulating solutions they cannot implement.
Moreover, they are trained about teaching, not
about the subjects they teach.
They have language literacy, but it is difficult to find those very few
endowed with real cultural literacy.
As a child, I brought home from school a diary that allowed my parents to
supervise my school homework, program and texts, from language to history,
Greek, Latin, modern languages, science, math or whatever we studied.
It made
all the difference in my behalf, and my parents knew what was going on.
Like the Japanese, French, British or Germans, Italians etc., we learned
more in modest buildings with poor equipment, in classrooms with over 40 pupils
than in today’s American public schools, which are the best financed, built and
equipped in the world, where teaching as pedagogy is practiced, but not as
knowledge to be shared.
All we hear, about improving education, is:
buildings, expenditures, teacher salaries, union requirements, but nothing about
the subjects being, or to be, taught. And definitions...
“2+2=4” taught in a rickety leaky shack amply beats “2+2=3” luxuriously proclaimed in
renowned, super-financed, extra-equipped schools or universities.
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