Education Policy types : There are several.
The types you are refering to have had a large influence on US education, almost all of it bad. They start at the Columbia School of Education, run with John Dewey, were pushing something called "social adjustment" in the 1950s as a fix for juvenile delinquency. There were also dumbing down curicula in the 1950s
In the 1970s they were pushing "values clarification" which was disguised moral relativism.
Later, the pushed "Goals 2000" a very coercive program to adjust cultural norms and make kids that did not conform feel left out.
Various organizations pushed back on Goals 2000, and it was complicated to implement.
One of the main objectives of Goals 2000 was to get kids to follow and be influenced more by school an dother secular & government authorities instead of parents, religeon, personal goals, cultural beliefs, etc. They weren't pushing blind obedience to authority, but instead a tendency to let "authority" set values - like ecological values, economic, racial tolerance and integration (the favorite example of these people - note that the Civil Rights struggle was well over when this programm was developed) and what ever else authority deems to be fashionable.
One major goal of this group - let's call them neo-Deweyites - was to make Americans into sheep.
Currently, the Pew Foundation is the nexus of most of these efforts.
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There are other groups.
The people pushing Chinese K-16 come from the military, intelligence, foreign policy, and heavy and high tech industrial communities.
This were the people who brought us the Sputnik panic - "America is falling behind in math and science !"
Let's call these bunch the "Space Racers" since that was a time when they had their largest influence on policy.
In the lated 1950s, they pushed more science and math into high schools, pushing out the neo-Dewey's "social adjustment stuff"
They created and pushed "New Math" because they though every one would need to work with computers (right) and would need to understand octal (base 8) and binary (pretty much wrong do to software advances).
The new math also brought in some set theory and formal logic, which are useful concepts for computer use.
The set theory crowd & rigid mathematical formalists (this group has been around for long time) even got the teaching of calculus to emphasize a set theory approach to replace much of the geometric basis of teaching calculus. I think that was horrible...
A little later, the Space racers pushed the PSSC physics and BSCS biology curiculums, which were excellent. They have been revised and made easier and politically correct, so they have regressed toward the mean.
Some where in a simmilar part of the mil/intel/policy community, there was an effort to create intelletual counters to communist ideology. For a number of years, there was an effort to promote "Critical Thinking" classes in high schools. The idea was to help people see through the various communist lies.
It was also designed to promote INDIVIDUAL thinking, and not group think. Most of these classes actually did promote some thinking, although the later texts were watered down to fit the intelligence and subtlety of the average teacher and student.
The neo-Dewey crowed hated these courses, and was able to get rid of most of them by the middle to late 1960s.
The Space Racers have number of nasty things to say about the neo-Dewey crowd. One of them called the actions of the developers of the current educational system (the neo-Deweys) as "equivalent to treason"
Now the Space Race crowd is pushing the Chinese K-16 project.
>>>Note that this will be about learning the language (Mandarin) and culture of China. I want to see how much Confucian thougth gets included - notions of responsibility, respect for learning and scholarship, respect for parents, useful work, prudence, etc.
Eventually, we may have kids asking themselves -
"What would Jackie Chan do ? "
This will drive the neo-Deweys up a wall ;-)
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Okay, there are other groups pushing various agendas on public education.
The Sex Education groups
The politically correct crowd
The physical fitness promoters
The anti-drug crusaders
Fortunately for the Republic, kids and especially teenagers are hard to persuade....
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The Space Racers are usually able to achieve a temporary victory over the neo-Deweys, but the neo-Deweys, like bathroom mildew, keep comming back...
Guess which side I'm on. |
