Everything in education seems mediocre at best and radically political at worst, precisely because the predominant worldview of American education would have it so.
Everything in education seems mediocre at best and radically political at worst, precisely because the predominant worldview of American education would have it so.
Editor’s note: The following is adapted from Daniel Buck’s new book, What Is Wrong with Our Schools?
E arly in my career, I did everything my university teacher-prep had told me to do. I let students pick their books and design their own class rules. I provided alternative seating, and student interest guided my instruction. But my room was always chaotic, except for the few minutes out of every day when I chose a book, cracked a page, and read out loud. I didn’t have to remind anyone to quiet down or find a seat. This moment of calm during a teacher-led portion of class began my journey away from progressive and toward classical, traditional theories of education.
A few years later, I gave students a survey — a chance to provide feedback to their teacher. One student wrote that she enjoyed my “new way of teaching.” My now-traditional instruction involved classic literature, whole-class discussions, memorization of poetry, seats in rows, and formal essays. My “new way of teaching” — new to both me and my students — was only a rediscovery of tradition.
While the media decry class size or school funding as the sources of American educational woes, these opening anecdotes expose another, ideological rot in our schools: the prevalence of both progressive and critical theories of education. In the same way that a bag of chips provides no more nutrition however large or small it is, we could halve class sizes or double funding to little effect so long as the actual instruction inside classrooms is based on faulty educational philosophies.
The predominance of progressive education wasn’t always so. From Aristotle’s writings to the Jesuits’ first attempts to systematize curriculum and instruction, and on to the education of America’s Founders, schooling in the West has historically been classical in nature. With a commitment to objectivity, teachers and schools helped students discover the truths of the world and mold their characters to an objective, moral law. In other words, education sought to align both actions and beliefs to an external reality.
Edmund Burke called tradition an inheritance: the great and beautiful literature that most eloquently distills the human experience and expresses the ideas worth knowing, the heroes and villains of histories worth emulating and fearing, the events that shaped our society, and the body of science that has allowed us to advance. Our institutions, traditions, and customs amount to a stack of accumulated wisdom that we ought to hand on to the next generation. This transmission of knowledge and wisdom was and is the goal of traditional education.
However, in the early 20th century, John Dewey and William Kilpatrick popularized progressive education at Columbia University’s Teachers College, turning students away from the external world and toward themselves. In their view, no content was worth learning in itself but only what appealed to the child’s natural bent. The child is perfect and society corrupting. As such, teachers are to leave them to pursue their own interests through which they’ll develop the necessary skills for participation in the economy and society at large — or so the argument runs.
Dewey and Kilpatrick emphasized authentic, student-directed classrooms. If students are to learn about science or history, they ought to “do” science or history just as the experts do. They scrubbed classrooms of teacher authority and severed students from any tradition or intellectual heritage. Progressive education valorizes and so instructs students in only that which is pragmatic, useful, and utilitarian — traditional content be damned.
But as we wouldn’t teach novice skiers by sending them straight off the jumps, academic novices need the direct guidance and structured practice that a traditional classroom provides. Unsurprisingly, whatever the idealized promises of progressive education, the rigorous evidence into such models as project-based or discovery learning is weak at best, and more realistically, these approaches to teaching could even have a negative impact on learning.
Alas, due to a coincidence in history, progressive education became popular just as teacher preparation became the responsibility of universities. And so, the ideas of Dewey and Kilpatrick became the “expert” opinion.
This brought a change in both the how and the what of education. The progressives dismantled classical education, a teacher directly guiding students through the best that has been thought and said, to have students doing only what is practical.
Unfortunately, without a clear what — preparing students for the economy is a telos as thin as broth — there was something of a philosophical vacuum that critical theorists were happy to fill. Beginning in the ’60s and ’70s, critical pedagogues such as Paulo Freire and Henry Giroux kept the how — the life-mimicking projects and an emphasis on doing — but the what became decidedly political. Schools were to be the loci of radical, societal, decidedly progressive change. To them, education was a means of progressive consciousness-raising and student-teacher co-advocacy.
Where classical education seeks to actively mold the child through the civilizing influence of tradition, progressive education leaves them alone to flourish free from constraint. Critical education goes further and encourages students to foist their own will upon society itself. Speaking metaphorically, classical education would take students out into the backyard to show them the skies, progressive education would keep them inside to pursue their own interests, and critical education encourages them to burn down the house and trench the garden.
These two ideologies — critical and progressive education — permeate American schools. Their leading thinkers, from Dewey to Giroux dominate the curricula in teacher-prep programs. Their ideas influence everything from state standards and district math curricula to discipline policies, teacher professional development, and much more. Everything in education seems mediocre at best and radically political at worst, precisely because the predominant worldview of American education would have it so.
The critiques of progressive education are myriad. Dare I say they warrant a whole book. But for now, I’ll end with a summation: Education has descended from the aristocratic ideals of the Greek academe to the scent of marijuana drifting down my halls; from Loyola’s first attempts to systematize a classical curriculum to movements to deconstruct them; from Shakespeare and Aristophanes to Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Divergent; from Plato’s celebration of an education that teaches us to love what is beautiful to professors encouraging “teaching to transgress.”
Forgive my early-onset curmudgeonliness when I say that education ain’t what it used to be. There has been a decline and fall that cannot continue. To arrest this descent requires not more money or smaller class sizes, but a wholesale reconsideration of popular, trendy, and ultimately ruinous educational first principles.