The “progressive” project of controlling education continues apace. Rather than producing knowledgeable people who can think for themselves, progressives envision education as a means of conditioning young minds to accept their beliefs, which don’t include individual success. They’re all about collectivism, and the goal of schooling is to produce lots of worker bees.
One American who understands the danger is Daniel Buck of the Fordham Institute. In today’s Martin Center article, he explains “Why the Canon Wars Still Matter.”
Buck writes, “Critics of the literary canon usually point to its preponderance of white males, but this antipathy toward tradition traces down to a more fundamental, even revolutionary, first principle. The radicals behind the anti-canon movement want more than the expansion of the existing canon; they want to eradicate any commitment to aesthetic ideals, objective truth, or moral imposition. Undergirding their resentment of Shakespeare or Tolstoy is a resentment of Western values as such, and so saving the canon is about more than saving Romeo and Juliet.”
Exactly.
Where classical education helps a student to understand reality, the “progressives” want to make reality optional. All objective standards must go, so out with all those books by dead white males. Instead, we get “critical pedagogy,” which is wholly negative.
Buck continues, “Perhaps the most egregious example of progressive deconstruction is contemporary gender ideology. Where it was in vogue decades ago to criticize religion or traditional institutions like the family, now even nature cannot impose itself on an individual. Self-actualization and subjective perception have such a final claim upon reality that one’s personal sense of gender—regardless of chromosomes or phenotypes—takes precedence. Thus, nature itself must conform to individual desire through gender surgery and hormone therapy.”
The Left has had its long march through our institutions, and it’s time for a counter-march. We need, as Bill Bennett argued, massive curricular change to reinstate the books and teachings that used to work so well before they were supplanted by junk from the likes of Paulo Freire and Howard Zinn.