Wednesday, September 26, 2012

"Life-adjustment educators would do anything in the name of science except encourage children to study it."

http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Library-Without-Walls/Anti-Intellectualism-in-American-Life/ba-p/8967


Anti-Intellectualism in American Life

By RICHARD HOFSTADTER
Reviewed by 

"All too often, our educational gurus have deliberately steered attention away from the academic: "Far from conceiving the mediocre, reluctant, or incapable student as an obstacle or a special problem in a school system devoted to educating the interested, the capable, and the gifted, American educators entered upon a crusade to exalt the academically uninterested or ungifted child into a kind of culture-hero…. They militantly proclaimed…that the noblest end of a truly democratic system of education was to meet the child's immediate interests by offering him a series of immediate utilities." In short, personal growth and "life adjustment" matter more than intellectual seriousness. "Life-adjustment educators would do anything in the name of science except encourage children to study it."

The source of much of this feel-good theory of schooling is John Dewey, whose fuzzy prose Hofstadter cruelly, but accurately, likens to "the cannonading of distant armies: one concludes that something portentous is going on at a remote and inaccessible distance, but one cannot determine just what it is." For Dewey, each child is special, needing to develop freely on his or her own, rather than being compelled to submit to authority imposed from without. Guidance in self-growth, rather than "rote learning," was what counted at school. In such a view, "the growth of the child stood for health, whereas traditions of society (including curricular traditions) stood for outworn, excessively authoritative demands." As so often, the heart was preferred to the head, the natural again trumped the time-honored, and cooperation and good citizenship were exalted over individual creativity." 

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