"The early decades of this century forged the central educational fallacy of our time: that one can think without having anything to think about."
"For over 80 years, teacher education in America has been in the grip of an immutable dogma, responsible for endless educational nonsense," observes Heather Mac Donald in a recent issue of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal. She calls this dogma "Anything But Knowledge," pointing to "self-actualization" and "multicultural sensitivity" as examples of the touchy-feely outcomes now pursued by certified teachers.
These rabid anti-intellectuals are determined to extend their pernicious influence. "The education profession," Mac Donald observes, "stands ready to tighten its already vise-like grip on teacher credentialing, persuading both the federal government and the states to 'professionalize' teaching further." Professionalizing, of course, is a euphemism for "closing off any routes to the classroom that do not pass through an education school."
Mac Donald traces the development of the Anything But Knowledge doctrine to the aftermath of World War I: "Educators within the federal government and at Columbia's Teachers College issued a clarion call to schools: cast off the traditional academic curriculum and start preparing young people for the demands of modern life. America is a forward-looking country, they boasted; what need have we for such impractical disciplines as Greek, Latin, and higher math? Instead, let the students . . . take such useful courses as family membership, hygiene, and the worthy use of leisure time. 'Life adjustment,' not wisdom or learning, was to be the goal of education."
Mac Donald cites William Heard Kilpatrick of Teachers College as "the most influential American educator of the century." She recalls how, several decades ago, Kilpatrick advised against "teaching children dead facts and figures," and summarizes his peculiar perspective as follows: "What matters is not what you know, but whether you know how to look it up, so that you can be a 'lifelong learner.'"
Mac Donald addresses two other doctrines that "rounded out the indelible legacy of progressivism." The first, she says, "shifted the locus of power in the classroom from the teacher to the student. In a child-centered class, the child determines what he wants to learn," Mac Donald explains. "The teacher becomes an enabler, an advisor; not, heaven forbid, the transmitter of a preexisting body of ideas, texts, or, worst of all, facts." The second doctrine expressed "disdain for report cards and objective tests of knowledge."
Mac Donald dismisses such self-indulgent drivel. "The foregoing doctrines are complete bunk," she declares. "The notion that one can teach . . . thinking in the abstract is senseless. Students need to learn something to learn how to learn at all. The claim that prior knowledge is superfluous because one can always look it up, preferably on the Internet, is equally senseless. Effective research depends on preexisting knowledge." Mac Donald charges that "today's schools lovingly guard the ancient flame of progressivism. Since the 1920s," she concludes, "they have not had a single new idea; they have merely gussied up old concepts in new rhetoric."
