Faculty Book Recommendations

Charles J. Sykes, Dumbing Down Our Kids. Why America's Children Feel Good About Themselves But Can't Read, Write, or Add. NY: St. Martin's Press, 1995, 341 pp.

ix As incendiary as the battles over political correctness on campus have been, I have become convinced that the defining cultural and political debates of the decade will center around the so-called school wars, which will be fought out in elementary, middle, junior high, and high schools.

9 Why then are so many schools moving in the opposite direction [of what parents want]? Because too often the schools are operated not by society's standards, but by those of the educationist establishment that has dominated American schools for six decades.

13 It is a debate over both the methods and aims of teaching, between those who believe that education should concern itself with intellectual discipline and the succeeding waves of innovators who offer the 'child's interest' or the well-adjusted personality, self-expressiveness, or self-esteem as more attractive alternatives.

16 ...the typical American high school student spends only 1,460 hours on subjects like math, science, and history....Japan 3,170...France 3,280...Germany 3,528.

49 Perhaps because the fear of working children too hard has become a preoccupation both of parents and educationists, self-esteem has virtually become an official ideology of American education"

64 1993 report...only two cents out of every $100 spent in education went to provide opportunities for academically gifted students....In American schools today, 'elitism' is regarded with suspicion while 'fairness' and 'equity' are regarded with almost totemic awe.

69 The attack on 'elitism' and competition in the schools is....about equality and ultimately about how much 'fairness' we can expect from life.

71 Margaret Clifford: the efforts 'to mass produce success in every educational situation' had created a cult of self-celebrating mediocrity, washed on every side by a tide of phony successes and inflated esteems.'

74 'A no-cut philosophy is recommended.' The world, unfortunately, doesn't work that way.

76 ...the real evil of the tracking system [ability grouping] is way that is has been used to dumb down the classes for students who are most in need of academic help....Instead of raising the floor, the trend is toward lowering the ceiling.

88 The idea of education as the passing on of knowledge is a strangely alien notion to these idealists....When the self-esteem of students becomes the focus of the schools, [Rita Kramer] noted, it was no longer important what teachers actually taught or how well students actually performed....89 'The ed school establishment,' Kramer concluded, 'is more concerned with politics--both academic and ideological--than with learning.'

96 When the public began to notice the rapid decline in the reading and writing ability of American students, educationists responded with 'holistic,' which guaranteed that grades would rise without any improvement in writing....97 Another response of educationists to the decline of literacy has been to simply change the definition of literacy. A literate person is no longer someone who has mastered the grammar, usage, and diction of language....[but] 'one who has developed a feeling of self-worth and importance; respect for and appreciation and understanding of other people and cultures; and a desire for learning. The literate person is one who continues to seek knowledge, to increase personal skills and the quality of relations with others, and to fulfill individual potential.'

109 educationists are adopting whole language programs without waiting for any indication that they work

120 But mathematics is more than merely function. It is a mental discipline that trains the mind for logical, ordered thinking that in turn provides students with the tools to move to higher and higher levels of reasoning and calculations."

122 As with changes in the way reading is taught, the new New Math is less about mathematics than it is about ideology. It is driven by the philosophy of teaching that puts a premium on child-centeredness rather than knowledge, and feeling good about oneself rather than intellectual training.

129 'Texts were simplified so as to increase children's "success" in reading,' even if this meant making the books less challenging.

131 It is a rather striking irony that a movement that so often invokes the 'interest' of the child and the need for education to be 'exciting' and 'stimulating' has produced materials of such eye-glazing, brain-numbing tedium.

137 The domination of special interest lobbies in the process of confecting textbooks has also led to notable and embarrassing gaps in the text, including the almost total absence of references to business or businessmen and a virtually complete aphasia concerning the role of religion in American life.

144 Cannell: 'How could so many children test below average on independent testing but do well on their official school achievement test?'....145 years of misleading and Pollyanish claims of academic above-averageness [the Lake Wobegon Effect] had staved off critics, accountability, and reform while many of the schools themselves went from wretched to hopeless.

146 Educationists are quick to blame their own failures on social problems, but Cannell argues that the schools themselves may have to take some responsibility for those same maladies.

161 The goal of values clarification was not to create a virtuous young person, or young adult with character or probity; its goal was empowering youngsters to make their own decisions, whatever those decisions were....162 The assumption behind such programs was that children had the capacity to develop character on their own; that students as young as third grade had the knowledge, insight, and cognitive abilities to wrestle through difficult dilemmas and thorny moral paradoxes without the benefit of a moral compass, either from parents or teachers.

165 The concept that there might be universal and objective moral principles at stake is completely alien to these youngsters.

173 Obsessed with shielding children from the rude shocks of an unenlightened world, educationists are eager to guard children against the effects of competition and low self-esteem by creating a bubble of artificial success and affirmation. But when it comes to sexuality, the same educationists plunge very young children into a maelstrom of harrowing issues including abortion, homosexuality, divorce, and masturbation at the earliest possible age.

174 But the philosophy that permeates the so-called 'protective behavior' curricula is that every child needs to be warned about and prepared for the dangers of verbal, physical, and sexual abuse because every child is a potential victim.

179 How realistic is it to expect children to handle the issues that haunt the anxieties of their parents? And how realistic is it to believe that a small child's feelings are always a reliable indicator of the appropriateness of adult behavior?...Ultimately, how realistic is it for educationists to imagine that they can interpose such wariness between child and parent without any lasting damage?

184 Re: mainstreaming. From the beginning, social and political considerations were placed at the forefront, while concerns about the impact on classroom order and educational quality were shoved into the background.....185 another expectation that the schools can be used as an instrument to undo the unfairness of life.

187 ...the schools have discovered the benefits of redefining academic failure as a 'disorder'--thus shifting responsibility for failure away from both families and schools.

191 The creation of the learning disabilities industry got the schools and parents off the hook.

197 1947 publication: The educationists authors of the yearbook called for refocusing the schools away from intellectual pursuits to a new agenda of 'life adjustment.'

201 Rousseau's Emile as blueprint...a plan for tearing down traditional notions of education and replacing them with a theory for creating a new man and a new society.

205 The 'Cardinal Principles,' issue in 1918 by the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education, remains to this day the ur-document of American educationism in the twentieth century....They dismissed scholarship with a single sentence: 'Provisions should be made also for those having distinctly academic interests.'...(Thus creating another tradition of 'goals,' 'outcomes,' and 'strategic planning' documents that would manage to say little or nothing about the teaching of any academic subject.

207 The real measure of the educational revolution was not in the statements of principle, but in the experience of the classroom. From the beginning, the results were mixed....208 Not every teacher could manage the new program.

209 For some, the essence of progressivism was the revolt against Puritanism and the celebration of self-expression, freedom, and creativity. Others saw it in political terms, as a battering ram against capitalism.

215 Two critics: John Keats, Schools Without Scholars; 216 Arthur Bestor, Educational Wastelands: The Retreat from Learning in Our Public Schools.

220 The back-to-basics movement of the late 1950s largely evaporated when the nation's attention turned to the question of equity in the 1960s....mission bloat 221 that would expand over the next three decades....The courts also drastically expanded student rights at the expense of the schools' ability to maintain discipline.

235 Often, it [the NEA] must execute an intricate balancing act: demanding more money and sweeping 'restructuring' of schools while also insisting that reports of their problems are grossly exaggerated.

237 The relationship among the teachers union, teachers' colleges, and bureaucracies is symbiotic.

241 Outcome Based Education--which insists that students be given as much time as they need (or want) to learn the subject matter.

242 The lessons the children were learning, she concluded, were 'procrastination, the ability to do any quality work without consequences, lack of responsibility, and the acceptance of mediocrity.'

245 Part of the problem is that different people mean different things when they talk about Outcome Based Education.

246 Wm. Bennett: 'The aim was to ensure greater accountability. What the education establishment has done is to appropriate the term but change the intent.' Central to this semantic hijacking is OBE's shift of outcomes from cognitive knowledge to goals centering on values, beliefs, attitudes, and feelings.

251 By focusing all of the efforts of the classroom on the slowest students, Mastery Learning inevitably moved toward lowest common denominator standards. In practice, the doctrine that every child must succeed meant that success had to be defined and redefined lower and lower lest the teacher and the system burn themselves out.

255 OBE godfather William Spady insists that it is not important what the student knows, only what he can do. But what a student can do is a direct product of what he knows, it is the knowledge that provides him with the power, not the artificial demonstration. 257 The liberally educated man or woman was not asked to 'project' or 'demonstrate' certain behaviors--he or she was merely expected to think.

258 ...by definition, all education is about outcomes. But the educationist focus on 'outcomes' upends the meaning of education by substituting artificially created 'goals' for the means to attain those goals....Any reform movement that fails to ground itself firmly on what students need to be taught and refuses to define what educational inputs schools will provide is almost certainly doomed to fail.

261 Goals 2000, which seeks to create national educational 'goals,'...262 embraces many of the flaws of educationism and raises them to the level of national policy.

265 Because the national 'goals' come so close to the establishment of an official ideology, they challenge fundamental constitutional protections.

266 The flaw in Goals 2000 is fundamental: It avoids fixing what needs to be fixed, leaving intact the educational establishment's throttlehold on the school.

269 Teacher Jack Reynoldson: "Encourage academic achievement, and with that will come self-esteem."

270 Schools that work....all have forceful administrators, high expectations among the faculty for student achievement, involved parents, and an orderly school atmosphere....Successful schools also maintain high standards and expectations: Students who fall below the minimum standards will be failed.

271 ...pupil progress is not wholly dependent on home, parents, or other outside factors and ...the schools themselves must take some responsibility.

278 Learning the basic skills of reading and writing and math wasn't the elitist privilege of the wealthy [Principal] Williams argued, it was the key to liberation for the poor.

281 Global competition has permanently raised the stakes for American schools.

284 Rather, they can save public education only by eliminating the monopoly status of public schools. When Congress passed the GI Bill, it attached dollars not to institutions, but to individuals who could use the money to attend any institution of higher education they chose, including private and religious colleges. State universities were not destroyed.

290 The public expects too much from teachers because educationists have led it to believe teachers could be substitute parents, psychotherapists, cops, social workers, dieticians, nursemaids, babysitters, and nose wipers and still do a decent job teaching kids to read, write, and do math. Instead of saying no, educationists have added courses in environmental education, death education, personal hygiene, self-esteem, driver's ed, job readiness, sexual harassment, radon studies, yoga, yogurt awareness, and god-knows-what-else. Now teachers are the ones left holding the bag when it turns out that less than half the day is spent on academics.

291 In short, teachers interested in improving their schools could find common ground with educational critics: ditch the bureaucracies, slim down the curriculum, trade accountability for more authority, build political support with higher standards, and boost pay for their most effective colleagues.

292 ...statements of educational 'outcomes' are seldom helpful or illuminating. The vast majority of schools will insist on their absolute and unwavering commitment to excellence and to academic rigor, but merely saying so doesn't mean it's true.

[ College of Liberal Arts | WSU Home ]