The pendulum may be starting to swing back toward a more moderate incremental embrace of change within the school systems of North America. We, thankfully, are starting to move away from ‘tearing down the old ways’ to acknowledging that the old ways were put in place for a reason and perhaps a more nuanced pace of change would benefit everyone in the school system.
“For decades, there was a general push and pull in the education world between progressives and traditionalists. The math wars stretch back at least to debates over California’s state curriculum in the 1990s. The phonics versus whole language debate began in the 1950s, and traditionalists have many times declared that phonics won. John Dewey first theorized a progressive education built on rationalist grounds in the early twentieth century, building on Jean Jacques Rousseau before him. As with old truths rediscovered, these are old debates as well.
Most recently, school systems embraced deconstructionism under pressure from anti-racist activists during Covid, imploring them to tear down old structures of discipline, instruction, testing, and curriculum. Traditionalists retreated while progressives advanced. Alas, an education system that forwent the basic truths of human nature was bound to fail, and schools are relearning old lessons.
In their renunciation of admissions tests, universities stumbled on the wisdom of the thought experiment “Chesterton’s Fence.” The purchaser of a new property, the idea goes, shouldn’t tear down a fence simply because they are unaware of its use. If they do, they may find snow drifts blocking their windows or wolves among the sheep. It is a call to respect the wisdom in existing institutions, but also a plea for intellectual humility. We may not know what’s best, so it is wise to respect those who came before.
What we need instead is a rediscovery of fundamentals, an acknowledgment that the old ways work, and a realization that if we sweep away everything old and try to reimagine something better, we will have swept away everything of value.”
I recommend going to Law & Liberty and reading the entire essay, as it advocates a reasonable way forward for Education in North America.
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3 comments
August 6, 2024 at 8:03 am
Steve Ruis
Re “What we need instead is a rediscovery of fundamentals, an acknowledgment that the old ways work, and a realization that if we sweep away everything old and try to reimagine something better, we will have swept away everything of value.”
This “conclusion” assumes that the “old ways” were vetted and proven superior, when in actuality, they were often protected from any such inspection by walls of “tradition” especially those thrown up by the church.
Traditionists were in favor of not educating girls as they were destined to be mothers and wives and they only needed a bit of training for those jobs, not a whole education.
In this country it was a crime to teach Black people to read and write.
We have replaced many of these traditions because we couldn’t vet them, as is proper.
Chesterton’s caution was to understand what the old system was before trying out a new system; don’t proceed from ignorance. It was not an absolute defense of “tradition” or “doing things the way we always have.”
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August 6, 2024 at 9:24 am
tildeb
As far as the social commentary goes about Chesterton’s thought experiment about deconstructing before constructing, your comment assumes the defence of the construction is based on presumed superiority, which is not always the case as you’ve pointed out. But sometimes it is, which you’ve omitted.
So it’s both ironic and a bit funny, Steve, that you immediately take a social activist framework of this essay which, itself, criticizes educators and education policy for doing exactly this when it comes to classroom education!
“But devoid of a great canon of literature, a body of scientific knowledge worth knowing, a compelling mythos of the American founding, or a robust understanding of Western history—even more broadly, without a commitment to objective truth or virtue—education itself becomes tinny, insubstantial, impotent.”
It’s the social movement into activism (worthy or not) in classrooms that has led us to the precipitous decline in academic educational quality which is factually true. Pursuing group social equity over academic excellence is not the role of the Academy and never was intended to be. And so ‘The Great Relearning’ is all about reforming education to move away from divisive social activism and return to this fundamental academic aim. I suspect it’s too late because western culture itself has been fundamentally broken from transmitting common liberal values and replaced with competing and conflicting illiberal ideological silos.
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August 6, 2024 at 11:25 am
tildeb
Andrew Sullivan noted that we all live on campus now and because social justice activism has been taught for and to an entire generation, it’s hardly surprising that the same divisive ideology now reigns throughout the professional class. This cannot end any time soon.
For example, “the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada (RCPSC) has been developing a new competency framework to guide physician training, called CanMEDS 2025. While most people who go to a doctor would probably prefer if the chief emphasis of that doctor’s education involved developing their medical expertise, the RCPSC’s new model would “seek to centre values such as anti-oppression, anti-racism and social justice, rather than medical expertise.”
The ideological capture of activism over academia is absolutely anathema to merit and achievement, which may sound somewhat elitist when speaking about education but deadly when taken into the wider and very hostile world. The West is losing its one advantage over competing authoritarian and totalitarian ideologies, namely, creative genius and the technological advantages this provides. Once social justice activism takes over these (the Arts are already fully captured) we all lose the core values necessary to support all kinds of freedoms.”
In the US, “all the major science funding agencies have now developed significant social justice programs, at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars that could otherwise be spent on cutting-edge science research.”
Now that somewhere between 10% and 40% of all federal money used to support scientific research is channelled into social justice activism – just like every student has been taught to support – how long do we really have for relearning to become as effective antidote to the established cancerous regressive activist policies undermining Western values to the point of collapse? (Day 8 now of civil rioting in dozens of English cities… not by ‘ethnic’ English of course but by those reframed as ‘far right wing racist extremists?’)
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