Dakota Beacon

“School days, school days

Dear old Golden Rule days,

Readin’ and ‘riting and ‘rithmetic

Taught to the tune of the hick’ry stick.”

Those were the days. Will Cobb and Gus Edwards wrote this refrain in 1907 about a man and woman looking back sentimentally on their lifelong friendship from early school days.

It’s been a long time since productive values governed education, values such as the Golden Rule (Christian precept); reading, writing and arithmetic (core subjects); and spanking (corporal punishment).

Another year and another cluster of kids skip off to the halls of academia. Many parents are all too happy to relinquish their kids to the “professionals” for twelve years of babysitting with lots of sports thrown in for family entertainment.

When most people speak of “education” the last thing they envision is the classical cultivation of the mind, teaching the student to learn how to think via the trivium. Education for education’s sake seldom enters the conversation.

Education typically means something to which many are blissfully oblivious. It means a government monopoly assuming that kids’ minds belong to the state. Kids are socialized in the progressive pedagogy as suggested by the US Department of Education and leveraged with tax dollars. That reeks of a totalitarian aroma.

Long ago the US, via the United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), adopted the Soviet style poly-technical pattern of education for American kids. The Soviet Union fell but left its legacy engrained in US public education.

As early as 1949 UNESCO, strongly urged and promulgated a global proposal for revising textbooks, especially history textbooks, and tendering a blasé initiative for “lifelong learning.” Those supporting the UNESCO changes regarded their choice as foresighted. Those targeted by the changes (especially the United States) and who spoke against them were branded as “conspiracy kooks.”

Twentieth century American education chronicles a long, involved story. It segues through the creation of the US Department of Education by President Jimmy Carter to reward the National Education Association for their support in his presidential bid. We all know how that presidency ended. The story continued through recent decades with the federally sponsored School-to-Work and the Goals 2000 initiatives.

But, by what authority does the federal government involve itself in top-down education in the first place? On this point the US Constitution is silent. The Founding Fathers took for granted that education would be left to the discretion of parents and the several states, not to the predisposition of a central government leveraged with billions of tax dollars.

The intellectual climate in America today may be measured by academia’s focus on sexuality and sexual fads -- gay marriage, gender studies, and do-your-own-thing promiscuity. Little wonder families increasingly seek alternatives to government schools.

Again, what should be taught? Contemporary education could incorporate the latest shake-and-bake theories of education laced with politically correct themes of ethnicity, gender, self-esteem, revisionist history, adulterated literature, and dumbed down math and science.

Or, education could embrace classical themes on which Americans built a vibrant beacon to the world including mathematics, natural and physical sciences, logic, rhetoric, classical literature and poetry, history, philosophy, economics, and music.

In the years between 1607 through the early 1900s, America’s education produced multiple generations that built the greatest engine of democracy and finest economic dynamo the world has ever seen. Today, the progressive program of government pedagogy, the so-called linear path to enlightenment, confounds more than clarifies.

Dennis M. Patrick can be contacted at (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).