The one about Will Lynch and the socialistic movement in the American education system

It was over eighty years ago that H.L. Mencken said that the aim of public education is not

“to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. ... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim ... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States... and that is its aim everywhere else.”

When reading James Taylor Gatto’s Against School, I didn’t heed his warning of the next sentence.

“Because of Mencken's reputation as a satirist, we might be tempted to dismiss this passage as a bit of hyperbolic sarcasm”

And thus I had dismissed the quote as hyperbolic sarcasm. But after a lot more inspection of the American Education system, I saw the pattern of despecializing students to the point of having one education through out life. In my personal experience in the Joplin R-VII School District, children that have an IQ below 130 are “left behind” in terms of having an area of expertise such as math or reading cultivated by being left out of the gifted program. Children and parents alike have no say in what their education contains until high school, and even then it’s minimal. Even the first two years of college can be spent rotting in “core” classes in the name of a broad education.

It was in Richard Rorty’s work Education as Socialization and as Individualization that we learned about the dichotomy of education. Rorty poses the idea that the rightists of the nation exude facts as the most important part of education; after the facts are set, then there is freedom of learning. The leftists in this situation, Rorty suggests, look at it differently. Freedom of learning ought to come first and then the facts of the area chosen soon follow.

In all American education systems the pervious had been settled fairly in a compromise. The right has kept control of primary and secondary education and the left has control of non-vocational higher education. It is again Rorty that raises the idea that these means of education make great preparatory schools, the problem lies in the fact that not all students attend non-vocational higher education and thus miss out on the ideas of liberty and freedom; the same ideas that founded our democracy.

All of this is compounded in the beautiful No Child Left Behind Act, which unwittingly builds Gatto’s idea of the benighted citizen and Rorty’s idea of the nescient socialized pupil built in America’s primary and secondary school system. This act dumbs down subject matter and causes teachers to “teach to a test” which is very arguably at grade level. Add to this underfunding and fraudulent activities and you have the state of disarray that our education system is in now. Building drones for the workplace. Keeping education for the rich. And ruining our nation with socialistic ideas.