The Failure of Modern Education

We are suffering the ill effects of modern education in today's society.  The young are being destroyed by the unionized incompetents who call themselves teachers.  Learning is not important--it's all about feeling good, self esteem, and unstructured actualization leading to creativity.  Well, that's the theory, anyway.

What reality shows, though, is that today's modern educational theory is patent bullshit.  Our children are being set up for failure in life because teachers aren't interested in teaching.  No, that would require actual hard work, students failing and learning from their failures, discovering how to overcome setbacks.  Instead, our children are all taught that everyone is bright, shiny, and equal to everyone else.  It's so much easier to teach songs about how wonderful the President is vice how to reason logically.  Too bad life eventually kicks them in the face, leaving them cursing the buffoons who wasted their childhood's making them feel good about themselves rather than how to think.

Janice Flamengo in PJ Media writes about the 'unteachables,' the 'generation that cannot learn.'

The unteachable student has been told all her life that she is excellent: gifted, creative, insightful, thoughtful, able to succeed at whatever she tries, full of potential and innate ability. Pedagogical wisdom since at least the time of John Dewey — and in some form all the way back to William Wordsworth’s divinely anointed child “trailing clouds of glory” — has stressed the development of self-esteem and a sense of achievement. Education, as Dewey made clear in such works as The Child and the Curriculum (1902), was not about transferring a cultural inheritance from one generation to the next; it was about students’ self-realization. It involved liberating pupils from that stuffy, often stifling, inheritance into free and unforced learning aided by sympathy and encouragement. The teacher was not so much to teach or judge as to elicit a response, leading the student to discover for herself what she, in a sense, already knew. In the past twenty years, the well-documented phenomenon of grade inflation in humanities subjects — the awarding of high “Bs” and “As” to the vast majority of students — has increased the conviction that everyone is first-rate.

Too bad it doesn't work in the real world, where engineers are expected to know facts and how to calculate stress loads on structures, where scientists are expected to know how to conduct research, where writers are expected to know how to construct a grammatical sentence.  No, life is not the fluffy bunny that is wrapped around children by do-good teachers intent on indoctrination, not education.  Unfortunately, it isn't a new occurrence.

It sounds good. The problem, as traditionalists have argued (but without much success), is that the utopian approach hasn’t worked as intended. Rather than forming cheerful, self-directed learners, the pedagogy of self-esteem has often created disaffected, passive pupils, bored precisely because they were never forced to learn. As Hilda Neatby commented in 1953, the students she was encountering at university were “distinctly blasé” about their coursework. A professor of history, Neatby was driven to investigate progressive education after noting how ill-equipped her students were for the high-level thinking required of them; her So Little For the Mind remains well-worth reading. 

 It's the same mindset that demands that we tax the rich because they don't deserve their wealth, that we should share the wealth like "A's" for everyone.  It's why mindless youth flocked to Obama in 2008--because no one had taught them how to reason or discern between truth and propaganda.  And now they reap the whirlwind that is progressive politics, wondering where all the jobs are that were supposed to be waiting for them after graduation.  Welcome to life, suckers.  Aren't you glad now that you didn't listen to the good teachers who tried to actually make you work and learn?

What must be even worse is the feeling those good teachers have in the pits of their stomachs as they try day after day to swim against the tide of crap, only to see mediocrity rewarded because supporting the NEA is more important than building the future.  These few, these band of brothers and sisters, are the real heroes.  We desperately need more of them and much less of the leftist ideologues who use our schools to indoctrinate our children in how horrible our nation and culture are.

Read the whole article here.