Summary: The premise of public education is that children will be educated and thereby lifted up to a better future. The reality is sometimes more cynical, as our elite educators scramble to promote their ideological agenda.
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Probably the most famous example of world-class cynicism is the wrought-metal sign above the gate into Auschwitz. Three German words: ARBEIT MACHT FREI (usually translated “work makes you free”).

The sign undoubtedly provided hope to many prisoners. (If we work hard enough, we will be released!) But these prisoners, no matter how hard they worked, were en route to a tragic fate. There was rarely any hope; the sign was a lie.

Of course, we are not surprised if a Nazi prison turns out to be dishonest and murderous. But what about our public schools? Surely, they would not stoop to cynicism and insincerity. I started thinking about this because the schools do make an offer that is conceptually parallel (albeit, a world apart) to the one above the gate.

The schools say: sit in our classrooms, endure the boredom, do your lessons, read books you may not enjoy, learn things you don’t want to know…and in return for all this work, you will be made free. Free to pursue a career, free to advance socially and financially, free to follow your dreams.

Probably every school since the beginning of history offered students some version of this trade-off. Study hard and move ahead. But this proposal was especially crucial–and welcomed–in a dynamic, fluid society like the United States circa 1900. Immigrants came from all over the world to pursue the American Dream. Their children went to the public schools for the same reason.

And then something happened. Dewey’s so-called progressives (a/k/a socialists and collectivists) commandeered the training of teachers and gained control over the daily activities inside thousands of schools. The focus shifted to social engineering. All of this was done in stealth. Cynicism loomed.

Socialists were not concerned with people moving ahead. Socialists were fixated on convincing people that they would be better off in a socialist society. When people were slow to accept this claim, socialists resorted to more aggressive measures: they filled the curricula in every grade with propaganda and discarded ever more academic content.

As we moved into mid-20th century, the Education Establishment was engaged in an increasingly cynical campaign. They said to the incoming students: we want to educate you. In fact, the public schools had veered off into an obsession with non-education (this being probably the best term for what happened to public education in this country during the last hundred years: non-education was labeled as education).

There was an endless emphasis on fancy new reasons for doing things in fancy new ways. But fundamentally all of this was bait-and-switch. Education, as most parents understand that term, was promised. However, what was actually delivered was an inferior, watered-down education that is more accurately called indoctrination.

The showpiece for this bait-and-switch is Whole Word. Flesch explained in 1955 why it was a hoax; I’m satisfied he was right. Virtually no one learns to read English by memorizing tens of thousands of graphic designs. But the Education Establishment started pushing this thing in 1932 and still has not stopped, with the result that the USA is said to have 50 million functional illiterates.

Consider the cynicism. You tell children: do what we say and you will learn to read. No, they will become illiterate, dyslexic and learning-disabled. It’s such a horrible, obvious lie that many of the older teachers refused to follow this gimmick and secretly taught phonics when the doors were closed. Other teachers had to be threatened. New waves of teachers needed to be indoctrinated in graduate school. Some of the cleverest sophists who ever lived helped create the indoctrination for Whole Word…

Now replicate this story dozens of times, in all subjects: lame, counterproductive methods are foisted on the public with the help of slick misinformation. (That sentence can serve as a Micro-History of American Public Education.)

The point is, ever since roughly 1920, our Education Establishment has not been primarily interested in setting people “free.” These so-called educators are passionately concerned with making people socialists. It’s the lying about it that I want to point out now: the promising of one thing while cynically delivering something else.

The people running Auschwitz knew what they were doing, knew that the metal sign was endlessly cynical. I have to suspect that the people now in control of the schools, professors of education and so forth, know precisely what they are doing. The problem with becoming a slave to ideology is that you no longer find it unacceptable or even strange that you want to turn everyone else into a slave.

(For more on cynicism in action, see “46: American Public Schools Seem To Be Designed to Fail” on Improve-Education.org.)

Author Bio: Bruce Deitrick Price is the founder of Improve-Education.org, a high-level education and intellectual site. One focus is reading; see “42: Reading Resources.” Another focus is education reform; see “38: Saving Public Schools.” Price is an author, artist and poet. His fifth book is “THE EDUCATION ENIGMA–What Happened to American Education.”

Category: Education
Keywords: k-12, sophistry, public schools, dumb down, cooperative learning, socialism, progressive education,