Why Do We Have a Borg Education System

Most of you are familiar with the Borg from Star Trek. Their goal is to assimilate everyone into the Collective or destroy them. They are all directed by a central hive. In many ways our education system is modeled on the same principles. To understand what has happened to education in America you need to look at some history.

The French Revolution, the first fascist revolution, was characterized by an effort based on Rousseau’s assertion that they should turn politics into a religion and that the people needed to be led by experts who told them what to do based on the experts view of the common good. Rousseau’s concept was that “the people” is sublime whereas “the person” is weak or at any rate, expendable. Rousseau said that individuals who live in accordance with the general will are virtuous. If an individual could not be forced to conform, they would be eliminated.

The philosophies of Jean Jacques Rousseau are foundational to many of the beliefs of the progressive movement in America that started in the early twentieth century. John Dewey used Rousseau’s philosophies in forming his progressive education initiatives. Rousseau wanted to take children away from parents and raise them in state-owned boarding schools. Note today that the liberal government believes it is vital to get children into government controlled pre-school. This is a stark contrast to Finland (a top performer on international achievement tests where kids start school at age 7). Dewey embraced the idea of getting children into school as early as possible before they could learn “harmful,” individualistic views from their parents.

The Progressive’s goal with education was and is to “socialize” the children (brainwash them) to be credulous “followers” of the liberal elite experts who would “guide the society to the collectivist good.” There’s is definitely not an “all men created equal with individual liberty and responsibility” approach.

For example, William Heard Kilpatrick, professor at Columbia Teachers College (early twentieth century), reflecting mainstream views of progressive education, rejected the notion that the study of mathematics contributed to mental discipline. His view was that subjects should be taught to students based on their direct practical value, or if students independently wanted to learn those subjects. This point of view toward education comported well with the pedagogical methods endorsed by progressive education. Limiting education primarily to utilitarian skills sharply limited academic content, and this helped to justify the slow pace of student centered, discovery learning, the centerpiece of progressivism. Kilpatrick proposed that the study of algebra and geometry in high school be discontinued “except as an intellectual luxury.” According to Kilpatrick, mathematics is “harmful rather than helpful to the kind of thinking necessary for ordinary living.” In an address before the student body at the University of Florida, Kilpatrick lectured, "We have in the past taught algebra and geometry to too many, not too few. Thus, while our educators TALK about the need for critical thinking skills, they don’t provide the knowledge base required to provide context to any attempt at critical thinking.

The Progressives are nothing if not tenacious. They have remained true to these principles to this day and by the mid-1950s they had attained effective total control of education school training of our educators. This has allowed the replacement of content-based curricula with content-free, how-to, skills-based curricula that are of the slow paced, student centered, discovery learning type. The education schools have brainwashed their graduates so successfully that even though the how-to curricula do not stand scientific scrutiny, they will not acknowledge it. E.D. Hirsh in his book “The Knowledge Deficit” calls scientific inadequacy a minor inconvenience to educators today. The ed schools have, also because their training essentially does not include any rigorous training in the subjects to be taught, made it very difficult to go back to the content rich curricula that worked well, because to do so would require “retreading” the current teacher force with subject knowledge. Our best global competitors all emphasize subject knowledge and their kids are scoring much better than ours on international achievement testing. We are at or near the top of the list in the amount spent per child for education but that is only enriching educators. It doesn’t result in better outcomes for our children.

The main question at hand is can we break out of this lack of competitiveness driven death spiral to lower and lower standards of living by “retooling” our education system to provide competitive skills to our children? Or will we keep ignoring the problem until we are past the point of no salvage and eventually have to start over from a much lower base of economic activity? Yes, it is that serious.