[TheMaleBrain]

Came across this article, from 2013.

If you are a parent (like I am), you try to keep an eye on your kids school.
Sometimes you hear utter nonsense which scare the living daylight out of you.

Here are some quotes from the article:
The reporter sent his kid to school based on reputation. Being a new parent you usually have no idea "how good" the school is actually:

Quote:

It had just been ranked by Parents magazine as one of the country’s ten best elementary schools—public or private—and the New York Times profiled it as one of the few city schools that middle-class parents still clamored to get their kids into. PS 87 had a reputation for adhering to the “progressive education” philosophy, but this didn’t concern me. I had little understanding of what progressivism would mean for my children in the classroom, other than that PS 87 seemed committed to providing a nurturing and minimally restrictive environment for its students

As a parent, you soon realize that being "post modern" means your child will be hurting:

Quote:

I soon received a crash course in educational progressivism. Many of the school’s teachers were trained at such citadels of progressive education as Columbia University’s Teachers College and the Bank Street College of Education, where they learned to repeat pleasant-sounding slogans like “teach the child, not the text” and were told that all children are “natural learners.” PS 87 had no coherent, grade-by-grade curriculum

It seems that the left no only corrupted the Academia, but was also oblivious to the nature of human kind:

Quote:

Hirsch addressed these concerns near the beginning of the book: “The unacceptable failure of our schools has occurred not because our teachers are inept but chiefly because they are compelled to teach a fragmented curriculum based on faulty education theories.” This didn’t happen by chance or because of professional incompetence, according to Hirsch. Rather it was intended, quite deliberately, by the schools of education. It wasn’t that professors of education favored the wrong curriculum, but that they stood for no curriculum at all. Citing romantic theories of child development going back to Rousseau, the progressives argued that, with just a little assistance from teachers, children would figure it out as they went along. That’s because students were capable of “constructing their own knowledge.”

It has a devastating consequence on society. The strong become stronger, and the weak become weaker:

Quote:

Hirsch also showed that the most devastating consequence of these doctrines was that they widened, rather than reduced, the gap in intellectual capital between middle-class children and those from disadvantaged families. “Learning builds cumulatively on learning,” he wrote. “By encouraging an early education that is free of ‘unnatural’ bookish knowledge and of ‘inappropriate’ pressure to exert hard effort, [progressive education] virtually ensures that children from well-educated homes who happen to be primed with academically relevant background knowledge which they bring with them to school, will learn faster than disadvantaged children who do not bring such knowledge with them and do not receive it at school.”

The educational faculties were more about securing the ideology than to actually teach:

Quote:

Hirsch describes how institutions like Teachers College created an “impregnable fortress” of ideas and doctrines, which were then transmitted to future teachers and to the parents who send their children to public schools. “Like any guild that determines who can and cannot enter a profession,” Hirsch wrote, “the citadel of education has developed powerful techniques for preventing outside interference, not least of which is mastery of slogan.”

Don't think for a moment that the Hivemind stood by and did not respond, in full strength:

Quote:

The progressive-education establishment turned on the interloper, branding him a reactionary, an elitist, and a defender of white privilege—all for suggesting that American schools should offer their students the academic content that they would need to become proficient readers and knowledgeable citizens.

Quote:

Feinberg’s 8,000-word broadside unintentionally illuminated what progressives believed about the purpose of American schooling. “Hirsch minimizes a history of racial and gender bias as factors in differential educational and economic achievement,” Feinberg wrote. “He dismisses complex theories of social class reproduction, and he demotes the importance of pedagogies that encourage the construction and negotiation of meaning across communities of difference. He insists that teachers and the texts are the proper bearers and students the proper recipients of meaning and refuses to understand the importance of meaning as a negotiated product in a multicultural society.”

Yes, because in the end it is more important to have your social class reproduces.
Question: In this "reproduction", who fucks who?

Hirsch had a mission - to better the education. No unfounded/out-of-context criticism was going to move him from his target:

Quote:

Hirsch wasn’t deterred by the education professors’ attacks. He continued exposing the utter lack of scientific validity in the progressives’ pedagogical principles. Hirsch spent the better part of the decade after writing Cultural Literacy mastering the findings of neurobiology, cognitive psychology, and psycholinguistics, seeking to determine which classroom methods best promote student learning.

This guy was not just writing papers, he took action:

Quote:

With the royalties from his best-selling Cultural Literacy, Hirsch founded the Core Knowledge Foundation in his hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia. The foundation, in turn, created a knowledge-based curriculum and a national network of 1,000 Core Knowledge schools, both charters and traditional public schools. Hirsch hoped that these schools would spread the news to teachers and parents that a content-rich curriculum works better than the “fragmented curriculum” favored by educational theorists. The most important breakthrough for Hirsch’s ideas occurred in 2009, when New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein admitted that he might have been wrong in choosing the Teachers College literacy program for the city’s schools

I know that falks around the manosphere are not always pro-public education. Maybe it is for a good reason, as I wrestle to undo some of the lies my kids are being taught.
However, in early Jewish literature, it was said:

Quote:

Pray for the integrity of the government; for were it not for the fear of its authority, a man would swallow his neighbor alive.

The opposite of the non-learning that was discussed here could be the authoritarian brain-washing. It is still better than not putting up standards for the kids.

One of the more funny/sad parts of the article is that it was all there since 1989:

Quote:

“American colleges and universities at their best are still among the finest in the world,” Hirsch wrote in 1989. “But in many of them the educational level of incoming students is so low that the first and second years of college must be largely devoted to remedial work. In the American school system, it is mainly those who start well who finish well. Business leaders and the general public are coming to recognize that the gravest, most recalcitrant problems of American education can be traced back to secondary and, above all, elementary schooling.” This was Hirsch’s portrait of American K-12 education almost a quarter-century ago. Remarkably, that grim assessment remains true today. According to a recent report from the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), “average reading and mathematics scores in 2012 for 17-year-olds were not significantly different from scores in the first assessment year [1971].”

My take from this:
1. Don't count on the school to teach your kid. Make sure for yourself.
2. Demand standards and make the time to enforce them with your kids.
3. Make sure to tell your kid stories about his nation, as well as to practice with him math skills and other skills.
4. We are on our own. We are responsible for our children, and that responsibility cannot be delegated (on in the long run).

As I see it, my responsibility as a parent is that my child can function on his/her own in the world. Every aspect of my education should be oriented first toward this goal.

[BortimusPrime]

What's funny is this kind of parallels what I see in college now. The author talks about an achievement gap caused by parents teaching their kids to read and do math before they go to school, thus giving those kids a huge advantage while the other kids are stuck learning about climate change and white privilege. Similarly in college I see kids in there coming in with scholarships and grants for being ethnically interesting, and they turn around and major in fluffy bunny bullshit like gender/race studies while the Chinese kids go into Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

I'm sure it must feel really good to be the first in your family to pull yourself out of the ghetto (possibly thanks to Sean Connery telling you that you are in fact the man now, dog), go to a big fancy university, take ethnic studies because you don't know it's bullshit, then get mass rejected for jobs once you hit the real world because you don't know C++.

[demolition]

Progressive education is stuck in a loop between the poles of highly structured learning and "construct your own knowledge" because it can't cope with the biological reality of intelligence. Decades ago we saw the first progressive attempts at taking over schooling and destroying standards which were deemed oppressive and discriminatory towards the "underprivileged" (less intelligent). Then here we have an article decrying how lack of standards is oppressive and discriminatory towards the "underprivileged." How both of these can be true is a dilemma the progressive can't solve because the answer is unspeakable.

[debeguiled]

I have been listening to a lot of John Taylor Gatto lately. Former award winning school teacher now lecturer/activist.

Short video in which he echoes much of Original Post:

A bit of background on him:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto

If you have the time, this lecture series will give you many many ideas about how to direct your kid's education:

One of the things that he emphasizes is that the elite schools teach their kids very differently from the state schools, and this sort of teaching is not a matter of money or equipment or opportunities. Rather it is a mentality that allows the child to become a creative and confident force in the world, rather than a dumbed down normal kid. Great lecture here:

I know that is a long video. Here is a summary of his idea:

I wish I had known this stuff when I raised my kids. It all makes so much sense. I give credit to Zelcorpion for introducing me to Gatto.