For Release May 19th

JUST A MATTER OF TIME: Education Failure and Radical Success!
By Albert Burns

     What is our present government school system designed to accomplish? A seemingly easy question to answer but one which needs to be looked at very carefully if we are to understand what has been (and is) taking place in our schools today.
     It is almost heretical to point out the simple truth that, once, the primary objective and purpose of schools, both public and private, was simply to educate: to impart knowledge. Perhaps the prime example of the great textbooks of the past was the McGuffey Reader series which were used for many decades in this country. Today, these are disparaged as being old fashioned. However, the Sixth Eclectic Reader of McGuffey contained selections from a pantheon of literary giants such as: Samuel Johnson, William Shakespeare, John Dryden, Charles Dickens, Thomas Gray, Patrick Henry, William Cullen Bryant, Sir Robert Walpole. William Pitt, Sir Walter Scott, St. Paul, Washington Irving, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Oliver Goldsmith, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Thomas Jefferson, Daniel Webster, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Dean Howells, Joseph Addison, John Milton, John Greenleaf Whittier, Sir Francis Bacon, John C. Calhoun, Alfred Tennyson, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Edmund Burke, Edgar Allen Poe, Benjamin Franklin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the list went on. Remember, this was in the SIXTH grade! How many college graduates of today are conversant with the writings of these masters?
     As long ago as 1973, Dr. Peter Witonski pointed out in his book "What Went Wrong With American Education and How To Make It Right" that where once the function of the schools was to educate, even then American schools served other purposes, i.e., they were being used to develop "new social attitudes" in children!
     Professor Frank Meyer pointed out, at about the same time (1974), that: "The present state of American education is the direct consequence of the pragmatic-instrumentalist philosophy of John Dewey. Applied to the educational process and transmitted to the American educational system through a network of associations, training schools and publications, these theories have, in little more than a generation, annihilated the education which for a thousand years formed the men who made Western civilization. This education, inherited from classical Greece and transmuted by Christianity, molded the framers of our Constitution and the leaders of our Republic in its early years. It was based on the assumption that the function of the school is to train the mind and transmit to the young the culture and the tradition of the civilization — leaving everything else necessary to the raising of the new generation to the family, the church, and other social institutions....
     "For the instrumentalist there can be no cultural heritage worth transmitting: values are a superstition left over from the Middle Ages; what is right and good is what serves as an instrument to achieve adjustment to society immediately around. Therefore, the aim of education must be ‘life adjustment' and the method, ‘life experience.' Above all, the teacher must ‘impose' nothing. His role is not to teach the wisdom that a great civilization and a great nation have created, but to ‘cooperate' with the child in gaining ‘acquaintance with a changing world,' where ‘experience' and ‘free activity' will somehow magically educate him."
     Beverly K. Eakman, Author, Educator and Executive Director of the National Education Consortium has written: "Today, few teachers even pursue an academic major. They major in education which means, quite simply: psychology— or social work. Even those few who do specialize in an academic subject, likely will find it isn't what they wind up ‘facilitating' once they hit the classroom.
     "FACILITATE: that's what teaching is called now in the field. It entails a whole new curricular experience: ‘survival and coping skills,' ‘anger management,' ‘conflict resolution,' ‘self- esteem,'‘sexual diversity,' and so on. Little in the curriculum provides insight into our cultural or constitutional underpinnings. Courses like logic, philosophy, and civics, that once helped kids get a handle on modern issues are gone. Nothing incorporates the values of self-reliance, property rights, limited government (especially in the context of regulatory power), or the role of religion in our society. Physics, chemistry, calculus and physiology are reserved for the few with very high IQ scores."
     Author Henry Lamb has pointed out: "The function of American schools has changed. Once the function of the school was to prepare each student to reach his own maximum individual potential. Now school has become a process to modify behavior, attitudes and beliefs in pursuit of a "tolerant" (read: obedient) society.. School activities that seek to transform attitudes about the environment, about government, about freedom, about the Bill of Rights— have gone largely unnoticed by parents and the community.
     "The results of the transformation are becoming clear: prayer, freedom, corporations, the Ten Commandments, national sovereignty, property rights- and certainly, guns- are all terms and concepts that have been demonized. Tolerance, cooperation and equity are values that supplant individual excellence, individual achievement and individual responsibility."
     The United States had distinguished itself, among all nations in history, because government did NOT limit education and information, and celebrated individual achievement. Tragically, those days are long gone. Our schools have been transformed! Unless enough Americans recognize the threat and are willing to invest their time and resources, the international community, aided by professional education associations will continue to "mold" our children into pliable conformists who follow the "party line" for fear of being different.
     Our schools have achieved education failure and radical success because WE weren't paying attention.