Why is Education Such a Mess?

Thanks to people (Sarah Hoyt in particular – thanks, Sarah!) linking to the last 2 posts, many more people are taking a good hard look at the history of education in America, the number one project of this blog. So let’s go back to the beginning. Long time readers have seen this all before; new readers might find it helpful. It’s a bit long, but I think worth it.

Why is education in America such a mess today? Another canard that need dispelling: everything was fine, back in the (pick an era) 50s! Back then, docile and obedient students got great educations in public schools (and their Catholic Mini-Me’s) all across America! It’s only since the 60s and all those damn hippies that things went bad, and only in the last decade or two that schools became miserable indoctrination camps! As discussed very briefly here, that’s wishful thinking – compulsory public schooling has never been ‘good’ in any sense a rational parent would consider good. This failure of the schools to teach what a loving, rational parent would want for his child is no accident.

It is well known among homeschoolers, unschoolers, and other double-plus ungood wrongthinkers that American schooling is based on the Prussian Model, often referred to as Factory Schooling. While calling it Factory Schooling is largely true, we misunderstand the stated and demonstrated goals of this system if we think obedient factory workers are the main goal

Here’s what happened: In 1806, Napoleon’s army conquered the Prussians; the Kaiser and his family were forced to flee to Russia. Prussians, who saw themselves as the quintessential Germans, were humiliated. Sitting on the seats of power in Berlin were despised Frenchmen, who were dictating Enlightened (after the fashion of Napoleon) laws and basically rubbing Prussian noses in it.

Along comes one of the leading Prussian intellectuals of the day – Johann Gottlieb Fichte, whose philosophizing bridges the teaching of Kant and Hegel. He’s a German Romantic, which, as the Oracle Wikipedia puts it, “were hostile to political liberalism, rationalism, neoclassicism, and cosmopolitanism.” So Fichte, and his German Romantic contemporaries, reject liberalism, which here includes the idea of individual human rights; rationalism, meaning making logical sense is not a priority (see: Hegel’s Logic for a complete exposition); neoclassicism, meaning don’t look to the past masters for guidance; and cosmopolitanism, meaning don’t think of yourself primarily as a citizen of the world, but rather (in his case) as a German.

Fichte is alarmingly nationalistic, saying Germans are the purest, most lofty thinkers on the planet, and must lead the lesser peoples into the next stage of human development.

So Fichte deliver a series of lectures over the winter of 1807-1808 called Addresses to the German Nation. These lectures were presented to the kind of people who would pay to hear a lecture by a philosopher in the dead of winter in Berlin – I don’t know what to make of that. Down the street were the occupying French soldiers and politicians.

Why this is important: The year after these lectures were delivered, the Prussian Minister of Education, von Humboldt, established a new thing on earth – the Prussian research university. Rejecting neoclassicism like a good German Romantic must, these new universities were dedicated to Progress, to moving the world (via Germans, of course) forward. Rather than being devoted to passing on a culture and cultivating a liberal (free) mind, these universities – and all American state and almost all private universities have adopted these principles – are dedicated to improving the world. Such improvement is to be defined and enforced by top men, such as Fichte and von Humboldt.

“Top Men”

Since Education Departments had yet to be invented, von Humboldt put Fichte in charge of the Philosophy department at the newly-founded University of Berlin. In this role, Fichte and his followers got to shape and gatekeep the Progress in education described below. Over the next 50 years, many American sons went to Prussia to study and get a (newly created) PhD from these research universities. These men then became the leaders and gatekeepers at all the newly-founded state Education Departments, the Normal Schools for training teachers, and eventually, all the major colleges and universities. Fichte’s ideas thus became the basis of American compulsory age-segregated graded classroom education to this day. (Note that the insane idea of segregating children by age and grading them like lumber or eggs is yet another product of the Prussian research universities – imported into the US in 1848. No one anywhere did school like that before.)

After many pages dedicated to praising real Germans and insulting people (the French, say) who speak the language of their conquerors, he finally gets to the point: Germans have long been miseducated, and, in order to take the great and glorious place in History, they have to do a better job going forward. I’ll let the man speak for himself:

Fichte believes the state has the right and duty to simply remove all children from their families and communities until they have raised to manhood:

“It is essential that from the very beginning the pupil should be continuously and completely under the influence of this education, and should be separated altogether from the community, and kept from all contact with it.”

and:

 ”Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished.”

Of course, it is not to be expected that all parents will be willing to be separated from their children, and to hand them over to this new education, a notion of which it will be difficult to convey to them. From past experience we must reckon that everyone who still believes he is able to support his children at home will set himself against public education, and especially against a public education that separates so strictly and lasts so long.

“that separates so strictly and lasts so long” – we’re talking handing over your kids to the state at some young age and not seeing  them again for many years. I could see how moms and dads might have a problem with this.

To put it more briefly. According to our supposition, those who need protection are deprived of the guardianship of their parents and relatives, whose place has been taken by masters. If they are not to become absolute slaves, they must be released from guardianship, and the first step in this direction is to educate them to manhood. German love of fatherland has lost its place; it shall get another, a wider and deeper one; there in peace and obscurity it shall establish itself and harden itself like steel, and at the right moment break forth in youthful strength and restore to the State its lost independence. Now, in regard to this restoration foreigners, and also those among us who have petty and narrow minds and despairing hearts, need not be alarmed; one can console them with the assurance that not one of them will live to see it, and that the age which will live to see it will think otherwise than they.

9th Address, pp 127.

See how that works? Petty, narrow-minded people with despairing hearts will be alarmed at having the state seize and physically remove their children from them for duration of their education, for the purpose of training them to restore the state to its proper independence. Such people – us! – are to be consoled with the assurance that none of us will live to see the state restored to its glory. We may miss our children, but we won’t have to endure the glorious future.

Now, assuming that the pupil is to remain until education is finished, reading and writing can be of no use in the purely national education, so long as this education continues. But it can, indeed, be very harmful; because, as it has hitherto so often done, it may easily lead the pupil astray from direct perception to mere signs, and from attention, which knows that it grasps nothing if it does not grasp it now and here, to distraction, which consoles itself by writing things down and wants to learn some day from paper what it will probably never learn, and, in general, to the dreaming which so often accompanies dealings with the letters of the alphabet. Not until the very end of education, and as its last gift for the journey, should these arts be imparted and the pupil led by analysis of the language, of which he has been completely master for a long time, to discover and use the letters. After the rest of the training he has already acquired, this would be play.

Fichte, 9th Address, pp 136

To sum up: a kid is to spend, effectively, 24 x 7 X 365 in school for around 10 years, learning to be a good German, how to really focus on the task at hand (2) but doesn’t learn reading and writing (and, one assumes, arithmetic) until something like age 15 or 16. If you can read and write, you don’t have to pay attention to the teacher as much – you can take notes, and review later. This will not do, as the child is to accept the state trained and certified teacher in the place of his displaced father, and fulfill his need for approval and love by pleasing that teacher. The magical education works, according to Fichte’s understanding of Pestalozzi, by having the student utterly emotionally dependent on pleasing the teacher, doing what the teacher wants him to do in the way the teacher wants it done, always eager for approval. There is no fallback: by design, a child who fails to please his teacher has no recourse, not to family, not even to books. His family has abandoned him, as far as he knows, and he’s not allowed to explore the world through reading, where he might come across other ways in which people interact.

In modern Europe education actually originated, not with the State, but with that power from which States, too, for the most part obtained their power—from the heavenly spiritual kingdom of the Church. The Church considered itself not so much a part of the earthly community as a colony from heaven quite foreign to the earthly community and sent out to enrol citizens for that foreign State, wherever it could take root. [note: ‘foreign’ is about as strong a put-down as Fichte uses, the opposite of German, his highest praise.] Its education aimed at nothing else but that men should not be damned in the other world but saved. The Reformation merely united this ecclesiastical power, which otherwise continued to regard itself as before, to the temporal power, with which formerly it had very often been actually in conflict. [note: Luther sought to have the state seize monasteries and turn them into state schools; much of his correspondence was with secular leaders urging them to pursue various programs. Eventually, we reached the point today where German churches are state-supported institutions.] In that connection, this was the only difference that resulted from that event; there also remained, therefore, the old view of educational matters. … The sole public education, that of the people, however, was simply education for salvation in heaven; the essential feature was a little Christianity and reading, with writing if it could be managed—all for the sake of Christianity. All other development of man was left to the blind and casual influence of the society in which they grew up, and to actual life. Even the institutions for scholarly education were intended mainly for the training of ecclesiastics. Theology was the important faculty; the others were merely supplementary to it, and usually received only its leavings.

Address 11, pp 164

Finally, is there any role for the Church? (He’s talking Lutheran, or at least. Protestant, churches here. That the Catholic Church might have a role was of course beyond consideration.) Not really:

Now, if for the future, and from this very hour, we are to be able to hope better things in this matter from the State, it will have to exchange what seems to have been up to the present its fundamental conception of the aim of education for an entirely different one. It must see that it was quite right before to refuse to be anxious about the eternal salvation of its citizens, because no special training is required for such salvation, and that a nursery for heaven, like the Church, whose power has at last been handed over to the State, should not be permitted, for it only obstructs all good education, and must be dispensed with. On the other hand, the State must see that education for life on earth is very greatly needed; from such a thorough education, training for heaven follows as an easy supplement. The more enlightened the State thought it was before, the more firmly it seems to have believed that it could attain its true aim merely by means of coercive institutions, and without any religion and morality in its citizens, who might do as they liked in regard to such matters. May it have learnt this at least from recent experiences—that it cannot do so, and that it has got into its present condition just because of the want of religion and morality!ibid, pp 166

There’s a lot going on in this paragraph:

• Fichte asserts that the Church has at last surrendered its power to the State, and that this is a good thing;
• The state has an entirely different aim for education than the Church
• The state should not ‘permit’ the Church, which should be ‘dispensed with’
• The state is concerned with education for life on earth. Earlier, Fichte described how this whole afterlife business interferes with men doing what men – German men, of course – need to do to bring about heaven on earth, that we obtain immortality through making the nation stronger and better, and need to embrace the goals of the nation (German, of course) and focus on that
• The state has previously ignored religion and morality in education, but now must take it up. Earlier, he argues that state education IS simply education in religion and morality, that reading and academics can and should be delayed until the end of the educational period, if indulged in at all. The important thing is to teach children to love the fatherland and do what they are told by their masters.
• “Recent experiences” include having their armies crushed and lands overrun by the loathsome French, who, even as Fichte was delivering these talks, were sitting in the seats of power just blocks away.

There’s a dreadful amount more to this. Just know that, at the roots of our system of schooling are the following core beliefs:

• Parents are the problem schools are designed to solve.
• The state has the duty and power to determine and deliver education. Parents, and most certainly students, have no say in how our kids are educated.
• All of the student’s time should be taken up by schooling as much as possible (The state may have found it impractical to simply seize our kids, but they do their best to keep them under constant control.)
• Formal religion is to be replaced by the state; education is to be shifted from the idea of learning to do right so as to gain Heaven to learning to do what you are told in order to achieve Heaven on earth – as defined by your betters
• The three R’s don’t figure into it, and, in fact, are dangerous temptations to thinking for yourself. Only after you have become thoroughly obedient to the state can such extras like reading, writing, and math be taught to you.
• People, especially us commoners, are Blank Slates for all practical purposes.

I could give examples of how each of these beliefs are manifested in modern schooling, but, as this is getting really long, I leave that as an exercise for the reader.

The Grateful Abused

However much I’m not an historian, I am much more not a psychologist. Yet, as Chesterton says at the beginning of The Everlasting Man,

As I have more than once differed from Mr. H. G. Wells in his view of history, it is the more right that I should here congratulate him on the courage and constructive imagination which carried through his vast and varied and intensely interesting work; but still more on having asserted the reasonable right of the amateur to do what he can with the facts which the specialists provide.

John Taylor Gatto said something to the effect that the greatest success of modern schooling is that no can think of doing it any other way. The colossal failure of modern schooling is so enormous, so obvious, so horrible that it is truly mind-blowing that any sane person is willing to keep doing it to themselves and their children. Yet not only are millions of parents eager to send their kids to school, they leap to its defense and complain about attempts to ease the burden on their children. Just look at the reactions of most parents when they are told that homework provides little if any benefit and should be eliminated – they freak out. No! Having their kid waste hours every night on homework is a badge of parental honor that shall not be taken away. Or something.

We’re not talking about people who reluctantly disregard their own children’s unhappiness with schooling through some misguided idea that they’re enforcing schooling for their kid’s own good, but about parents who actively (often angrily) support wasting even more of their kids time with homework, even when presented with the evidence that it doesn’t contribute meaningfully to academic success.

As we discussed in the last post, the typical American was much more literate in 1850 than in 2000 – despite? Because of? – the total professionalization of schooling. Here’s what an American 10 year old would be expected to be able to read and understand back in the 19th century:

If we postpone independence, do we mean to carry on, or to give up, the war? Do we mean to submit, and consent that we shall be ground to powder, and our country and its rights trodden down in the dust? I know we do not mean to submit. We NEVER shall submit! Do we intend to violate that most solemn obligation ever entered into by men, that plighting, before God, of our sacred honor to Washington, when, putting him forth to incur the dangers of war, as well as the political hazards of the times, we promised to adhere to him in every extremity with our fortunes and our lives? I know there is not a man here, who would not rather see a general conflagration sweep over the land, or an earthquake sink it, than one jot or tittle of that plighted faith fall to the ground. For myself, having twelve months ago, in this place, moved you that George Washington be appointed commander of the forces raised, or to be raised, for the defense of American liberty; may my righthand forget her cunning, and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I hesitate or waver in the support I give him.

Daniel Webster, excerpt, Supposed Speech of John Adams, McGuffey’s 5th Eclectic Reader.

But mere evidence and logic stand no chance among the well-schooled. Most parents find some way to dismiss the success of homeschoolers – they’re weird, or socially stunted, or something. That homeschoolers, like those 19th century kids in their one-room schoolhouses, typically cover much more material in much less time and with much less stress can’t be allowed to contradict such parents’ need to send their kids to real school. Then when you get to the real crazies – like me – who not only didn’t send his kids to real school, but refused to bend the knee to grade level nonsense, and encouraged their children to do whatever they wanted, so long as they recognized that they were fresponsible for the outcome – well, that’s simply crazy! That our kids – and hundreds of thousands of similarly raised children – are some of the finest, brightest, kind, and thoughtful people you’ll ever meet just cannot be allowed.

We were told by family and friends that we were ruining our kids, then, when that became untenable, that our kids were just different, or that they were geniuses, that it might work for our kids, but their kids could never handle that level of freedom and responsibility. Never could it be admitted that keeping our kids out of the clutches of professional educators not only didn’t hurt them, but was a huge part in their ultimate successes.

How does one even begin to address this level of insanity? How can people be so blind as to insist that modern schooling is good and necessary (so much so that those who reject it are somehow evil) when not a shred of evidence supports that conclusion?

Here begins the psychological and evolutionary speculation.

In her book Thou Shalt Not Be Aware, German psychiatrist Alice Miller describes how an abused child follows this 11th commandment of the book’s title, and simply cannot allow himself to be aware of the abuse.

Miller trained as a traditional Freudian, and worked with troubled children. She did extensive research into Freud’s writings. She discovered that, prior to his creation of his theory of sexual repression, he had taken the possibility that his clients were sexually abused seriously. Doing so, however, put him in conflict with the people paying his bills, making him an enemy of the sort of people who send their kids and wives to psychiatrists in the first place.

Miller’s direct experience taught her that abused children of all ages are often strangely unaware of the abuse they’ve suffered. When confronted with the evidence of their having been abused, they make up excuses for their abusers. Daddy or Mommy didn’t mean it. I was asking for it. If only I hadn’t done X, nothing would have happened. And so on.

Then, the kicker: in their own adult lives, these victims will often subject their own children to the same kind of abuse. This is key: to do otherwise, they would need to own that they, themselves, were abused. But that’s too painful to endure, too disruptive of their lives and relationships. Besides, they turned out OK. What’s the big deal? It couldn’t have been as bad as all that.

Thou shalt not be aware – so, the pattern repeats itself from generation to generation. Facing their own abuse is too painful. They have built up emotional structures to fend off the hurt. Trying to get them to see it only makes them angry. That’s Miller’s account, at least.

My only contribution here: this inability to acknowledge or even see the abuse we’ve suffered is both much broader than the classically abused, and is based in harsh biological reality. We humans, especially as children, simply must belong to a group in order to survive. A child is soon dead without the care of adults. From a Darwinian survival perspective, even adults without a tribe are as good as dead- there is no reproduction without other people!

Thus, all human beings are highly motivated – at a biological level – to somehow make peace with their abusers, if those abusers are part of their family or tribe. Miller points out that, in her practice, it made all the difference if the victim had someone in his life who told him that, no, what’s being done to you is not ok. Lacking such a sympathetic witness, the victim had little chance of recovery.

Stockholm Syndrome may be a similar phenomenon. In 1974, during a botched bank robbery in Stockholm, 4 hostages quickly began to identify with and support their captor. He didn’t kill them, after all, and so, for their emotional survival, they came to see things from his point of view.

It’s much more complicated than that, of course. Not every hostage identifies with his captors. It takes time, for one thing, and the captors must be in some sense sympathetic. But in a situation where the hostage situation goes on for a while, and the captors have opportunities to be, or at least appear, kind, eventually, biological reality will kick in: I, a human organism, need to figure out how to survive in this situation. If I can’t escape, then identifying with my captors might make the most (Darwinian) sense.

I do think that underlying both Miller’s claims and Stockholm Syndrome is a basic human need to be part of a group , even to fit in when one is being threatened and abused. This need to belong is a good thing, in itself, but can easily be twisted into something evil. The simplest, most common example is people going along with whatever their crowd promotes. The truth is a small price to pay for belonging.

There is a continuum from such basic and simply conformity up through groupthink and on to real insanity. I think you, my dear readers, can come up with plenty of examples.

And so here we are: That modern schooling is an expensive, humiliating failure by any objective standards simply must not be seen, if we are to maintain our place in society and our heavily reinforced psychological defenses. If our kids complain about being bored at school, at having their time wasted, of being made to do things they don’t want to do – well, those complaints have no standing! We MUST make our children do what we did – suck it up, and do what the teacher wants. To take our children’s complaints and unhappiness seriously would undermine OUR whole world – so we just don’t do it.

This is not just a theory. I spent years having discussions about the above with parents considering enrolling their children in our Sudbury school. Even among parents willing to consider this radical unschooling approach, about half just could not pull the trigger. These parents might acknowledge many of the points above, and might acknowledge the unhappiness of their child, but simply letting go of the schooling they, themselves, went through was too much.

Among the general population of parents, those not considering such extreme unschooling, the response is what i mentioned above: we were ruining our kids! Lord of the Flies! Wasting their time! They’ll never learn discipline! And so on. Never mind that a walk through the school showed generally happy, articulate self-controlled kids comfortable with talking with adults as well as children of all ages. Never mind the success of our kids by any measure. Nope, it can’t work, because, if it did, then I have to deal with all my feelings about my schooling – and all that had better be left buried. Even if I have to bury my own children with it.

An American Education Timeline

(Been super-busy and a bit under the weather, so very few posts. Hope to change that soon.)

There are a bunch of American education canards that need rebuttal. One of the most unconscious and deeply embedded is the idea that compulsory schooling, and the professionalization of education that it required, achieved anything positive. It’s like flu shots: if flu shots work, then we should see a drop in deaths caused by the flu as the number of people getting the shots increases- at the very least. Yet, over the last 40 years or so, the number of people getting flu shots has skyrocketed – yet the number of flu deaths and hospitalizations just keeps going up and up. So, what exactly do those shots DO, if they don’t curtail deaths and severe sickness?

In the same way, our nation went from almost no professional educators (outside of colleges, at least) prior to 1848 to very near 100% professional educators by 1950. What I mean: prior to the opening of the first state-controlled compulsory age-segregated graded classroom school in 1848, very few teachers were formally trained in teaching. The Normal School, which became teacher colleges, were mostly but a gleam in their fathers’ eyes at that time; the typical teacher was just somebody who would take the job – a college grad if the school, usually in a city, had money; but more often than not, at least in the one-room schools in which most Americans were educated, some teenage product of those one-room schools who needed a job.

By 1900, about half of all students went to ‘consolidated’ schools, but about half still went to one-room schools. By 1950, virtually every public school was staffed by graduates of teacher colleges, while Catholic schools – by far the largest system outside the state schools – tried to hire ‘qualified’ teachers or get teacher-college training for their staff. Catholic schools all wanted to be public schools, at least on the structural, classroom, and training side. This trend continues today.

So: we should expect the basic markers of education – literacy and numeracy – to increase as the professionalism of the educators increased, just as we would expect health, using the markers ‘staying alive’ and ‘staying out of the hospital’, to increase with the spread of flu shots.

But education, as measured by literacy and numeracy, did not increase over the 100 years from 1850 to 1950. Quite the contrary. Here’s an example:

The imbecility of her military leaders abroad, and the fatal want of energy in her councils at home, had lowered the character of Great Britain from the proud elevation on which it had been placed by the talents and enterprise of her former warriors and statesmen. No longer dreaded by her enemies, her servants were fast losing the confidence of self-respect. In this mortifying abasement, the colonists, though innocent of her imbecility, and too humble to be the agents of her blunders, were but the natural participators. They had recently seen a chosen army from that country, which, reverencing as a mother, they had blindly believed invincible—an army led by a chief who had been selected from a crowd of trained warriors, for his rare military endowments, disgracefully routed by a handful of French and Indians, and only saved from annihilation by the coolness and spirit of a Virginian boy, whose riper fame has since diffused itself, with the steady influence of moral truth, to the uttermost confines of Christendom. A wide frontier had been laid naked by this unexpected disaster, and more substantial evils were preceded by a thousand fanciful and imaginary dangers. The alarmed colonists believed that the yells of the savages mingled with every fitful gust of wind that issued from the interminable forests of the west. The terrific character of their merciless enemies increased immeasurably the natural horrors of warfare. Numberless recent massacres were still vivid in their recollections; nor was there any ear in the provinces so deaf as not to have drunk in with avidity the narrative of some fearful tale of midnight murder, in which the natives of the forests were the principal and barbarous actors. As the credulous and excited traveler related the hazardous chances of the wilderness, the blood of the timid curdled with terror, and mothers cast anxious glances even at those children which slumbered within the security of the largest towns. In short, the magnifying influence of fear began to set at naught the calculations of reason, and to render those who should have remembered their manhood, the slaves of the basest passions. Even the most confident and the stoutest hearts began to think the issue of the contest was becoming doubtful; and that abject class was hourly increasing in numbers, who thought they foresaw all the possessions of the English crown in America subdued by their Christian foes, or laid waste by the inroads of their relentless allies.

James Fenimore Cooper, the Last of the Mohicans, 1827 (The ‘Virginian boy’ is Washington)

And so on, for several hundred pages. In 1826, this book was a smash best seller, the Harry Potter of its day, only more so, read by young and old. Yet in 1826, there were no compulsory state-funded schools. People learned to read in slapdash ways, famously out of the King James Bible on grandmother’s knee. But read they could!

I bet your average American college student would think it a slog, or even nigh unreadable. Cooper’s long sentences, nested clauses, adventurous vocabulary are likely to prove difficult. But they were not too difficult for Americans 200 years ago.

30 years earlier, the Federalist Papers and Anti-Federalist Papers, full of historical and classical references, were published in popular newspapers – and hundreds of thousands of people read them and talked about them. Papers in those days were not written to a 6th grade reading level, yet many, many people read them.

Excepting slaves, the population of America was by all evidence as literate in the 1820s as it ever got. In 1835, Tocqueville wrote about seeing farmers sitting under trees in their fields, reading Descartes (I think) while resting their plow horses.

The evidence – these, and many more similar examples – suggests a very high level of literacy in America prior to any compulsory schooling.

In the 1850s, when compulsory age-segregated classrooms were still a bit of a novelty, we had spectacles like the Lincoln-Douglass debates – by modern standards, high-level political discourse, but targeting the general public. During the Civil War, soldiers with very minimal formal education wrote home in letters the sophistication of which would put most modern adults to shame; Lincoln’s speeches and addresses were certainly aimed at a higher level of intellectual attainment than anything our modern politicians crank out. One can reasonably conclude that literacy was high without the benefit of compulsory education.

By 1900, compulsory state schooling had thoroughly metastasized. In cities, where about half the US population lived, almost every child attended a graded classroom school run by professional educators. Out in the country, locally run one-room schools still educated the other half.

In his book One-Room Schools of the Middle West: An Illustrated History, Dr. Fuller mentions (and I can’t lay my hands on it at the moment) that, once, the NEA made the mistake of giving their standardized tests to the one-room school children, hoping to show how superior the consolidated schools were. Problem was, the country kids outperformed their city slicker peers – despite the tests being geared to what was taught in the consolidated schools, and despite 0ne-room schooling costing 25% what the consolidated schools cost per pupil, and having some fraction of the contact hours.

Already by 1900, Americans as a whole were getting stupider.

The US Military has long conducted reading comprehension tests as part of its processing of recruits. Again, I don’t have the book at hand (I think Gatto laid is all out in Underground History), but I recall these reading comprehension tests were given to all recruits starting before WWI. Since the military is interested in every warm body it can grab, these tests are about as close as we can get to a nationwide measure of literacy over the time period when professional educators gained complete control of K-12 schooling.

We’d use the WWI results as our baseline: that’s American literacy when about half the nation had been taught to read primarily in state run schools. Once again, I need to build a few huge floor to ceiling bookcases so I can liberate the 50+ boxes of books I have yet to even bring into the house before I can lay my hands on the sources, so this is all based on my memory: Recruits, both black and white, scored very highly in basic reading comprehension, back in the 1910s.

And, as the professional educators replaced the one room schools with their consolidated schools and the Catholic schools slavishly adopted the standards and practices of the public schools, reading comprehension among military recruits fell. In the 1950s, when the professionalization of schools was all but complete, the tests results continued to decline. By now, while finding physically fit recruits makes the news, finding some with basic reading comprehension is also a challenge.

There’s pretty much a straight-line decline in overall reading comprehension among military recruits from 1900 to now. Correlation is not causation, but it makes a fellah think.

Finally, what for me is the last straw: if graded classroom education is good and necessary, done selflessly for the good of the children, then failing to run children through state schools or their private school equivalents would be a bad thing. Well, is it? I, who radically unschooled our children, and thousands of homeschoolers and unschoolers, can see the results. In my case, 5 out of 5 our our kids chose to attend college, got into their first choice, and we now have 3 – the only three who have now reached an age at which they should have normally completed college – have degrees, honors, one masters and counting. And they are nice, respectful, decent people, who can form lasting personal attachments. Not that college is the best or only measure – far from it! – but even by that popular measure, our kids – and hundreds of thousands of others! – who skipped k-12 schooling entirely, are not suffering from some lack of education, and, indeed, on average, far exceed the achievements of the graded classroom victims. It seems less school = more achievement (adjusting for poverty and sanity, of course).

Enough for now. Didn’t want you all to think I forgot you. I retire in 5 weeks (but who’s counting?) and plan to spend a lot of time pulling all this school stuff together, with citations and quotations and so on. I can hardly wait!

Oh look! Young people arranged in rows, following orders, performing specific difficult manual tasks!

Chaser: Woodrow Wilson, after whom numerous public schools are named, then president of Princeton University, said the following to the New York City School Teachers Association in 1909:

We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.

Engineering & Brief Update

A tale of two bridges:

Here is the suspension section of the Oakland Bay Bridge:

Designed in the early 1930s and completed in 1936, the bridge spans one of the world’s busy shipping lanes into the port of Oakland. Hundreds of ships, including giant container ships, sail beneath this bridge every year, and have for decades.

Look a little closer:

Notice that giant steel-reinforced tower right in the middle? And those towers holding up the suspension cables are gigantic chunks of steel siting on their own little islands of steel and concrete.

Back in 1936, this bridge won all the engineering awards, not the more scenic and famous Golden Gate Bridge being built a few miles away at the same time. Later engineers opined that it was really wildly overengineered, that the tower in the middle was unnecessary. The original engineers put it there to make double and triple sure that, were a ship to run into it or one of the other towers, the bridge would stay up.

Almost 90 years later, it’s still standing. Having driven over it hundreds of times, it certainly feels solid, for what that’s worth.

Now look at the late Francis Scott Key Bridge, opened in 1977:

Now, I’m no engineer, but that thing looks like one good whack with a big boat, and it’s collapsing domino-style – Oh! Oops!

May the souls of the men who died in the collapse rest in peace, and may the Spirit comfort their loved ones left behind.

Next, I’ve been super busy and ill the last, oh, 2 months. Life has been eventful. I’ve been scarce around these here parts. Now, I have to fix up a couple rooms at Recusant Ranch for family visitors who are coming for my mother in law’s funeral.

She died a month ago, in her sleep in her own bed, after 86 years of life, leaving 11 children, 20+ grandchildren, and 4 great-grandchildren. We should all be so blessed. She lived with us, and my wife had taken care of her, for the last 6 and half years. Now, the family is gathering, half of whom live on the East Coast or in England, which is why there was such a long delay for the funeral. 50+ kids, grandkids, spouses, and great grand kids are coming in. I’ll be accompanying my daughter who will be singing Schubert’s Ave Maria at the funeral mass.

Anyway, school is out May 25th. I should have time to blog then. I kind of miss it.

Kulturkampf and Prussian Anti-Catholicism – Here We Go…

Just came across this while googling around:

In a popular cartoon of 1875, the French artist and writer Felix Regamey lampooned the powerful Chancellor of Germany, Otto von Bismarck. In the cartoon, the Chancellor tries to pull a rope attached to St. Peter’s Basilica and declares to Satan that he intends to destroy the papacy. Satan replies, “I have been trying to do it all my life. If you manage it, I shall give you full marks.”

Regamey’s cartoon was a humorous but biting expression of Catholic resentment and anger across Europe for one of the most forgotten events of the 19th century: the persecution and oppression of the Church at the hands of the German government under Kaiser Wilhelm I and his “Iron Chancellor” Bismarck. For a period of nearly 20 years, from 1871 to 1890, Catholics in the German Empire, especially in the German states of Prussia, Bavaria, Hesse, Baden, and occupied Poland, faced legal disabilities, imprisonment, and exile, all in the name of German national pride and unity. For their part, Catholics and Germans of good will fought for their rights, defended the Catholic faith and institutions, and above all, refused to allow a secular government to trample on the Holy See and their beloved pontiff Bl. Pius IX.

The name given to the struggle in the German Empire was the Kulturkampf, meaning the struggle for culture, or the culture war. It proved only the first of many similar conflicts between anti-religious governments and the Church that afflicted Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but the Kulturkampf had even greater ramifications than its counterparts in Italy, France, and Spain. The clash in the German Empire laid the groundwork for the repression of Catholics in Germany and Europe under Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.

German Catholics under the Iron Fist: Bismarck and the Kulturkampf by Matthew Bunson

And so on. All of this comports well with my other reading, but it’s nice to see it all brought together. That’s both the problem and the goal: this stuff, all the horrors of education history, is right out there in front of our eyes – just generally scattered in bits and pieces over many different sources. My job is to bring it all together. The author lists 4 books in his bibliography – guess I’ve got 4 more books to read.

A couple more paragraphs specifically on education:

Surprisingly, however, Bismarck’s strongest supporters in the Prussian Landtag and then in the Reichstag were the Liberals. The Liberal Party in Germany had long opposed absolutism and called for constitutional government, but they were also united in their antipathy for the Catholic Church; many Liberal leaders were anti-clerical and ardent students of the German Enlightenment. This hatred for the Church naturally extended into their calls for a pure German culture freed from the supposed superstitions, dogmatism, and obscurantism of the Church. Their influence in German politics increased in the middle of the 19th century, when they used public sentiment for German nationalism to their advantage. Their presence increased steadily in the Landtag after 1860, and in that year they were permitted to introduce harsh anti-Catholic educational measures in traditionally Catholic Bavaria.

And

In March 1873, the Landtag passed a series of laws drafted by Adalbert Falk, the German minister of education, that regulated Catholic life in Prussia. The new laws were then approved for the entire German Empire on May 15, 1873 by the Reichstag and came to be called the Maigesetze (May Laws). Ecclesiastical punishments were prohibited save in purely spiritual matters. In areas of religious law, appeal was permitted to the state, and from the state’s decision there would be no further ecclesiastical appeal.

All seminarians, both Catholic and Protestant, had to study at state-controlled high schools and universities, where they had to pass an examination in German culture, including history, philosophy, and literature. Once ordained, all priests and clergy faced state approval before they could be appointed to any positions. If the Church installed an unapproved priest or bishop, the offending cleric was removed and charged with a civil crime.

Once the basic framework was in place through the May Laws of 1873, a new round of even tighter restrictions was launched. In 1874, the government decreed that bishops who were deposed by the state could be replaced only by a prelate acceptable to the state. Appointments of pastors over parishes were no longer the right off local bishops but were given to the parishioners or local government officials. In 1875 all priests were stripped of any stipends or endowments granted by the government. That same year, all religious orders and communities in the Empire were outlawed except for those engaged directly in nursing or hospital care. Marriage was decreed a mandatory civil ceremony and taken completely out of ecclesiastical hands. These acts climaxed on June 20, 1875, when all Church property was confiscated. By 1875, over 200 priests had been arrested, along with over 130 newspaper editors. Five bishops in Prussia had been forcibly deposed, and nearly 1,000 parishes had been stripped of their priests.

Is it surprising that the Minister of Education is the one cracking down on Catholics? Feature, not bug, and I’m sure it appealed very much to the Americans in Prussia studying at their universities and bringing back their schooling system.

Anyway, good stuff. I’m getting to the end of my research (ha! I slay me!). Just need to unpack and reread a few critical sources, then compile, compile, compile, then finish writing The Book.

Germany & Chesterton

I suppose I should open with a Chesterton quotation, because he has a couple things to say about Germans. But, nah. Suffice it to say that Ol’ GK noted a strange contradiction in how the German government (he was a lover of people, including German people, but not so much of governments): Germany was both the greatest power on earth, far superior to those French and English posers, yet, when the German army won a battle against them, it was a great triumph over dangerous, unreasonable foes. All this mixed in with a persecution complex. GK was writing this sort of thing during WWI and the period leading up to WWII, but before it got completely nasty. He died in 1936.

That’s an aside. On the reading front, have 3 books on Germany running concurrently. The first is the Pinson’s Modern Germany. Pure background reading – I need some context for the Prussian education reform movement in the first part of the 19th century. I’m up to the middle of the 19th century so far, and will at least a little farther. At some point, maybe 1900, the information will become less relevant to my needs.

So far, the major finds are a discussion of German Romanticism, German nationalism versus ‘cosmopolitanism’, and the influence of Napoleon and the French Revolution – much more complex than I suspected. It helps to think of Fichte, and by extension Hegel, as Romantics. Add in their fundamental rejection of objective reality – Fichte, quite explicitly as a student of Kant, Hegel more subtly – and all this business of predicting the future becomes more, I want to say coherent, but maybe consistent. Fichte seems to really believe that Humanity (which exists only a conception in his own mind) is progressing through 5 – not 4, not 6 – stages, at the end of which it becomes, essentially, God – as Fichte imagines God. These things are so because that’s how Fichte conceives them. All this also goes a long way toward explaining how Fichte was both rigorously moral and insufferable.

The other two – Raack’s the Fall of Stein and Simon’s the Failure of the German Reform Movement 1807-1810, are again attempts to focus in on the period during which the University of Berlin was founded, the age-segregated classroom model was invented and the ideas of Fichte embodied in that model were disseminated around the world.

Eh. A few helpful bits, but nothing earth shaking yet. But they’re shortish books, at least. I next need to find out more about German immigration during the Kulturkampf.

The key here, for me, is that such books as these presume a fairly high level of familiarity with the basic historical trends – they discuss the how and why, but assume you already know the what. So it’s off to the internet to look things up. That’s how I end up with three books going at once and take a couple months to read them.

On the Chesterton front, last night I finished my reread of the Ball and the Cross. Only rarely do I end a book and start immediately to reread it. This is one of those times, and – whoa. This story may not be for everyone, but for me? Wow. I picked up on so much I’d missed the first time through. It’s typically broad in outline – a crazy world thinks sane people crazy – and is full of Chesterton’s idealized conversations – you know, where one character lays out a philosophical position in some detail over the course of several pages, while he and his interlocutor are running for their lives, say.

But the punch at the end, which left me going ‘that’s it?! You’re going to stop there!?’ is a little mind-banding.

The Ball and the Cross was written over 1905-6; Benson’s The Lord of the World was written in 1907. Mere coincidence? I think not. Maybe.

Insomniac Flash Fiction

“Ain’t that a little dear?” The prospector looked down his long nose and over his expansive beard at a small grey box bristling with antennae.

The wind outside, settling down to a brisk 150 kilometers an hour, whipped the snow off Stanton’s Pike, trailing it off the rock like a medieval banner. Johnny was looking out the small window behind the prospector.

“Everything in this shop I haul up to the saddle myself,” he said without emotion. “You can get a much better price down on the flats.”

The prospector said nothing, but after a brief pause, slapped the credits on the counter and pocketed the box. He turned, pulled his headgear into place and headed toward the air lock. “Good luck!” Johnny mumbled after him. It’s not like I’m doing this for my health, he thought.

With a low thump, the air lock resealed, and after a few steps the prospector disappeared in the swirling snow. Johnny put the credits in his pocket.

A shudder and what could be described as a change in lighting passed through the shop. A pulse in the wind shook more snow loose, and sent a small avalanche down from the saddle into the canyon below.

A wave of vertigo hit Johnny. He grabbed the edge of the counter. An image entered his mind. He seemed to be standing on an impossibly high gantry, looking down at long lines of translucent cables descending into the rock, ending in a low metallic dome far below. Things just beyond his vision throbbed. He knew there was some sense to this scene, just beyond his grasp…

He snapped out of it. His head cleared after a long moment. On the glass shelf behind him, a dozen little grey boxes lit up and emitted tiny popping noises.

Johnny had not opened his shop, perched precariously in the high mountains, to sell gadgets to random prospectors. This spot, next to Stanton Pike, had come to him in just such a vision as had just now passed. It was a clue.

“Didn’t get it. Shame.” Johnny sat down, but quickly sprang to his feet when he heard a sound from the vision that had had that lead to him to the saddle. The Door had swung open. With one motion, he locked up the shop, then hurried into the back room.

A portal had opened in the bare rock that made up the back of the store room – just like he had seen in his mind.

Many a man, curious, seeking his fortune, or both, had come to Hephaestus, only to be frustrated, and sometimes to die. Something was wrong, or at least very different about this planet. All probes of the interior had been defeated; all attempts at mining had failed, often violently and fatally. What looked like rock was not, but what it was tended to fight back against the miner’s tools. Hephaestus seemed to defend itself.

But many who came to this desolate planet had visions – nonsensical but intriguing visions, almost always of inscrutable tech buried in the deep.

Then a man named Stanton had had a vision, right here on the saddle, where he saw something he could almost make sense of. He described it to a team of technicians. While even the most brilliant experts could only make out a small part of what was seen, that small part had revolutionized power generation all across the sector, all the way back to Old Earth. Stanton became a very wealthy man.

Now, prospectors, armed with the little grey boxes that picked up – something – braved the thin, freezing air and terrifying slopes, hoping for the vision that might make them rich.

Johnny stepped through the portal.

(to be continued?)

The Last 9 Days

A week ago Saturday, my mother-in-law, age 86, who had lived with us for the last 6 and a half years, died in her sleep. My wife found her around 7 in the morning. Her health had been bad for the last couple years, and, unlike prior problems, she was not bouncing back this time. As is often the case in these situations, the fundamental reaction for both my wife and me is relief. Mother- in-law had a good, long life, and leaves 11 children and 20+ grandkids and 4 great grand kids. We should all be so lucky. Please pray for the repose of her soul.

The Great Transition

My wife and I now find ourselves alone together for the first time in 33 years. Our youngest headed off to college this year, so we now live on 7 beautiful acres with a cat, a renter, and two cows. The Caboose is coming home for the summer, and our other kids and their families live within a 40 minute drive, so it’s not like we’re deserted or anything. But it is weird waking up in the morning knowing it’s just us. I’ll be 66 in a few weeks; my beloved is 5 years younger.

We spent this past Saturday planting fruit trees. 5 hours in the sun – beautiful day! – eventually ruined by swarms of mosquitos. In February. On Sunday, we all – the three local kids and their spouses and children – gathered at elder daughter’s place for brunch, then middle son and younger daughter and their families headed up to help us plant more trees. Over the course of a few weekends, got 11 in the ground: 4 peach, 3 apricot, 2 cherry and 2 pear. Have a couple little figs grown from cuttings from our awesome little fig tree in the Bay Area that we’ll plant soon, and we want some blueberries, persimmons, quince, and a couple olive trees. But – maybe not this year.

Assuming my health holds up, this should be a beautiful place in a year or two.

Circle of life, and all that.

Son-in-law takes the lawn tractor down the hill to load up the trailer at the woodchip pile.

Education History: Tracking Down the Last Bits…

This is all in my mind, and spread across many thousands of words of blog posts, heavily marked-up books, and articles and books online or saved electronically, but: I think I’m really missing only one thing to make my case. There’s this easy leap to make, but I’d rather have names and dates and places.

1807-1808: Fichte delivers his Addresses to the German Nation. He pushes hard for compulsory state-run education, with the express goal of replacing the student’s attachments to family, church, and village with unquestioned loyalty to the state. The state, per Fichte, has the right, power, and duty to simply remove all children from the control of their families and the influence of church and village, until such time as the state judges their education complete.

The three Rs don’t figure into it; in fact, Fichte warns against learning to read until the very end of the child’s schooling, as reading might lead the student astray. Only after his loyalty to the state is made absolute can the student be trusted with reading.

1809: University of Berlin was founded by Frederick William III, as a result of efforts of von Humboldt, Fichte, and Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher in 1809, and opened in 1810, as the world’s first research university. Research, with the goal of “Progress”, is to replace passing on a culture’s tradition of scholarship, which is what “classical” universities did. Fichte is appointed chair of Philosophy and voted rector.

***Gap what needs filling*** Research university “Progress” in education means, at least to Stein, Humboldt, and Fichte, developing the tools to execute compulsory national education as laid out by Fichte, and flavored by the other two.

The age-segregated graded classroom model is developed (by whom? exactly when and where?) The sources all point back to Prussia; University of Berlin was inspiring imitators and absorbing other schools in Berlin – somewhere in this mix, somebody came up with age-segregation and many short classes as the means to this end. The source I have point rather vaguely to such modern schools having already been rolled out within a decade or two – again, by whom, where and when?

1848: Back to Known Space: Americans who studied in Prussia finally succeed in getting the first “modern” “progressive” age-segregated compulsory graded school set up in Boston: the Quincy Grammar School. Horace Mann figures into this somehow, need to nail that down. The first victims, excuse me, ‘students’, were immigrants – the solid Boston Yankees were fine with the education options developed over almost 200 years for their kids, but those dirty immigrants needed a little of the right kind of Protestant Jesus beat into their heads. And the immigrants were in no position to object…

After that, I’ve got the goods on the rollout of ‘Normal’ schools, the Catholic immigrants starting their parish schools in reaction to and defiance of the state schools, the preposterous ‘psychologists’ at Catholic University pushing for ‘modern’ education, and so on and so forth.

Starting this summer, I’m getting this thing written! This time, for sure!

Current Reading

Got a couple things going at the moment:

Modern Germany: Its History and Civilization, by Koppel Shub Pinson. Published around 1948, then appended with a chapter covering 1949 – 1965, this book begins in the late 18th century – the time of Kant, Pestalozzi, and early Fichte. Reading it to get some background on the period during which the whole Prussian education reform movement got going.

I’m only about 45 pages in so far, but there are some gems already. I don’t know if this is a shortcoming or not, but I don’t think in terms of eras or epochs, but rather focus on what individual writers have to say for themselves. Therefore, I’m likely to to miss – and did miss – the grand sweep of German Romanticism. If the author is correct, and he seems to be, the rejection of objective reality and any need to make logical sense is not just a characteristic of Fichte (and Hegel) but is part of a general rejection of the Enlightenment, as understood in 18th century Germany.

Fichte, an incurable Romantic.

Fichte’s proto-Nazi nationalism (and the Third Reich loved them some Fichte) is seen in a context where, in Prussia, hardcore Royalists were the liberal progressives. A very non-Catholic form of feudalism, under which serfdom is hardly distinguishable from slavery, was enjoyed by the nobility. These nobles and the bureaucracies under them, had loyalty to the king, maybe, but not much to the larger idea of Germany. So the stary-eyed dreamers idea was to destroy this vestige of ill-formed feudalism and replace it with something more ‘modern’ and ‘national’.

The reformers were having little success until Napoleon and his army blew into town in 1806 and did it for them. Fichte’s over-the-top nationalism is partly a reaction to French occupation, and partly a push to finish the job of getting the little people in line with national goals and out from under feudal loyalties.

Then we get to one of the curious contradictions of German Romanticism (again, assuming I’m understanding it and author is playing fair): the individual is everything, yet his only realization of his individuality is as a part of the state. This sounds a little like Catholic doctrine, in that our individuality is only fully realized as a member of the Body of Christ, but it’s more a parody than a parallel. For Fichte, at least, there are no valid goals for any individual that stand in contradiction to the goals of the state. If you want anything other than what the state needs of you, you are broken and need fixing. The state, as usual, is an idealized historical force pushing us little people into the next stage of development. The messy part, where the state in practice is a bunch of toadies, swamp creatures, and zealots, doesn’t seem to occur to Fichte, just as it never occurred to Luther that the state could do anything other than support Lutheranism.

Then there’s just crazy stuff: a lot of German intellectuals – Kant, for example – welcomed the French conquest of Germany, at least at first. Napoleon was seen as the avatar of everything good about the French Revolution. German intellectuals seem a little weak in their understanding, seeing Napoleon as the fulfillment, rather than the defeat, of the Revolution. This resulted from their mixed reactions to the Revolution itself: good, in that it threw off the shackles of the old regime and the Church; bad in that it did not respect property or any religion (one guy said the Revolution was OK, but the French needed to be Protestantized). So Napoleon looked to them like the hero who takes up what was good about it and carried it forward – until he proved to be a empire-building tyrant.

And yet – they were kind of right. Napoleon did end corrupt feudalism and install modern laws in Germany. Which might have been fine with the intellectuals, if Napoleon had then simply gone home rather than looting their country…

Looking forward to finishing this up and writing a full review.

The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages. 3 Volumes (Complete Set)
Rashdall, Hastings. Published in 1895, this is reputed to be the first big, complete study of the Medieval Universities. Hardly cracked it yet, looking forward to it.

Finally, rereading the Ball and the Cross, because it’s so good.

The floor next to the bed is littered with other books. Sigh. I need to retire so I can get to work.