It's the Culture, Stupid

The American educational crisis is caused by the predominant American philosophy of education. That is, the problems we have with our education system in this country are generally cultural, not financial or structural, because our philosophy is embodied in our culture. That’s why we will never solve these problems by throwing more money at schools, trying new teaching fads, giving inner-city schools a makeover, or rearranging our educational bureaucracy.

Endless research studying the difference between American academic performance in K-12 and that of other countries clearly shows that America has a pathetic school system. This is a fact beyond debate. We’re being left in the dust. Despite paying more per student than most other countries, our students’ academic performance is lower than even less-developed countries on nearly every measure. Obviously, this makes progressives’ call for “more school funding” seem to be only a palliative to their consciences, not a solution of the actual problem, because the money we spend does NOT improve academic performance. Because the problem is cultural, not financial, we can’t spend our way out of it.

A new coat of paint, a fancy new computer lab, a shiny new gymnasium, a bunch of new football team uniforms…these are the worthless improvements that American progressives think will change our schools for the better, but they won’t. Hire new teachers, create merit-based pay systems, try out a few dozen new edu-fads…these won’t work either. Tell students how wonderful they are, improve their self-esteem without merit, sing “Kumbaya” (I did this in public school camp), and talk about feelings, beliefs, attitudes, ethics, equality—do everything but focus on basic education, and you get the academic and social disaster we have now, but it makes progressive teachers feel so good about themselves, which, I suspect, is the real but subconscious cause of this appalling social experiment.

We’ve eliminated discipline in the classroom. We’ve eliminated student accountability. We’ve lowered standards so every student can seem like a success. We’ve institutionalized political correctness so we can’t even tell the truth anymore: that some students are stupid, that stupid parents usually have stupid children, that America is filled with broken families that don’t value education, that some students are not fit for college, and that you can’t have winners without losers. This is what we got when the progressive, indulgent, and permissive “mommy” teachers and administrators displaced conservative and traditional “daddy” teachers and administrators in our school system. How do you show students you care about them? By rigorously training them to be self-sufficient and successful ("daddy teaching"), or by giving them everything they want ("mommy teaching")? You get the idea.

The teacher-student relationship is warped and dysfunctional. Instead of training students for success, we get praise without merit, misbehavior without discipline, self-indulgent sloth without consequences, unconditional respect of students who should be viewed as inferiors, and the most immature students on the globe. When you let your students run your schools, you get the same consequences as when you let your kids run your household: Disaster.

We used to be taught in one-room schoolhouses on the prairie, and in brick inner-city schools, and the education American students got was vastly superior to the one they get now. What changed is our culture, and the educational philosophies that stem from it. The catalyst was the Vietnam War and the 1960s, which transformed the goal of American education from teaching the basics to teaching progressive social values. For example, in my sixth-grade class, we were required to do a module on American slavery, in which half of the students had to wear black paper slave yokes around their necks for most of the day, and the other half got to be “slave owners” and tell the “slaves” what to do. Did this teach us math, science, or English? Hardly. This is what they call “affective education,” and it’s an outcome of the 1960s social revolution.

Teachers and administrators from Kindergarten to graduate school are generally social progressives. We all know this. To claim that they don’t bring their worldview and personal politics into the workplace is absurd. And what have we gotten for this switcheroo of traditional educational values with worthless progressive social engineering in the classroom? We all know the answer to that question, and the results of this educational revolution are disturbing enough to fuel the creation of a website like this one.