Cults of Ignorance

National Review, May 5, 2003 by M. D. Aeschliman

Perhaps the most damaging single effect of the long, wrong turn of Spencer, Dewey, Kilpatrick, Piaget, and the Progressives has been, in Egan's words, "the reduction of academic content in primary schools in the 20th century." The Progressives shared a naive belief in "nature," and insisted that all learning therefore ought to be "natural" -- as if to discern what is natural were a simple thing, and, even if practicable, a good thing. Egan writes that "generations of schoolchildren, deprived of challenging tasks because [the Progressives] said they were incapable of them, bear the evidence of [the educators'] impact." The passionate opposition to memorization has dumbed down several generations of Americans -- a disaster documented by international comparisons of the educational competencies of students.

The effects of the breakdown in the teaching and knowledge of history may be inadvertently evident even in Egan's otherwise fine book. Himself an (Irish-born) Canadian, Egan seems unaware of the long and dogged line of American critics of Dewey and the Progressives, including Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, William C. Bagley and Isaac Kandel (colleagues of Dewey and Kilpatrick), Reinhold Niebuhr, Hofstadter, Russell Kirk, and the conservative Protestant R. J. Rushdoony, whose The Messianic Character of American Education (1963) is a neglected classic with a useful title. More regrettably and culpably, Egan makes no mention of three recent, widely read books that document much of his argument in greater detail and with even greater force than he himself does: E. D. Hirsch Jr.'s The Schools We Need: And Why We Don't Have Them, the late Jeanne Chall's The Academic Achievement Challenge, and Diane Ravitch's superbly illuminating if depressing survey Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms. Ravitch's book gives valuable portraits of noble dissenters from Progressivism -- such as Bagley, Kandel, and Hirsch -- whose specific objections and alternatives need to be known and carefully weighed.

These books -- along with Egan's, and Charles Glenn's important revisionist study The Myth of the Common School -- point the way toward genuine educational progress. Such improvement has already seriously begun in the hundreds of K-8 American schools now using E. D. Hirsch's Core Knowledge curriculum, a classic instance of individual initiative and grassroots reform.

In response to the Romantic, Rousseauvian half-truth that each child needs to "construct" his own knowledge anew, one traditional lesson, expressed in a "dead" language and long ago, might profitably be relearned: Only "the stupid have no teacher except their own experience" (eventu rerum stolidi didicere magistro).