At the start of WWII millions of men showed up at registration offices to take low-level academic tests before being inducted. The years of maximum mobilization were 1942 to1944; the fighting force had been mostly schooled in the 1930s, both those inducted and those turned away. Of the 18 million men were tested, 17,280,000 of them were judged to have the minimum competence in reading required to be a soldier, a 96 percent literacy rate. Although this was a 2 percent fall-off from the 98 percent rate among voluntary military applicants ten years earlier, the dip was so small it didn’t worry anybody.WWII was over in 1945. Six years later another war began in Korea. Several million men were tested for military service but this time 600,000 were rejected. Literacy in the draft pool had dropped to 81 percent, even though all that was needed to classify a soldier as literate was fourth- grade reading proficiency. In the few short years from the beginning of WWII to Korea, a terrifying problem of adult illiteracy had appeared. The Korean War group received most of its schooling in the 1940s, and it had more years in school with more professionally trained personnel and more scientifically selected textbooks than the WWII men, yet it could not read, write, count, speak, or think as well as the earlier, less-schooled contingent.
A third American war began in the mid-1960s. By its end in 1973 the number of men found noninductible by reason of inability to read safety instructions, interpret road signs, decipher orders, and so on—in other words, the number found illiterate—had reached 27 percent of the total pool. Vietnam-era young men had been schooled in the 1950s and the 1960s—much better schooled than either of the two earlier groups—but the 4 percent illiteracy of 1941 which had transmuted into the 19 percent illiteracy of 1952 had now had grown into the 27 percent illiteracy of 1970. Not only had the fraction of competent readers dropped to 73 percent but a substantial chunk of even those were only barely adequate; they could not keep abreast of developments by reading a newspaper, they could not read for pleasure, they could not sustain a thought or an argument, they could not write well enough to manage their own affairs without assistance.
Consider how much more compelling this steady progression of intellectual blindness is when we track it through army admissions tests rather than college admissions scores and standardized reading tests, which inflate apparent proficiency by frequently changing the way the tests are scored.
Looking back, abundant data exist from states like Connecticut and Massachusetts to show that by 1840 the incidence of complex literacy in the United States was between 93 and 100 percent wherever such a thing mattered. According to the Connecticut census of 1840, only one citizen out of every 579 was illiterate and you probably don’t want to know, not really, what people in those days considered literate; it’s too embarrassing. Popular novels of the period give a clue: Last of the Mohicans, published in 1826, sold so well that a contemporary equivalent would have to move 10 million copies to match it. If you pick up an uncut version you find yourself in a dense thicket of philosophy, history, culture, manners, politics, geography, analysis of human motives and actions, all conveyed in data-rich periodic sentences so formidable only a determined and well-educated reader can handle it nowadays.
Tag: Philosophy
Quote of the Day – John Taylor Gatto (Pt. 9)
In 1973, Catherine Barrett, president of the National Education Association, said, “Dramatic changes in the way we raise our children are indicated, particularly in terms of schooling…we will be agents of change.” By 1989, a senior director of the Mid-Continent Regional Educational Laboratory told the fifty governors of American states that year assembled to discuss government schooling. “What we’re into is total restructuring of society.” It doesn’t get much plainer than that. There is no record of a single governor objecting.Two years later Gerald Bracey, a leading professional promoter of government schooling, wrote in his annual report to clients: “We must continue to produce an uneducated social class.” Overproduction was the bogey of industrialists in 1900; a century later underproduction made possible by dumbed-down schooling had still to keep that disease in check.
And from A Nation at Risk (1983):
If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves.
Quote of the Day – John Taylor Gatto (Pt. 3)
Another excerpt from The Underground History of American Education:
By standards of the time, America was utopia already. No grinding poverty, no dangerous national enemies, no indigenous tradition beyond a general spirit of exuberant optimism, a belief the land had been touched by destiny, a conviction Americans could accomplish anything. John Jay wrote to Jefferson in 1787, “The enterprise of our country is inconceivable”—inconceivable, that is, to the British, Germans, and French, who were accustomed to keeping the common population on a leash. Our colonial government was the creation of the Crown, of course, but soon a fantastic idea began to circulate, a belief that people might create or destroy governments at their will.
The empty slate of the new republic made it vulnerable to advanced utopian thinking. While in England and Germany, temptation was great to develop and use Oriental social machinery to bend mass population into an instrument of elite will, in America there was no hereditary order or traditional direction. We were a nation awash in literate, self-reliant men and women, the vast majority with an independent livelihood or ambitions toward getting one. Americans were inventors and technicians without precedent, entrepreneurs unlocked from traditional controls, dreamers, confidence men, flim-flam artists. There never was a social stew quite like it.
The practical difficulties these circumstances posed to utopian governing would have been insuperable except for one seemingly strange source of enthusiasm for such an endeavor in the business community. That puzzle can be solved by considering how the promise of democracy was a frightening terra incognita to men of substance. To look to men like Sam Adams or Tom Paine as directors of the future was like looking down the barrel of a loaded gun, at least to people of means. So the men who had begun the Revolution were eased out by the men who ended it.
Quote of the Day – John Taylor Gatto (Pt. 2)
From his Underground History of American Education:
The official use of common schooling was invented by Plato; after him the idea languished, its single torchbearer the Church. Educational offerings from the Church were intended for, though not completely limited to, those young whose parentage qualified them as a potential Guardian class. You would hardly know this from reading any standard histories of Western schooling intended for the clientele of teacher colleges.Intense development of the Platonic ideal of comprehensive social control through schooling suddenly reappeared two-thousand years later in eighteenth-century France at the hands of a philosophical cultus known to history as philosophes, enthusiastic promoters of the bizarre idea of mass forced schooling. Most prominent among them, a self-willed man named Jean Jacques Rousseau. To add piquancy to Rousseau’s thought, you need to know that when they were born, he chose to give away his own five offspring to strangers at birth. If any man captures the essence of enlightenment transformation, it is Rousseau.
The Enlightenment “project” was conceived as a series of stages, each further leveling mankind, collectivizing ordinary humanity into a colonial organism like a volvox.
—
The ideal of a leveling Oriental pedagogy expressed through government schooling was promoted by Jacobin orators of the French National Convention in the early 1790s, the commencement years of our own republic. The notion of forced schooling was irresistible to French radicals, an enthusiasm whose foundation had been laid in preceding centuries by utopian writers like Harrington (Oceania), More (Utopia), Bacon (New Atlantis), Campanella (City of the Sun), and in other speculative fantasy embracing the fate of children. Cultivating a collective social organism was considered the ingredient missing from feudal society, an ingredient which would allow the West the harmony and stability of the East.
Utopian schooling (was) never about learning in the traditional sense; it’s about the transformation of human nature.
(My emphasis.)
Quote of the Day – John Taylor Gatto
From his Underground History of American Education, which I will be quoting from for the next several days, I think:
The word pedagogue is Latin for a specialzed class of slave assigned to walk a student to the schoomaster. Over time the slave was given additional duties, his role was enlarged to that of drill master, a procedure memorialized in Varro’s instituit pedagogus, docet magister: in my rusty altar-boy Latin, The Master creates instruction, the slave pounds it in. A key to modern schooling is this: free men were never pedagogues. And yet we often refer to the science of modern schooling as pedagogy. The unenlightened parent who innocently brings matters of concern to the pedagogue, whether that poor soul is called schoolteacher, principal, or superintendent, is usually beginning a game of frustration which will end in no fundamental change. A case of barking up the wrong tree in a dark wood where the right tree is far away and obscure.
Pedagogy is social technology for winning attention and cooperation (or obedience) while strings are attached to the mind and placed in the hands of an unseen master. This may be done holistically, with smiles, music, and light-duty simulations of intellection, or it can be done harshly with rigorous drills and competitive tests. The quality of self-doubt aimed for in either case is similar.
Pedagogy is a useful concept to help us unthread some of the mysteries of modern schooling. That it is increasingly vital to the social order is evinced by the quiet teacher-pay revolution that has occurred since the 1960’s. As with police work (to which pedagogy bears important similarities), school pay has become relatively good, its hours of labor short, its job security first rate. Contrast this with the golden years of one-room schooling where pay was subsistence only and teachers were compelled to board around to keep body and soul together. Yet there was no shortage then of applicants and many sons of prominent Americans began their adult lives as schoolteachers.
With the relative opulence of today, it would be simple to fill teaching slots with accomplished men and women if that were a goal. A little adjustment in what are rationally indefensible licensing requirements would make talented people, many performance-tested adults in their fifties and sixties, available to teach. That there is not such fluid access is a good sign the purpose of schooling is more than it appears. The year-in, year-out consistency of mediocre teacher candidates demonstrates clearly that the school institution actively seeks, nurtures, hires, and promotes the caliber of personnel it needs.
And I quote this as the brother of a woman who has been teaching in the public education sector since 1980. Her work hours are not short, and her pay is not exhorbitant, but the same cannot be said of many of her coworkers or administrators. Nor, I would add, would this have been true of the author prior to his resignation from the NYC public school system, exceptions proving the rule.
Once a Month Until the Election
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ-4gnNz0vc?rel=0]
Quote of the Day – Your Teacher Said WHAT?! Edition
Last one from this book:
Progressivism may be hysterical, but it isn’t in retreat; it’s on the attack. And it retains a powerful set of channels for communicating its philosophy, including television, newspapers, and the Internet.
Oh, and the schools.
Toward the end of the 2010 school year, and therefore the writing of this book, Blake brought home a writing project for her fifth-grade class entitled “Understanding Environmental Concerns.” Here’s a sample.
Today you read about the environment and the importance of your country’s natural resources. Currently a conflict exists between people who want to reduce the amount of chemicals in the air in order to protect the environement, and those who say it hurts business if we limit the amount of emissions they release.
Now, if you’re going to load a question for a bunch of ten-year-olds, you couldn’t really do much better than this: The conflict is between people who want to protect the evnironment and those who want to help (or at least not hurt) business. Environment or business: Pick one.
But teachers aren’t pushing a Progressive agenda! Just ask ’em!
As one commenter here has noted, they don’t see it for the same reason fish don’t notice water – they’re swimming in it.
Quote of the Day – Ideological Purity Edition
From Robb:
The problem with Libertarianism is the same problem with Communism. Not everyone buys into your fantasy.
It’s…why Libertarians are powerless. Instead of trying to actually do something, they spend more time circle jerking in their purity tests than picking up their bowcasters and going door to door trying to explain their positions and heaven forbid – compromising where they can to move forward.
Quote of the Day – Progressive Edition
From Your Teacher Said WHAT?!:
The desire to regulate economic life might be the defining characteristic of Progressive philosophy. It combines a mistrust of the free market in allocating resources; an appeal to a vague and indefinable virtue (“fairness”); a desire to achieve perfection in economic outcomes; a deference to experts over the judgement of ordinary folks; and, best of all, a chance to tell other people what to do. Oh, heck, let’s just say it: Regulation is progressivism.
It is also the perfect way to illustrate just how much Progressive thinking depends on treating adults like kids.
From Chapter 10, June 2010: 99.985 Percent Pure: The Price of Regulation
Your Teacher Said WHAT?!
I recently received a copy of Joe and Blake Kernen’s book, Your Teacher Said WHAT?!: Trying to Raise a Fifth Grade Capitalist in Obama’s America. I’m about halfway through it. Joe Kernen is an anchor of MSNBC’s morning show Squawk Box. Blake is his young daughter – ten years old when this book was started. The impetus for it is explaned in the preface. An excerpt:
…a couple of years ago, I found the first truly worthwhile reason to rant about the economy. It wasn’t unfunded mandates, Medicare insolvency, CEO compensation, or the federal deficit.
It was one nine-year-old girl. And that same girl – by the time you read this she’ll be eleven, going on twenty – is the reason for this book.
She’s not what I rant about, of course. From the day Blake Alexandra Kernen was born, the day after Christmas in 1999, she’s done hardly anything worth complaining about.
—
By the time Blakes’s brother, Scott Joseph, showed up two years later, I was an old hand at worrying. In fact, by then I had found an entirely new and durable thing to worry about. Like any father, I worried about whether I would measure up – whether I would succeed in doing for Blake and Scott what my parents had done for me: giving them the values that reflected what their mother and I cherished most. We wanted our kids to believe in God, love their country, and respect the principles of hard work and fairness. We wanted them to value honesty, courage, and kindness, to be polite and respectful.
Simple, right? After all, these principles are widely shared in twenty-first-century America. Our church teaches us that we are obliged to care for people who can’t care for themselves; our schools reward hard work and demand respect. Kids learn good sportsmanship from playing tennis and soccer. The heroes of their favorite movies and television programs are generally pretty brave (though occasionally a little goofy; SpongeBob, anyone?).
With one exception. Penelope and I are capitalists – and not just because we’ve done pretty well out of the capitalist system. We believe that free-market capitalism is not only the most powerful engine for human prosperity ever but also history’s strongest force for freedom and human advancement. We beleive – no, we know – that economic freedom is as important as religioius freedom or freedom of speech. We believe that productive work, freely exchanged, is a virtue, just like charity freely given.
Please don’t misunderstand this. We’re not teaching Blake and Scott that their purpose in life is to get as rich as possible; it’s to make sure that everyone is as free as possible. For us, the only difference between defending economic freedom and defending religious freedom is that while the mainstream culture offers no real opposition to the many ways in which Americans worship, there is a powerful current of antagonism toward the way they do business.
Some of the attacks on free-market capitalism are overt: the idea, for example, that capitalism is unavoidably brutal, or at least immoral. Some are of the moren-in-sorrow-than-anger category, such as the notion that we should increase the benefits of the free market by taxing and regulating it into submission. Many are specific to the issues of the moment, like the idea that the best solution to the unsustainable growth of entitlements like Social Security and Medicare is to make them grow even faster (you can’t make up some of this stuff).
And that is something worth ranting about: not anything my kids do, but what is being done to them.
A little later:
…if you’re anything like me, I can guarantee that your jaw will drop the same way mind did once I started paying attention to the hostility to free-market capitalism that infects almost every movie and television show your kids are watching.
And later still:
One thing I learned is that the most powerful way in which nine- or ten-year-olds resemble grown-up Progressives is in their love of regulating things. There’s just no way Blake can see something that’s not good for you – like smoking cigarettes, or eating too much fast food – without wanting a law to ban it.
And from chapter 1:
“My teacher says the recession is the banks’ fault.”
“That’s way too simple, Blake. For something as big as this recession, there’s a lot of blame to go around.”
“And my teacher says it’s ’cause we care too much about buying stuff, and it might not be so bad if we stopped.”
“Your teacher said . . . what?“
So far, this is an excellent book for pretty much anybody, not just capitalist parents of young children – but especially for them. And especially if they’re the victims of our now anti-capitalist culture. But the previous excerpts aren’t the Quote-of-the-Day. This is, from Chapter 4, October 2009: Who made my shoelaces?:
Now, I know that Progressives aren’t all, or maybe even mostly, socialists, but that’s a little like saying that they only have a chronic head cold instead of tuberculosis. When it comes to the economy, Progressives have a reflexive distrust of the market, and for the same reason that Scott does: They believe that it’s just as sensible to trust an economic system designed and operated by no one as it is to be a passenger in a car without a driver. Progressives, who are reliably hostile to the idea of intelligent design in human evolution, are positively ecstatic about it in economic planning.
Of course, intelligent design in biology at least argues that the designer is divine and lives in heaven; in Progressive economics, it just assumes that the designer has a PhD and lives in Washington, D.C.