Back to School with John Dewey and the School Board Marxists

The day I write this, August 11, is the day the cultural Marxists down at the local school board have decreed that all public school students under their control must go, in shopping mall vernacular, "back to school." This is the earliest anyone around here can remember that our children have had to resume classes following summer vacation. It is a date that effectively cheats them of a full six weeks of summer and plays havoc with the already beleaguered tourist industry in North Carolina, a state currently reeling from the beleaguerment of quite a few industries.

No one seems to like the early return except the school board Marxists themselves, but it is a curious quirk of our democratic system that such officials keep getting re-elected, regardless of how many unpopular decisions they make.

In their case, I suspect they are reaping one of the rewards of the system of education they have foisted on us over the past hundred years. The publicly educated citizens in their democratic utopia have the right to vote all right, but they lack the rational tools for deciding who, and who not, to vote for. Such a blind and stupid citizenry can be easily led to vote for more and more school bond issues and to surrender more and more control over their own children's lives because they themselves are a product of the whole rotten system. A corrupt socialist elite mis-spending a million dollars of taxpayers' money? To such electoral robots, the solution is easy: give 'em two million.Here in the South we were slow to adopt the idea of state-controlled education, opting instead through the colonial and antebellum periods for a system of tutors and private academies for the well-to-do, and small, community-run schools for the less well off.

(And, yes, the teaching of slaves to read and write was not widely regarded as a socially useful practice.) After the War, the South was invaded by armies of carpetbagging schoolmarms, and Reconstruction state governments set up public schools to inculcate the values of the victorious side. In spite of official histories of the War to the contrary, the Lost Cause grew in power throughout the rest of the 19th century, and by 1900, many of the racial ideas it had embodied had made their way into the American mainstream. (Witness, for example, the extraordinary success of D.W. Griffith's 1915 movie Birth of Nation.)

Then came another turning point. The early years of the 20th century saw a world-wide, communist movement that not only made enormous changes in politics, but also fueled revolutions in psychology, anthropology, and perhaps most especially, in the field of education. The granddaddy of all the school board Marxists, and one of the philosophers most responsible for the muddy logic of every generation born in the 20th century, was John Dewey. Dewey was another in a long series of New England Unitarian/Christian Socialists, which also included Daniel Ford, of the Ford Hall Forum, Edward Bellamy, author of the utopian novel Looking Backward, and his cousin, Francis Bellamy, author of the Pledge of Allegiance. In Dewey's case, he was not only a socialist but a doctrinaire communist as well. (He was, in fact, so important a member of the worldwide communist movement that in the 1930s he chaired the group?the "Dewey Commission" that met in Mexico to examine Stalin's charges of counter-revolutionary activities against Trotsky. The commission found Trotsky to be a faithful Red.)

Along with a cadre of followers and imitators, Dewey revolutionized, in every sense of the word, the educational system in the United States. The Deweyites oversaw the conversion of the old classical model, which had emphasized Greek, Latin, natural philosophy (physics), and literature, to the new, "progressive" one, which sought to turn every discipline into a pseudo-social science. Progressivism emphasized group learning as opposed to the individualism that had prevailed under the classical system. It favored content-less instruction, focussing on method divorced from information. Above all it promoted the school as the primary agent in the socialization of children. Distrusting parents as much as the NEA and the Federal Department of Education do today, the progressivists believed that if they could keep children away from home and in the classroom long enough and enough days per year, they could efficiently control the kind of adults the children would eventually become. And what they wanted those adults to be was an army of unthinking, absolutely equal automatons.

In many ways, the South was again their stumbling block. Legally enforced segregation prevented the racial leveling that Dewey had sought. One of the founders of the NAACP in 1913, Dewey had taught the only answer to the race problem was the complete submergence of the races within one another. His "democratization of education" was never made possible until the Brown Supreme Court decision of 1954, however. Although the case originated ironically in the abolitionist stronghold of Kansas, Brown was aimed squarely at the South. Before Brown, the separate but equal doctrine ensured that the racial leveling sought by Dewey could not take place. Separated from blacks, the majority of whites could be dragged down only so far. After Brown, when white and black were forced together at bayonet-point, the path was cleared for the Deweyite plan.

For awhile, however, even forced mixing did not quite achieve the desired goal. Whites and blacks separated once again within the schoolhouse walls, both socially and academically, as whites filled advanced and honors classes while blacks predominated in the basic sections. On their academic records and standardized tests, whites continued for decades to maintain a steady 15-percentage-point advantage over blacks, galling the school board Marxists and giving rise to countless local, state and federal programs, each one a failure. Try as they may, they could not close the gap from the bottom. For that reason, by and by the school board Marxists, along with their fellow travelers in the arts, sports, and entertainment industries, began a campaign to close the gap from the top. If Mohammed could not come to the mountain, the mountain would come down to Mohammed.

Thus began the across-the-board dumbing down phenomenon about which we have heard so much. In school system after school system across the country, words were replaced by gaily colored pictures, answers to math problems became correct if the student could show only that he tried, understanding was replaced by "affective" feelings, academic success gave way to self-esteem enhancement, and drug awareness programs, sensitivity training, drivers' education, community service, student fund-raising, and countless non-academic pursuits gradually reduced to 41% the percentage of the school day actually spent studying academics. This last figure is by far the lowest percentage in the developed world.

This wholesale dumbing down of our public schools, has been documented in a number of books, but few authorities have identified the primary cause of this bizarre campaign: enforced racial leveling.

It has taken almost a century but the final harvest from the seeds sown by John Dewey are now being reaped. He would be pleased.

Today, as I look out my window at the yellow school buses passing in the hot summer sun, sprinkling whites and blacks throughout the city in their eternal quest for society's perfect tan, the situation would seem a bleak one. Yet the democratization of education that Dewey sought has not been fully realized, even in the integrated, dumbed-down world of modern public education. Just as enterprising peasants on a collective farm will find a way to out-produce their indolent neighbors, so do some teachers and students find a way to rise above the brown mass into which they are thrown. The remarkable thing about intelligence is, it's more effective than stupidity. It is stupidity that the school board Marxists depend upon and seek to foster. While they have been largely successful in creating a bovine electorate with their mushy theories and muddled logic, theirs is a difficult and a continual challenge. They may fight to control the young people under their dominion even more months of the year, and even more hours of the day. Socialist Republicans like George Bush may throw billions of dollars their way to try to ensure that no child slips his leash and gets "left behind." But all that power and all that money can't change the fact that the school board Marxists are forced to deal in the currency of mediocrity. And when confronted with ability and intelligence, mediocrity withers and fades away.

So, here on August 11, the earliest "back to school" anyone around here can remember, I take heart in the thought that somewhere on one of those ubiquitous yellow school buses, there's a young anti-Dewey, watching and learning in spite of them all, who will someday grow up to smash their system. To quote the tagline to Mel Gibson's Mad Max, "Pray he's out there."