12/5/21

My reactions to this book upon reading it in 1990.

Mitchell's prose is vitrolic, logical, angry, sarcastic, witty, and -- most dangerous of all for his foes -- often very funny.

Mitchell tracks the decay of modern education -- mostly secondary and elementary but he also shows the rot has reached college -- starting with the overenthusiastic, oversimplified, and overly optimistic application of behavioralist psychology as propounded by nineteenth century Austrian Wilhem Max Wundt. Mitchell correctly points out Wundt believed all emotions, attitudes, ideas could be measured and predicted. The American educationists who took Wundt's views to heart did not realize this dream had not been realized. It is from this nonsense that we get surveys that purport to assign exact numerical values to a person's existentialism and self-awareness. The National Education Associations's pernicious 1918 document Cardinal Principles furthered the rot.

The path of educationists since is a lot like modern liberalism. Its professed goals (things like Health, Worthy Homemembership, Vocation, Civics, Worthy Use of Leisure) sound good and everyone agrees are good. The trouble lies with the precise definition of those terms, how the goals are to be achieved, and who should be in charge of achieving them. Like liberals, educationists are obsessed with the group dominating the individual, emotion over reason, excusing individual failures by teachers and students, damning individual achievement as "elitism". This book explains a lot of what I've seen in edcation as student and as friend of those taking education classes. The educationist perpetuate their behaviorist-based myth that a teacher, armed with a plethora of an education classes, can teach anything without being armed with "mere knowledge".

The book explains why educationists are all too willing to embrace things like "cultural awareness" classes. They are interested in social conditioning and it's less work than teaching real subjects. And, no matter how much they complain, they're all to delighted to accept new roles like lunch provider, sex educator, drug counselor. Mitchell's prose is interesting in that, just as you think he's overstated his case; overblown the situation that educationists can't really be more interested in social engineering and instilling class harmony and civil obediance than teaching "mere knowledge" and "traditional" subjects; that educationists don't really think writing can be taught as a emotional form of communication apart from its mere "aspects" of organization, spelling, punctuation; that they don't really engage in intellectual bashing and blame scientists and technicians and learning for the world's ills; that they don't really think civics should "concern itself less with constitutional questions and remote governmental functions;, that they do mean just that by quoting their own writings.

At best their work is boring -- all the faults of nominalizations and passive verbs -- and, at it's worst, sloppy in technique and logic, pernicious in thought and implication. Mitchell performs a ruthless analysis of educationists' writings. He reveals illogical, pernicious implications, and bad analgoies in their writings.

Mitchell's view of education is somewhat unique. He wants a value-free education. He views educationists' preoccupation with teaching values and attitudes as little more than thought control and social engineering.

Mitchell wants no values, right or left, taught in schools. Practically, he says, your success at doing so couldn't be quantified. Morally it smacks -- is -- mind control of a sorts. Mitchell wants "mere knowledge" and reasoning taught in a wide variety of areas, mainly through reading and writing. I found his remarks on textbooks -- the banal work of committees -- and books -- the work of an individual mind, illuminating. Textbooks with their approved, diluted knowledge and apropriate attitudes are accepted. A renegade teacher can get in trouble for having his students read a real book. The ability to acquire and adequately reason with knowledge (as well as just have "the mere knowledge") is Mitchell's broad definition of literacy. He ridicules the minimum concept of literacy embraced by schools today. He sees the skills as merely basic, a starting point, and easily taught. Mitchell rightly points out that it is in the educational establishment's best interest -- with the underpinning of rampant behavioralism -- to see all sorts of "learning disorders" everywhere. The fault lies not, they say, with an incompetent teacher but a somewhow dysfunctinal student.

Mitchell's literate person can arive at their own values given the facts -- which they have, or know how to get, and can reason with. They are not dupes for the approved values of government or any other group. As Mitchell points out, the value of having stupid, thoughtless (and many of the thoughtless can read, write, and cipher as so many of the thoughtless can) people is obvious in a democracy. These people can make marks on a ballot.

Mitchell's final chapter is despairing. He sees little hope of reform, and I definitely agree with him that any reforms will never come from the educationists who blather on about the obvious in obscure terms so as to hide their basic worthlessness. The only potential revolutionists are the teachers, the most powerless in the educational establishment. And, as Mitchell says, if the public and parents who suffer from the educationists' crimes don't care, why should the teachers? The rot spreads. ( )

a "must read" ... to be aware of a danger is to arm yourself. But more important to educate your children so that they can judge for themselves.