Clipping the wings of our youngsters

February 08, 2004

Scholar and fellow Marine Jesse Brown shares this apropos quote from Atlas Shrugged:

He thought of all the living species that train their young in the art of survival, the cats who teach their kittens to hunt, the birds who spend such strident effort on teaching their fledglings to fly - yet man, whose tool of survival is the mind, does not merely fail to teach a child to think, but devotes the child's education to the purpose of destroying his brain, of convincing him that thought is futile and evil, before he has started to think . . .

Men would shudder, he thought, if they saw a mother bird plucking the feathers from the wings of her young, then pushing him out of the nest to struggle for survival - yet that was what they did to their children.

Yes, mother bird is supposed to kick baby bird out of the nest, but not without the very things he'll need for survival, namely the ability to read and do math, plus a grounding in science and history.

The savage irony is that Progressive educators propose doing just that, for the good of baby bird. Who needs dry, boring feathers? We're going to teach you how to fly!

Yes, their hearts are in the right place, but with an entirely confused sense of history, lacking in the basics of cause-and-effect. It is absolutely impossible to celebrate process without content.

We fully agree with Progressive educators that we need to teach our children problem-solving skills, and that process is very important. We diverge both in remembering how it used to be done, and in knowledge in how it best can be done.

Say "remember" in the presence of Progressive educators and you'll be greeted with accusations of nostalgia. How hopelessly old-fashioned we Traditionalists are, longing for the good old days, days gone by which can never be reclaimed. Thus with a few glib words, Progressives seek to end the discussion.

They say that we live in a different world. We now have computers, cell phones, and spell-check. The Internet has brought a galaxy of knowledge to within a few mouse clicks. And what is their point? That we focus less on textbooks with their dry, boring facts, and focus more on process and problem-solving.

But who exactly has the faulty memory here?

In math, dry concepts such as times tables and long division and least common denominators are assailed as what's choking the creativity out of our young, and they say what we need is problem solving. Yet we've never seen a textbook that teaches any of these concepts without a healthy dose of problem solving.

What Progressives fail to realize is that problem solving is only one point to learning "dry" things like long division. The second point is that learning seemingly pointless mathematical procedures opens the door to ever more mathematical concepts.

Ultimately, the attempt to teach problem solving without a solid grounding in the "dry" foundations is doomed to fail. We have generations of students who will never reach Calculus by graduation, slamming doors on entire fields of study in higher education. (Pluck pluck.)

Similar missteps happen in Progressive approaches to the other academic subjects.

The Whole Language or Balanced Literacy approach to learning to read essentially says, yeah, phonics might be nice, but what is really great is Literature. Unfortunately, by giving short shrift to "dry" phonics, one hobbles the future reader of said great literature.

Some baby birds pick up phonics on their own, but many don't. Why pluck their wings of these valuable feathers?

With their faulty memories Progressives completely forget how early readers were taught to read using phonics, and nourished on a steady diet of literature, hand-in-hand beginning from the earliest grades! But any time Progressives hear references to McGuffey's Readers (which are still available), all they can muster is outrage at the offensive stereotypes and pervasive religious themes.

Yet they claim to have pioneered the use of literature in the early grades.

In mistakenly claiming open ended problem solving and the embracing of literature as being solely within the Progressive domain, they eliminate any need to study from history. The thinking goes, "Why bother paying attention to the way it used to be done, when we know it was wrong?" Thus they make a classic error, one that has been revisited for centuries:

Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Good luck, baby bird.