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Today: Not Education but Social Engineering

This Rock Volume 19, Number 1   January 2008     Reasons for Hope By Cherie Peacock   Letters   True Education Liberates By Rollin A. Lasseter   How We Got Where We Are   Inaccuracy is Lying   The Connection between Education and Prayer   Today: Not Education but Social Engineering   The Sin of Sloth: What the Couch Potato and the Workaholic Have in Common By Leon Suprenant   Further Reading   Former Anglican Clergymen Bolster British Catholicism By Joanna Bogle   Who Worships in the UK?   Loaves and Fishes: Fashionable Priests and the "Miracle of Sharing" By Steve Ray   Read the Different Accounts of the Miracle   What is a Miracle?   What Did the Fathers of the Church Teach?   Damascus Road Episcopal Clergyman Discovers True Home By Chris Findley   By the Book Latter-Day Saints and the "Great Apostasy." By Tim Staples   Eyes to See Ugly as Sin By Michael Schrauzer   Truth be Told The Popess Who Just Won’t Go Away By Robert P. Lockwood   Quick Questions   Last Writes By Karl Keating    Subscribe    Permissions

Educationists today distinguish five major approaches to curriculum presently accepted in American schools. The first, called by the educationists "academic rationalism," (they shy away from using the term liberal arts), includes all those curricula that we would call liberal arts curricula, emphasizing the learning and mastery of a set body of knowledge and skills derived from the past, a love for the good and the true, and the character formation necessary to accomplish that mastery.

The other four comprise cognitive process development, instruction as a technology, social reconstruction, and self-actua1ization. These new approaches, the dominant notions in today’s public and parochial schools, keep the appearance of the subjects and sequences of the reformed liberal arts system of our past, but they are not the same. They change the emphasis in such way that they change the end result and the purpose of the enterprise, sometimes beyond recognition.

These approaches shift the emphasis from the achievement of skills for the sake of pursuit of the truth to the formation of this or that sort of character considered useful at the moment for this or that faddish conception of utopia. The new approaches are, in other words, forms of social engineering, not of intellectual and spiritual formation. Their concern is not acquiring skills and knowledge, or self-control, but formation (or deformation) of the pupil’s personality and character to some model preconceived and pre-constructed by the authorities. They are methods not of education, but of imposition of the teacher’s will on the student. I do not think I misread their nature or their intent.

Regrettably, they are more immediately gratifying to many teachers, offering what appear to be measurable results (to a steady dumbing-down of expectations), and a kind of emotional reward, an intimacy of spirit with students that the older demand for mastery, with its unfortunate necessity of drill and other drudgery, could not hope to bestow.