John Dewey, Father of Modern Education.

When it comes to discussions of John Dewey and his effect on American education, my eyes tend to glaze over. Education isn't an issue that has interested me much in this life, apart from my own efforts to spread the good word on Islam and the dangers of abandoning limited government to the occasional girlfriend, hitchhiker, or visitor to this blog. Very occasional in the case of the latter. Hi, Mom!

A friend just sent me a link to Frank Miele's article below that is the best thing I've ever read about "progressive" American education and Dewey's role.

Be that as it may, it's blindingly obvious that American kids and adults, alike, have zero understanding of their heritage, consider political freedom as just the natural order of things, and believe that a Zulu will, magically, have attitudes, values, and capabilities that ensure the viability of the United States as much as someone from Gascony, Ipswich, or St. Petersburg. Actually, Zulus would be a distinct improvement over a great many of our present crop of resident Africans whose thinking is deeply and terminally infected with the most amazing notions of revenge, separatism, privilege, and "you owe us" bullshit. Did I mention their "but for the legacy of slavery we'd be fantastic" views?

Zulus looking pretty good.

To all of the aforementioned Americans (excepting Zulu-Americans) "never-ending peace and prosperity" are our birthright and nothing about America is exceptional. The cloying celebration of "American exceptionalism" day in and day out that seems appeal to them is worse than useless and lends itself to the belief that there is something about us that's exceptional.

Maybe not so much.

Adherence to the laws and principles of this constitutional republic (as originally conceived)? Now that does make one exceptional as that bespeaks an intellectual grasp of America's place in history and an admirable decision to support and defend the doctrines and attitudes that make Old America the exceptional place that is was. It also bespeaks a capable intellect and sound character in that it employs the technique of comparative analysis in which an imperfect-but-on-balance-admirable society is compared to murderous dung heaps like Stalin's Russia, Mao's China, and Pol Pot's Cambodia not to the disadvantage of the former.

Not that liberals, socialists, and progressives/communists will ever do that but that's a whole 'nother story.

If America increasingly looks like a country with the vitality and bright future of a magnificent race horse that's just broken its leg, it could be because one of the putatitve leading lights of "modern" American education had this clear idea of what he was working for:

“We agree,” Dewey once said, “that we are uncertain as to where we are going and where we want to go, and why we are doing what we do.”^[1]

Presumably, it was clear that the Crusades, the Inquisition, colonialism, slavery, and double-entry bookkeeping marked the whole Western enterprise -- America in particular -- as corrupt. Perhaps these necessitated the embrace of happy talk and group study hall in place of Newtonian physics, constitutional government, free markets, and a vision of man as dangerously and unquestionably ungod-like. The replacement vision, however, wasn't clear at all. QED.

Maybe it was even poisonous.

Notes
^[1] "The past is prologue; the future is bleak." By Frank Miele, Daily Inter Lake, 6/25/11.