ARE WE SHEEP?
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We must compare our
students' basic
knowledge
with students
from the past.
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Thomas SowellHave we become a nation of
sheep?
Chicago is the latest and largest public school system
to impose compulsory "volunteer" work on its students as a
requirement for graduation. If the parents stand for this in
Chicago, you can expect it to spread all across the
country.
There is even less reason to put up with such
heavy-handedness from education bureaucrats in Chicago than in most
other places, because the school system there is under the control
of an elected mayor. If the voters get up in arms, this half-baked
power play will have to go. But if the public can be soothed or
deflected with pretty words like "community service," you can expect
"educators" to push their intrusions into students' lives even
further.
Most of the children in the Chicago schools cannot
read at the national average. Yet the bureaucrats want them out
serving soup to bums or handing out leaflets for the Sierra
Club.
What is happening in the Chicago schools is not limited
to Chicago or even to the "community service" craze. It is part of a
much larger and much older hidden agenda that goes back at least as
far as John Dewey.
Professor Dewey, the godfather of
"progressive" education, said it all, 70 years ago: "The great task
of the school," he said "is to counteract and transform" the beliefs
and values that the child brings from "the home and the
Church."
That is what the educational trends of the past two
generations have been all about, whether the specifics were called
"values clarification," "community service," "outcome-based
education" or a thousand other pretty names. Once you look behind
these glittering labels to the specific things that are said and
done, the agenda becomes clear: Undermining the values and beliefs
that parents have taught their children and replacing them with
politically correct notions from the
counter-culture.
"Community service" is not about the
community or about service. It is about using children for
ideological agendas and using those agendas to insinuate the
welfare-state view of the world on impressionable young
minds.
This is not about educating children. It is about
using children as cannon fodder in ideological battles and as guinea
pigs for experiments. Children are also being used by the schools as
entering wedges through which to invade the family itself and
insinuate and impose the agenda of the anointed on the
unwary.
Intruding into family privacy is the first step
toward intruding into the family itself. Most parents have no idea
how much personal family information is being collected from school
children and fed into computer networks.
These networks can
integrate medical, psychological, academic and social information
from numerous sources to create an electronic dossier on each
individual child -- a dossier that can follow that child on through
school and out into the adult world. Assurances about the
confidentiality of such information are absolutely meaningless.
Even when the forms filled out by children or their families
have no name on them, the forms themselves are pre-coded with
identifying numbers that tell a computer whose form it is.
Assurances that this information will never be given to any
"unauthorized" individuals or organizations likewise mean nothing,
because anyone they give it to will be called "authorized." It is
one of the signs of our dumbed-down education that we are so easily
taken in by people who play with words.
The most fundamental
objection to the manipulation and indoctrination of children is not
to what educators want children to be used for. Children are not
being sent to school to be used for anything. The school is supposed
to be used to educate them. Above all, the so-called educators
should never forget whose children these are.
Parents who
want to debate the merits or demerits of various programs using
their children as guinea pigs in the schools miss the point
entirely. The real question is: "Whose children are
these?"
Who takes the consequences if the latest fads in the
schools turn out to be wrong?
It is children and their
parents -- not the glib and smug talkers. Decisions should be made
by those who pay the price when things go wrong, not by those
looking for "exciting" things to do, instead of teaching.
To
find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other
Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators
Syndicate web page at http://www.creators.com/.
COPYRIGHT
1998 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
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