My response to Bruce Deitrick Price’s American Thinker article, K-12: The Knowledge Killers, sent by William Brown of ECC (Education Consumers Clearinghouse) June 15, 2022 https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/06/k12_the_knowledge_killers.html
In his article, Bruce Deitrick Price says: “Locals nowadays don’t seem to care about the children in nearby schools being dumbed down”. He is so right! I wonder what it will take to notice the virtually morbid path this leads us on — both for students and society as a whole.
The worst misfortunes that befall us are those we inflict upon ourselves. What’s really maddening is that often we have early warnings, which we neglect at our peril.
Such is the state of education in our Western Democratic states. Increasingly, we are being warned that there is a general “dumbing down” of our people via the public-school systems — yet we neglect to pay heed. As the United States school achievement scores continue their slide, E D Hirsch quotes from the 1983 study — A Nation At Risk — “We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament”.
Here is but a short list of dumbing-down books and note that there are 100s of books dealing with the topic, but not necessarily in the title:
• Dumbing Us Down, John Taylor Gatto, 1992
• Dumbing Down Our Kids, Charles J Sykes, 1995
• The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, Charlotte Thompson Iserbyt, 1999
• The Feel-Good Curriculum: The Dumbing Down of America’s Kids in the Name of Self-Esteem, Maureen Stout, 2000
• Cheats, Choices & Dumbing Down, Jerry Jarvis, Gary Ward, 2012 (UK)
• Dumbing Down America, James R Delisle, 2014
• Dumbing Down, The Crisis of Quality and Equity in a Once-Great School System, and How to Reverse the Trend, Magnus Henrekson, Johan Wennstrom, 2022 (Sweden) *
(* This last book listed is an “open access” book, and can be ordered by mail or downloaded https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93429-3 It’s meant to be open for public discussion, though I have not seen any yet.)
Does anyone have any ideas? This last Swedish book recommends a turnaround from “constructivist” teaching to “instructivist” teaching. That word, “instructivist” is from E D Hirsch’s latest book, How to Educate a Citizen. To confuse our minds, unfortunately, the Swedish book produces a great 3-page chart to show the difference between the two styles, but keeps using the long-winded term for the second style — “An alternative paradigm based on the classical view of knowledge” — not helpful. I like reading the book, but would like someone to distill the book to a form that people can discuss. The book describes the Swedish procrustean, legislatively imposed, authoritarian egalitarianism versus the same intent via the progressive stealth approach of the last 50 years in other Western nations.