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their product for some time now.
Pure wrongheadedness was to blame.
American schools were doing their part of a hard job pretty well until the 1960s. In 1953, when I was six, a teacher put me through hell’s own maw for hitting a little girl with a bucket. In 1962, they suspended me for three days for letting a lab mate copy my work.
Neither would happen today in most schools. I’d probably be referred for counseling and enjoined to ponder aloud the real purposes of buckets.
But ill winds were blowing by then, and the academy, the source of a lot of contemporary wind, was huff-ing and puffing.
Education departments were in heat, marching in synch with the avant garde of the New Age. The educationists’ particular task in the coming of Consciousness III was the creation of a new psychology to mold the New Man. What they gave us was “humanistic education” and “values clarification.”
Those ideas swept the field, and the biggest generation of educators in American history took them in like stupid boys at the fair.
At the murky center of those theories was the ideologically derived certainty that it was wrong, and hence ineffective, to impose anything on anybody, especially the discredited values of a hopelessly materialistic society on defenseless children.
Yet the humanists and valueclarifiers still esteemed virtue, virtue free of hypocrisy and heartfelt, and they still believed that the schools had a vital role in teaching them. That role was to lead the child to virtue through critical thinking.
Verities were there to be questioned and tested, and what was good and true would shake out. By
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