The year 2011 marks the 123rd year since the publication of Edward Bellamy’s famous utopian novel, Looking Backward, in which the author depicted a happy, socialist America in the year 2000. In Bellamy’s optimistic fantasy, greed and material want ceased to exist, brotherly harmony prevailed, the arts and sciences flourished, and an all-powerful and pervasive government and bureaucracy were efficient and fair.
Bellamy envisaged America becoming socialist by way of consensus rather than revolution. In turn, Dewey, who spent his professional life trying to transform Bellamy’s vision into American reality, saw education as the principle means by which this transformation could be achieved. He spent the years 1894 to 1904 at the University of Chicago in his Laboratory School seeking to devise a new curriculum for the public schools that would produce the kind of socialized youngsters who would bring about the new socialist millenium.
The result, of course, is the education we have today — a minimal interest in the development of intellectual, scientific, and literacy skills and a maximal effort to produce socialized, politically correct, individuals who can barely read.
Today, many years later, the University of Chicago stands as an island of academic tranquility in Chicago’s Southside, surrounded by a sea of social and urban devastation caused by the philosophical emanations from Dewey’s laboratory and other departments. Charles Judd, the university’s Wundtian professor of educational psychology, labored mightily to organize the radical reform of the public school curriculum to conform with Dewey’s socialist plan.
According to Dewey, the philosophical underpinning of capitalism is individualism sustained by an education that stressed the development of literacy skills. High literacy encourages intellectual independence which produces strong individualism. It was Dewey’s exhaustive analysis of individualism that led him to believe that the socialized individual could only be produced by first getting rid of the traditional emphasis on language and literacy in the primary grades and turning the children toward socialized activities and behavior.
Be sure to read the rest.
This knocks it out of the park. Thanks for posting it. Education/indoctrination, is one the most vital challenges that we face. There is no way around it.
The whole story explains what is happening today. It really is frightening.
Explains a lot, doesn’t it?
Yes it does.
It does indeed explain a lot. How we undo it is our challenge.
I agree it is going to be really tough undoing this.