As we have seen in Part I, education in North America at all levels was an indisputably Christian enterprise from the arrival of the Pilgrims in 1620 to the early part of the 20th century. The Bible and other books reflecting a biblical worldview were the foundation of American education, that is, the original common core curriculum. In Part II, we will describe the destruction of the original biblically-based common core curriculum by the humanistic progressive education philosophies of John Dewey and others.
The churches were the principal founders of the first colleges and universities in the American colonies and whose purpose was for the training of pastors. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, colleges and universities expanded their academic portfolios, and the cultural ties between the Church and higher education gradually weakened. However, the weakening ties generated little cultural controversy because the explicitly Christian and generally conservative ends of education were understood by the great majority of Americans. Nevertheless, as the end of the nineteenth century approached, “…the breach separating the universities and the churches widened suddenly and culminated in the extraordinarily rapid and dramatic ‘disestablishment’ of conservative Protestantism from North American academic life from about 1890 to 1930.” [Gay, pp. 204-205.]
John Dewey’s admirers called him the greatest American philosopher and the philosopher of American democracy. His views and teachings during his exceptionally long career would influence many facets of American life—art, knowledge, education, morals, politics, science, and religion—and publication of his writings spanned seventy years. The breadth of change during Dewey’s lifetime is astounding. Dewey was a grocer’s son born in Burlington, Vermont, on October 20, 1859, while James Buchanan was president, a year and a half before Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration. With remembrances of the Civil War, he would live to see two world wars and the atomic age by the time of his death in 1952, just five years before Sputnik would herald the beginning of the space age.
Dewey’s progressive educational agenda was framed by child-centeredness and psychology. Children were taught that an understanding of morality flowed from reason based on experience and that there was no one morality good for all societies. Reason through science became the determinant of what was good for society and replaced character education as modeled by Judeo-Christian morality. In other words, the standards of the new morality flowed from the dictates of science and reason. In Dewey’s philosophy, there is no absolute, no transcendent being, no room for supernatural religion, and nothing beyond the possibilities of concrete human experience. Value and meaning in life exist in humanity and flow from individual and collective self-realization through civilization.
Psychology, published by Dewey in 1896, was the first American textbook on the “revised” subject of education. It became the most widely read, quoted, and used textbook in American schools of education. Beginning with his twenty-five-year affiliation with Columbia University’s Teachers’ College, Dewey’s “…writings shaped the 20th Century U.S. curriculum…” [Iserbyt, pp. 5-6, 345.] His ideas on education would extensively permeate American education, and the devastating results are still being felt today.
One measure of John Dewey’s impact on American education can be judged by the level of criticism that was provoked by his teachings. In March 1959, President Eisenhower severely condemned Dewey’s philosophy: “Educators, parents, and students must be continuously stirred up by the defects in our education system. They must be induced to abandon the educational path that, rather blindly, they have been following as a result of John Dewey’s teachings.” [Hook, p. 3.] For an individual deceased for seven years to have his work and philosophy receive the stinging rebuke of a sitting president, that individual’s influence on American life, for good or ill, must be viewed as substantial.
Richard Weaver succinctly and superbly describes the disastrous consequences of progressive education’s revolt against the traditional idea of education.
Knowledge, which has been the traditional reason for instituting schools, does not exist in any absolute or binding sense. The mind, which has always been regarded as the distinguishing possession of the human race, is now viewed as a tyrant which has been denying the rights of the body as a whole. It is to be “democratized” or reduced to an equality with the rest. Discipline, that great shaper of mind and body, is to be discarded because it carries elements of fear and compulsion. The student is to be prepared not to save his soul, or to inherit the wisdom and usages of past civilizations, or even to get ahead in life, but to become a member of a utopia resting on a false view of both nature and man. (emphasis added)
For almost one hundred years, a major conflict has grown between the dominant American culture including the beliefs and values upon which the nation was founded and the ascendant progressive theory of education and its proponents. This conflict arose because of a systematic and successful attempt by a radical minority of educators and their allies to undermine through the educational system American society’s traditions and beliefs. Of all American institutions under assault, the subversion of American culture through the humanistic educational establishment’s progressive movement represents the greatest single threat to the central cultural vision upon which the nation was founded.
Larry G. Johnson
Sources:
Larry G. Johnson, Ye shall be as gods – Humanism and Christianity – The Battle for Supremacy in the American Cultural Vision, (Owasso, Oklahoma: Anvil House Publishers, 2011), pp. 21-22, 24-25, 289, 291, 304.
Craig M. Gay, The way of the (modern) world, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1998), pp. 204-205.
Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, the deliberate dumbing down of america, (Ravenna, Ohio: Conscience Press, 1999), pp. 5-6, 345.
Sidney Hook, John Dewey – His Philosophy of Education and Its Critics, (New York: Tamiment Institute, 1959), p. 3.
Richard M. Weaver, Visions of Order, (Wilmington, Delaware: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1964), p. 117.
