What If Education Was Redefined Before It Was Reformed

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This transcript was supplied by Homeschool Now and cleaned for readability. Spoken phrasing and the episode’s qualifications have been preserved.

What if the biggest change in American education happened long before anyone ever changed the curriculum? Parents usually enter the education debate at the level of textbooks, standards, and things like that. You’ll hear people say things like, what is this doing in my child’s curriculum? What is this? We’re upset and distraught much of the time. Those questions, of course, matter, but they come after a more basic question has been asked and established. What is education actually for? And that is the question underneath this investigation. And it’s kind of what we’re going to be talking about today, because in episode one, we looked at measurable learning decline. And what changed before that decline. And if you were able to catch an episode, then you’re going to be well positioned for today’s one layer deeper question.

Before methods changed, before standards changed, before testing systems expanded, were there some influential educators who changed the definition of education itself? So, as you guys know, we’ve been studying The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America by Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, and she believes the answer to this is an emphatic yes. In her book, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, she assembled a chronological paper trail arguing that American education gradually moved away from its primary academic model toward a system increasingly concerned with things like experience, behavior, attitudes, social outcomes. And that raises a basic question: what business does a school have shaping a child’s attitudes, dispositions, and social outlook? Isn’t the institution supposed to be focused on academics? We’re going to start with John Dewey. Go back to 1897. He wrote a title called My Pedagogic Creed.

In it, Dewey wrote that the school was primarily a social institution and that education is, in his words, “a process of living and not a preparation for future living”. Now, he also described education as participation in social consciousness and argued that, the school could influence ethical and social development. And on that point, he is right: schools can influence social development. We can see that around us every day. That does not necessarily mean that Dewey rejected knowledge. If you, read his writings, you can tell that he wanted children to connect knowledge to lived experience.

But the purpose of schooling in his framework was clearly bigger, broader than transmitting just academic content. The school was a social environment, in his opinion, with a role in forming the child for participation in society. And, and this is really powerful because once education is understood as “formation”, the next question becomes unavoidable so formation toward what? And I would even say, who determines what that formation output would look like? From there, the discussion becomes more scientific. In 1906, psychologist Edward Thorndike entered this story. You will hear his name often, along with Skinner and Dewey, because they come up repeatedly in Iserbyt’s book, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America.

So you’ll hear those names a lot. But Thorndike in particular, he described teaching in stimulus and response terms in the Principles of Teaching. There’s a book called The Principles of Teaching Based on Psychology. He wrote that the teacher’s aim was to produce desirable and prevent undesirable changes by controlling the stimuli that could be brought to bear upon the pupil. Now, there is a reasonable reading of this. Teachers obviously arrange environments. They choose books, they ask questions, they give feedback, they structure practice and things like that. Scientific study potentially can make teaching better. That’s the hopeful goal.

But when you have a philosophical shift, we’re no longer asking, what truth should this child know? We’re now asking, what conditions will produce the response we want? Those are different. What conditions will produce the response we want? And who is “we”? Now, we already have some names, but then who’s, in my opinion, who is giving them all of these, directions? Who decided what the ultimate picture of society should look like? Was that a consensus? Did everyone agree to it? At what point did you ask people what it is that they want their society to look like? Or has it been engineered over roughly the last 100 years while going largely unnoticed by most people? You will see the behaviorist tradition associated with B. F. Skinner. He argued that learning could be improved by carefully arranging contingencies of reinforcement.

His work on programmed instruction treated teaching as something of a design of conditions that made desired behaviors more likely. For these guys, a lot of this is simply experimentation. It’s just science. One of Skinner’s academic peers was Fred S. Keller. He’ll come up from time to time. But Keller did not merely discuss this in theory; he built an instructional system around behavior. In his 1968 paper, it’s called “Good-Bye, Teacher…”, Keller described a model in which pacing, mastery testing, feedback, and reinforcement were deliberately arranged. He believed this was better teaching. As we just saw, a learning environment can be intentionally designed to make some responses more likely than others. Think about that. That makes our question even more important. If the environment is designed, who defines the desired outcome? It really does sort of go back to that.

Who is making these calls without being elected to represent the people? Now, consider someone like Benjamin Bloom. He’s another character who will come up a lot, especially if you’re following this series from start to finish or if you just come in every now and then, you will hear his name. Benjamin Bloom, David Krathwohl, and Bertram Masia helped formalize educational objectives. They involve not only cognition, but attitudes, interests, values, things like commitments and internalization. The affective taxonomy moved through categories such as receiving, responding, valuing, organizing, and characterization. Is this, by itself, proof of ideological manipulation? No. Families form values. Churches form values. Communities form values. And schools inevitably form values, too.

But what we’re trying to determine is, are those values aligned with the kind of person you want your child to become and the society he will help shape as an adult? And we still cannot get around this question: Who has the authority to make all these calls on behalf of the next generation? And by the way, this has been happening, like I said before, for a long time, so it’s not something that’s new. There is also Howard Kirschenbaum. He gives us a useful human bridge. He became a prominent leader in the values clarification movement, and later he taught the approach to some graduate counseling students at the University of Rochester. In his own retrospective account, he described techniques designed to help young people reflect on what they prize, considering alternatives, making choices, affirming values, and things like that.

Kirschenbaum’s stated goal was not to impose a predetermined ideology. That was his stated goal—not to impose an ideology, but to help people clarify their own values. But even that more sympathetic, formulation might leave a Christian parent with a serious question. When should an institution enter a child’s valuing process? And again, where should the authority of the family begin and end? And you’ll see this a lot. I cover many examples of parents being gradually pushed out of decisions affecting their children in the classroom. We see disputes over gender identity, pronouns, and whether parental consent is required. More and more parents are being sidelined.

So ideas do not change institutions by themselves. People have to introduce these ideas. They have to persuade people and manage resistance. Speaking of resistance, In 1973, Ronald Havelock wrote a book, The Change Agent’s Guide to Innovation in Education. I should say he wrote a guide to innovation in education. In it, he openly described change agents: someone has to persuade, influence, manage resistance, and stabilize an innovation for it to be implemented. The phrase actually does sound conspiratorial, but it was not hidden terminology. It was professional change management language.

So while the phrase “change agent” can sound conspiratorial, in this context it was professional change-management terminology. Decades later, educator Lynn Turner used the same phrase about her own career. Turner served as a principal, a district accountability director, and a state-level consultant. In a public oral history interview, she recalled that after leading a successful Title I school, her superintendent asked her to take over a school under No Child Left Behind sanctions to be, in her words, a “change agent”. Now, her testimony is especially helpful because it is nuanced. She describes benchmark testing, data analysis, and all the test preparation that came with the system. She also says some accountability practices actually strengthened her curriculum. In other words, managed educational change can have positive results.

But the question is simpler. Who chose to change and what outcome was the institution being reorganized to produce? And that’s the question that will just never go away. By the 1990s, another purpose was explicit in federal policy. And this is something we’ll talk a lot about as well, and that is workforce preparation. The Goals 2000: Educate America Act promoted a national framework for education reform and a voluntary national system of skills standards and certifications. There’s also the School-to-Work Opportunities Act. You might have heard of some of these things. It created a national framework connecting schools, employers, workplace learning, skill development, and career pathways. All those sound nice. And there’s nothing wrong with preparing youth for meaningful work, because children are going to become adults eventually and they’re going to need skills, and work is good.

God gave Adam work to do. So we’re not opposed to work. The more important question is whether workforce preparation is one legitimate purpose of education or whether it becomes an organizing purpose powerful enough to reshape everything around it. And by that I literally mean, is workforce preparation dictating to all of your child’s curriculum and educational metrics what it is he should be learning so that he could be a good worker, a good employee? That is exactly where Iserbyt’s larger interpretation becomes provocative. She argued that these developments were not isolated reforms but part of a longer transition: from academic education, to values or behavioral formation, and then to workforce training. The documentary record strongly supports a narrower conclusion and that is that the purposes of American education were intentionally expanded by identifiable thinkers, researchers, policymakers and institutions.

Social development, measurable behavior, planned change, accountability, and workforce readiness were not accidental topics. They were openly discussed and in many cases deliberately designed. Now, the evidence does not establish by itself that every reformer shared necessarily a coordinated plan to reduce children’s intellectual capability by moving focus away from academics and toward workforce preparation. However, everything has been seemingly aligned to produce the results we see today in our school system. And that’s the point that we’re making today. Award-winning principal Carol Burris offers a useful closing example. Burris originally supported the No Child Left Behind movement. She believed testing would reveal opportunity gaps and lead to better support for children. She genuinely thought she was doing the right thing.

But after administering a school under the system, she publicly reversed her position and acknowledged that colleagues who had warned her were right. Her story does not prove Iserbyt’s entire thesis necessarily, but it demonstrates something more modest and perhaps probably more important, that is that an educational goal can sound reasonable. Initially, No Child Left Behind sounded like something everyone should get behind. But it can possibly grow so powerful that school itself has to be reorganized around it. So where does that leave parents? Not with the simplistic conclusion that experience, measurement, values, or work preparation are automatically bad. Any of them can be used badly, and any of them can also serve legitimate purposes. Values will be taught and outcomes will be measured in some form. If a child spends most of the day in an institution, that child is going to receive messages about what is right and wrong, what to accept and reject.

Morals, values, experiences, and peer influences will all shape the child. And then, unfortunately, some children go home to more shaping influences through television, movies, video games, music, and other media. There’s no way around that. However, the question is shaped into what? And how much should the school system be a part of that? Intentional institutional shaping is different from ordinary peer influence. With peers, we understand that the loudest children may receive the most attention and therefore become influential. And because they get the most attention, they’re probably going to be the most influential and are probably going to affect my daughter or my son. Granted, it happens all the time. It even happens among adults in some cases.

But the question still remains. Why are schools intentionally designed to teach values and shape a child’s moral beliefs? At what point is this appropriate? And again, what is education primarily for? Because if every institution forms a child, what kind of person is being formed? If schools measure outcomes, which outcomes deserve the most weight? Are we caring about ethics, moral values, integrity, and contribution to society? The things that, of course, they will never measure things by the way God measures. God is looking at the fruit of the spirit. That’s, in his opinion, the fruit that he’s looking for. That’s what he cares most about.

But does society, and more importantly, the school system, which is actually the one shaping society as we speak, if education prepares workers, does it still cultivate the knowledge, judgment, memory, language, and all these things that. that children need in order to become free and capable adults? So for Christian parents, formation is not optional. The real question is, who is forming the child and by what authority? And here’s the real thing, toward what end? And that may be the most important lesson in this entire paper trail. Because before you evaluate a curriculum, you have to understand the definition of education underneath it. Once the purpose changes, everything downstream can change with it.

Thanks so much for listening to today’s podcast. I hope that this gets you to thinking a little bit about what’s happening in the schools and what they’re intentionally designed to shift, modify, change, alter, teach, instruct, and what role you can play in making sure that your child is as protected as they can be. Especially if your child is in that system. If your child is not, you have more freedom to shape that formation yourself. But even for those parents who still have their child in the system, how can I counter some of this? When the child comes Home, maybe put the, just tell them, hey, the video game is going to have to wait. I need to spend time developing your moral character because the school is as. Every day your child is there, competing influences can work against the moral formation you are trying to build at home.

And as we continue this podcast, we’re going to learn and look at some real-life examples of these things. You see examples in the news: children being told what to believe, what to do, or how to act. And they come home and they say something to you like, no, all my friends are doing this. But how is it that your teacher is also encouraging this behavior and supporting it and even potentially shaming you if you don’t? That, that’s not okay. But it’s what they are doing to shape the next generation, because whoever they are, they want it to look a certain way. Parents should make sure that the institution’s vision for the adult their child is becoming aligns with their own convictions. That would be an important accomplishment. And if you don’t agree with it, if you don’t appreciate it, then just pull your child out.

You can homeschool them or put them in an institution that you do trust, where values and beliefs and principles and skills are being molded after a direction that you better align with. And you can say, I don’t mind you guys teaching this, this, this, but maybe I don’t want my child introduced to sex education at five. As a parent, I would not. Parents have the right to determine what they do and do not want their child learning at different stages. And if they’re forcing it on you anyways, because that’s typically the case, you also reserve the right to make changes in your, in your child’s educational path. Thank you so much for listening to today’s podcast. This has been Homeschool Now with Nita. Until next week, God bless.