First, that the deficiencies of twentieth and twenty-first century public schooling are organic, growing systematically from premises instilled by colleges and universities, and especially by the schools of education located within them.
Second, that the damage done and being done is sometimes done deliberately and consciously, and sometimes done unawares.
Whatever Smith might have meant by “pragmatic-instrumentalist-experimentalist” principles of education, it is clear that they fail to recognize the centrality of content and curriculum, and they privilege non-cognitive activities, such as “social-emotional learning” and the “affective domain.” The reader will note the quotation marks in the preceding sentence: ever-changing and ever more convoluted jargon is one of the primary products of educational administration.
In specific instances, such jargon is ambiguous, when it serves, not the needs of students, but rather the purposes of administrators and social engineers.
Well-intentioned university students, who become teachers and educational administrators, are the victims of institutions which feed them only carefully selected ideological presentations. Thus many employees of public schools are the unwitting instruments of subversive intentions:
Learning, in the traditional sense of disciplined knowledge, is rapidly declining in our public schools, not through fortuitous circumstances but by deliberate, and almost invariably well-intentioned, design of those responsible for setting the direction of public education.
The educational complex is good at defending itself. Part of this defense is an ad hominem deflection of attention to those who would point out the deficiencies and malignancies of governmental educational institutions. A series of straw men is put forth, designed to cause the public to dismiss any criticisms as the products of unfit minds:
Mortimer Smith continues:
The hierarchy which has set up the controlling doctrines of public education in this country has a tendency, as its monopoly is threatened, to lump all critics of schools together indiscriminately as reactionaries, penny-pinchers, members of pressure groups, possibly fascists, certainly cranks.
To point out that the average public school in the United States wastes money and time, and that it by design directs students away from content and curriculum, is an intellectual exercise which can be judged on the basis of evidence. Instead, the educational establishment choses to attack the characters of those making the analyses, rather than to examine the analyses themselves.
Intense personal invective is directed at those who reveal how public education has failed both cultural life and the national economy. The intensity of these belittling aspersions results from the fact that those defending the current educational trends lack rational argumentation for their views.
