The establishment thereby shames the public into blindly accepting the verdict that anyone who criticizes the governmental educational system is a crackpot.
To be sure, there are quite a few intelligent people of goodwill who work as teachers and administrators in the system. But the system itself is bent. Some knowingly foster this warped establishment. Others innocently but unwittingly empower it.
Yet it remains clear that knowledge — both the sense of “knowing that” and in the sense of “knowing how” — both information and skills — is increasingly rare in ordinary public schools.
Instead of defending itself, the bureaucracy attacks anyone who questions contemporary public schooling as those who “believe the little red schoolhouse represents the peak of educational achievement,” in the words of Mortimer Smith, who catalogs the labels thrown at those who voice skepticism about the educational establishment.
He notes that, in order to promote the current system, the previous versions of American education must be attacked. Today’s social engineers can defend the indefensible only by offering a distorted, or entirely fabricated, narrative about the past. If the current product is bad, then they simply baselessly allege that the previous product was worse.
Slandering the school of the past, activist educational bureaucrats describe “a prison presided over by steely-eyed matrons equipped with birch rods.” This is, according to Smith, “the picture educators present of American schools before the current enlightenment.”
The critics of twenty-first century public schools do not “feel that they way” they were “taught in the fourth grade involved pedagogical technique in its perfection.” There is no naive nostalgia for older forms of education, but rather a forward looking realism about the consequences of current education.
Those pointing out the flaws in today’s schools “do not habitually sneer at the mention of progressive education,” even if they “feel that its philosophical foundations are built on quicksand.” Those who desire the introduction of more rigor, and less social analysis, into public education do not deny that progressive education “has made undoubted contributions in method to all education.” The knee-jerk reactions are on the side of those defending contemporary educational trends, not on the side of those questioning them.
Mortimer Smith notes that merely because one identifies the flaws in today’s schools does not mean that one wishes “to revive the classical trivium for American high schools,” but rather is quite willing “to admit that physics and four years of Latin may not be the ideal curriculum for” all young people.
The pattern of events reveals that those who promote certain contemporary trends within established public educational institutions, when questioned or criticized, respond only by creating irrational caricatures of those who express any skepticism about the institutions. Meaningful defenses and rational argumentation are not forthcoming from the establishment.
In sum, the system responds to criticism by bullying those who criticize and sneering at their criticisms.
