Over 100 years ago, the Progressive Movement decided that the nation's school curriculum emphasized history, the Founders, and the Constitution too much. Made the proletariat all feisty & such.
So they deliberately dumbed it down, started teaching case law instead of Constitutional law, and so forth. The proles won't know to protest, if they don't know what the law says the elitists can/can't do.
The problem is that the nation's schoolchildren included the kids of the elitists. Now the bobbleheads in Congress are just as ignorant as the voters they're supposed to represent. And now the voters are starting to wise up, studying the Constitution, the Founders, and such.
The elected elite continues look down from their personal & self-appointed Mt. Olympus, disdaining the protests of the electorate. Ignorance may be pandemic, but stupidity is a personal choice.
1 comment:
I think there's a lot to this.
I remember my father talking a lot about an undergraduate education in the liberal arts being first and foremost to "teach you how to think."
It wasn't until years later when I finally sat down with the Trivium of old-school Liberal Arts and read about classwork in rhetoric and formal logic that I realized that at one time what he'd been telling me had actually been true.
The late 19th/early 20th century educators I think scrapped that Classical system with the best of intentions - they saw the great leaps in the physical sciences of the last century, and were sure they could turn the lens of (big-S) Science to the social spheres as well. Why keep looking backward to how the long-dead did things, when logic and intentionally planned development could pave a better road?
By the just post-WWII period, I think the system was still more or less functional, surviving on the managerial logic of the first progressive generation and the vapors of discipline left over from aging faculty educated in the Classical model.
By the time *I* was in college though, the Liberal Arts had pretty much decayed into utter mush.
We still had the letters on the wall, the "learn to think" mantra was still repeated - there was then still even some social cred attached. But in retrospect, I think my BA itself was a hollowed-out shell.
Lord is there a lot to re-learn.
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