Not My Boy, Not My School

Although he makes no reference to this song in the article, I can't help but think of Rev. Dr. Steven Hein's "The Intent and Effect of American Progressive Education" in A Handbook for Classical Lutheran Education.

His essay opens:

Very few of us today are aware of the history of education in America.  It is commonly thought that whatever innovations have come over the centuries and decades, they have been conceived and implemented with the goal of improving pedagogy to enable the learner to learn more and and to learn more efficiently.... with the goal of improving education for all our children - that is, to make our children better educated.  Unfortunately, this is not, and has never been, the case with compulsory, government-administered progressive American education whose beginnings can be traced to the middle 1800s in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia."

And it continues in this provocative and well-documented fashion, with a devastating look at how America went from being almost 100% literate to being pitiful in the area of reading - and this was not a failure, but rather a success, of the architects of progressive education.

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