"Kittie and Mousie, Lesson IX," McGuffey's Second Reader 1879
"It is we, not the Victorians, who are weakly sentimental when it comes to educating children," writes Michael Knox Beran in the Winter issue of City Journal, tracing the growth of public education theory and practice in America from its sturdy Emersonian roots in the nineteenth century to its mushy Deweyesque fruits today.
Dewey read Emerson superficially and overlooked entirely the heart of Emerson’s idea of self-reliance, the belief that the self can achieve its fullest development only through immersion in nature, poetry, and biography. Spontaneous play may indeed be essential to learning; but more important is the hard study that prepares young people for the intricate art of thinking.
The notion that if you feel good about yourself you will be able to achieve something worthwhile, though it contains a grain of truth, puts the cart before the horse. The soundest foundation of self-esteem is genuine achievement, and numerous studies have shown no measurable benefit from the self-esteem movement in the schools. Even so, under the banner of self-esteem, schools have dumbed down their curricula, ended gifted-and-talented programs, stopped tracking kids, emphasized Dewey-style group projects and groupthink rather than individual achievement, and done away with valedictorians—because rewarding success might make some kids feel bad.
Prophetically, Emerson advised “Don’t trust children with edge tools. Don’t trust man, great God, with more power than he has, until he has learned to use that little better. What a hell we should make of the world if we could do what we would!”
[via Arts & Letters Daily]
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