Unholy Alliance Wrecks American Education

You can hardly imagine two people more different than John Dewey and John D. Rockefeller. But these two guys, and their assembled forces, joined in an unholy alliance that is still devastating American schools.

John Dewey, now considered our greatest educator, was a brainiac, a socialist, a nerd. In his pictures, he looks like a man who never played sports, understands nothing about business or finance, and doesn’t have a penny in the bank.

John D. Rockefeller, on the other hand, was one of the world’s greatest businessmen, and one of history’s most successful capitalists. He had $1 billion in the bank, at least.

What could they possibly have in common? It’s not at all obvious, is it? That’s why this is such an interesting and unexpected story.

John Dewey wanted a socialist America. Accordingly, he needed to engineer a more cooperative child. The dirty word for John Dewey was individualism. Heaven for John Dewey was a room full of nearly identical children, all thinking similar thoughts and smiling obediently at their teacher.

John D. Rockefeller, much like Henry Ford, Pierre DuPont, Andrew Carnegie and all the other tycoons and industrialists, needed two things: a stable society and eager, manageable workers.

Now you start to see where the two visions intersected. If a single word must be chosen, that word would be compliant. Neither man had any use for nonconformists or independent types of whatever kind. John Dewey and John Rockefeller wanted people who would do as they were told.

And so, about a century ago, the desires of these two very different men coalesced into a nearly irresistible force with a unified goal: the creation of public schools that would produce adults who were good workers and good socialists. This force operated in complete secrecy. There were never any votes, elections, authorizations of public funds, or discussions in public. John Rockefeller, eager to improve his public image, funneled vast amounts of money into education. John Dewey used a lot of that money to build Teachers College into a vast degree-granting machine. Dewey and his colleagues created the courses, the techniques, the all-encompassing orthodoxy that fulfilled the mutual dreams of Dewey and Rockefeller. Teachers College turned out a progressive, radicalized teacher. Hordes of them were sent out to the small towns of America to transform the children there into obedient workers and docile citizens.

Note that all of these forces, and all these results, were fully in play by 1910. Then, to make matters worse, along came the Russian Revolution and the Third International, circa 1922, which resulted in this country having to contend with a plague of meddlers trying to undermine the society. Then, to make matters even worse, along came the Great Depression, circa 1932, which convinced all of our socialist educators that capitalism was doomed, and now it was time to go for broke: Socialism Today. Even as World War II was fought and won, all of the forces set in motion by Dewey and Rockefeller were fully institutionalized by mid-20th-century. That is, we were stuck with a vast Educational Establishment whose primary concerns were not educational, as that term is usually understood, but ideological.

In many ways this Establishment was anti-American and in some degree an alien presence. That is why the Nation at Risk report of 1983 could conclude that our public schools were so bad that they could seem to have been designed by a hostile foreign power!

But let’s suppose you know none of this history, and you merely look at the practices and proposals of this Educational Establishment. I submit that you would be able to deduce all that I have said, because every proposal has a bizarre and counterintuitive common denominator: it doesn’t work. If an idea is supposed to help X, you can be sure that the test scores for X will decline!

Our educators, so-called, came up with Look-Say in 1930s. (This gimmick is also known as Whole Word, Sight Words and Dolch Words.) We now have 50 million functional illiterates because of this bogus pedagogy. You see the same pattern across the board. New Math and Reform Math don’t teach much math. Self-Esteem doesn’t raise self-esteem. Constructivism keeps children from constructing very much at all in the way of knowledge. Critical Thinking does not create critical thinkers. And so it goes. You can tell that our eucators are playing two games: a public one that honors education, and a secret one that works to make sure people aren’t too well educated.

The unholy dreams of Rockefeller and Dewey are with us still. I say “unholy” because both men conspired to limit the capacity of individual people to achieve all that they possibly could.

Bottom line: Perhaps the most striking feature of our Educational Establishment, now a century in the making, is that it is impervious to change. Personally, I’m not optimistic that bigger budgets or more ingenious policy recommendations will help American education. I suggest we devote more effort to dismantling all the bad ideas in the public schools; then perhaps good ideas can thrive. For an example of demolishing a bad idea, please see “36: The Assault On Math” and other articles on Improve-Education.org.