On The Myth of Neutral Schools
January 23, 2012
GREG J. writes in response to this entry:
The most insidious part of modern Dewey-ite education is its claim to being morally neutral. All education is moral; that is inevitable. By definition, when you instruct someone, you are claiming to do so from a position of moral authority. No matter what may be claimed by secular humanists in the NEA and the Department of Education, children do not sit down in a classroom, see their teacher, and think to themselves, “Well obviously this person is only doing her job. I’m just a customer, and she’s just a customer service representative. She’s simply presenting the curriculum, and it’s my role to decide whether I wish to purchase her product (ie believe her words) or to reject it. I’m free to do as I wish within the marketplace of ideas.”
In reality, not even college-age students do this, as is proven by the universal truth that the first Christmas break after a freshman’s fall semester is typically characterized by the student regaling his family with tales of the ingenious atheists he met in his courses. But children, the ‘conservative’ liberals tell us, are smart enough to resist malarkey when they come across it. This is the fantasy of radical individualism once again, and there is just one small problem with it as a picture of reality. It ignores the natural trust that children impute to the adults who care for them, while exaggerating a child’s capacity to think critically, and to truly assess the wisdom of what an authority figure is saying. The idea that young children, who typically spend far more time in the care and under the tutelage of their school teachers than they do with their parents, will resist the false parts of public schooling while imbibing only those parts which align with their families’ beliefs is absolutely absurd.
Now what the educrats have been saying, forever, is that it’s perfectly fine for the state to be in charge of many aspects of a child’s education, and that the state can administer education without inculcating children with any particular world view or bias. Once again, we will not examine whether the claim has been made in good faith or not, for we have no way of knowing the answer. But we can answer the question, “Is state education actually morally neutral?”; and of course the answer to that question is, “Hell no, absolutely not!” The moral character of modern American education is quite obvious from the new proposal for broadening sex education.
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