Education as Neurotoxin

More than a century ago, Maria Montessori reached a brilliant insight. Observing children at a mental institution, she wondered: "Suppose we created a sensuous, mentally-jazzed environment that constantly challenged, provoked and inspired these young minds?"

Montessori acted on her insight. She created a new kind of school for supposedly retarded children. Very quickly, her students were equal to "normal" children. She became the toast of Europe; as she deserved to be. Montessori´s vision has to inspire all true educators.

Unfortunately, American education, for a century, has followed exactly the opposite path from Montessori's. Our public schools are based on a model of intellectual minimalism.

The first question asked by John Dewey---and all agree that he is the Father of American Education---was this: how much content can we toss out the window? The second question was just as destructive: how can we teach school subjects so that all students remain more or less at the same stage? For Dewey the goal was never primarily an educational one, but a political and ideological one. He wanted cooperative children who work and play well together, who don't strive to get ahead, who are nearly interchangeable. Dewey hated the thought of an individualistic or superior child. He wanted to create cookie-cutter C-students who would welcome socialism. To do this, he and his followers devised what might be called the anti-Montessori classroom. The only positive stimulation was to come from group activities. Other than that, Dewey's classrooms, behind the contrived festiveness, were to be academically slow and stunted. The results would inevitably be numbing for many young minds.

None of this is subtle or arguable. If you confine children or animals to an intellectually sterile environment, day after day, these creatures will hardly develop at all. Indeed, they will probably devolve. A lot of energy will to be wasted on frustration, anger, resentment, and what might be called cognitive hunger. Children wouldn't have names for any of this. The children would merely shrivel inwardly and slowly wither. Education as neurotoxin.

Tragically, much of the genius of American Education has gone into devising dozens of methods that sound scientific or otherwise impressive; but in practice they don't work. That is, they don't work from the perspective of students and parents. They seem to work just fine from the perspective of the top educators at Teachers College. This perversity is so counterintuitive that you never stop being amazed by it. The facts, however, are clear. Consider the most egregious case of education gone bad. Whole Word was always sold to the public as "modern" whereas "dear old phonics" was dismissed as quaintly obsolete. Sounds good until we tally up the 50,000,000 functional illiterates and 1,000,000 dyslexics created by Whole Word. I would say that Whole Word is the purest example of education as neurotoxin.

Pause to consider the massive project required to create this bogus pedagogy, and then to enlist the parade of professors who would vouch for it, and finally to indoctrinate the tens of thousands of teachers who would be sent out to sell this non-starter to parents. Dewey's Gang was basically staging a slow-motion coup; it unfolds to this day.

Rudolph Flesch, in 1955, wrote something very haunting: "The word method is gradually destroying democracy in this country; it returns to the upper middle class the privileges that public education was supposed to distribute evenly among the people. The American Dream is, essentially, equal opportunity through free education for all. This dream is beginning to vanish in a country where the public schools are falling down on the job." (Perhaps younger readers need to be reminded: Rudolph Flesch was the extraordinarily smart and decent man who led the fight against Whole Word. Read him. I'm sure you will find that any page by Flesch contains more sense than whole books by the pretenders he had to fight against.)

John Dewey and his people hoped, in effect, to reverse the American Revolution. Our stated national goal was to provide universal education, to give ordinary people the scholastic blessings that had once been enjoyed only by the aristocracy. All of this was unfolding on schedule in the late 1800s. And then came Dewey. In the name of his ideology, he was willing to dumb down an entire country, to propagate neurotoxins falsely labeled as education. Discarding all of his dishonest ideas should be our first order of business.

For Dewey and his ilk the operative phrase was "social engineering." I would argue that the operative words should be "intellectual engineering." No matter whether kids are gifted or slow, they are best served by Montessori's insight that all children develop most quickly in a challenging, cognitively enriched environment. Dewey's disgraceful goal was to crush all children down to the same average size. Thanks for the neurotoxins, John. But enough already. What we need is education as neuroenhancer.

For more on Whole Word, see "42: Reading Resources" on Improve-Education.org.