How Education Became Indoctrination

Once education included free will and the spiritual nature of man. An individual, taught how to think rationally, could make rational choices.

(Transcript for How Education Became Indoctrination available below.)

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Transcript:

Here we go. Learning never exhausts the mind. -Leonardo da Vinci

Hello again. Ed Thompson here, and I hope this podcast finds you doing well. This is Buried Lede #22, entitled, How Education Became Indoctrination.

Once upon a time America taught its young people by following proven, time-tested methods that had worked beautifully in education for centuries. These were not American inventions. They were used for millennia all around the world. They included the basic three Rs — reading, writing and arithmetic. Languages and history, especially of one’s own country and culture, were added. Science and arts rounded things out. Trades were taught early for those so inclined, and apprenticeships enabled nearly anyone to acquire the functional skills that would translate easily into a productive job for life. These were the time-honored educational traditions that had brought Western civilization forward through the Golden Age of Greece, Pax Romana, the European Renaissance in art and the humanities, and the Age of Enlightenment that brought forth a major scientific revolution and the liberal ideas that formed the basis for modern free societies. Bottom line, these techniques worked.

So the question has to be, what went wrong?

To find out what we start with when. When did American education begin to change? Many people might think this is only a recent development. After all it’s easy to look back at our own youth and think fondly that it was different then. You know, the good old days. It was good back then, etc. But was it?

I’m afraid that the slippery slope of decline in American education began much earlier. It’s a little like the frog and the boiling water story. Public education has declined slowly over many decades while we weren’t paying attention. Students being required to learn less and less don’t notice what’s being lost. How could they? They look around and see everyone else at about the same level. It’s all about normalization and the dumbing of America. To give you an idea how far things have fallen, there was a time when a degree in classic literature required studying in both Greek and Latin. Today Princeton University offers their highest literature degree without a word of either. Yale’s English majors can now graduate without even reading Shakespeare. That would be the equivalent of getting a degree in classical music by only listening to rap music. For some specific comparisons, Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence at age 34 and Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in 1818. Read it sometime. It’s a short book that will give you an eye-opening experience of the vocabulary level of the early 1800’s, especially knowing that she was only 18 years old when she wrote it. The educational difference between then and now is embarrassing.

Granted, most citizens then were not as highly educated or well-read as Thomas Jefferson or Mary Shelley, but they did learn their basics very well. The liberal education of yesteryear, and I use the word liberal as it truly applied in yesteryear — maximum civil liberties for rational citizens, representative governments with limited power, open and free markets — resulted in an American and French revolution that unleashed an entrepreneurial spirit that still drives our civilization forward today.

Unfortunately, there were other revolutionary forces at work as well. During the 1800’s, Germany was becoming a major intellectual center of the world. You had Hegel developing new theories of philosophy at the University of Berlin. Marx and Engels writing on society and government. Karl Marx developed his theories of class warfare, communism and an ideology of materialism. Marx took a hard turn away from spirit and religion. According to him, man and all life was nothing more than what he called matter in motion. Pavlov, the Russian famous for his experiments with salivating dogs, spent years studying in Leipzig. Germany was the place to be.

A lesser known but equally important doctor took up residency at the University of Leipzig. Wilhelm Wundt would change the direction of psychology forever. Wundt, like Marx, was a materialist. Psychology prior to Wundt was, as its name suggests, the study of the soul and mind. Wundt would change all that by redefining psychology as a physiological subject rather than a philosophical one. Another hard turn away from spirit and religion.

Marxism and Wundtian psychology became a marriage of convenience that appealed to the totalitarian minded. Both ideas invalidated the human spirit. Both denied free will, God and natural rights. Both could justify a lot of bad deeds. After all, man was nothing more than an animal to be trained and controlled. And so it went. Together these philosophies led to a devastating death and destruction wrought by the Nazis in Germany, the Soviet regime in Russia and the Maoist regime in China that cost many millions of innocent lives.

However, the so-called free world did not escape the damage these ideas caused. Previously the concept of education included the idea of free will and the spiritual nature of man. An individual, taught HOW to think rationally, HOW to read and speak and compute, and then presented sufficient data could himself make rational choices that would further his own and others’ survival. He would be an educated citizen. Common sense could prevail.

That changed after Wundt. According to Wundt, man was nothing more than a programmable beast, thought was nothing but the chemical firing of neurons, and education merely the proper stimulation of nerve endings. These were the ideas that led to the psychiatric horrors like electric shock and lobotomies that disabled and killed too many defenseless victims. And it was the students of Wundt who brought these same ideas to American education. Men like G. Stanley Hall, Edward Lee Thorndike, and John Dewey, who was considered the father of American education, to name just a few. In the decades leading into the 20th century, these men and others infiltrated the top universities like Johns Hopkins, Harvard, the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, bringing in this new psychology. But nowhere was the impact felt more than through what became the Columbia University Teachers College in New York. There the disciples of Wundt established experimental psychology and merged it with education, which is how it stands today. A great number of teachers went forth to implement this new social conditioning form of teaching. It is the reason why public schools don’t teach, but they do indoctrinate. What else would you do with a stimulus-response creature like man?

Later on behavioral psychologists like B. F. Skinner invalidated the very existence of free will and dictated that behavioral conditioning was the only path to good behavior and a decent society. More recently critical race theory was spawned from the bowels of Marxism and injected into schools and society, turning groups against each other and pushing our culture toward a 1984 dystopia. And right there is the real divide between freedom and tyranny, between self-determinism and state-dictated behavior, between free thought and cowed compliance.

I have no doubt that you can see in which camp those in charge of our schools currently reside. That is why there is such a heavy push for indoctrination in schools, as well as a push to censor voices in the general society. Think about it. If you didn’t believe man was a spiritual being, or had free will or that a person had the ability to choose rational action, and if you believed man was nothing more than a reactive animal or worse that he was just a bunch of matter in motion, atoms and molecules bumping into each other, as Marx and Wundt believed, you might be inclined to demand complete control of everyone else around you. With that in mind, perhaps you can better understand why otherwise decent people might call for indoctrination and government control of education and society in general. They have been duped, they are afraid and they have lost their way.

The current scene is not good, but remember that it is darkest before the dawn. We can turn the ship around. But in order to do so, we must first identify the real enemies and confront them head on.