Digging Deeper For The Sake of Texas Children
By Cathy Wells & Ms. Mac (Jeanine McGregor)
Texas Insider Report: AUSTIN, Texas – Got a shovel? During the September SBOE meeting, a pro-CSCOPE lackey credited Dr. Jim Barufaldi, a UT professor, for the “invaluable” 5E formula wrapped around CSCOPE lessons. 5E is defined as: Engage, 
Explore, Explain, Extend/Elaborate, Evaluate. Sounds good, but …
Let’s Up the Ante. Have you witnessed the best Texas teachers? They:
- Capture their students’ attention;
- Connect for deeper understanding;
- Clarify words, items, steps when needed;
- Challenge students to reach higher;
- Communicate the need for common-sense;
- Champion individual merit;
- Commit to common courtesy for all;
- Collaborate, first, with the student and parent;
- Condemn ignorance;
- Confirm truth, sources and accuracy;
- Congeal ill-defined goals;
- Conquer red-tape;
- Contact experts;
- Captivate listeners;
- Counterbalance disrespect;
- Crave learning as an example for others;
- Crown each student’s improvement and drive;
- Coach the hesitant;
- Curb inefficiency;
- Cycle reinforcement;
Contribute true American & Texas values;- Cultivate the best opportunities;
- Correct when needed; and
- Continue digging!
That’s 24 C’s and counting!
Our digging reveals that behind Prof. Barufaldi, who is also known for his collectivistic classroom approach, stands the progressive behaviorist, John Dewey, the first “E” promoter. The following article by Cathy Wells reveals how deep the CSCOPE roots go!
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Dewey Back from the Grave?
By Cathy Wells
Texas Insider Report: AUSTIN, Texas – Since the inception of our nation, there has been a push to use public education to indoctrinate our children with socialist ideals. From Robert Owen, the father of socialism, to the current CSCOPE and Common Core standards, socialist philosophy is front and center in the pedagogical world.
John Dewey, a secular humanist and leftist who is rightly called “The Father of Modern Education,” was no different. Dewey’s philosophies and ideas, like those before him, were grounded in behavioral psychology and a break from traditional values in education. Dewey wrote the following in his 1898 essay, “The Primary Education Fetish:”
“There is… a false education god whose idolaters are legion, and whose cult influences the entire educational system. This is language study…it is almost an unquestioned assumption…that the first three years of a child’s school life shall be mainly taken up with learning to read and write his own language…the great importance attaching to literature seems to me a perversion.”
Clearly, Dewey took issue with the traditional “ 3 Rs” instruction model. Similarly, Dewey had a disdain for the typical role of the teacher in a classroom. Dewey saw the teacher not as an older and wiser person from whom a student could glean wisdom but as a facilitator and guide.
Sound familiar? It should. Because what we are now seeing in the educational realm, particularly in CSCOPE and Common Core, is merely a regurgitation of ideas that are over 100 years old.
It is also interesting to note Dewey’s ideas about the purpose of education. Any of us who purport to educate a child ought to ask ourselves, after all, what it is we hope to achieve. Here are Dewey’s thoughts, taken from “My Pedagogic Creed:”
“The school is primarily a social institution. Education being a social process, the school is simply that form of community life in which all those agencies are concentrated that will be most effective in bringing the child to share in the inherited resources of the race, and to use his own powers for social ends.”
I personally cannot think of a better example of socialism finding a comfortable home in education.
In terms of economic philosophy, Dewey was extremely left-leaning. He headed up several leftist, socialist organizations and clubs and had a definite focus on the child as a function of a larger social unit. The focus that we see today in CSCOPE and Common Core on socialist philosophy and thought is no accident. It has been quietly fomenting for a century.
As William Brooks notes in his article Was Dewey a Marxist?,
“Dewey asserted that in the school “individualism and socialism are at one” and it was “especially necessary to take the broader view” over the narrow and acquisitive course. Like Marx, Dewey informed his readers that inevitable changes were forthcoming in the
“modes of industry and commerce” and, again like Marx, Dewey was convinced that his predictions were based on scientific laws generated through the methods of dialectical materialism.
Indeed, in one of his later works, Dewey was very forthright in declaring that “we are in for some kind of socialism, call it whatever name we please, and no matter what it will be called when it is realized, economic determinism is now a fact not a theory.”
In the light of his convictions, Dewey sought to conceive a new philosophy of education. Dewey’s school would be intricately connected with the unfolding of materialist history or as Dewey put it “part and parcel of the whole social evolution.”
Another aspect of Dewey’s background that greatly influenced his educational strategies and, thus, ours today, was his close association with behavioral psychology.
Dewey had been mentored by G. Stanley Hall who in turn had studied the burgeoning new field of behavioral psychology in Leipzig, Germany, the birthplace and nucleus of behavioral psychological theory and research and home of Wilhelm Wundt, the father of behavioral psychology.
What is behavioral psychology and what has it to do with education? Paolo Lionni notes the following in his book The Leipzig Connection, about Wundt’s views on “education:”
“…the individual will learn to respond to any given stimulus, with the “correct” response. The child is not, for example, thought capable of volitional control over his actions, or of deciding whether he will act or not act in a certain way; his actions are thought to be preconditioned and beyond his control, he is a stimulus- response mechanism.
“According to this thinking, he is his reactions. Wundt’s thesis laid the philosophical basis for:
- the principles of conditioning later developed by Pavlov (who studied physiology in Leipzig in 1884, five years after Wundt had inaugurated his laboratory there)
- American behavioral psychologists such as Watson and Skinner;
- for laboratories and electroconvulsive therapy;
- for schools oriented more toward socialization of the child than toward the development of intellect;
- and for the emergence of a society more and more blatantly devoted to the gratification of sensory desire at the expense of responsibility and achievement.”
Lionni notes that Dewey, as a true behavioral psychologist, “believed that learning occurred only through experience, that the stimulus-response mechanism was basic to learning, and that teachers were not instructors, but designers of learning experiences.”
Dewey adherence to the principles of behavioral psychology greatly influenced his views on the purpose of school. As Charlotte Iserbyt notes in her excellent book, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America,
“Dewey’s recommendation was indeed radical: build the curriculum not around academic subjects but around occupational activities which provided maximum opportunities for peer interaction and socialization. Since the beginning of Western civilization, the school curriculum was centered around the development of academic skills, the intellectual faculties, and high literacy.
Dewey wanted to change all of that. Why? Because high literacy produced that abominable form of independent intelligence which was basically, as Dewey believed, anti-social.”
In short, Dewey’s behavioral psychology background not only influenced schools of his day but stretches forth to the present, causing students to be looked at not as autonomous human beings but as malleable cogs in a greater societal wheel.
Finally, we will examine Dewey’s views on faith, God and man. In 1897 in My Pedagogic Creed, Dewey wrote,
“The teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usher of the true kingdom of God.”
Despite his strict religious upbringing, Dewey had, like many philosophers of his day, abandoned his belief in a deity. In fact, Dewey co-authored the Humanist Manifesto I which stated, in part,
“The basis of humanist belief is that there is no Almighty God, the Creator and Sustainer of life. Humanists believe that man is his own god. They believe that moral values are relative, devised according to the needs of particular people, and that ethics are likewise situational.”
As we lament the lack of ethical instruction or emphasis in today’s schools, the moral relativism and secular humanism, we can look backward at the “father” of our educational system and give a nod to his influence.
Lest we think that Dewey is simply a dead philosopher whose ideas don’t matter, it is important to note that commentators confess that his ideas have figured most prominently in American education for the last century. No other ideologue has had as much influence as Dewey. And while the philosophies might be renamed or repackaged, they remain static.
There is now, and has been for a long time, a move to creating “global citizens,” “social thinkers,” and “teacher guides.” Common Core and CSCOPE are merely the culmination of a century of honing an idea that rejects traditionalism and faith and tries to implement instead a progressive notion of man as God and the state as a family.
Cathy Wells (right) is a NorthTexas wife, mother, educational historian, private tutor & school instructor, freelance writer and Constitutionalist.
SERIES EDITOR Jeanine McGregor (left,) known to most in the Texas Education Debate as ”Ms. Mac”, is an Award-Winning Teacher, an educational researcher, and an author-publisher as CEO of Character of American Productions. She is also producer of Ms. Mac’s Schoolhouse, and the innovative “Ms. Mac TV” Program.
