Education Reform: The Hegelian Principle In Education Part 2

Education reform has been billed as grassroots, local in flavor. It is neither. Nor is it anything new as shown by the 1973 United Nations documents. At the bureaucratic level, the agenda is being forced on the states and school districts. While federal, state, and local officials have touted Goals 2000 as being "voluntary," HR 6, the reauthorization of the ESEA (renamed the IASA — the Improving America's Schools Act), and the funding mechanism for Goals 2000, states very specifically that any state or school district which takes federal funds will conform to Goals 2000 as condition of receipt of money. Goals 2000 just became mandatory. But at the local level, as repeatedly stressed in the Community Action Toolkit, public participation and ownership of the reform process is vital to the evolution to Oneness of Mind. If people do not accept ownership, if people become educated about education reform, then wholesale rebellion will result, and the socialist agenda of Goals 2000 will not come to pass, nor will the quiet revolution. We need only look to Pasco, Washington, to see how far reform advocates are willing to go to implement their agenda — to see the corruption, coercion and deceit that surround education reform. Too many school districts sport similar stories.

In final analogy, what we are talking about, in discussing education reform, is not Sputnik, seat time, clock time, and the Taylorian education system; we are talking about a change in philosophy — from the Traditional paradigm built upon and conducive to the tenets upon which this country was founded, to the Progressive paradigm — the collaborative, cooperative, collective man willing to work for minimal compensation for the good of the collective whole, for the state. This is the very essence, the very tenets of socialism. Under the Traditional paradigm, education was the acquisition of knowledge with the child being challenged to use the scope of that knowledge to formulate a reasoned conclusion as an individual. Under the Progressive or Transformational paradigm, education is for the purpose of socializing the child, producing the collaborative, cooperative, collective child. Remember that John Dewey said that literacy was the greatest obstacle to socialism. The only way to create illiteracy is to remove knowledge. Progressive education does just that — knowledge is incorporated as it is used and applied in addressing social or life-related issues. To soften the tone, parents are told that education must be relevant, centered around life-role situations, what the children will encounter when they get out into the real world.

All the social programs, centered around Third Force psychology and practices, implemented to make life better, the future better for our youth — have had just the opposite effect, creating more juvenile crime, teenage pregnancy, etc, taking more and more of the time needed to educate for literacy. But instead of putting a stop to it, instead of holding accountable those instigating and implementing these social programs, we have allowed ourselves to be duped by the "expert" mentality, by the psychologists, sociologists, psychiatrists, behavioral scientists, people we should have been able to trust but who belied our trust in the interests of this great "social" experiment where the world was truly their "oyster." And we have listened to, and believed, the worn out rhetoric of "bad parents", "bad schools."

Our country has become the victim of the same self-perpetuating philosophy that took Germany down the road to Hitler. Are we smart enough to stop it? There is one thing for sure — we won't if we don't educate ourselves, if we refuse to look past the rhetoric to the reality.

"Every child is unique. We are not all the same. My finger prints can not be matched with yours, nor can yours be matched with my fingerprints. One size does not fit all....we are created in our own image by the Creator".......Earl Brown
Pbut you all.

The information that I have present is as follows:
© March 1996; Lynn M Stuter