When Pamela Hobart started discovering how broken age-based grade levels were, she assumed something must have gone wrong:
An astounding 1909 book by Leonard Ayres for the Russell Sage Foundation tells all: Laggards In Our Schools: A Study of Retardation and Elimination In City School Systems.
At this time, teachers were not pressured to “socially promote” students who had not learned that year’s material. Instead, they faced classes with huge age disparities that often resolved by the “overaged” students dropping out (“elimination”) rather than ever catching up to grade level expectations.
For instance, consider New York City in 1906, where “of every 100 children entering the first grade, only 24 are found in the eighth grade at the end of eight years. The remainder have either dropped out or are still repeating the lower grades.”
This state of affairs was typical for the time. Across Boston, Philadelphia, Camden, Kansas City, plus New York, “one-fourth to one-half of the pupils are repeating their work, and that the proportion varies little from city to city.” In other words, we’re talking about 30-50% of students being at least one year older than expected for their grade.
Despite the magnitude of the problem, there appears to have been no real mechanism for catching anyone up once they’d fallen behind. As a result, these cities had 7-26% of students lingering 2 or more years behind age level in their work (and as many as 13% of students 3 years behind!)
Grade level reorganization, then, never really delivered efficiency.
The occupational schooling regime is characterized by the following principal attributes:
1. Strict student segregation by age
2. No meaningful student segregation by ability
3. Strictly verboten student segregation by race (however defined; even the several white races are forbidden the right to be free of each other)
4. Regimented curricula designed with no consideration for differing student ability
5. The notion that teachers are somehow responsible for their students’ differing ability
6. The proposition that attendance is mandatory, and therefore carceral
7. The principle that a less competent student deserves more time, attention, and care than a more competent student
A legitimate schooling order would have the following principal attributes:
1. Moderate to minimal student segregation by age
2. Very meaningful student segregation by ability
3. Self-assortative student segregation by race (in particular, capable white students will always be outcompeted by insane Asian strivers)
4. Unregimented curricula designed to maximize high-fidelity token rate transference per unit time
5. The openly contemplated reality that teachers did not cause their students’ initial gene configurations, and do not cause subsequent gene reconfiguration
6. The operating principle of high-performance law firms et al. everywhere: Up Or Out
7. The unshakeable faith that a more competent student deserves more time, attention, and care than a less competent student
The purpose of a system is what it does. The occupational schooling regime, as manifest in substantially all schools “public” and “private”, exists to invert the natural order in the minds and hearts of all whom it swallows.
The inversion of nature is commonly associated with black magic, devilry, or Satan.
For an interesting experiment, run that comment through this prompt:
“Despite the magnitude of the problem, there appears to have been no real mechanism for catching anyone up once they’d fallen behind. As a result, these cities had 7-26% of students lingering 2 or more years behind age level in their work (and as many as 13% of students 3 years behind!)”
Because they hadn’t fallen behind, they were/are – with rare exception not worth mentioning or addressing at an institutional level – exactly where their abilities had sorted them relative to their peers.
The modern educational industrial complex hates humanity. It is, on an institutional level, philosophically misanthropic to the core. While the vast majority of its agents are NOT misanthropic and in fact tend to be, by temperamental disposition, quite philanthropic (in fact, “teacher” is one of the occupations that is notable for having LOWER levels of sociopathy and psychopathy than average), they are all operating within a system flatly contradictory to their vocations.
Unless and until:
- Mothers return to their homes as primary instructors for their young children
- Schools normalize failing students who cannot meet standards
- Education is understood to be a privilege and not a right
- The effective monopoly of public education is broken
- Society and the market stop treating a lack of a high school degree as some sort of employability Scarlet Letter
Everyone talks about the Military Industrial complex, or the Pharmaceutical Industrial complex because of the harm they do, but both of those pale in comparison to the damage inflicted upon society by the Educational Industrial complex.
I have a lot of bile to vent on the topic of miseducation. I am not yet drunk enough to start a jeremiad against Dewey (give me time, I might come back after I have liquored up) but I can drop a few links and quotes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto
https://deliberatedumbingdown.com/ddd/
https://www.fisheaters.com/garbagegeneration.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deschooling_Society
I was prepared to claim that Rockefeller could be proven as the driving force behind the “Prussian” bent of early 20th century US education but in fact I could not muster enough footnotes, so that controversy will have to wait.
Gatto described himself as a saboteur.
Gatto also came up tangentially, while answering the question, Are Chinese mothers superior?
Michael Strong cites John Taylor Gatto’s description of conventional K-12 education as thirteen years’ training in passivity and dependence, meaninglessness and incoherence.