Folks... I... your beloved blog host... did not know this!
My humble thanks to Williamson M. Evers, research fellow
at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
* * *
* *
When we think of President Woodrow Wilson, we think of...
* DON'T... GET... ME... STARTED...
(*GNASHING MY TEETH*)
...a multitude of historical events: the creation of the
Federal Reserve Bank and other "progressive" legislation at home;
idealistic internationalism, a world war to “keep the world safe for
democracy,” and promotion of the League of Nations abroad.
* DON'T FORGET FASCISM!
* OH... AND IMPLACABLE HOSTILITY TO THE CONSTITUTION AND
THE IDEALS OF OUR FOUNDERS!
Lately, we think of the Princeton University students
protesting against him. In mid-November, they were agitating for the former
university president’s name to be removed from the Woodrow Wilson School of
Public and International Affairs over his legacy of white supremacy. But
there’s another reason conservatives should revisit Woodrow Wilson. We need to
hold him responsible for the fact that many Americans don’t know the timeline
of world or American history and don’t know much about how constitutional
government works in the United States:
One hundred years ago, in 1916, the Wilson administration
put the clout of the federal government behind a new curricular development –
social studies.
In this project, the Wilson administration worked with a
prominent figure from the world of philanthropy - Thomas Jesse Jones.
A well-known "progressive" educator, Jones, who
was white, had spent time teaching and developing the curriculum at the Hampton
Institute, a vocationally oriented, historically black college in Virginia.
While at Hampton, Jones created the social-studies curriculum.
Jones was responsible for popularizing the term “social
studies” for this new conglomeration of subject matter.
In fact, Jones headed the panel that wrote an influential
1916 Federal Report on Social Studies, a report that set the course for the new
field and is widely acknowledged as still influential to this day.
Because Jones was a federal education official at the
time, the social-studies report — although created by a non-federal group, the
Committee on Social Studies — was issued as a bulletin of the U.S. Bureau of
Education. In the report, the federal education agency generously offered to
act as a center for disseminating information on textbooks that took the new
“social studies” approach.
(*SIGH*)
“Social studies” is a cross-disciplinary K–12 curriculum
of history, civics, geography, and related subjects — but, crucially, the
curriculum is focused not on chronology or governmental structure and
processes; the report proposed that social-studies teachers should focus on
“concrete problems” that are “of vital importance to society.”
* WITH THE UNDERCURRENT BEING TO ENCOURAGE THE PURSUIT OF
"PROGRESSIVE SOLUTIONS."
(*ANOTHER SIGH*)
The new curriculum prescribed that any history taught in
school should be studied because it is practical or functional: Ancient Athens
was studied not as part of the political and intellectual development of
Western civilization, but rather in connection with the contemporary problems
of city planning.
(*ROLLING MY EYES*)
The report quotes Syracuse University professor William
Mace, a member of the social-studies committee, as proposing that students
study the similarities between the policies of the Gracchi in ancient Rome
(price controls on grain, limits on land holdings), the then-recent measures
installed by Prime Minister David Lloyd George in Britain, and those proposed
in the 1912 Progressive party platform in America.
* AND ABSENT THE "PROGRESSIVES" PLACING A THUMB
ON THE SCALE I WOULD HAVE NO PROBLEM WITH SUCH AN APPROACH - AS A ADJUNCT FOCUS
OF STUDY. BUT OBVIOUSLY THE WHOLE POINT OF THE EXERCISE WAS PREFACED UPON THE
GOAL OF INDOCTRINATING STUDENTS - NOT "TEACHING THEM TO THINK
CRITICALLY." (AT LEAST NOT IN THE REAL WORLD AS ACADEMIC LEFTISTS ACCRUED
MORE AND MORE POWER OVER THE DECADES...)
These historical examples help make history a “practical
subject,” Mace said, and are “richly suggestive in the lessons they teach.” (As
a side note, the report is also misleading in drawing such comparisons.
Probably because of the unpopularity of Germany in America during World War I,
the report neglects to mention the more exact similarities between Lloyd
George’s measures and the policies of Bismarck’s Germany — from which Lloyd
George’s welfare-state measures were in fact copied. The report also omits
mention of the similarities between the 1912 platform of America’s Progressive
party and Bismarck’s policies.)
The Progressive era worshiped a cult of "efficiency"
and kowtowed before "scientific" management.
(SEE: SANGER, MARGARET)
In this vein, the social-studies report concluded that
the “key note of modern education” is “social efficiency.” It postulated that
whatever the value of social studies in terms of the development of the
intellectual knowledge and personal potential of the individual, the
social-studies curriculum would “fail” in its “most important function” unless
it contributed “directly” to “the cultivation of social efficiency on the part
of the pupil.”
(*PURSED LIPS*)
Students should be taught to look at their own future
jobs in terms of overall workforce planning and should take a job based on the
service the job “rendered” to “the community” and which jobs were “most
necessary,” rather than choosing a job based on remuneration and the job
market.
As citizens, we need to understand history because the
present comes at the end of a long chain of cause and effect stretching back
into the past. Instead of recommending that students study the social sciences
in order to form an independent mind knowledgeable about the past, the 1916
social-studies report effectively encouraged students to conform and adjust to
prevailing views.
* CONFORM...
(*SADLY SHAKING MY HEAD*)
Ever since this paradigm change, social studies has been
bedeviled by fads, fashions, and indoctrination in the name of relevance.
Unfortunately, many Americans educated by our public schools don’t know what
happened or when in American history. Nor do they understand federalism and our
system of checks and balances.
(*NODDING*)
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