The previous posts in this series can be read here: first, second, third, fourth, and fifth.
Here are my top ten polemic reads on education, books that challenge the status quo and dissect the motivations and methods of progressive education. I’m certain there are other good books out there that treat this subject, but I’m sticking with the books with which I am familiar and would recommend to anyone who asked me what they should read on the subject. By all means, share your favorite educational polemic in the comments. I’m always looking for sound criticism of our current public and modern educational models.
I want to begin with Charles Murray’s Real Education because this is the book that started me down the rabbit hole of exploring modern education’s great failures, a rabbit hole that would eventually lead me to discover Classical Christian Education. A libertarian and “professional contrarian,” Murray is most well-known for his book, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, that he co-wrote with Richard J. Herrnstein. In Real Education, Murray argues that we are narrating, believing, and literally living a lie when it comes to education. We need to accept the fact that “abilities vary,” “half of the children are below average,” “too many people are going to college,” and “America’s future depends on how we educate the academically gifted.” Thus, one cans see why Tom Wolfe called him a “professional contrarian.” Murray forces his readers to “take reality into consideration.”
Next up is Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society. Illich is another great thinker who challenges modern assumptions about education and candidly, but eloquently, argues that “The school system is a modern phenomenon, as is the childhood it produces.” He demonstrates the way our institutions impede education and have thus created immature, ignorant consumer-cogs who rely on the government and other institutions to take care of them and tell them what to think. Another way to put is by adopting the Prussian model of education, Americans have forfeited actual education for slavish training— producing industrial workers, docile citizens who do what they’re told: be faithful to one’s job and buy the stuff the companies we work for make and don’t think to hard about life because someone else has done that for you.
The next two recommendations take us back to the early twentieth century when the modern system of education had only recently been adopted but was in full swing and already presenting with the symptoms of its disease. Jacque Maritain’s Education at a Crossroads and Christopher Dawson’s The Crisis of Western Education both offer Christian humanist perspectives on education. These two works demonstrate that the purpose of education is the humanizing of the person being educated, but modern education was accomplishing the very opposite of its purpose. Modern education was dehumanizing its subjects and subsequently facilitating the degeneration of Western civilization.
Following the theological and philosophical approaches, the next two books I recommend take more of a historical look at the failure of the Mann-Dewey-progressivist approach to education. Horace Mann’s Troubling Legacy by Bob Peppermint Taylor and Democracy’s Schools by Johann Neem are helpful works because while one does not have to agree with all of their conclusions, they certainly offer a balanced and sound historical perspective on the motivations and implementations of the American public school system. A short film I created with Roman Roads Media and Kepler Education captures the essence of what I gleaned from reading the books so far recommended.
I don’t suppose I could offer a list like this without recommending Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. Love him or hate him, Bloom’s book is a staple in the intellectual diet of educational conservatism, and should be read by anyone wanting to understand the ins and outs of the conversation. Where I depart from Bloom is very subtle. Where he sees the social and political crisis of modern America as being purely intellectual, I believe it is first spiritual and subsequently intellectual. In the downward flowing stream that creates culture, religion is first, intellectual education is second, then comes the arts broadly conceived, and finally, politics.
John Agresto’s The Death of Learning shares similarities with Bloom’s arguments, broadly speaking; but as a former president of St. John’s College, Agresto takes up a fairly sound—albeit secular—defense for the historic liberal arts in public higher education at a time when it’s extremely unpopular to do so—especially as a secularist.
My ninth recommendation for this list is going to actually be three books by the same author. In other words, I’m going to sorta cheat again. Any of John Taylor Gatto’s works, while maybe not highly intellectual treatments of education, will be great polemics against the public school system. A former (and retired) public school teacher who received New York State’s official “Teacher of the Year,” Gatto knows the system from the inside-out and advocates for “open-source learning” instead. He would often allow his public school students to leave campus without a pass so they could go to a museum or library to do research. Popular with homeschoolers, Gatto is a frequent speaker and wrote several books on the subject including, Dumbing Us Down, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and The Underground History of American Education.
My final recommendation is Battle for the American Mind: Uprooting a Century of Miseducation by Pete Hegseth and David Goodwin. While I like both the men who wrote this book and heartily agree with most of what they wrote, I have to admit that somewhat like Gatto’s books, I am a bit ambivalent about this final book because it is rather populist in its tone and approach. It could actually serve as a good summary of most of this list, but it’s most useful purpose, I think, is to give it to families who are discerning the trouble with modern education but don’t understand the nature of what’s going on. I would consider it a cogently-written primer on the history of progressive education and a book that faithfully champions Classical Christian Education.
The final post in this series is coming soon. Thanks for reading and don’t forget to share your favorite educational polemic in the comments.
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