30 years of dumbing down your children


    Over more than a half-century, in the United States, as each
generation of professional educators is weeded out, the standard
of literacy of graduating classes of public schools and
universities is lowered. There have been occasional, partial, but
relatively short-lived reversals in this prevailing trend, such
as the ``post-Sputnik'' programs for teacher training in the
mathematical natural sciences. Nonetheless, overall, and even
within the shrinking percentage of graduates who are not totally
illiterate in natural science, the overall trend has been down,
down, down.
    This problem has become most acute since the radical change
in youth culture introduced during the 1963-68 spread of the
sociology mass-experiments with the rock-drug-sex counterculture
by associates of Aldous Huxley, Bertrand Russell, and Margaret
Mead. In entire categories of education which were standard
competencies among virtually all college entrants 30 years ago,
behind the eyes of today's typical college graduate, there is an
appalling vacuousness. Often, the private alternative school,
even high-priced, produces a result as painful to the caring
parent as the public ones.
    Over 250 years ago, the famous Jonathan Swift wrote a series
of brilliant satires on the moral and intellectual decay of
social life in early 18th-century Britain. Later, this piece of
adult humor, {Gulliver's Travels}, circulated as a popular
children's book. To understand what are called by such names as
``outcome-based education,'' or ``A World of Difference'' today,
turn to one of the later stories in that Swift collection, ``A
Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms.''
    In that tale, the country is ruled by a queer race of horses,
the ``Houyhnhnms,'' who speak like British Liberal Party asses of
Walpole's time. The human inhabitants, who are ruled over by
these odd horses, have been degraded to wretched creatures with
the morals and literacy of baboons, called ``Yahoos.''
    Today, it is difficult to think of Lemuel Gulliver's Yahoos
without being reminded of images of the famous Woodstock rock-
sex-drug festival.
    Forty years ago, the ``radical counterculture'' in the United
States was little more than a plot by a sadistic pack of perverts
associated with Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, Nazi philosopher
Martin Heidegger, Heidegger's former mistress Hannah Arendt,
Margaret Mead, and a gutter-full of Yahoos calling themselves
``beatniks.'' At that time, ``recreational drugs'' was a rarely
visited snake-pit in a corner of the zoo, an exotic disorder
spilling over into the nation's gutters from the ranks of
organized crime's purveyers of prostitution and other so-called
``popular'' entertainment. Later came what the London Tavistock
Institute sometimes described as its 1963-68 ``cultural paradigm
shift;'' with that came Woodstock's ``Yahoo'' romp.
    Looking at the facts, it is obvious today, that this
destruction of our nation's children became today's general
phenomenon as a result of the rock-drug-sex counterculture's mass
brainwashing of many of the 1963-68 university-age generation. It
is, in large part, those radicals of the mid-1960s campus who are
top-down controllers of the corporate level of management in most
of the key private and governmental institutions of today. Those
seen as countercultural ``freaks'' in 1968-70 have become today
virtually the arbiters of ``politically correct'' public morality
and educational policy. If this trend is not reversed, this
nation, perhaps even this civilization will not survive. Today's
radical educational policies, rooted in the rock-drug-sex
counterculture, are the new bubonic plague which threatens to
destroy many of the world's communities, even entire nations,
unless the needed emergency programs of cultural sanitation are
introduced soon.

                 - Reason for optimism -
    It is as bad as that, and actually worse. Nonetheless, there
are reasons to be optimistic.
    The last time something as bad as the present counterculture
occurred, was during the so-called New Dark Ages of Europe's 14th
century. The typical ``counterculture freaks'' of that barbaric
time were the so-called ``flagellants,'' the massed migratory
hordes of followers of weird pseudo-Christian cults, with beliefs
as ugly as those of a recently influential de-schooler Ivan
Illich. These flagellants preyed upon the hungry land of that
darkened century like swarms of human locusts. Yet, out of that
terrible time, educational movements such as the Brothers of the
Common Life of Gerhard Groote and Thomas a@ag Kempis produced the
greatest renaissance in all of human existence to the present
date, the 15th-century Golden Renaissance of such famous names as
Nicolaus of Cusa, Leonardo da Vinci, Erasmus of Rotterdam, and so
on.
    Sometimes, only a menacing adversity, such as the mind-
destroying effects of programs such as ``outcome-based education,
'' is required to kick the frightened conscience of reformers
into bringing about long-overdue revivals of the civilization
they were about to lose.
    The following discussions are increasingly typical today.
    Concerned parents see the effect of present-day trends in
education as children of neighbors and friends being turned into
virtual zombies. ``What can we do to protect our children from
this?'' There are measures which can be taken to lessen the risk
of irreversible mind damage.
    Or, a person who is bright, moral, but who has been cruelly
cheated of literacy, asks: ``Can I fix this? Can I learn to read
and write above a 3,000-word vocabulary? Can I also become at
least literate in mathematics?'' Yes, it can be done, if you are
determined to succeed.
    These fears, these questions lead to the issues of
educational policy in general. Some suggest: ``Back to basics,
back to the Three Rs.'' That would be acceptable, temporarily, as
a desperate alternative to the perverted practice of shoving sex
education down the gullets of first-graders; but, it does not
address the issue of providing a competent education. The
simplistic recipe, ``the Three Rs'' shows a crude
misunderstanding of education. It does not address the issue of
equipping the next generation adequately to survive the
technological and moral challenges of the time their generation
will run the nation.
    There are models of compensatory education for children,
conducted outside of school programs, which have had some
success, and which also typify the kinds of approaches which are
more likely to succeed.
    For rebuilding school systems, there are good models of
education which can be copied by educational systems, or also
used as guides for the case of the individual requiring a good
remedial program. The best are the models of what were known as {
Classical Christian humanist} programs --absolutely no kinship to
more recent ``secular humanist'' packages. These classical
programs were pioneered by the Brothers of the Common Life, and
are typified in modern form by those Schiller-Humboldt reforms of
education revived, until two decades ago, as post-Hitler
Germany's gymnasium program.

               - Why European thinkers? -
    This means taking head-on the so-called issue of ``dead white
European males.'' Why should children of U.S. citizens, or
residents, be required to achieve competency in the work of
``dead white European males''? The short answer is: to enable
them, and our nation to survive. The evidence which proves this
is the key to discovering the requirements which any competent
educational system, and any teacher must satisfy before being
allowed to teach your child.  This evidence centers upon three
facts.
    {{Fact #1:}}^The best reported archeological evidence is,
that the human species has existed on this planet for not less
than 2 million years.
    {{Fact #2:}}^The increase in mankind's power over nature, per
capita, has increased vastly more during the last six centuries,
since A.D. 1440, than during all human existence before A.D.
1440. This fact is measurable beyond all reasonable dispute.
    {{Fact #3:}}^This unique quality of the last six centuries is
entirely the result of the spread, throughout this planet, of a
cultural revolution which erupted in western Europe, centered in
the city of Florence, Italy, during the 15th century's Golden
Renaissance.
    This revolution was a Christian revival, led by a group of
figures of both religion and science, including the founder of
modern science, Cardinal Nicolaus of Cusa. It was also an
ecumenical revival of civilization, out of the long ``New Dark
Age'' of the preceding, 14th century. It was based on the common
principle of the three great monotheisms, based upon the
principle of Moses' Genesis 1:26-28, that man is in the image of
God by virtue of man's inborn potential for willfully increasing
man's power over nature per capita through creative discovery.
    This Renaissance drew, directly or indirectly, upon virtually
all of the accumulated knowledge of mankind up to that point. The
center of the scientific side of the Renaissance was the assembly
in Florence, of the manuscripts of Plato. Other Classical Greek
writers were significant, but Plato's principles of scientific
discovery were at the center of the Renaissance.
    There were two leading aspects to this Renaissance, the
religious or political side, and the scientific side. From the
religious side of the Renaissance came the definition of a new
kind of political order, the modern constitutional nation-state
republic, replacing the previously established order of
international law based upon empire. Cusa's famous {Concordantia
Catholica} is at the center of this. The new design of state was
based centrally upon the unique quality of each and every person
as, in Latin, {imago Dei} and {capax Dei}: man in the image of
God by virtue of the person's willful power of creative reason.
The state must be designed to conform to this nature of mankind,
in respect to the circumstances of individual life and the fact,
that through creative reason, man had the capacity to know, and
to be accountable to natural law.
    This new conception of national republic was uniquely
required for the fostering of scientific progress as a means for
increasing the productive powers of labor of mankind as a whole.
Although all of the rudiments for the achievements of modern
natural science were found in the work of Plato and such of his
students and collaborators as Theaetetus and Eudoxus, the
explosion of scientific progress after Brunelleschi, Cusa,
Toscanelli, et al. is without precedent in human existence
earlier: Names such as Leonardo, Kepler, Leibniz, and Gauss
typify the rapid accumulation, within about four centuries, of
more newly discovered fundamental principles of scientific
knowledge than in the entire existence of mankind earlier.
    The ability of mankind to increase humanity's power to meet
human needs, and to maintain the habitability of this planet,
depends absolutely upon continuing both that rate of scientific
progress in discoveries, and also in transforming production and
products alike to increase man's per capita productive powers of
labor to new heights with ever-less effort required.
    This requires a quality of individual citizen who is capable
of participating efficiently in this scientific progress. Without
that quality of citizen, civilization cannot survive. Without
that, our children's world, our grandchildren, will not survive. 
Unless today's generation assimilates the essential contributions
of preceding generations of mankind, this generation lacks the
qualifications of a people fit to survive. Like it or not, the
greatest part of the knowledge upon which continued existence
today depends, was contributed by ``dead white European males''
who lived during the recent six centuries.
    For the moment, stick to the case of natural science.

              - A modern U.S. curriculum -
    Do you wish your child to be adequately prepared to succeed
at being an adult? The following is a fair description of what
modern society requires.
    What today's student needs to learn is not a pack of
mathematical formulas. Formulas can be programmed into computers.
The student must master what no computer will ever be able to do,
what only a human being can do: discover a fundamental principle
of nature. The way in which the pupil can learn the principle of
scientific discovery, is to develop his or her own innate
creative-mental potential. There is but one way in which this
kind of education can be accomplished: The student must relive
the mental act of discovery by some of the greatest minds of all
history. Pythagoras, for example, and Plato, Eudoxus, and so on.
The pupil must work through these discoveries in some definite
order: first, the discovery whose mastery prepares the pupil to
face the challenge of mastering the next problem on the list.
This begins with a study of Classical Greek geometry, and uses
classical and synthetic geometries as the springboards for
structuring physical observations and experiments.
    What the pupil accomplishes through reliving crucial creative
moments from the minds of the past's great discoverers is
twofold. Obviously, the student becomes familiar with the method
for effecting valid discoveries. The student also comes to
understand history in a way which is otherwise almost impossible,
as the history of interlinked ideas respecting mankind's efforts
to willfully increase man's productive powers of labor, mankind's
power over nature, per capita.
    In addition to natural science and mathematics, the pupil
must become familiar with history in a similar way. The child
should master languages, including Classical forms of some
ancient ones such as Greek, Sanskrit, and so on, in order to
understand the common principles underlying the multiplicity of
language in general. The student must master the use of language,
especially in the classical forms of poetry and dramatic tragedy,
the two highest art-forms in the verbal medium. The student
should also master the rudiments of singing according to
principles of well-tempered polyphony--using the best methods of
voice-training, known as {bel canto}.
    Three aspects of such a general curriculum are emphasized
here. They are stressed because they are those elements of a
general curriculum which are most important for either remedial
education of young adults, or for out-of-school programs used by
parents to minimize the mental and emotional damage done by
today's typical public school system. These three are geometry,
music, and poetry and drama. For adolescents and older persons,
classical tragedy is indispensable as the form of drama
emphasized for study.

         - Educational help outside the school -
    The student should be guided to think of geometry as ``the
language of vision,'' of music as ``the language of hearing,''
and classical tragedy as ``the language of truth-seeking.'' The
relevant features of all three of these topics are treated in the
author's contribution to the forthcoming, Summer 1994 issue of {
Fidelio}, ``The Truth of Temporal Eternity.'' In summary of the
pertinent contents of that document, the case to be made for each
is as follows.
    The teaching of mathematics can be greatly simplified for the
student, by using geometrical methods which render the subject
matter not only easier to master, but with a more rigorous, more
advanced grasp of fundamentals involved. The point is made
briefly as follows.
    Since the fundamental discoveries announced at the end of the
century by the mathematician Georg Cantor, the modern
geometrician is able to divide the notion of {number} into four
species: {rational}, {algebraic}, {non-algebriac} or {
transcendental}, and higher {transfinite} cardinalities. Each of
these four classes of number is separated from the others by
precisely defined limits, and by corresponding discoveries.
    For example, the ancient Greeks mastered the geometric
representation of the class of non-rational numbers which they
defined as ``incommensurables.'' In the middle of the 15th
century, Nicolaus of Cusa was the first to prove that the number
{@gp} is not an algebraic number, but what Leibniz and others
later identified as {transcendental}. The existence of numbers
beyond the limits of the transcendental was identified by
Leibniz, and well-known to 19th-century mathematicians such as
Gauss, Dirichlet, Riemann, and Weierstrass.  The proof of the
existence of such classes of {transfinite} numbers was supplied
by Cantor in 1897.
    It should be mentioned that some mathematicians will argue,
mistakenly, that the transcendental character of {@gp} was first
proven by the successive work of Hermite and Lindemann, late
during the 19th century. The rigorous proof was supplied, as part
of the founding of modern science by Nicolaus of Cusa, in A.D.
1453.
    Each of these proofs is accomplished by a rigorous but
elementary form of geometrical construction, which can be fully
mastered on the level of a good high-school curriculum. The
student who takes this short-cut, can overtake and pass way ahead
of the student who follows the laborious and flawed algebraic
route plotted by today's popularized ``new math.''
    The well-tempered tuning of the 12-tone octave scale is
embedded naturally in the physiological characteristics of the
human singing (and speaking) voice. This is based on the
existence of six possible types of human singing voice, and the
result of attempting to integrate all simultaneously into vocal
polyphony. The Bach well-tempered system was not a matter of
taste, but a scientific discovery of the natural characteristics
of the human chorus. It is discovered, as Classical Vedic hymns
show this, for example, that any classical poem is already a
scored song, by virtue of the naturally determined pitches of the
vocalization (of the vowels), and that all music is derived from
the polyphonic singing of classical forms of poetry according to
this principle of natural vocalization.
    In geometry, the pupils are exploring the way in which the
mind organizes its conceptions of vision. In music, the students
are exploring the way in which the mind organizes its conceptions
of hearing. The two combined, are the basis on which Johannes
Kepler made the first successful attempt to establish a
comprehensive mathematical physics including the notion of
universal gravitation.
    Probably, although tragedy can be presented in a superficial
way as simple drama to younger pupils, the principles of tragedy
itself can not be taught at age levels much below the secondary
school classroom. An additional difficulty, the number of
competent tragedies available for use are relatively very few.
There are the few surviving works from the ancient Greek, such as
those of Aeschylos, Marlowe's tragedies, those of Marlowe's
friend Shakespeare, Cervantes's prose-drama-tragedy, {Don
Quixote}, and the tragedies of Friedrich Schiller. Yet, the study
of tragedy is perhaps indispensable for developing the student's
capacity to understand history and the principles of language.
    In the usual case today, where secondary schools offer no
competent programs in musical training, poetry, or drama, music
and tragedy can be provided through resourceful parents'
cooperative efforts as an extra-curricular activity.  Similarly,
special programs in elementary through advanced mathematics from
a geometry standpoint can be provided.  It is probably to the
degree that concerned parents occupy themselves with the
challenge of such extra-curricular programs in these three areas,
that the needed popular constituency basis for needed sweeping
reforms within the school system can be established.

From Executive Intelligence Review V21, #18. If you would like
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          covici@ccs.covici.com










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