Everything Bold Deformers Never Wanted to Know About Education
A hundred years ago the first "scientific" generation of bold reformers set out to right America's education ship. White, male, Protestant and business class all, they were armed with the new behaviorist psychology, the new principles of scientific management, and the new pseudo-science of eugenics. They created the perfect sorting machine based on intelligence testing and other standardized measures, where poor children at age 5 or 6 were slotted into industrial training schools or vocational prep if they were lucky. The high scorers went on to high school and college.
Today's education deformers, weaponized with the same antique armaments, advocate for no such distinctions in their education crusade. Everyone should go to college. And besides, there aren't any vocations anymore to require vocational training.
Old habits are hard to break, however, and the evidence for it can be found in the fact that we still use the same primitive sorting devices we used then to do a similar sort of sorting, except now we pretend that poverty is not an excuse for scoring poorly. Back then we just assumed the poor deserved to be poor because of defective
Today's education deformers, weaponized with the same antique armaments, advocate for no such distinctions in their education crusade. Everyone should go to college. And besides, there aren't any vocations anymore to require vocational training.
Old habits are hard to break, however, and the evidence for it can be found in the fact that we still use the same primitive sorting devices we used then to do a similar sort of sorting, except now we pretend that poverty is not an excuse for scoring poorly. Back then we just assumed the poor deserved to be poor because of defective
