After a six-month deluge of editorials and articles on education-are standards dropping? are the kids illiterate?-Globe & Mail readers were presented with the best evidence of the state of education in January. They may not have recognized it for what it was. The smoking gun was a simple letter to the editor.
William Hynes, a teacher and freelance commentator on education, wrote in response to a university professor's article demonstrating the appalling ignorance of Canadian history among first-year students in her Canadian studies courses. Hynes's terse retort: "Who cares?"
He wrote that he had asked his inner-city Grade 6 class which line separated most of Canada from the United States. One student blurted, "Who cares?" Hynes answered them saying they should not care, but, if they should ever need this information, where could they find it? The children said, "Look in the atlas," "Ask a librarian," and "Ask a computer." Hynes then added in his letter, "Have these students.memorized any of the names and dates [on the professor's quiz]? Who cares? They know where to find them if they need them." E. D. Hirsch's The Schools We Need is a comprehensive account of the evolution of this corrosive pedagogy and how its tenets have managed to shunt aside established traditions in North America's faculties of education, school boards, and classrooms. It is a story of such rampant success that Hirsch appropriately calls today's orthodoxy a "Thoughtworld", a self-referential community endlessly churning out its main themes, all the while ignoring evidence or criticism from outside its tight circles. Education has become an intellectual autarky.
Hirsch is a professor of English at the University of Virginia who has spent the last two decades studying education. His focus is naturally on the United States but this is very much a Canadian story too, since Canadian education is just as bound up in this Thoughtworld. It may even be that progressive pedagogy has had greater success in Canada than the United States. Ontario, for example, followed the progressive prescription to its fullest when it scrapped standard testing in 1968 (leaving Ontarians merely sensing that the quality of education is sinking, whereas the Americans know).
That progressive pedagogy has crossed national borders is due to more than the usual cultural traffic. Hirsch deftly demonstrates that progressivism has been swept along, like ink in water, by a powerful intellectual undercurrent: nineteenth-century romanticism. The inner is natural and good, the romantics asserted, but it is besieged by the external and artificial repression of our true natures. In the tradition of Emerson, learning itself is natural and must be guided by the inner lights of each child, not the constraints of scholars and their oppressive, rationalistic exercises.
These broad romantic sketches need not have led to educational decline. John Dewey, often unfairly saddled with the mantle of founder of progressivism, used his romantic views to buttress classical views of education. In a prophetic passage, he worried that without strenuous efforts to ensure the continual transfer of traditional subjects and factual knowledge, even "the most civilized group will relapse into barbarism and then savagery."
Dewey's deep respect for traditional knowledge failed to temper the dogmas that progressives created from his (and others') far subtler romantic thought. Taking the stress on the "natural" as a blunt mantra, progressivism extrapolated an anti-intellectual agenda. Objective standards for the quality and rate of learning are external impositions hostile to a child's natural course; so too are traditional subject groupings of knowledge. Learning should be "holistic", with cross-disciplinary, self-directed inquiries. Teachers must not lead by direct instruction as an authority at the front of the classroom, but wander about, assisting children's inquiries. It is more important that children learn "how to learn" than to master any body of knowledge. The development of self-awareness and openness is the essence of education, and only factual knowledge that is "relevant" to that development matters.
This litany should sound familiar to the Canadian reader. Every major Canadian educational change of the past several decades has sprung from this ideology. The reforms of the Ontario government of Bob Rae, for example, slavishly followed the progressive formula, in particular by replacing traditional elementary school subjects with bloated themes like "Self and Society". These are modern reforms-"the latest education science"-or so we have been repeatedly assured by the powers that be.
These reforms are neither modern nor science, and The Schools We Need is an indictment of a massive fraud. Progressive ideas were first advocated in the early part of this century, most influentially by William Heard Kilpatrick. His 1918 classic The Project Method advocates replacing traditional subjects with interdisciplinary projects grouped around large themes-a neat summary of the Rae reforms. "Teach the child, not the subject," a phrase that in various forms dominates today's faculties of education, dates from the era of flappers. The whole package of progressive ideology was ensconced in the Teachers College of Columbia University before the onset of the Depression, and the early graduates of the college carried these brave new ideas to other faculties of education, largely taking control of the academic side of education by the 1950s.
Of course, these are ideas, not armies. It is difficult to imagine an intellectual movement rising from protest to power (pace Mr. Rae) in a period not much longer than the Roosevelt presidency. Hirsch amply demonstrates that progressivism, playing on the deep currents of romanticism in American culture, also filled a critical professional role for teachers. It was during this period that the full development of teaching as a profession occurred, with the creation of faculties of education and mandatory teacher certification. These new faculties found themselves dismissed as trivial novelties by the established universities. If education faculties had continued to esteem factual knowledge in traditional subject groupings, the new professors of education would have had little to distinguish themselves from their hostile and renowned colleagues in the faculties of science, history, and so on. Progressivism gave education faculties the ability to turn the derision back on itself, by dismissing the importance of factual knowledge and the faculties that were its guardians. The process of teaching mattered, not the content. Progressivism promised education faculties a special new wisdom unknown to other scholars.
This schism between faculties of education and the broader university largely continues today-the University of Toronto's education faculty (particularly its graduate studies) is commonly derided by other faculties. This is in part the cause of progressivism's power to keep regurgitating its tired old themes in the face of overwhelming empirical evidence that it is simply wrong. The current evidence of neurobiology-developed outside the hermetically sealed faculties of education-has cut to the heart of progressivism by proving that basic skills such as reading and use of the base-ten system of counting are not natural and hence there is no developmentally appropriate time to learn them. The stress on teaching "critical thinking skills" rather than "mere facts" is magnificently oblivious of studies which show, not surprisingly, that creative thinkers tend to be those whose thoughts draw from a wide store of factual knowledge that permits the formation of unexpected connections. Similarly, it is accepted fact everywhere but in education faculties that fixing knowledge in memory is not natural and effortless but requires new neural pathways to be forged by repetition: drills, the method of learning most loathed by progressivism.
Of course, more than professional myopia is required to maintain ignorance of mounting empirical evidence. The education autarky is a windowless tree-fort swaying atop a thin, sick old elm. Questions about the strength of the tree itself are unthinkable within the fort and most unwelcome when asked from outside. Educational leaders are much like modern Trotskyites, never capable of admitting that Marx's ideas have been tried in a thousand variations, always resulting in miserable failure. Progressive educators claim that every failure proves only that teachers did not fully apply the ideas, or that principals were resistant, parents were reactionary, and so on. The ideas are necessarily right; failures must be blamed on others who just do not understand. The education Thoughtworld is begging for the application of Karl Popper's falsifiability test: since progressivism will not allow for evidence that its basic assertions are false, it is not science but dogma.
Education alarmists have been raising this warning for years, yet our society keeps ticking along. How socially harmful can these odd ideas really be? The answer cannot be glibly given, because the more fundamental harms caused by progressivism are not as easily quantifiable as poor reading test scores. Consider this article. I have made rhetorical references to Roosevelt, the Depression, flappers, and Trotskyites, among others. All decent writers make these sorts of cultural contacts as commonly and unselfconsciously as they breathe. Writers have to assume that they share with readers a stock of factual knowledge-"cultural capital" in Hirsch's memorable phrase. Without possession of at least some of that capital, this article-and books, and newspapers, and television documentaries-are beyond the reach of a reader or viewer. Think of how an allusion to someone or something named "Roosevelt" must look to someone whose knowledge of the past ends at Pac-Man.
Yet progressivism belittles the vital cultural store of the engaged citizen as "mere facts". Facts have no value in themselves but are only vehicles to progressivism's nirvana of "critical thinking". Our provincial curriculum documents have been scrubbed clean of any requirements to learn specific facts or read specific works. Instead, the provinces produce endless, process-based documents. Here is a typical expectation for Grade 9 students in Ontario's Common Curriculum: "read a wide range of materials for a variety of purposes, using different thinking skills (e.g., analysing, synthesizing, interpreting) to achieve the purpose for reading." Provincial documents virtually never refer to specific facts except to give examples of people or events that could be studied, implying that any other person or event could substitute. The only reference to specific historical facts in the Common Curriculum is: "Describe the contributions of various individuals to the history of Canada (e.g., Laura Secord, Susanna Moodie, Alexander Graham Bell, David Thompson, Pauline Johnson, Rosemary Brown, William Peyton Hubbard, George Erasmus)." The choice of more specific knowledge-whether A Tale of Two Cities or the latest from Stephen King will be read in class, for example-is almost always left to school boards or individual teachers. To the establishment, whether an English teacher introduces her class to "In Flanders Fields" or Snoop Doggy Dog's rap lyrics is just not important.
The fragmentation of shared cultural knowledge that this system inevitably produces is naturally slowed by the cultural contacts children make outside school. A father who looks at a water-filled hole dug in the beach by his four-year-old may applaud her "Lake Victoria". She may ask what that is and be told it's a big lake in Africa. One more strand of the cultural web is put in place for the little girl, a process she will have repeated dozens of times every day.
But this ameliorative to cultural corrosion is not available to every child. Poor parents, who are disproportionately badly educated, will not be able to pass on cultural contacts with which they themselves are unfamiliar. In this way, progressivism ensures that society's disadvantaged become more so. Without cultural capital, the poor cannot engage the public discourse and, more tangibly, they find themselves shut off from the very professions that could lead to their social advance. William Hynes's advice to his students that they need not bother mastering "trivial" facts will make it most unlikely that his students will ever be journalists, lawyers, librarians, or politicians, or join any other profession that trades in the coin of cultural capital. Hirsch summarizes this insidious harm with a brilliant 1932 passage from the Italian Communist leader Antonio Gramsci:
"The new concept of schooling is in its romantic phase, in which the replacement of `mechanical' with `natural' methods has become unhealthily exaggerated.. Previously pupils at least acquired a certain baggage of concrete facts. Now there will no longer be any baggage to put in order.. The most paradoxical aspect of it all is that this new type of school is advocated as being democratic, while in fact it is destined not merely to perpetuate social differences but crystallize them in Chinese complexities."
Hirsch calls himself a "political liberal", and this spurs him to a particularly strong exposure of the harm being done to poor children. His liberalism, however, has rendered him somewhat blind to the final component that allowed progressivism to make the leap from academic dominance to the school board and classroom: the egalitarian social revolution of the 1960s. That social transformation fit perfectly with progressivism's romantic pretensions, which resulted in the fall of Canadian education systems to the new orthodoxy. The 1968 Hall-Dennis report in Ontario, for example, brought about the capitulation of the Ontario Ministry of Education, formerly a bastion of conservative pedagogy.
The daisy-chains and tie-dye may have faded, but the social ideals of the sixties revolution are very much alive. Baby boomer parents are attracted to the rhetoric about removing "top-down authority" in the classroom by having the teacher become a "facilitator" for children working in "teams". Many admire their eight-year-old Johnny calling his teacher "Dave", not "Mr. Smith". It is these same parents, after all, who have replaced the navy suit at work with jeans and a sweater and re-engineered their companies with "flattened decision-making" by co-operative "teams". We are a society in which a CEO would be thought uptight if he asked the janitor to call him "Mr. Jones" rather than "Bob". Politicians do obligatory comedy routines on Air Farce, and marketers advertise a phone company with a corporate executive who insists he makes the coffee if he is the first into the office.
The pervasiveness of this folksy egalitarianism means that progressivism and the support its rhetoric can win cannot be defined by simple Left-Right politics. Ontario's Harris government is taken to be the high-water mark of Canadian conservatism, yet its education minister, John Snobelen, is a former business consultant perfectly attuned to progressive sensibilities. This explains why Canada's most conservative of Conservative governments has done absolutely nothing to break the progressive education monopoly. In discussing the potential of computers, Snobelen recently gushed, "It takes teachers out of being an information system into being back where they were, what their tradition has been, which is to motivate and stimulate people who are stuck." Teachers, of course, have a millennia-old tradition as dispensers of factual knowledge. What Snobelen described is precisely the progressive view of the teacher's role.
Snobelen's statement also illustrates his well-known fixation with technology. Hirsch has little to say on computers, beyond seeing them as potential distractions, offered up as panaceas for deeper problems. One wishes he had examined many progressive educators' advocacy of the technological revolution. Computers are now commonly portrayed as the ultimate solution for overcoming the resistance of teachers, which the progressives believe has blocked the full blossoming of their ideology. A teacher facing a classroom in which every child is focused on the large glowing screen on his or her desk cannot engage in Socratic questioning or the other forms of direct instruction that progressivism has worked so long to erase. The physical nature of the large box on the desk makes the computer screen the centre of a student's attention, the fount of factual knowledge, and the teacher is forced to scuttle about facilitating. In the progressive view, the highest virtue of computers is their ability to be networked, allowing co-operative group-work that cannot be interrupted by teachers with incorrect views on authority.
Politicians ignorant of pedagogy beyond the progressive tree-fort are in alliance with the progressive educators. This coalition is working at breakneck speeds to have Canadian classrooms-all classrooms, not just technology classes-wired as soon as strained budgets allow. John Snobelen has even mused that his tight-fisted government will pour out billions of dollars. When those billions have been spent and the very structure of our schools is physically changed, it will become politically impossible for any future government to finally reject progressive doctrines and return the teacher to the front of the classroom. Progressivism will be hard-wired into our schools, more difficult to remove than asbestos.
This looming confluence of technology, pedagogy, and politics makes The Schools We Need even more important than Hirsch's consistently urgent tone conveys. We are now in a race between the public exposure of the progressive disaster and its permanent installation. Progressives have the marketing efforts of billion-dollar computer companies and politicians bedazzled by rhetoric on their side. Those who would oppose them have E. D. Hirsch. 

Dan Gardner is an editorial writer for the Ottawa Citizen. He was formerly a policy adviser to the premier and the minister of education of Ontario.