Starting in 1975, Pol Pot and his Communist revolutionaries killed almost 2,000,000 Cambodians, out of a total population of 5,000,000. Why??
Pol Pot lived in Paris for many years where he became a Marxist intellectual. Sitting in classrooms and cafes, he visualized the perfect Cambodia. He went back to Cambodia to eliminate foreign influences, purge educated people, and thereby create an agrarian workers paradise.
Pol Pot was a fanatic, a true believer. The best one-word summary is to say that Pol Pot was an ideologue. He had ideas in his head; he knew they were right; and he was thereby entitled to kill millions of people to make those ideas prevail. Pol Pot, some may object, is a monster and too horrible to contemplate. I would counter that contemplating Pol Pot is one of the most useful things we can do. Let us declare April (said by Eliot to be the cruelest month) as Ideology and Mass Murderers Month.
Students in public schools especially should be urged to contemplate the ravages of ideology. So many of them are its victims.
Ideological extremism is relatively rare in the United States; many people may be lulled into thinking it does not exist at all. However, for several years I've suspected that the only way to explain the failures in American education is to look at the ideological extremism of the people in charge.
Pol Pot is one of the great monsters of history and obviously very rare. But the thing to focus on is that once he committed to his ideas, he believed there were no limits, no rules, no restrictions. That's the mark of a true ideologue.
What happened in America is that around 1900, all the leaders in education were Socialists, Collectivists, or Marxists of some stripe. They believed their views were correct and that it was their duty to prepare the country for Socialism. When they dumbed down schools and leveled children, John Dewey and his fellow ideologues believed they were doing a noble service. The point is, so did Pol Pot and his gang. Ideologues always believe they are doing good deeds. That is why they are so dangerous.
The "killer" part of Dewey's ideology is he felt he was above American society. He did not need the approval of Congress, the president, the Supreme Court or the voters. All of these obstacles had to be circumvented and this is where Dewey's ideology got us into real trouble. Maybe they weren't murdering people; they were definitely murdering truth and transparency.
Dewey and his fellow conspirators worked in secret from their headquarters at Teachers College in Manhattan. Their plot was to indoctrinate future teachers, send them out to the schools in the countryside, and use the classroom to steer the US to socialism. Ideology made secrecy seem respectable.
This machinery, once in place, got out of control, as you might predict. The Russian Revolution circa 1920 and the Great Depression circa 1930 galvanized our left-wing educators into thinking that their time had come, all arguments were settled, and big bold steps must be taken.
So now we see one of the most destructive events in American history: circa 1932 educators abruptly imposed Look-say on the children of America. This was a bogus, unworkable system whereby children were supposed to learn to read by memorizing the shapes of words. Memorizing a few hundred sight-words is doable, and thus the illusion is created that children are making progress. But virtually nobody actually goes on to read with whole-words. Typically, more than half the class will belatedly evolve into reading phonetically. But a third will stay mired in whole-words and become functional illiterates. We have 50,000,000 of them.
The simplest way to explain this tragedy is to say that ideology caused it. I think the same pattern repeated itself with New Math circa 1965. Both these gimmicks are grotesque in their manifest inability to do the purported task. It's as if you go to the store to buy white bread and someone sells you a lump of styrofoam.
I would argue that the same pattern repeats itself many DOZENS of times, as our Education Establishment devised numerous so-called methods that never seemed to work as promised. Only ideology could produce such a ditzy parade of failure. Clearly, the methods were not supposed to work educationally; they were intended to work ideologically.
One of the distinguishing traits of American education today is that the people in charge have not only dumbed it down, they have also wrapped the entire subject in propaganda, alibis, excuses, sophistries, deceptions, and confusion. The public is trained now to blame children, parents, television, computers, drugs, sex, rock 'n roll, internet, cell phones, especially parents. Anything but the real perps.
Typically, when large enterprises fail, we blame the leaders and replace them. That's what we should do here. But the Education Establishment is brilliant at deflecting criticism. The last thing they want you to realize is that they are ideologues, and all of us are victims of their ideology.
(For how we eliminate Dewey's ideology, see "38: Saving Public Schools" on
Improve-Education.org. For more on the reading tragedy, see "42: Reading Resources.")