Inputs and Outputs: Education and its maintenance of the social order

News from the West's great post, The Education System Was Designed To Keep Us Uneducated and Docile, traces the roots of the US system and its quest to maintain social order and dominant power structures. While I love John Dewey, the post points out even Dewey's references to students as products to be molded within a specific social order. John Taylor Gatto, retired NYC teacher and former NYC and NYS Teacher of the Year, unearths these problems in his book The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation into the Problem of Modern Schooling. (Full text available for free online.)

Writes Gatto: "Another major architect of standardized testing, H.H. Goddard, said in his book Human Efficiency (1920) that government schooling was about 'the perfect organization of the hive.'"

While President of Harvard from 1933 to 1953, James Bryant Conant wrote that the change to a forced, rigid, potential-destroying educational system had been demanded by "certain industrialists and the innovative who were altering the nature of the industrial process."

In other words, the captains of industry and government explicitly wanted an educational system that would maintain social order by teaching us just enough to get by but not enough so that we could think for ourselves, question the sociopolitical order, or communicate articulately. We were to become good worker-drones, with a razor-thin slice of the population—mainly the children of the captains of industry and government—to rise to the level where they could continue running things.

This was the openly admitted blueprint for the public schooling system, a blueprint which remains unchanged to this day.

SAT Spin

A recent study shows that the revamped SAT isn't any better at predicting college success than the old test was. The College Board began to revise the test in 2002, adding a writing section and taking away the analogies portion, when the University of California recommended that the school use a more curriculum- based approach to testing, saying that the SAT favored students from middle to high income families. (Think of the money lost if students applying to University of California schools weren't required to take the SAT!) The new test format was released three years ago. 

“The changes made to the SAT did not substantially change how predictive the test is of first-year college performance,” the studies said.

College Board officials presented their findings as “important and positive” confirmation of the test’s success.

Huh? Sounds similar to Bush's spin on the Reading First results.

“The new SAT was supposed to be significantly better and fairer than the old one, but it is neither,” said Robert Schaeffer, the public education director at FairTest, a group that is critical of much standardized testing. “It underpredicts college success for females and those whose best language is not English, and over all, it does not predict college success as well as high school grades, so why do we need the SAT, old or new?”

“Given the data released today, what was the point of all the hoopla about the SAT’s revisions beyond preserving their California market?” Mr. Schaeffer said. “This is all spin. It’s been a marketing operation from the get-go.”

Why do we need the SAT???