How American K-12 education has become a cultural contradiction
A popular American childrearing manual, “What to Expect: The Toddler Years,” warns that “children who are nagged about their manners or are punished for not saying ‘thank you’ or for not using a fork . . . won’t feel positive about manners.” Hymowitz is not saying that American parents are indifferent to manners, or that “Americanstyle individualism” is “altogether noxious.” It does, however, underscore the cultural contradiction of U.S. education: What Hymowitz calls the “creativity craze” is in tension with the need to instill certain “soft skills” — habits and manners conducive to social cohesion.
U.S. employers increasingly complain about young workers “who have trouble getting to work on time, collaborating, communicating, and dealing with workplace discipline and authority,” Hymowitz says. Teachers who adopt the role of “guides on the side” flatter children (who are regularly flattered by their parents) but do not challenge what she calls the child’s “natural egotism and immaturity.” She says “personalized learning” is the newest departure from “the idea of education as a collective, social activity” — “a structured transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next.” When a classroom is “a teeming warehouse of options,” education becomes “a rummage sale of resources for enhancing individual meaning, identity, and creativity.”
This occupies educational space at the expense of such disciplines — the term is apposite — as history and mathematics, with their exacting chronologies and sequential mastery of increasingly complex material. As each student meanders down a “personalized learning path,” fake news and “alternative facts” flourish, and society frays.
Hymowitz wrote her essay long ago, in 2019, before the sudden permeation of
K-12 education with politics in the form of an imposed racial orthodoxy (“systemic racism” and all that), with a dash of other progressive preoccupations (e.g., grade schoolers taught “gender fluidity”). These reductions of identity to group memberships are endorsed, and hence enforced in curriculum designs, and in teacher hiring and promotions. Similarly, when thousands of classrooms adopt the New York Times’s 1619 Project, which asserts that white supremacy is encoded in the nation’s DNA, such ideological pedagogy is necessarily presented not as a contestable interpretation but as an official orthodoxy.
So, there is a distinctively 2021 cultural contradiction of K-12 education: Pupils who are assumed to be unfolding flowers of spontaneous individuality are nevertheless treated as empty vessels into which government-approved political doctrines should be poured. In 2022, multitudes of parents are properly going to take their anger about all this to polling places.
As each student meanders down a “personalized learning path,” fake news and “alternative facts” flourish, and society frays.