It is from Dewey's own words that you can see his true intentions. He wrote and helped write the Humanist Manifesto after returning from a trip to meet with others of like mind in eastern europe. Two books he wrote tell how he planned to accomplish the goals laid out in the Humanist Manifesto through America's public school system. The first title is Faith in Education and the second is Democracy and Education.
B.F. Skinner jumped on the bandwagon, working to change the mold for American children through public schools and help that mold conform with many goals of the Humanist Manifesto.
Dewey, John, 1859-1952, American philosopher and educator; b. Burlington, Vt. He rejected authoritarian (the Bible is authoritarian) teaching methods , regarding education in a democracy as a tool to enable the citizen to integrate his or her culture and vocation usefully. To accomplish those aims, both pedagogical methods and curricula needed radical reform. Dewey's philosophy, called instrumentalism and related to pragmatism, holds that truth is an instrument used by human beings to solve their problems, and that it must change as their problems change. Thus it partakes of no transcendental or eternal reality (specially not God or the Bible). Dewey's view of democracy as a primary ethical value permeated his educational theories. Dear reader, please notice this definition of democracy as a primary ethical value. It means nothing less than the will of the majority is the law. We used to call that mob rule. The ethical value of a mob was to hang a man without a trial in the old west. Our Founding Fathers built this nation as a republic based on the laws of God to which the people were to elect representatives to run that government based on those unchanging laws of God) He had a profound impact on progressive education and was regarded as the foremost educator of his day. He lectured all over the world and prepared educational surveys for Turkey, Mexico, and the Soviet Union. Among his works are Democracy and Education (1916) and Logic (1938). From the Concise Columbia Encyclopedia. Copyright © 1991 by Columbia University Press. Dear reader, please note that the above article omits reference to his penning of the Humanist Manifesto which is an Amerikanized version of the Communist Manifesto which he studied.
Dewey knew how to change the schools so our customs would not be passed on to our children. He well knew how to destroy the transfer from generation to generation. He undertook a plan which would have been treason by the standards of George Washington and Noah Webster. Those statesmen of our country called for the continual teaching of the great stories of our land to children from the earliest age. Instead, what the children have today is the denigration of our great heroes, the defaming of good men's intentions, and the omission of noble words; all for the intent of cutting off America's children from their inheritance.
Dewey wrote: Particularly is it true that a society which not only changes
but-which has the ideal of such change as will improve it,
will have different standards and methods of education
from one which aims simply at the perpetuation of its own customs.
To make the general ideas set forth
applicable to our own educational practice, it is, therefore, necessary
to come to closer quarters with the nature of present social life.
Larry: I am always amazed at the wisdom of Jesus' words, "the people of this generation are wiser in their own ways than are the children of light.." Dewey has touched on a simple point that the Christian pastors and teachers have ignored for too long, even though it is a major theme in scripture. Basically it is this: A child tends to become like the environment where he spends time. John Dewey knew it. He knew how to accomplish his goal of stripping Christianity from America. Just leave it out of the children's schools. After all, a man rarely will go read the Bible as an adult if he is not taught from it as a youth. That was common knowledge back before 1810 in this nation. It is in the quotes from the founding fathers as compiled by David Barton and published by Wallbuilder Presentations. The Christian who can not support that idea with scripture just does not know his Bible. Yet John Dewey, who was for the destruction of Christian faith seems to get great credit for restating a clear truth which he then turns to use against the Christian upbringing of children. How? By bringing them up in a school room which ignores, denies, and contradicts God at every opportunity. Thus effectively conditioning the children to do the same. The children become accustomed to doing what they and their peers and their teachers continually do. Who doesn't know that?
Larry: Dewey's standard was to split the difference, go half way, one step at a time, bring the best down to the worst. That's what we have in our schools today. The best is brought down. The worst remains rotten, and a step at a time, the criteria for excellence is lowered so that everybody looks good in the brave new society of changing values. Dewey proposes to split the difference between thieves and others for the standard norm of society, then operate from there.
JD wrote: The problem is to extract the desirable traits of forms of community life which actually exist, and employ them to criticize undesirable features and suggest improvement. Now in any social group whatever, even in a gang of thieves, we find some interest held in common, and we find a certain amount of interaction and cooperative intercourse with other groups. From these two traits we derive our standard.
Larry: Bayonets are referred to by the founding fathers in the sense of saying our government was not set up to rule by bayonets. Our Constitution depends upon a people who are ruled from within, by their heart, according to the laws of God. That is why they insisted on godly schools in the North West Ordinance as a requirement for statehood. But this is no longer learned by school children today. Nothing of its kind is taught in most public schools. By design I say.
Dewey wrote: Let us apply the first element in this criterion to a despotically governed state. It is not true there is no common interest in such an organization between governed and governors. The authorities in command must make some appeal to the native activities of the subjects, must call some of their powers into play. Talleyrand said that a government could do everything with bayonets except sit on them. This cynical declaration is at least a recognition that the bond of union is not merely one of coercive force.
Larry: Enslavement is found when government is able to force children to go to a school that does not teach the same values as the parents. If you think that is too far out, then please realize that it has been said by others for a long time. Way before John Dewey, this was realized. The U.S. Government used the tool of forced government schools on the Indians. Sending them to government schools so as to separate them from the ways of their families was a strong armed method forced on the Indians. It worked. It is also working to separate children today from regular study of scripture as being the foundation of all true learning.
Dewey wrote: Plato defined a slave as one who accepts from another the purposes which control his conduct. This condition obtains even where there is no slavery in the legal sense.
Larry: Dewey pursues what he calls the Democratic Ideal. The averaging of everything. That is why the best seller book, The Dumbing Down of Our Children, was written; because of the continual readjustment of curriculum to lower and lower standards. Let's face it, the ones who don't want to learn will always be ignorant. Thus the bottom never moves. But so long as averaging is done each year, the top keeps on being cut down to lower and lower levels as the schools minimize requirements so they can say everybody is getting an excellent education.
Dewey wrote: The Democratic Ideal. The two elements in our criterion both point to democracy. The first signifies not only more numerous and more varied points of shared common interest, but greater reliance upon the recognition of mutual interests as a factor in social control. The second means not only freer interaction between social groups ( once isolated so far as intention could keep up a separation ) but change in social habit -- its continuous readjustment through meeting the new situations produced by varied intercourse. And these two traits are precisely what characterize the democratically constituted society.
Dewey has established in the public mind that this is a democratically constituted society. Truth is that the Constitution guarantees us a republican form of government. Noah Webster defined that as being based on the laws of nature and of nature's God, ie the Bible and its laws. 95% of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence and of the Constitution agreed that this nation was founded on the laws of God. British common law acknowledged Christianity as its foundation. All these truths are omitted or denied in typical school rooms today. Dewey's teachers have done their job well. America has been nearly stripped of its last vestige of memory of the words from our Founding Fathers. Shall we also be raped or shall we put back on our clothes woven with those wonderful words of wisdom and advice on how to run this country from the men who established it?
Dewey wrote: The superficial explanation is that a government resting upon popular
suffrage cannot be successful unless those who elect and who obey their
governors are educated.
Since a democratic society repudiates the principle of external authority, it must find a substitute in voluntary
disposition and interest; these can be created only by education.
Platonic Educational Philosophy:
Democratic Ideas in Education
Cradle to the Grave Concept of Government Education
Dewey saw himself as one having greater conscious understanding than Plato. No wonder his followers admired him so much.
Larry: Dewey is a Greek thinker. He loves to organize ideas the way he sees them. The error is constantly clear to one who knows scripture. Others may think he was a very wise man. I acknowledge his capacity for thought and ordering of ideas, but I also see his gross darkness resulting from the denial of light from scripture on the training of children.
Dewey:3. The Platonic Educational Philosophy. Subsequent chapters will be devoted to making explicit the implications of the democratic ideas in education. In the remaining portions of this chapter, we shall consider the educational theories which have been evolved in three epochs when the social import of education was especially conspicuous. Cradle to the Grave State Control, a la Brave New World, now called K-12 and school to work program, reinforced with even earlier day care government centers and computer recorded aptitude guidance The first one to be considered is that of Plato. No one could better express than did he the fact that a society is stably organized when each individual is doing that for which he has aptitude by nature in such a way as to be useful to others ,or to contribute to the whole to which he belongs; and that it is the business of education to discover these aptitudes and progressively to train them for social use.
Dewey saw himself as having greater conceptions than Plato.
Much which has been said so far is borrowed from what Plato first consciously taught the world. But conditions which he could not intellectually control led him to restrict
these ideas in their application. He never got any conception of the indefinite plurality of activities which may characterize an individual and a social group, and consequently limited his view to a limited number of classes of capacities and of social arrangements.
Larry: God's ultimate judgment is denied by our education system to the children. The roots of that denial in American history are shown here from the atheist Dewey himself. Christian parents, please attend to the training and conditioning of your children's way of thinking. Else what terrible prize must be paid.
Dewey wrote: Plato's starting point is that the organization of society depends
ultimately upon knowledge of the end of existence. If we do not know its end, we shall be at the mercy of accident and caprice. Unless we know the end, the good, we shall have no criterion for rationally deciding
what the possibilities are which should be promoted, nor how social arrangements are to be ordered. We shall have no conception of the proper limits and distribution of activities -- what he called justice -- as a trait of both individual and social organization. But how is the knowledge of the final and permanent good to be achieved? In dealing
with this question we come upon the seemingly insuperable obstacle that
such knowledge is not possible save in a just and harmonious social
order.
Larry: Dewey says the Bible values are false. That's what he has reference to.
--- Here Dewey is referring to what he calls false, the absolute values of the Bible.---
Everywhere else the mind is distracted and misled by false valuations and false perspectives.
A disorganized and factional society...
sets up a number of different models and standards. Under such
conditions it is impossible for the individual to attain consistency of
mind. Only a complete whole is fully self-consistent.
Larry: Dewey believes the Bible values inevitably lead people astray. A society which rests upon the supremacy of some factor over another irrespective of its rational or proportionate claims, inevitably leads thought astray. It puts a premium on certain things and slurs over others, and creates a mind whose seeming unity is forced and distorted. Education proceeds ultimately from the patterns furnished by institutions, customs, and laws.
Christian parents, this is the concept of your current public school education system to which you are willingly subjecting your children. You must provide for your own children a school which is founded on God and His truth as the only foundation for all good learning. The public school is redefining the word good to your children as being what the majority wills. Dewey redefines the word just and right as being dependent upon highly trained minds. How much more must you hear before you take action to care for a godly school for your children?
Only in a just state will these be such as to give the right education; and only those who have rightly trained minds will be able to recognize the end, and ordering principle of things.
Brave New World, State School, Cradle to the Grave Education System
Dewey wrote: We seem to be caught in a hopeless circle. However, Plato suggested a way out. A few men, philosophers or lovers of wisdom -- or truth -- may by study learn at least in outline the proper patterns of true existence. If a powerful ruler should form a state after these patterns, then its regulations could be preserved. An education could be given which would sift individuals, discovering what they were good for, and supplying a method of assigning each to the work in life for which his nature fits him. Each doing his own part, and never transgressing, the order and unity of the whole would be maintained.
It would be impossible to find in any scheme of philosophic thought a more adequate recognition on one hand of the educational significance of social arrangements and, on the other, of the dependence of those arrangements upon the means used to educate the young. It would be impossible to find a deeper sense of the function of education in discovering and developing personal capacities, and training them so that they would connect with the activities of others. Yet the society in which the theory was propounded was so undemocratic that Plato could not work out a solution for the problem whose terms he clearly saw.
Larry: The next part of chapter seven in his book deals with the historical change of schools from training up a person as an individual to educating a mind as a citizen of a state-society, all of one homogeneous mind, fitted to serve the rulers of the state who also rule the school! You must read it yourself for now it is late, and I have no more time to give this particular page. The subject is covered well in two other places at this site, History of Education and also at S.A. Kossor's site.
Larry: Let me add that I can see where certain bits and pieces of Dewey's ideas might go over well with teachers in teachers colleges, even with Christian teachers, for in part, taken out of their context, some of his sentences sound ok, even sound good. But when it is realized where he is coming from, and the redefinition of terms, and his goals, then his works become abominable. Yet their influence is seen more today. His theme has been taken up and rephrased in many ways by most educators around the country and the world. He is rightly called the Father of Modern Education. Christian parents should not send their children to such a school if they have any choice in the matter. God calls us to provide a godly school for our children. Dewey type schools are too subtle a series of traps for the children to be sent there. They are a snare and a trap and the primary instrument of the changing of America from a Christian nation as defined by the Supreme Court on at least two occasions prior to 1948 to what is now a nation that denies God and the right to mention His name in all public places, public meaning state, just as in our schools, public schools mean state schools. Don't forget that, lest you be charmed to sleep while your children' s mind is charmed away from the teaching of God. In Jesus' name. God help our children. See Malachi 4:6, the last chapter and last verse in the KJV Bible. Father's take heed to the word of God so you can say before God that you love your children.
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