In the mid-Eighties, I visited a favorite old prof, back in the old home town. He was a tenured professor, so he didn’t care what he said, but his wife was a lowly lecturer in the Faculty of Education, on yearly contracts, so she cared. Judy was a model of common sense, with her specialty, “Testing” in Educational Psychology. And she saw at ground-level the disastrous results of the new ideology, dominating her profession. Already, kids were failing.

Child Liberationists, mandating a pedagogy of Creativity and Self-esteem, now ran the Education Faculty, and she feared to lift her head over the edge of her trench. “It’s insanity,” she warned, “but if I say anything, it’ll cost me my job.” She was confirming what a friend had told me, ten years earlier. He’d done a real Honors Psych degree, then went into Education for a teaching diploma.  Already in mid-Seventies, he had to keep his head down:  “They’re crazy,” he marveled. “They don’t want to do real testing, and they don’t care about content.”

            Liberation education has been the rage since the Sixties. Pedagogues like Paulo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed) and Ivan Illich (Deschooling Society) hawked the notion that children are really Noble little Savages, who need only to be liberated from societal norms (good habits) and economic categories (useful skills). With natural exploration, “discovery learning,” every child can blossom into a creative artist. So now, freed from the oppression of reality, our graduates see themselves as witty little gods, remaking reality into a Pixar movie.

In reality, the HUMA – the Homogenous, Universal and Managerial Administration – is a religion of dependency, and Creativity pedagogy is its catechism. Nurturing the soul of an artist in every child looks attractive, but… Creative artists have always been the very few clients of the many productive patrons, the people who actually cope with reality, producing the wealth to support artists and everybody else. If everybody wants to be an artist, everybody starves. Or maybe “the government” will have to feed us all.

There’s been culture war between the “Discipline of Reality” and “Liberation of Creativity” pedagogies since the dawn of our public schools. I learned Old Math in the early Sixties, then watched my younger brother struggle with the New Math in the late Sixties. New Math didn’t teach basic skills, didn’t work and was quietly dumped in the Eighties—only to return holus-bolus in the Nineties and ever since.  Whole Language enjoyed the same ebb-and-flow in the Seventies; when it failed, phonics was resurrected; but now Whole Language is back—and it still doesn’t work. Meanwhile, in Social Studies, kids are made to write Policy Papers, expressing their wishes how the world should be – as if they could create the Earthly Paradise, simply by imagining it.  You know, like John Lennon’s “Imagine.”

True story:  Back in 2011, while I was teaching Latin part-time in our little independent school, a grade ten boy came into my classroom, threw his Social Studies text (Globalization) into the corner, and cried with disgust, “THEY WANT US TO WRITE POLICY PAPERS, AND WE DON’T KNOW ANYTHING!”  No lie: grade ten, and he already knew what ideology-blinded educators do not:  real creativity is nurtured only with discipline, real skills and real knowledge.

Dorothy Sayers’ 1948 essay, “The Lost Tools of Learning,” describes the same liberation pedagogy dominating the 1930s — and failing back then. Educational professionals promise a “silver-bullet,” “discovery, easy and fun,” ignoring kids’ real needs. Lower school kids love and need drill, but teachers get bored, doing what’s needed. It’s less work and more fun, talking to kids about their feelings. Bonus:  the textbook industry flourishes at public expense, promising that the newest, most expensive textbook really makes learning effortless and entertaining.

Okay, the backstory:  in the early Nineties, with our own kids hitting school age, we joined a small private school startup:  seven families, forty kids, and four teachers in a vacant storefront. We used homeschooling resources, with drills, exercises, chants and memorization, and lots of parental involvement. We flourished, rocketing to the top of the province.

Then, a decade later, with 300 students and a real building, we made the mistake of hiring an ambitious, mainstream principal. He quickly trashed our “fringe” homeschooling stuff, hired curriculum experts, and forced our school onto the textbook merry-go-round. The most extreme example: in middle-school math, we went through four different textbook series in five years (like Math to the Max, Math Power, Math Meth, whatever). They didn’t work. A teacher came into the staff room, asking me what some grade-six textbook problem was trying to ask – he couldn’t understand it. The Department of Education itself yanked one text, only six months after we bought it. It didn’t work.  Texts for 50 kids per grade, times $60 – $100 per book. Do the math. The same thing happens in your public schools, only hidden in your taxes.

This sounds insane, but it’s true:  the mantra in the education faculties is, “Drill will kill.” The math pedagogy forbids drill and multiplication tables, since kids need to “intuit creatively” number relations. Student teachers are drilled in this Prohibition Against Drill in content and skills – arithmetic, reading, geography – since it “kills creativity.”  So in our school, by grade nine, our science teachers found their up-coming students couldn’t do single-digit multiplication in their heads – you know, 6 x 3 = …. ?  The official answer:  as long as they can punch calculator keys, they don’t need that. But what if they hit the wrong key?  Can they see an absurd answer? So one science teacher began multiplication drills in grade nine… too late.

Postmodern faculties of education are perfect examples of Nietzsche’s diagnosis, “Insanity is the rule in groups.” No one in sports education would ever buy into the false dichotomy of Creativity Versus Discipline.  Creativity needs practice. No coach with a lackluster team would let them do their laps on bicycles. Rather than make the practices easier, she’d find the drills to make the team more fit—and she’d do them herself. If the team seemed bored, she wouldn’t give them more stylish uniforms. She’d get their attention by drilling them until they internalized the moves they need – and then she’d delight the kids by showing them how proficient they’d become. That would make them happy and give them real self-esteem. We don’t need to make education easier and more entertaining. We need to make it challenging and more satisfying.

Postmodern self-esteem has been the religion of our Universal public education for 50 years. The real tragedy – even among educators themselves – is that it’s founded on a lunatic theory of human happiness. For 3,000 years, Western Civilization (and every other survivable civilization) understood that “Human Beings are Social Animals.” This means that our happiness is founded in friendship, co-operative enterprise and community celebration. This means that kids need to learn impulse control, useful skills and cultural etiquette. However, for the past half-century, the people controlling our schools have taught precisely the opposite. Our kids are taught that they should be the Drama Queens in plays of their own illiterate scrawling, and everybody else should pay attention to them. That’s making everybody miserable. More to come.