I’ve done quite a bit of reporting about how Wikipedia is definitely not “the encyclopedia anyone can edit.” It’s become a vehicle for special interests to control information. Agenda editors are able to prevent or revert edits and sourcing on selected issues and people in order to control the narrative.
My own battle with Wikipedia included being unable to correct provably false facts such as incorrect job history, incorrect birth place and incorrect birth date.
What’s worse is that agenda editors related to pharmaceutical interests and the partisan blog Media Matters control my Wikipedia biographical page, making sure that slanted or false information stays on it. For example, they falsely refer to my reporting as “anti-vaccine,” and imply my reporting on the topic has been discredited. In fact, my vaccine and medical reporting has been recognized by top national journalism awards organizations, and has even been cited as a source in a peer-reviewed scientific publication. However, anyone who tries to edit this factual context and footnotes onto my page finds it is quickly removed.
What persists on my page, however, are sources that are supposedly disallowed by Wikipedia’s policies. They include citations by Media Matters, with no disclosure that it’s a partisan blog.
Another entity quoted on my Wikipedia biographical page to disparage my work is the vaccine industry’s Dr. Paul Offit. But there’s no mention of the lawsuits filed against Offit for libel (one prompted him to apologize and correct his book), or the fact that he provided false information about his work and my reporting to the Orange County Register, which later corrected its article. Obviously, these facts would normally make Offit an unreliable source, but for Wikipedia, he’s presented as if an unconflicted expert. In fact, Wikipedia doesn’t even mention that’s Offit is a vaccine industry insider who’s made millions of dollars off of vaccines.
Meantime, turn to Dr. Offit’s own Wikipedia biography and– at last look– it also omitted all mention of his countless controversies. Instead, it’s written like a promotional resume– in violation of Wikipedia’s supposed politics on neutrality.
These biographies are just two examples of ones that blatantly violate Wikipedia’s strict rules, yet they are set in stone. The powerful interests that “watch” and control the pages make sure Offit’s background is whitewashed and that mine is subtly tarnished. They will revert or change any edits that attempt to correct the record.
This, in a nutshell, exemplifies Wikipedia’s problems across the platform as described by its co-founder Larry Sanger.
While it’s almost universally understood that the American school system is underperforming, “reform,” too, is almost universally prescribed as the solution. Yet in other walks of life, bad ideas are not reformed—they are eliminated and replaced with better ones. Our school system is rarely identified as a bad idea.
The motivations at the origins were not pure; they were never to educate but to nationalize the youth in a particular mold.
The system is reflexively left alone while the methods are the bad ideas that get cycled in and out: open concept schools, multiple intelligences, project-based learning, universal design for learning, merit-based pay, vouchers, charters, and most recently, educational neuroscience. Every decade or so we are told by the pedagogic experts that they have found an answer to our school’s problems. The trouble is, they’re looking right past the problem.
Schooling Monopoly
The problem is the monopoly that schooling has gained over education. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, approximately 97 percent of kids go through traditional schooling (as opposed to homeschooling or unschooling), and just over 90 percent of those attend government schools. That is to say, there is basically one accepted way to educate kids today: school them.
Given the relatively poor performance of American students on international achievement tests, you would think schooling might receive a second look. Quite the opposite, actually. It is instead made mandatory, and taxpayers are forced to subsidize it. This begs the question: Why would the government continue to propagate a system that produces such questionable results? The answer lies in their motives, and their motives are best understood by reviewing a brief history of compulsory schooling.
Roots in Germany
The earliest ancestor to our system of government-mandated schooling comes from 16th-century Germany. Martin Luther was a fierce advocate for state-mandated public schooling, not because he wanted kids to become educated, but because he wanted them to become educated in the ways of Lutheranism. Luther was resourceful and understood the power of the state in his quest to reform Jews, Catholics, and other non-believers. No less significant was fellow reformist John Calvin, who also advocated heavily for forced schooling. Calvin was particularly influential among the later Puritans of New England (Rothbard, 1979).
Considering compulsory schooling has such deep roots in Germany, it should be no surprise that the precursor to our American government school system came directly from the German state of Prussia. In 1807, fresh off a humiliating defeat by the French during the War of the Fourth Coalition, the Germans instituted a series of vast, sweeping societal reforms. Key within this movement was education reform, and one of the most influential educational reformers in Germany at the time was a man named Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Like Luther before him, Fichte saw compulsory schooling as a tool to indoctrinate kids, not educate them. Fichte describes his aim for Germany’s “new education” this way:
Then, in order to define more clearly the new education which I propose, I should reply that that very recognition of, and reliance upon, free will in the pupil is the first mistake of the old system and the clear confession of its impotence and futility.
But actual education is an organic process and requires free will; this was not an attempt at education. Schools were to be factories that would churn out the type of obedient, compliant workers the state preferred. Here’s Fichte again explaining the desired interaction between teachers and students:
[Y]ou must do more than merely talk to him; you must fashion him, and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than you wish him to will.
Fichte understood full well that a statist vision could most easily be realized if governments were given kids’ minds early on:
Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters would have wished … When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for more than one generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen.
If such a totalitarian vision were quietly isolated in Germany, or even Europe, it might be of very little consequence. But it would be this Prussian model of control-by-schooling that 19th-century American politicians would bring to our nation—and the one that is still with us today.
Seven years ago, I had Kahn Academy slated as a near perfect mathematics curriculum for my sons, when they were ready. The testimonials of grade-schoolers doing college calculus were impressive. That they were doing so by watching videos at their own pace was all I needed to hear.
Then, something awful happened.
Sal Kahn Met Google, then Bill Gates
Not long after discovering Kahn’s videos, I saw him discussing “Innovation in Education” with Bill Gates.
What did Kahn have to learn from Gates about education? Gates had skipped out of college to become a billionaire. And his common core was failing miserably?!
In fairness to Kahn, the outcry against common core, introduced in 2010, was not yet nation-wide. At the time of their meeting in 2012, it was not the anti-endorsement of Gates for “innovation in education” it would soon become.
Ironically, the worst complaints about common core are in Kahn’s area of expertise: mathematics. Isn’t math the easiest subject to get right in a curriculum?
According to common core expert James Pesta, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, the curriculum:
Changes math into writing and drawing. Instead of solving math problems, the students must draw circles, tubes, and squares to solve a problem.
Takes the natural parts and makes them non-intuitive.
Pushes exposure to algebra out to high-school from the usual start in 6th or 7th grade.
Shifts the purpose away from getting the right answer to getting a group consensus on what the correct answer might be.
Turns math into a subject for which even parents who are experts in math cannot help their children.
That’s great for kids who want to avoid math, altogether. But it’s a complete waste of time for kids that do.
Professor James Milgram, who did the calculations for the Apollo moonshots, explains why he wouldn’t sign off on common core math:
How could an expert in math like Khan, who’d made his reputation by helping grade-schoolers do college-level math, be fooled?
The Core of Common Core
In an interview on the Tom Woods show, Pesta says the unstated goal of common core is training parents to accept that only the state can teach their children, properly. Pesta also believes that common core is a vehicle for teaching children a one-sided ideological view:
Why else would they have children reading executive orders from President Obama and EPA tracts instead of the classics of literature?
The premise of Common Core, when you boil it right down, is that the state owns your kids, not you. And we all should be very worried about that.
Is Kahn’s Academy Salvageable?
It’s best to let Kahn speak for himself on whether his academy is a non-common-core alternative. Here’s Khan in 2013:
“…When we looked at the standards, when we looked at the items coming out of the assessment consortium, smarter balanced, we realized that this is a very very very good standard.”
“Right now, we have a team of teachers, of professors, of graduate students who are working closely with us, working very closely with many of the authors of the common core itself, to make sure that we intentionally create content that really hits at the conceptual spirit of the common core.”
Conceptual spirit, Sal?
Do you mean the “conceptual spirit” of forestalling algebra until high-school? The “conceptual spirit” of having children read presidential executive orders and EPA tracts instead of classic literature? The “conceptual spirit” of the most centrally federalized education scheme ever devised?
Due to the small size of our content team, we don’t currently have the resources to pursue a curriculum alignment with non-Common Core standards.
2016 Update from Sal
“Now we have 150,000 exercises and many thousands of videos vetted by the authors of common core!”
Can I Trust You to be Alone with My Children?
Curriculums are best chosen the same way parents decide on a tutor. Trusting them to be alone with your children is a good start.
Would you trust a tutor who did any of the following to be alone with your child?
Leaves gaping holes in essential subjects.
Confuses them with lots of words when a simple answer will do.
Uses methods that even expert parents don’t understand.
Trains them on political agendas instead of teaching them the subject at hand.
Some accuse parents of using school as a babysitter. But, would even those parents hire a babysitter who behaved in such ways?
Failure to Who?
To parents that want the best education possible for their children, common core is a failure. However, it’s not a failure to Gates. His goals have little in common with those of individual parents.
Gates wants to impose “standards” on children, worldwide. Here he is admitting that doing so requires making a range of compromises that will hold many children back.
The uniform approach, sort of monolithic state-by-state approach that we have, yes that probably holds things back. But politically, to get that to change is very hard. I mean, charter schools at California shorts their charter schools in a way that most of them are are financially unstable right now. And, you know, the Union often are used for the status quo, whether it’s against charters or against personnel systems. So, it’s very very tough because everybody wants a minimum standard. And using a market-based approach you worry that you won’t hit that minimum and so you get these kinds of rigid approaches.”
That’s fair warning to all discerning parents. Common core cannot (and was not designed to) match the results of homeschooling or private schools. Neither must compromise with a union, take rigid monolithic approaches, or meet only minimum standards. All three of those “requirements” for Gates is tantamount to failure in a homeschool or private school.
Gates says that using a market-based approach makes him “worry that you won’t hit that minimum and so you get these kinds of rigid approaches.” Prior to his co-opting of Kahn, Sal’s market-based approach was mopping the floor with any educational innovation Gates had ever dreamed of. But, now he’s worried about turning education over to the market from which Kahn’s Academy emerged? This is either willful ignorance or another checkmark in the unqualified column for Gates on “innovation in education.”
Making Common Core Irrelevant
As tragic as it was to watch the co-opting of Salman Kahn and his academy, the work he began is being carried out by other teachers. Their classrooms are free of “rigid, monolithic, minimum” standards. And, the fruits of their market-based labor have already put any child with web access only a few clicks away from escaping Gate’s “innovations.”
Even with the many superior curriculums, already online, common core will not become irrelevant until parents become aware of them. They must also dare to walk away from so-called traditional models of education. Of course, referring to common core as traditional is like referring to an 8-year-old as a great great grandfather.
Outliers’ Perspective
Khan let his academy be co-opted by billionaires and “standards” with a regrettable “Conceptual spirit.” Thanks to other teachers who’ve taken up the work Kahn set out to do, the impact is minimal, if not zero.
Professor Pesta describes common core as “the most centrally federalized education scheme ever devised.” Unfortunately, states have a long history of injecting themselves into the arena of education. Aside from the Cathedral schools under Charlemagne in the early 9th century, state intervention in education has produced lackluster, and lately catastrophic, results.
Today, western civilization is still recovering from the Prussian model that replaced education with mere training. Common core takes the Prussian model and adds ideological indoctrination, the forestalling of exposure to essential subjects to early adulthood, and unnecessary confusion to straightforward subjects like math.
Remarkably, though still unvalidated or tested, common core consortiums managed to push their “standards” into the SAT college admission tests in 2016. Even parents dead-set against common core now believe they must go along with it lest their children are prevented from getting into college. This is false, but a topic for a separate essay.
The Solution is Yours
It is the responsibility of parents, not the state, to provide their children with an education. The shirking of that responsibility invites third parties into the mix.
Fortunately, all underperforming third parties can be disinvited if parents educate their children without relying on the state. That doesn’t necessarily mean doing it yourself but making it happen. If you can afford them, there are still excellent private schools “out there.” Alternatively, more curriculums arrive on the scene, every day.
Most property taxes are justified in the name of paying for local public schools. This will almost certainly mean forgoing the benefit of property tax money for the public schools your children will not be attending.
Update: After watching ~450 videos, I can wholeheartedly recommend three courses in the Ron Paul Homeschool Curriculum:Western Civilization I & II, and Government 1B. I’ll hold off on further recommendations until I’ve taken the course, personally. That also helps ensure my kids don’t get ahead of me, anytime soon!
BTW, those three courses are also available as bonuses when purchasing the “Master” level of Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom.
