The biggest mystery of the 20th century is this: how did American education get lost in its own private wilderness??

Here's the short answer: John Dewey and his "progressive" pals decided that public schools should be primarily interested in a child's "social activities," with a corresponding decrease in emphasis on reading, writing, arithmetic, etc.--and all those finer things that Dewey dismissed as "mere learning."  (This tragic shift started about 100 years ago, financed mainly by John D. Rockefeller's guilty millions, which is one of history's big ironies, that the world's most successful capitalist would pay for the undermining of capitalism.)

Next step: the Third International--with its waves of meddlers, subversives, and front groups--buffeted us with insults on top of injuries, all of THESE people being primarily concerned with doing whatever would weaken Russia's main enemy.

Note that the people behind all of this activity could never tell the truth about their goals. They had to say they were concerned only with better education. (As in, "Give us more money and we'll provide better education.")

The result from 1925 onward is one of the most startling edifices in the intellectual history of the world--a gigantic Rube Goldberg contraption that went through the motions of educating but somehow ended up producing uninformed citizens and 40,000,000 functional illiterates. So many wheels and gears turning. So little product. Hmmm. It's almost as if some of our top educators weren't all that interested in education.

I call this whole charade The Big Pretend. And it's this phenomenon that I'll write about in this blog.

 (For those who would like to investigate the matter more deeply, there are two huge paradigms of failure to explain, and it's these historical events that, for me, prove my case. We now know that New Math makes arithmetic difficult; and Whole Word makes reading difficult. Some would like to say that incompetence explains the introduction of these failures. I would counter that too many people, over too many years, were involved. No, I suspect that our top educators knew what they were doing.)

( For a good look at why Whole Word is a fraud, please see my 21: A Tribute to Rudolph Flesch on Improve-Education.org.)