EDUCATIONAL WASTELANDS: The Retreat from Learning in Our Public Schools [Paperback]

Arthur E. Bestor (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: University of Illinois Press; 2nd/Reprnt edition (March 1, 1988)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0252012445
• ISBN-13: 978-0252012440
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #119,177 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Early Warning of Educational Decline, April 22, 2009

By 

Bruce Deitrick Price (Virginia Beach, Va.) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: EDUCATIONAL WASTELANDS: The Retreat from Learning in Our Public Schools (Paperback)

A somewhat unsettling book for me to read. A lot of the research I've been doing on American education, and many of the dark insights I've gained, turn out to be forcefully stated in Arthur Bestor's long-ago book. It came out in 1953 and is thus a wonderful time capsule of how bad things had gotten by mid-century. Recall that Rudolf Flesch published his first Johnny-can't-read book in 1955. So the sky was indeed falling; and some very smart people were there to record the collapse.

Bestor was a distinguished historian and professor; and he waged an absolutely heroic battle against the forces of dumb. Like Flesch, he mostly failed, so wonderfully adamantine were our ed commissars. For a professor of history, Bestor was quite the game guy. Over several years he actually tried to organize the country's scholars and professors. He wanted them to present a unified front, on behalf of the humanities, against the educationists, a common term circa 1950. The educators, as we call them now, had a good time chuckling, sneering, and going ahead with their plans to make schooling as dumb as possible.

Their program was called, at that time, life-adjustment. The basic idea was that students needed to learn how to dress and fill out forms, how to drive and interview for a job, all that practical stuff. The job of the school was to make sure that children were suitably adjusted to life in modern times. The educators bragged, in this most delightful of sophistries: "We don't teach history. We teach children." Isn't that precious?

So if you like deja vue all over again, this is an informative and grimly amusing book. Bestor presents all the reasons why you might want to stress content and thinking. Educationists hated that kind of talk. (The 1985 edition I read included a rebuttal by an eminent educator who basically took 10,000 words to conclude that Bestor was a fool.)

Nor was Bestor shy in stating his contempt for people he considered to be his intellectual inferiors and enemies of genuine education. I'll just give you two examples: "Until public school educationists...acquire sufficient intellectual humility to accept the guidance of past experience and of the considered judgment of the modern learned world, no amount of financial support can possibly raise their schools above mediocrity."

And this: "The issue is drawn between those who believe that good teaching should be directed to sound intellectual ends, and those who are content to dethrone intellectual values and cultivate the techniques of teaching for their own sake, in an intellectual and cultural vacuum." Take that, you Deweyites.

A major theme running through the book is whether education, as conceived by Bestor, is democratic. The educators seem to argue from the curious position that because quality education was once an aristocratic thing, to now give it to ordinary children was elitist and unreasonable. Bestor took the position I hold, that we must try to raise everyone as high as possible. Not to do so is the essence of undemocratic. Indeed, Bestor long ago discovered one of my favorite discoveries (as I fondly imagined it), that much so-called progressive education is actually regressive. Behold the title of Chapter 4: "Progressive Education and Regressive Education."

When we study public schools and find them so mediocre, it seems to be a great mystery, one that I've written about in my book "The Education Enigma." Bestor's book makes the whole matter less mysterious. Our educators, starting several generations ago, were unanimous in wanting the schools to be mediocre.