Author is a quack. There is deliberate mis-quoting in the article that completely warps the source material.
From their quoted section:
> We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or of science. We are not to raise up from among them authors, orators, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embr}-o great artists, painters, musicians. Nor will we cherish even the humbler ambition to raise up from among them lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we now have ample supply.
And then the removed section, which effectively negates the (facial) point of the previous statement:
> We are to follow the admonitions of the good apostle, who said, ''Mind not high things, but condescend to men of low degree." And generally, with respect to these high things, all that we shall try to do is just to create presently about these country homes an atmosphere and conditions such, that, if by chance a child of genius should spring up from the soil, that genius will surely bud and not be blighted.
This is a really, REALLY common quote (with the latter part deliberately omitted) in lots of places complaining about the way the US education system works, as well as antigovernment movement people.
I certainly will not claim the US education system isn't broken, but using such a deliberate, malicious out-of-context quote casts a pall over anything else the author has to say, particularly given it's long, storied history in antigovernment propaganda.
I would definitely recommend that everyone read it.
They were dealing with some very big problems at the time (such as rampant disease), and were seeking ways to improve America's primitive and ad-hoc education system.
Did it work? It certainly missed the mark in a number of ways, but overall it's a damn sight better than it was!
Here's another quote from the same text:
As for the school house, we cannot now even plan the building, or rather, group of buildings. Quite likely we would not recognize the future group if the plan were put before us to-day, so different will it be from the traditional school house. For of one thing we may be sure : Our schools will no longer resemble, in their methods and their discipline, institutions of penal servitude. They will not be, as now, places of forced confinement, accompanied by physical and mental torture during six hours of the day. Straitjackets, now called educational, will no longer thwart and stifle the physical and mental activities of the child. We shall, on the contrary, take the child from the hand of God, the crown and glory of His creative work, by Him pronounced good, and by Jesus blessed. We shall seize the restless activities of his body and mind and, instead of repressing them, we shall stimulate those activities, as the natural forces of growth in action. We shall seek to learn the instincts of the child and reverently to follow and obey them as guides in his development; for those instincts are the Voice of God within him, teaching us the direction of his unfolding. We will harness the natural activities of the child to his natural aspirations, and guide and help him in their realization. The child naturally wishes to do the things that adults do, and therefore the operations of adult life form the imitative plays of the child. The child lives in a dreamland, full of glowing hopes of the future, and seeks anticipatively to live to-day the life of his manhood.
So we will organize our children into a little community and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way, in the home, in the shop, on the farm. We shall train the child for the life before him by methods which reach the perfection of their adaptation only when the child shall not be able to distinguish between the pleasures of his school work and the pleasures of bis play.
From their quoted section:
> We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or of science. We are not to raise up from among them authors, orators, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embr}-o great artists, painters, musicians. Nor will we cherish even the humbler ambition to raise up from among them lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we now have ample supply.
And then the removed section, which effectively negates the (facial) point of the previous statement:
> We are to follow the admonitions of the good apostle, who said, ''Mind not high things, but condescend to men of low degree." And generally, with respect to these high things, all that we shall try to do is just to create presently about these country homes an atmosphere and conditions such, that, if by chance a child of genius should spring up from the soil, that genius will surely bud and not be blighted.
This is a really, REALLY common quote (with the latter part deliberately omitted) in lots of places complaining about the way the US education system works, as well as antigovernment movement people.
I certainly will not claim the US education system isn't broken, but using such a deliberate, malicious out-of-context quote casts a pall over anything else the author has to say, particularly given it's long, storied history in antigovernment propaganda.