According to USA Today:
One in three U.S. high school students say the press ought to be more restricted, and even more say the government should approve newspaper stories before readers see them, according to a survey being released today.
The survey of 112,003 students finds that 36% believe newspapers should get “government approval” of stories before publishing; 51% say they should be able to publish freely; 13% have no opinion.
Asked whether the press enjoys “too much freedom,” not enough or about the right amount, 32% say “too much,” and 37% say it has the right amount. Ten percent say it has too little.
It seems that the vision of John Dewey, a.k.a. the “father of progressive education,” has been realized. Lewis S. Feuer, in Marx and the Intellectuals (1969), reported that Dewey lamented his lack of “the necessary literate skill” to proclaim to America the “achievements” of the schools and policies in the USSR, and that he was envious that in the USSR, as opposed to the USA, intellectuals “have a task that is total and constructive. They are organic members of an organic going movment.” Here is Dewey’s vision as discussed by John Taylor Gatto, the 1991 New York State Teacher of the Year, in “Our Prussian School System” (Cato Policy Report 15, no. 2, March/April 1993)
In 1896 John Dewey said that independent, self-reliant people would be a counterproductive anachronism in the collective society of the future. In modern society, said Dewey, people would be defined by their associations ? the group to which they belonged ? not by their own individual accomplishments. … Dewey said that the great mistake of traditional pedagogy had been to make reading and writing constitute the bulk of early schoolwork. He advocated the whole-word method, not because the latter was more efficient (he admitted it was less efficient), but because reading hard books produces independent thinkers, thinkers who cannot be socialized very easily. By socialized Dewey meant conditioned to a program of social objectives administered by the best social thinkers in government. That was a giant step on the road to state socialism, and it was a vision radically disconnected from America’s past, its historic hopes and dreams.
Students who think newspapers should await the verdicts of government censors no doubt fit perfectly Dewey’s idea of students prepared for state socialism. Congratulations to our state schools for helping make a century-old vision of education a reality.
(Hat tip to Dar?o Fern?ndez-Morera, from whose book American Academia and the Survival of Marxist Ideas those references were gleaned.)
