Educational Essentialism

Week 7 Learning Summary, April 13 – April 19, 2014 – Dr. Paul Rux

This week your humble servant has provided a “conservative” view of ethical issues in education in response to your positions.  The idea has been to challenge critical thinking on your part.  You need not to agree with this writer’s feedback to you; he hopes you take time to reflect on, think about it.  Your professor follows a philosophy of education called Essentialism.  Basically, it says the purpose of education is to prepare us to go to work; therefore, the focus of education ought to be on hard skills, like reading, writing, and arithmetic, not psycho-babble rehabilitation.  Other agencies can do that.  The work ethic focus of Essentialism has its roots in the following two realities:  A country’s first two jobs are to  1) feed itself and 2) defend itself.  If a country knows how to compete economically and win wars,  it will know how to educate its people.  Alas, America has lost its edge to compete economically and to win wars, good and hard.  The result is a dysfunctional, costly educational system that more and more no longer supports our country’s economic and military needs.  It is not popular to say these things; they are there.  We need to think about and factor them in our evaluations of education today.