In Richard Weaver’s book Visions of Order, available through ISI, he includes a chapter called Gnostics of Education in which he demonstrates the parallel teachings of the Progressive educators who dominate American thought and the gnostics of the first two centuries.
For one who is opposed to the enemies of the human soul, this essay is enlightening, somewhat discouraging, and even invigorating. Here’s something:
First, we may turn to the objects of learning. Traditional education has always been based on the assumption that there is a world of data, a fixed reality, which is worth knowing and even worth reverencing. The content of education therefore reflected the structure of an antecedent reality. This in fact was education…. The world is there a priori [i.e. it comes first]; the learner has the duty of familiarizing itself with its nature and its set of relations.
Now all of this has been reversed. The main concern of modern educationists is not knowledge of an existent reality, but rather the mastery of a methodology. The aim of the methodology is to “grow through experience.” These are key terms requiring some examination.
Indeed they are. Here you see a pretty fair summary of progressive education compared to that which arises from the Christian classical tradition. Reality cannot be known, says the progressive, and people who try to make it knowable are a problem. Therefore, let us build a school system on the premise that reality cannot be known.
Read that last sentence again.
