I picked up a copy of J. Allen Broyles’ 1964 book “The John Birch Society: Anatomy of a Protest” at a library sale last weekend and read it. I’ve been interested, because when I was growing up in the 1960s the ultra-righty John Birch society was seen, in most quarters, as something of a joke. There was a “John Birch Society Coloring Book”, and other such joke items available from gaf companies, and I don’t recall them having a major impact on the national scene. But I wanted to know more about them.
I was surprised to read in Chapter 7 about their education agenda:
I was surprised, because I’ve heard almost exactly this line urged in the past few years by conservative groups, right down to the insistence on phonics. So it looks as if part of the Birch Society agenda has become mainstream conservative platform.
The thing is, I don’t understand the fuss. Certainly I learned the above subjects in school back in the 1960s. I even learned reading by phonics. What horrible alternative program did or do supporters of this program see as waiting to seduce their kids away from the True Path? Even lefty Molly Ivins says phonics should be used, just not exclusively, which makes sense, because in the past forty years since this was written you’d think advances and changes in teaching would arise. My daughter certainly learns handwriting, arithmetic, and reading. She learns history, although whether what she learns would have been considered “patriotic history” by them I don’t know. It’s hard for me to imagine a school curriculum without these. Was someone pushing a school day filled with “feel good” exercises and Self-Esteem classes (like the ones in last year’s Simpsons episode) or something?
The competition to phonics was “whole word”, also called “look say” It has been dropped or at least radically deemphisized. There was also “new math” which people in my generation hated. Of course most people in my generation hated math, weren’t very good at it, and certainly didn’t know how to teach it.
I would assume that “patriotic history” would be a sort of throwback to “manifest destiny”, that everything the US did in the course of history was justified on the grounds that we had found the ideal method of government.
Leaving aside the problem of “patriotic history” (and I consider history as taught in US High Schools too narrow, biased and so on already), I think the problem is all that’s left out. No arts or music. No ethics. No language. No geography, biology, chemistry, physics. And the reading is to be done with some primers (careful propaganda), but nothing further. Where’s comprehension, essays, dialetic reasoning? Will math go higher into irrational numbers and logic?
Basically, it sounds like drone teaching - read what we give you, but don’t think; add the prices in supermarket, but don’t bother with any other science; learn the great history of our country, but nothing about the rest of the world, or what we did wrong; learn how to write a letter, but not a dialectic argument. Then go out into life to read what we (the conservatives) put into the newspapers, so you know what to think and who to vote, and consume. Don’t question, don’t get interested in things.
Ingteresting article – but they didn’t, AFAIK, have such “total immersion” teaching of language, and I don’t recall anyone teaching “Look-say” , when I was a kid. So what were the Birchers fulminating against in the 1960s?
MilliCal , as far as I can tell, isn’;t getting anything as extreme as the immersion program. She’s brought home lists of words to learn and use and now reads voraciously asnd has a staggering vocabulary. She doesn’t seem to be using either simple phonics or total immersion, The war between those two looks like a fight between black and white, when I’ll bet most of the country is gray.
as far as the New Math goes, I was caught by it in grade school. IO’d had a couple of years of traditional math before they dropped New Math on us. It was more confusing for my parents than for me, I think. I understood the concepts easily enough, but thought that some of the ways they taught it were roundabout and ponderous.
costanze – I agree about the seeming limitations there. I don’t know if that’s the entire Birch agenda (“teach this and nothing else!”), but i have heard others championing such a limited curriculum, and agree that it’s a rotten idea.
Basically, I agree with this, but I just wanted to say that I never heard of irrationals numbers before college and the first time I ever learned anything about logic was when I was asked to teach it. They are not topics for elementary or even high schools.
As far as I am concerned, someone who is taught to read without any phonics, cannot read. How much phonics is required ought to be a research topic, but just seems to be a source of polemics.
I learned about them in trigonometry, at least, and probably geometry.