“Today, bogus egalitarianism has killed memory among uneducated people, and therefore increased social division. Experts attack “rote learning”, but I prefer the phrase “learning by heart”. Head and heart together is what we need, but our culture has separated them.”

So very true in 2013. Its not only the historical facts that must be taught to memory, it applies across the spectrum to learn the basic knowledge and facts to truly be able to used the learning skills, to correctly interpret and to developed deeper knowledge banks.

For example - to truly understand Animal Farm, a common English novel studied by high school students - one must know what is communism, and the governance structure of it.  And yet in the K to 12 history courses, the facts of communism is part of the poison tree in today’‘s education classroom, just a lot of other basic facts of the knowledge tree are missing in the learning and curriculum of today’s schools.

Animal Farm, my youngest hated the book. She complained she did not understand it. She did not understand Animal Farm, because she, like her other classmates had no prior knowledge in the governance and operation of government systems. Once I provided the context - the background information on communism comparing it to a democratic governance system of Canada, my child knew what the pigs were all about and their bogus egalitarianism.

So yes, not only does it killed the collective memories of the citizens leaving in its wake, cultural genocide and weakening the foundations of civil society and the way they governed themselves: progressive teaching methods where knowledge facts are dismissed as useless leads to the conditions in the far off future of children, sitting in a high school class - not at all understanding Animal Farm and the dire implications concerning civil and human rights to the connections of political governance systems.

And the progressive education system wonders why students are not eagerly looking up the missing facts. Its very difficult to do when students do not have the basic knowledge facts to mastery, in order to determined the missing knowledge facts, to truly understand the topic and the questions.

To repeat - ” Head and heart together is what we need, but our culture has separated them.”

It should be our governance and social institutes have separated the knowledge from its people, using progressive teaching methodologies as the vehicle to keep the majority in their ignorance.

ALLElUIA !  what took them so long.

Interesting post, Nancy.  Children don’t do their own research because many are simply uninterested in history:  this is why they need responsible adults around to guide them through courses that they would otherwise totally ignore.  How many adults have you heard say how grateful they are to parents and teachers who, when they were children, forced them to learn certain things like piano; swimming; ballet; math; etc?  Currently we don’t have that in Ontario’s public educational system:  it’s become self-serving, and the agenda of the educrats appears to be to indoctrinate them with left-winged idealism, plus educators are interested in very short working days, and as few working days as possible.
I hope England’s education secretary gets his way.  It’ll be good for the children.  England’s unions are very strong and have become self-serving as well, so he may or may not succeed.