Patrick Deneen Quotes
We have fallen into the bad and unquestioned habit of thinking that our educational system is broken, but it is working on all cylinders. What our educational system aims to produce is cultural amnesia, a wholesale lack of curiosity, history-less free agents, and educational goals composed of content-free processes and unexamined buzz-words like “critical thinking,” “diversity,” “ways of knowing,” “social justice,” and “cultural competence.”
Black and Hispanic student performance on educational achievement tests were much lower than that of whites. There were many who believed that this gap was responsible for most of the other ethnic differences that made for ethnic and racial inequality. Ironically, it was Romney’s party in Congress that opposed more funding for education and generally was opposed to federal efforts to improve and monitor civil rights. However, Romney was talking to a mostly Hispanic audience and took a position that was seemingly contradictory to his Party’s Platform and the actions of the then Republican Controlled House of Representatives.
This quotation from the great educator is frequently used in the argument over testing in schools which measure in large part the transmission of knowledge. This was especially true in the “No Child Left Behind Program of the George W. Bush Administration.
Patrick Deneen is David A. Potenziani Memorial Associate Professor of Constitutional Studies at Notre Dame.
