I have just read a short book by R. C. Sproul with the same title as this essay, in which he traces the key strains of Western philosophical thought from the Greeks to the present in order to illustrate the consequences of the ideas on our present condition (a kind of takeoff on Richard Weaver). Nothing new here, but I was struck by his highlighting of the concept of pragmatism, America’s only homegrown philosophical movement, and its dramatic impact on our system of public education. John Dewey (1859-1952) was the chief architect of the form of
pragmatism that had the most long lasting impact. Put simply, pragmatism holds
that a theory is true only insofar as its actions are “successful”. In pushing this philosophy, Dewey succeeded in revolutionizing our public school system. He did so by denouncing well founded theories of knowledge and objective truth as a waste of time and removing the norms for determining the purposes of education and even what is ultimately pragmatic. In short, he took away the question, “what kind of child are we trying to produce?” The result was the destruction of the classical method of education from which we are still struggling to recover.
