The Primary Education Fetish

It's worth re-emphasizing that as early as John Dewey's essay 1898 The Primary Education Fetish where he articulates that school shouldn't try that hard to teach kids to read, the leaders of the education establishment have been self-consciously opposed to what parents generally want for their kids. Different Drummers: How Teachers of Teachers View Public Education is a more comprehensive survey of teacher attitudes from mid 20th century for those curious.

In 1982, Anthony Oettinger, a member of the private discussion group called the Council on Foreign Relations, asked an audience of communications executives this question: "Do we really have to have everybody literate—writing and reading in the traditional sense—when we have means through our technology to achieve a new flowering of oral communication?" Oettinger suggested "our idea of literacy" is "obsolete."¹ Eighty-three years earlier John Dewey had written in The Primary Education Fetish that "The plea for the predominance of learning to read in early school-life because of the great importance attaching to literature seems to me a perversion."[p.334]²