29 June 2016
Patrick Dean is the president of McMaster University in Hamilton, ON. He is a great admirer of John Dewey, an American educator and famous progressive whose work spanned the 1890s to the 1930s. Dean, by his own admission, is a progressive and follower of Dewey and in a speech to the graduates of the class of 2016, President Dean remarked at length about the aims of education and how good and admirable they can be. They are good and admirable, in short, when they advance the progressivist agenda of today. Not of yesterday, but of today. (Apparently, the value of education per se holds no value, only the secondary political aims have value.)
Progressive's memory is remarkably short and selective. A portion of his speech was reproduced in the Hamilton Spectator, and was published on this date on the opinion page.
The constancy of the progressivist agenda is that it seeks to advance the good, as seen and defined by the "experts." The trouble is, the experts are technocrats whose underlying philosophy that guides their judgment of the good is undeclared, unexamined, and unsystematic. But that they aim at the good must make their opponents the supporters of evil.
For those not up on the topic, residential schools was a program run by the Canadian government from the 1870s to the 1990s with the aim of educating Canada's aboriginal population to the level of the Europeans. Presently, the programmed is condemned because it secondarily aimed at destroying the neolithic culture of the Indian tribes of Canada.
Progressives are often quite unaware of themselves:
You have to admire the sense of purity that progressives
have of themselves. Even when they hold their own mistakes before their
eyes, they fail to discover their work in it.
Patrick Dean, President of McMaster University, is one such
progressive. A great admirer of John Dewey, Dean’s speech to graduates is
full of the condescension, unselfawareness, and racism of the man he admires.
Education can be a powerful agent of social reformation and
should not allow itself to be the enemy of progress and reform, Dean
holds. He then turns to Residential Schools. What was an object of
Residential Schools? Why, the social reformation and progress – of
aboriginals!
Dean is appalled to say that the progressives of the late 19th
century (the John Deweys of Canada) held that “the aim of education [of
aboriginals] is to destroy the Indian.” The experts of that day compared
that Neolithic culture of Canada’s aboriginals with that of European society
and decided that if aboriginals were to survive at all, they had to be educated
as Europeans.
Today’s experts now condemn that policy of education of
aboriginals as destructive, an attempt at cultural hegemony and political
control. But these Monday morning quarterbacks don’t say what they would
have done differently, or address the consequences of their prescription.
They just condemn their intellectual forebears without recognizing the family
heritage, and move on.
It gets worse. Dean proudly announced that McMaster
University squats on traditional territories of the Mississauga and
Haudenosaunee Nations, recognized and protected as such by the treaty of “Dish
With One Spoon” wampum agreement. When is President Dean going to realize
what he just said and begin the process of returning the filched territory back
to its rightful owners?
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