Why The Foundational Knowledge McGuffey's Offers Needs To Be Shared

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Why the foundational knowledge McGuffey's offers needs to be shared: RJRushdoony on the direction of modern curriculum: "...The real question we are told is not what does this mean but how can I use it. Man must renounce meaning and knowledge for the pragmatic use of things. The goal of learning therefore is not knowledge but the power to manipulate. In dealing either with men or things our purpose under pragmatism and relativism becomes not a knowledge of things but the power to manipulate them. Education today is under the influence of this philosophy and expressive of it. Whether it is Marxist, existentialist, pragmatic, instrumentalist, progressivistic, or other forms, modern education is hostile to knowledge and is in flight from knowledge. Its negative function is to indoctrinate its subjects with a radical cynicism concerning the family, patriotism, religion, philosophy, theology and all things else. The students must be divorced from meaning and knowledge and married to power because it is held: knowledge is power. As a result all the traditional subjects have changed. History is no longer treated as history: the knowledge of the past. It is social science now, the science of human control. And when the past is studied is in terms of controlling the present. Philosophy too has changed. It is no longer as its name indicates: the law of wisdom or knowledge. Its basic disciplines: epistemology and metaphysics are treated with contempt. Philosophy has become the tool of power, it is instrumental to science and science controls it. The idea that true knowledge should be the goal of philosophy is ridiculed as a prescientific expectation. Much of philosophy has become logical analysis, the study of words and their uses as instruments of power."