Modern Education and Classic Education

Modern education, especially as it exists in the government controlled public schools, has deteriorated continually over the past 100 years. There are no "education specialists" who aren't now actually behavioral psychologists or psychiatrists.

The field of psychology has very much taken over the public school system, and is doing its best to take over private schools. Through covert tactics, extensive lobbying efforts, and setting government mandated "educational standards", even home-schooling may have to conform to the dictates of psychologists.
Before the advent of psychology into the schools, education involved learning to read, acquiring mental skills, and developing the ability to think conceptually.

The idea behind traditional education was to prepare the student with as wide and strong a base as possible for future success and contribution in the world. The modern psychologists have a different idea, and this involves ensuring the students possess the correct beliefs, attitudes and behaviors. The attention in education has gone from cognitive skills and effective thinking ability, to affective things, such as how the student feels, what he believes and what attitudes he has. This is why students perform worse on standardized tests today that gauge thinking ability and cognitive skills compared to 25 or 50 years ago.

By 1952, behavioral psychology had not only become the "scientific" foundation of American pedagogy, but it had changed our textbooks, revised the classroom curriculum, and redesigned the American school building. If you detect something mindless about American education, it's because the mind has been taken out of it. Only visible behavior counts.