RALEIGH – Just about everyone has an opinion about how to improve education, and it’s usually an opinion passionately held and forcefully argued. Schools are the single-largest expenditure of state taxpayers’ funds. Educational mediocrity is the common denominator of many other social maladies. Most folks have spouses, siblings, parents, or other family members in the teaching profession. And everyone has been a student.

In one sense, this is bad news. Because government, through coercive tax and regulatory powers, has attained a near-monopoly on educational provision, issues have been thrust into the public discourse that, if related to any other profession, wouldn’t be heard outside of professional circles. Politicians and political activists have to debate such matters as the proper role of phonics in reading instruction, given the current environment. But in a less-biased market for teaching and learning, parents and educators would simply gravitate towards the schools that best reflect their preferences and best succeed at teaching students what their parents and educators wish to teach them.

That’s not the world we live in, not yet. Educationally, we live in a world created in large part by philosopher John Dewey. The extent to which the public-school establishment venerates Dewey, purveyor of some of the most noxious ideas of the 20th century, is the extent to which it is destined to fail at its appointed task of imparting knowledge, skills, and understanding to its captive clientele.

Henry Edmondson III, a professor of political science at Georgia College, chronicles Dewey’s wrongheaded approach to education policy (and many other issues) in a new book, John Dewey & the Decline of American Education. His subtitle reads, “How the patron saint of schools has corrupted teaching and learning.” The book delivers on that promise.

One of the ironies Edmondson explores is that despite Dewey’s saintly status – or perhaps because of it – his books and articles are “rarely read and his work is poorly understood in public schools and in colleges of education.” One could devote whole tomes to arguing with Dewey, who was at least prolific, but Edmondson chooses to spend much of his book simply laying out Dewey’s stated philosophy and providing extensive quotations. That’s damning enough.

Here are some of the most revealing Deweyisms:

• Dewey argued for the liberation of students, by which he meant “freedom from authority, freedom from the curriculum, [and] freedom from convention.”

• “Boys and girls alike take the same interest in all these occupations, whether they are sewing and playing with dolls, or marble making and carpentry. . . It does not occur to a boy that dolls are not just as fascinating and legitimate a plaything for him as for his sister, until someone puts the idea into his head.”

• “‘It thinks’ is a truer psychological statement than ‘I think.’”

• Dewey dismissed traditional civics education as a preoccupation with the “established mechanisms” of American government that approaches “idolatry of the Constitution.” He also rejected the foundations of the Declaration of Independence, writing that “self-evident truths have been weakened by historic and by philosophic criticism” and have become “emotional cries” that lack “practical meaning.”

The progressive education movement, essentially founded by Dewey, wreaked havoc on schools for decades. Perhaps this should not have come as a surprise, as Edmondson reports:

The most astonishing symbol of education’s surrealistic separation between theory and practice is this: although he has told millions how to teach elementary and secondary students, John Dewey himself was a poor teacher. He had trouble maintaining discipline in both the secondary teaching posts he occupied, and when he left the latter in Charlotte, Vermont, “the townspeople … were glad to see him depart.”

I’ll be glad to see his legacy depart Charlotte, North Carolina – and everywhere else it persists.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.