Jerry Jesness is a special education teacher in a south Texas elementary school. His email address is: jjesness@hiline.net.

While traveling in Japan, I was amazed at Japanese teachers' interest in John Dewey and his writing. The stereotype that Americans have of the Japanese classroom is that of a grim place, ruled by an iron-fisted teacher who instructs through boring lectures and enforces discipline with sharp whacks with a kendo stick. So why would the Japanese like a man credited with laying the foundation for the stereotypical modern American school -- a child-centered place long on activities but short on academics?

It should come as no surprise that Japanese educators have heard of Dewey. After all, post-World War II Japanese education largely was shaped by the American occupation forces. Nor should we be surprised that many modern Japanese teachers have read Dewey's books while few of their American peers have done so. The Japanese read more than we do.

The surprise for me was that progressive education, often blamed for low academic standards in the United States, had managed to land in Japan and take a pro-intellectual bounce. The moral of this tale is that the ground onto which the seed falls matters at least as much as the seed itself.

Dewey's progressivism is not the problem

Diane Ravitch's latest book, Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms, has drawn fresh attention to Dewey and other progressive reformers. Ravitch describes the various philosophies and movements that have shaped U.S. education in the 20th century, with particular attention given to progressive education.

In this fine book, Ravitch, while critical of much of the progressive education movement, does not blame the progressive educators for all of our educational woes. She finds good elements in some of the progressive reforms and notes that the progressive educators never enjoyed absolute hegemony. Many teachers resisted and continue to resist their reforms.

It is unfortunate that so many people believe we can save our schools simply by purging them of the influences of progressive education. This is not because progressive education has had a positive impact. We probably would be better off if Dewey and his ilk had peddled their intellectual wares elsewhere, perhaps in Dewey's beloved Soviet Union.

If we were, however, able to eliminate the influence of the progressives, there would likely be little improvement. Our problems run too deep for that.

In her book's introduction, Ravitch wrote: "As the academic curriculum lost its importance as the central focus of the public school system, the schools lost their anchor, their sense of mission, their intense moral commitment to the intellectual development to each child. Once that happened, education reform movements would come and go with surprising rapidity, almost randomly, each leaving its mark behind in the schools. Over time, as this happened, educators forgot how to say 'no,' even to the loopiest notions of what schools were for."

Ravitch argues that "anti-intellectualism was an inescapable consequence of important strains of educational progressivism." But one also could argue that progressivism was the consequence of anti-intellectualism. We have here the classic chicken-and-egg argument.

The failings of an unanchored education system

We teachers learn early in our careers that without the anchor Ravitch described, pressures will tend to be downward, even when those pressures come from those who claim to be traditionalists. I learned of the phenomenon during my first year of teaching during the back-to-basics era of the late 1970s.

Although I was expected to teach high-school English, I had only a handful of literature books, not even enough to make a single classroom set. Several students had failed to return their books in previous years, and to get new books issued, someone would have had to accept blame for their disappearance, a responsibility that nobody was willing to accept.

My principal suggested that because we were a back-to-basics school, I should teach mostly grammar. Nobody had bothered to steal the grammar books, so we still had plenty of them. When I noted that literature is reading, and that reading is a basic, he suggested that I teach basic reading. He never explained what literature-free basic reading was, but he was certain I could teach it with the materials we had.

That was not the last time I had to justify the teaching of literature in English or reading classes. In the 1980s, my principal determined that Hamlet was too difficult for my 10th-grade students. His belief was not guided by any educational philosophy but by the fact that grades were too low, too many students were failing, and too many parents were complaining.

Even now, in this supposedly new era of standards, I have had to defend my requirement that my elementary students read children's novels instead of sample standardized tests. In a neighboring district, at least one high-school reading teacher was reprimanded for having students silently read novels in reading class. Such an activity did not, the administrator claimed, prepare the students for their all-important standardized exit-level reading test.

High-level thinking, low-quality education

Other movements have brought with them excuses to lower standards as well. The call for higher-level thinking justified an assault on rote memorization.

To learn the Periodic Table of Elements is mere rote, but to square dance while imagining oneself to be an electron orbiting around a nucleus -- that is higher-level thinking. A child who is able to recite the Gettysburg Address is exhibiting mere knowledge, the bottom of Bloom's Taxonomy, but one who wrote "teecher stincks" was exhibiting judgment, Bloom's pinnacle.

The individualized-curriculum movement of the '70s was supposed to encourage all students to work up to their potential, but the effect was the opposite. If a child received a failing grade, his individual program was obviously too difficult, so standards could be lowered to match each student's level of motivation. The list continues ad nauseum.

The Japanese schools, it seems, never lost their anchor. Because content is of supreme importance there, no philosophy has been allowed to water it down.

Even if we were somehow able to exorcise the ghosts of Dewey and others of his ilk from our schools of pedagogy, American education probably would not improve one iota. Until we recover our anchor, no philosophy will save our schools.