The Return of the Primitive was the title of an Ayn Rand book on the post-McGovern left. I borrowed it to use for my category on some of the more extreme examples of the flight from reason that's an ongoing part of much of today's society.

There's a review of Henry T. Edmondson III's John Dewey & the Decline of American Education by M.D. Aeschliman, professor of education at Boston University in the new "dead tree" edition of National Review (subscription required, sadly). Aeschliman explains how mass education itself was made primitivist in the early decades of the 20th century, rather ironically by a movement that dubbed itself "progressive":

Quentin Anderson has described Dewey’s resulting “child-centered,” primitivist “conception of the school” as “the most extravagant and nationally influential of his fantasies.” This school is a present-oriented, limited-literacy, “experiential” tool for the “reconstruction of society.” As close, critical observers such as W. C. Bagley, Arthur Bestor, and Glenn have asked, when did Dewey or his disciples ever consult parents or elected officials to ask whether they thought that their children and future citizens should be dragooned into this utopian project? And, as Diane Ravitch and E. D. Hirsch have noted, the 80-year dominance of Dewey’s “Progressive” ideas — almost indelibly institutionalized in the world of teachers’ colleges, teachers’ unions, and certification procedures — has been a gross failure in terms of the educational levels and competences of our public-school graduates. “Standards-based” education reforms at the state level and the bipartisan No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, whatever their defects or difficulties, are well-warranted responses by parents, citizens, and legislators to generations of scholastic decline that have left many of our children and young adults not only functionally incompetent and quasi-illiterate but also vulnerable to an unprecedented tide of polluted cultural effluvia. The “child-centered school” has helped give birth to an infantile culture — one that threatens the very capacity of the American republic to retain and convey its economic accomplishments, social decencies, and civic self-understanding.

Like many thoughtful and liberally educated critics of Dewey, Henry Edmondson is puzzled and depressed at how widespread and long-lasting his influence has proved to be, given the turgid, confusing quality of both his thought and his prose, his logic and his rhetoric. Even admirers of Dewey have conceded the opacity or obscurity of his literary style: Both William Heard Kilpatrick and Sidney Hook started their own academic careers by trying to communicate Dewey’s thought to others, recognizing how badly he needed such help. (The experience of having to read large quantities of his prose has been compared to sawing wide logs with a dull saw and to taking a slow subway train to hell.)

Edmondson’s critique of Dewey is useful, clear, and brief. He rightly sees Rousseau’s primitivism as a major influence, and he rightly distinguishes Dewey from Jefferson, whose reputation and lineage Dewey was eager to claim as his own. Like E. D. Hirsch, but at more length, Edmondson is eager to show how decisively Dewey departs and differs from the heritage of Jefferson and the other Founders on the questions of the centrality of literacy and history in the American K–12 curriculum: Dewey and his disciples and allies promoted “hands-on” experience and “social studies” as against literacy and the study of history.

In addition, Dewey’s promotion of what he called “social experimentation leading to great social change” was a working out of Whitman’s social, psychological, and sexual radicalism and egalitarianism. Dewey decently defended Trotsky against the Stalinists in the late 1930s — perhaps his finest hour — but his own version of the need for “permanent revolution” has had more long-lasting and insidious effects than Trotsky’s, creating a climate and expectation for novelty, change, and experimentation in American public education — uncritical “neophilia” and what Frederick Hess has called bogus “policy churn.” Dewey slandered a wide range of more conservative or traditionalist education-policy thinkers and critics as “fundamentalists” obsessed with a fruitless, retrograde “quest for certainty” (the title of his 1929 book). In this regard he is the father — as that agile nihilist Richard Rorty has seen — of our contemporary “postmodern” deconstructionists, with their attacks on “foundationalism” and “logocentrism.” But some of the most powerful and enduring criticism of the whole “Progressive” movement of which Dewey is the patron saint came early from thoughtful liberal-traditionalist Columbia Teachers College professors such as W. C. Bagley and Isaac L. Kandel. Kandel protested the illogical riot of Whitmanian “experimentation” in what Diane Ravitch calls his “classic” study, The Cult of Uncertainty (1943). A Jewish immigrant writing in a dark time, Kandel knew that Dewey’s influential denial of history, traditional learning, and moral common sense in teacher training and the schools was a new form of barbarism. We are living with its consequences.

In addition to all of the points that Professor Aeschliman makes above, as Alvin Toffler has noted in several of his books, most recently, in his upcoming Revolutionary Wealth, the current K-12 education system is designed to prepare children for the rigid conditions of factory life: reporting for work in a central location early, performing repetitious tasks in a rigid hierarchical structure, etc. It's certainly not designed for life in an Army of Davids world.