About five years ago (as of writing this) one LeBron James, a professional basketball player, and notorious (and infamous) far-leftist activist, created a grade school that uses a different approach at teaching. Its stated purpose is to help those kids who are "marginalized", or in "typically marginalized" ethnic groups, and its novel approach at teaching is supposed to help them better than normal public school, in order to learn and become successful (measured by, among other things, standardized tests that test student proficiency and knowledge.) Needless to say, "equity" is the key (buzz)word in the school in question.
Unsurprisingly, five years ago the leftist media hailed the opening of this school as one of the greatest things since sliced bread. What a novel new way to run a school and help "marginalized" children, who usually fall under the cracks in the machine of the normal public school system.
So now, five years later, how are the students of that school faring?
Not a single one has passed the standardized math test for their education level. Not one.
That's a much worse result than kids from similar backgrounds and areas attending public school.
One of the most fundamental problems that "progressives" have is that they don't understand (and outright refuse to understand) why things, for the most part, are traditionally run the way they are. Why things in society that have been done in a particular way for decades or even centuries are being done in that particular way and not some other completely different way.
They want to think that when something, like education, has been performed in a particular way, for many decades or even centuries, it's done in such a manner solely because of stubborn and antiquated traditionalism and conservatism, with a mentality of "this is the way we have always done these things, there's no need to change it". On top of that, especially in the United States, they always want to put the roots of such things into "racism" and "white supremacy" (completely disregarding the fact that such things, eg. education, has worked in the same way for a long time in most of the world, not just the United States.)
Thus, they want to "break the mold", get rid of antiquated stubborn traditionalism and conservatism, and come up with new better improved modern ways of doing things, ways that are not restricted nor tied to old customs and traditions. Surely the end result will be much better when we start doing things in a much better way, rather than the old antiquated way!
And then they are astonished when the end results are catastrophic.
The problem is that they are wrong. Most things that have been done in a particular way in society for many decades or even centuries are not done so merely because of tradition and conservatism. It's not like someone just came up with an idea like "this is how this thing will be done from this day forward" and the entirety of the world just blindly copied it and have been doing it like that for decades without question.
These things are the result of centuries of testing and fine-tuning. They are the result of trying tons and tons of different things, finding out which ways work best, and choosing those. For example different teaching methods have been tried for millenia, and honed to maximize results. Are the teaching methods used in many places the absolute best and most optimal? No. However, they are much closer to optimal than the far-leftist modern newfangled alternatives. There's a reason it's done like it's done. It's not random. It's not mere traditionalism.
The problem with "progressivism" is that it thinks, based on principle, that everything traditional is bad and should be changed or removed, completely ignoring the reasons why those things are done like they are.
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