Deliberate Dumbing down of America
In your book, you charge—and document—that the decline in American education is what you call a deliberate dumbing down of America’s public school children.
The result has been the changing of our whole society and our whole culture. You can’t deny a human being an education and some moral values
without having the disastrous results which we now see all around us.
In 1965, when the federal government became actively involved financially in education and they poured millions into it, ostensibly to help the poor,
they changed schooling from and academic education, giving children the ability to understand the world around them and other cultures, languages, history, etc., to what is known as “outcome- based education.” People think that only happened in the 1990s. The philosophy changed in 1965. This was the internationalization of education.
Education no longer mattered. They were looking at using our children as little tools—basically robots in the global, planned economy. And we see the global economy coming in now.
We’re seeing children who are only in eighth grade being told to make up their minds about what they are going to do with the rest of their lives. This is a socialist, collectivist quota system, a planned economy with a certain number
of persons assigned to different slots: we saw it in the old Soviet Union, with certain number of welders. We never dreamed that we would have this failed system here. But we do.
Our dumbed down Congress passed it during the 1980s and 1990s. But they obviously don’t know what kind of system we have, since they are a product of a public school system that never taught them that we are a republic, not a democracy; that we are suppose to have a free enterprise system, not a planned economy. So the results
are very, very clear.
If you can’t see it with the results, then look at the money. How could you spend billions of dollars every year and see test scores continue to decline? Yet, every time test scores go down, people seem to be more enthusiastic about pouring
more money in. They seem to forget that prior to 1960 the United States had the finest education system in the world.
In 1895 they had a test for eighth graders in which they asked them to answer questions that I don’t think I could answer. I have that test in front of me. Questions include: give nine rules for the use of capital letters; name the parts of speech and define those that have no modifications; define verse, stanza and paragraph; what are the principle parts of a verb?
Define case and illustrate each case. Why is the Atlantic coast colder than the Pacific in the same latitude? They didn’t give you multiple choice, you had to write out the answers.
Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev said recently that the European Union is the new Soviet Union. George Bush is giving us another Soviet Union here in this hemisphere with the United States, Canada and Latin America. You would never have been able to get the American people 40 or 50 years ago to accept this.
Our children will be nothing but drones in the global economy, working for the global elite. It’s the same old totalitarianism. People wouldn’t accept
it as they do, if they hadn’t deliberately changed the country through the schools over a long period of time.
A close associate of Soviet agent Alger Hiss, in a speech to the World Health Organization, suggested “getting rid of the conscience.” He recommended
that teachers be retrained to be psychiatrists to train students that there’s no right and no wrong. We saw those types of teaching programs from the 1960s through the 1990s.
In 1965 along came Professor Benjamin Bloom with his redefinition of education. Bloom’s definition of education was accepted. He said, “The
purpose of education is to change the thoughts, actions and feelings of students.” Not academics.
He defined good teaching as “challenging the students’ fixed beliefs.”
In my study of all this, I’ve focused on the Leipzig connection. In the late 1800s many of our American educators went to Germany. You’ve heard of “The Order” (or “Skull and Bones,” as it is often called) at Yale. Many of those people were
retrained in Germany to consider the child as an animal, basically, not as a human being. The child was to be manipulated through stimulus response, etc. B.F. Skinner and John Dewey picked up on this.
They all worked out of the University of Chicago and Columbia University. They changed the label to “outcome-based education” after the so called “Mastery Learning” had been such a disaster and so many inner city children had dropped
out in Chicago.
Yet, President Bush is putting in the same old “Mastery Learning” under the label “Direct Instruction.”
Regardless of what you call it, it is not learning. It is training.
Skinner himself said: “I could make a pigeon a high achiever,” by reinforcing it on a proper schedule. So when you hear them say “all children will learn,” they are saying, “All children will jump through the hoop.” Yes, all children will learn if you reinforce them with a reward. It’s like your dog. But our children aren’t dogs.
Instead of thinking it’s wonderful that the president and the secretary are saying “All children will learn. No child will be left behind,” you must
ask yourself what that means. It has nothing to do with education. It has to do with reaching the lowest common denominator and getting rid of any academics because corporations—certainly the multinationals—don’t want intelligent workers.
The Carnegie Corporation’s David Hornback, who has restructured education in many of the states, essentially said in his book, Human Capital, that “We don’t want educated workers. They gives us a hard time. They quit their jobs. They ask too many questions.”
So all of this just didn’t happen. The goal has long been world government, but the year 1934 was a very important year. That’s when the New York-based Carnegie Corporation published the results of a study commissioned with the American
Historical Association. The book was entitled Conclusions and Recommendations for the Social Studies.
Did the work of the Cultural Marxists of the Frankfurt School influence this?
The Frankfurt School philosophy was a complete attack on the social fiber of society. But the Carnegie group was more concerned with chang-Public School Kids Deliberately ‘Dumbed Down’ to be Automatons in Global Collective Orignially published in American Free Press • September 23, 2002 (p. 10-11)
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American public school children have been deliberately “dumbed down” and indoctrinated—rather than educated—to accept the global plantation and the dissolution of American sovereignty and liberty. That’s the shocking thesis put forth in a carefully-documented 750-page volume entitled The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, by Charlotte Iserbyt. A former school board member who sent her children to public schools, Mrs. Iserbyt was a longtime supporter of Ronald Reagan and was appointed to the U.S. Department of Education by Regean, only to be fired in 1982 after she objected to—and later leaked documents exposing—top-level agreements between the administration and the Soviet Union for the purpose of redirecting the course of American Education.
Mrs. Iserbyt was the guest on the Aug. 25 broadcast of Radio Free America, the weekly callin talk forum sponsored by American Free Press with host Tom Valentine. An edited transcription of the interview follows. Valentine’s questions are in boldface. Mrs. Iserbyt’s responses are in regular text.
Benjamin Bloom Wikipedia
EXCERPT:
February 21, 1913 – September 13, 1999) was a Jewish-American educational psychologist who made contributions to the classification of educational objectives and to the theory of mastery-learning. He also directed a research team which conducted a major investigation into the development of exceptional talent whose results are relevant to the question of eminence, exceptional achievement, and greatness[1] .
[edit] Biography
Benjamin S. Bloom was born on February 21, 1913, in Lansford, Pennsylvania. He received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Pennsylvania State University in 1935 and a Ph.D. in education from the University of Chicago in March 1942. He became a staff member of the Board of Examinations at the University of Chicago in 1940 and served in that capacity until 1943, when he became university examiner, a position he held until 1959. He received his initial appointment as an instructor in the department of education at the University of Chicago in 1944 and was eventually appointed Charles H. Swift Distinguished Service Professor there in 1970. He also served as educational adviser to the governments of Israel, India, and numerous other nations. Bloom died on September 13, 1999.
Outcome Based Education OBE
EXCERPT:
2) OBE uses students as guinea pigs in a vast social experiment. OBE advocates are not able to produce any replicable research or pilot studies to show that it works. OBE is being forced on entire state school systems without any evidence that it has been tried anywhere and found effective.
The best test of an OBE-type system was Chicago's experiment in the 1970s with Professor Benjamin Bloom's Mastery Learning (ML), which is essentially the same as OBE. ML was a colossal failure and was abandoned in disgrace in 1982. The test scores proved to be appallingly low and the illiteracy rate became a national scandal. Bloom, the father of ML, is well known for his statement that "the purpose of education is to change the thoughts, feelings and actions of students." (All Our Children Learning, page 180.)
Prof Benjamin Bloom's Mastery Learning
EXCERPT:
Levels of Learning
Benjamin Bloom
(1913–99)
PROFESSOR Benjamin Bloom of Chicago University and co-workers that met from 1948 to 1953, devised a stairway with six steps to learning. The six steps (read: levels) are rough estimates. They are not absolute, nor do they include learning of confluent symbols as a possible step above evaluation, provided such imagery rests on and builds on fit evaluations and estimates. The ability to observe is not included in this model either. Observational skills can be fostered or trained to your advantage. Relaxation and even boredom should help it.
Also know that other systems or hierarchies have been devised. But Bloom's taxonomy is easily understood and widely applied.
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