Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

90 five and two, and six and one, and zero and seven and three and four all total seven and had the students practice 21 out of the 100, emphasizing that each operation illustrated a general principle. I found that the youngsters in the experimental group who had practiced on only 21 illustrations did just as well on the average over the sample of the total 100 as the pupils who had practiced systematically every one of the 100.... The possibility of generalization is of course not new to the reader of this booklet. In curriculum development we now work on the principle that human beings can generalize, so they do not have to practice every specific. The question is at what level of generalization do we set up objectives. There are overgeneralizations you can immediately see; for example, the use of “you” for both singular and plural forms often confuses students in grammar exer cises. The problem of the effective curriculum maker and teacher is to figure out the level of generalization that is possible with a certain child or a certain group, then to establish objectives based on reaching that level of generalization. You will have twenty objectives perhaps, but not more. The conditioning view, based upon specific situations and practices, may involve several hundred objectives for a course because specific practices must be used to accomplish each aspect of the conditioning. (pp. 8–9) Is the U.S. Office of Education, a division of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, poised for a total takeover of every elementary school in the nation? That was indicated Thursday in a federally funded project at Cal State, Fullerton by Bernard Kravett, a professor at the school who took part last year in a federally funded proj ect at the University of Washington. Known as the Tri-University Project, three universities were involved in a massively funded federal project to restructure the entire higher education system for training teachers, which, in effect, would make local elementary schools only a subsidiary arm of the federal government.... This system, to be called Teacher Preparation Experienced Systematically, is to be instituted at once.... All teacher training institutions will operate jointly with local school districts and teacher organizations to “establish performance criteria which become behavioral objectives.” ...Students in colleges who are studying to be teachers will be placed in “clinical settings,” where there will be a clinical counselor for each 12 students.... As the teacher trainees progress through the four-year course, they will be constantly assessed by testing and performance criteria, as well as constantly counseled by the trained psychologists.... At the end of each year, the teacher trainee will either pass on to the next level or will be recycled to take additional work in the areas in which he is found deficient.... The new approach is to stress attitudinal changes on the part of the teachers and the stu dents.... Built into the system is a strong emphasis on the findings of the behavioral scientists. Teacher trainees will be counseled into becoming a “good team member on the faculty,” and those who cannot adapt to “teamstanding” will be washed out of the teacher courses. The teacher is to learn how to “carry out the order of the team and the team leader.” ...The purpose of the so-called college activities will be to “build on behavioral objectives in order to help children find out who they are and help the child in his quest for identity. All education will be built on behavioral tasks rather than on course credits and grade point averages,” he said. Kravett said the federal government had financed nine universities to come up with “programs” and it is from these programs, largely developed in behavioral science laboratories, that the “U.S. P LAN TO ‘T AKE O VER ’ G RADE S CHOOLS I NTIMATED ” BY J OHN S TEINBACHER WAS AN article which appeared in the Anaheim Bulletin (Anaheim, California) in 1969. Excerpts follow: