Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

99 lecturer in Comparative Education at the University of Auckland; and as Professor of Com parative Education at the University of London, Institute of Education.... Dr. Parkyn was asked to review the available literature in this field and to involve several of his colleagues at Stanford University, California, in discussions on the basic concept. Psychologists, soci ologists, and anthropologists, as well as professional educators took part in the conceptual stage, contributing a rich variety of views. Among those who helped the author in the preparation of the study were his research assistants, Mr. Alejandro Toledo and Mr. Hei-tak Wu, and his colleagues, Dr. John C. Bock, Dr. Martin Carnoy, Dr. Henry M. Levin and Dr. Frank J. Moore. [Ed. Note: The Dr. Henry M. Levin mentioned above is the same Henry Levin whose K–8 Accelerated Schools Project is one of the seventeen reform models that schools may adopt to qualify for their share of nearly $150 million in federal grants, according to the January 20, 1999 edition of Education Week (p. 1). The article “Who’s In, Who’s Out” listed Accelerated Learning as being used in urban schools. It is based on a constructivist philosophy which has echoes of and references to Maria Montessori’s and John Dewey’s philosophies of education and incorporates the controversial Lozanov method of Superlearning.] P SYCHOLOGY A PPLIED TO T EACHING BY R OBERT F. B IENTER (H OUGHTON M IFFLIN C O .: B OS ton, 1971) was published. This popular psychology text was recommended for use in Introduction to Educational Psychology courses in universities in the early 1970s. Chapter 5, under the sub heading of “S-R Associationism and Programmed Learning,” is excerpted here: Watson [John B.] (who did the most to popularize Pavlovian theory in the United States) based one of his most famous experiments (Watson and Rayner, 1920) on the observation that young children have a “natural” fear of sudden loud sounds. He set up a situation in which a two-year-old boy named Albert was encouraged to play with a white rat. After this preliminary period, Watson suddenly hit a steel bar with a hammer just as Albert reached for the rat, and the noise frightened the child so much that he came to respond to the rat with fear. He had been conditioned to associate the rat with the loud sound. The success of this experiment led Watson to believe that he could control behavior in almost limitless ways, by arranging sequences of conditioned responses. He trumpeted his claim in this famous statement: The Serious Seventies : c. 1971

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well formed, and my own special world to bring them up in, and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and yes, even beggarman and thief—regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestry. (pp. 152–3)

Later on in the chapter, Skinner’s contributions are discussed:

An even more striking example of Skinner’s overwhelming enthusiasm for programmed learning is his claim that mere manipulation of the teaching machine should be “reinforcing enough to keep a pupil at work for suitable periods every day.”... Thus it is apparent that Skinner’s enthusiasm has prevented him from seeing some of the deficiencies of programmed instruction. Many critics have been especially dissatisfied with his attempt to refute the charge that programs limit creativity. Clearly when the person composing a program decides in advance what is to be learned and how it is to be learned, a student has no opportunity