Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

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The Serious Seventies : c. 1971

already affluent middle class, larger families can be made an economic liability by increasing the incentives for and the costs of advanced education for their children.... Cultural changes to reduce the social pressure to marry and have a family can be pur sued by changing educational materials which glorify married life and family life as the only “normal” life pattern, by granting greater public recognition to non-married and non-family life styles, by facilitating careers for single women.... [Ed. Note: The above recommendation regarding reducing the social pressure to marry and have a family was successfully carried out over a period of 25 years according to an article entitled “Institution in Transition” by Michelle Boorstein which appeared in The Maine Sunday Telegram ’s August 30, 1998 issue, Home and Family Section, G–1. This Associated Press article said in part: They [Pam Hesse and Rob Lemar] share a home and a future but not a formal vow—just one couple caught up in the seismic shifts taking place in American attitudes toward mar riage and childbearing. A soon-to-be-released Census Bureau report shows Hesse is far from an exception; in fact, she’s in the majority. The report, the bureau’s first compilation of all its 60 years of data on childbearing and marriage, finds that for the first time, the majority of “first births”—someone’s first child—were either conceived by or born to an unmarried woman. That is up from 18 percent in the 1930s. This is connected to an erosion of the centrality of marriage, said Stephanie Coontz of Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, who studies the family and its role in history.] Direct Behavior Changes Two general types of public policies are distributive policies and regulative policies. Distribu tive policies involve the distribution of resources and opportunities to people who choose to modify their behavior to conform with the socially desired patterns. They thus operate as incentives rather than as official constraints. Examples include the elimination of tax incentives for larger families, monetary incentives for sterilization or adopted families, and removing the income tax discrimination against single citizens.... Regulative policies involve direct constraints on behavior and necessarily generate greater political conflict than distributive policies. This is because regulative policies elimi nate the element of voluntary choice and apply automatically and categorically to a whole class of people or of behaviors. Examples of such regulative policies designed to control population growth include forced sterilization and restrictive licensing procedures to marry and to have children. However, it does not seem necessary, desirable, or feasible to involve regulative policies for population control at this time. One regulative type policy which is now in effect and which allows population increase is the law forbidding abortion. Restrictions against abortions should be removed to allow individual choice in the use of this back-up method of birth control.... A general acceptance of birth control to obtain population stability will create a more static ethnic, cultural and racial structure in society. Minority groups will continue to stay at a numerical minority. Minority problems are basically social and should be solved in that manner. An equilibrium condition will also alter the structure of our economic relationship both within our society (a shift from an expanding economy to a competitive displacement economy) and between other countries that will still be experiencing increasing popula Returning to the Population Subcommittee’s report: