Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

162 education—be abolished. Abolishing NIE required only that Secretary Bell give his approval, while abolishing the Department of Education—an election promise President Reagan had made which was incorporated into the Republican Party Platform—required the difficult to obtain approval of Congress. Once Ed Curran was gone, there was no further resistance to the plans of those members of the ad ministration and their corporate cronies (school-business partnerships) who wished to transform the nation’s schools from academics to the polytech education being implemented today. As a conservative Republican, it has not been easy to come to the above conclusion regarding the role of the Republican Party in the “deliberate dumbing down” of America. At the same time, I must add that it is very likely the Democratic Party would have been even more steadfast in implementing the same agenda, had it been in a position to do so. This march to destruction seems to join all forces under its banner. S CHOOLING FOR A G LOBAL A GE EDITED BY J AMES B ECKER (M C G RAW H ILL : N EW Y ORK , 1980) was published. The preface by Professor John Goodlad is excerpted here: Parents and the general public must be reached also [taught a global perspective]. Otherwise, children and youth enrolled in globally-oriented programs may find themselves in conflict with values assumed in the home. And then the educational institution frequently comes under scrutiny and must pull back. E DUCATIONAL G OALS : S TUDIES AND S URVEYS IN C OMPARATIVE E DUCATION WAS PREPARED for the International Bureau of Education, United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO: Courvoisier S.A.: La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, 1980). Charles Fitouri wrote the following introduction to this document which clearly reflects the influence of UNESCO on education: The crisis of education, about which so much has been written since the early 1960s, may be seen as the source of the need for change and innovation which has been felt and ex pressed since the early seventies. But what kind of innovation? And for what purpose? For what blueprint of society and to train what kind of man? This book on educational goals is based on such questions as these. The following excerpts from Educational Goals identify the roots of American education re structuring: The International Bureau of Education’s interest in the problem of educational goals and theories does not arise from pure philosophical speculation or a simple academic exercise. It has been aroused, and even imposed, by a confrontation with certain realities which sprang up in this area when, in the early 1970’s, the International Bureau of Education (IBE) set out to examine the process of educational innovation in order to attempt to analyse it and, so 1980