Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

Introduction

“Human capital,” a term coined by reformers to describe our children, implies that humans are expendable. This explains why the lifeboat exercise has been used so rampantly, and why it was so critical to the education reformers’ plans. Is it any wonder, then, that we witnessed the horror of the Littleton, Colorado shootings, and that other violence in schools across the country is increasing? Death education in the classroom may be linked to deaths in the classroom. The dumbing down of a nation inevitably leads to the death of a culture. The premise of Charlotte Iserbyt’s chronological history of the “deliberate dumbing down” of America is borne out by the author’s extensive documentation, gathered from the education community’s own sources. Iserbyt isolates the public policy end of education and sticks with it from decade to decade, steadfastly documenting the controversial methodology that has been institutionalized into legislation, public documents and other important papers setting forth public agenda. By choosing to focus on public policy in the context of academic theory, Iserbyt fills an important void in anti-reform literature. Her most important contribution is demonstrating how theory influenced public policy, public policy influenced theory, and how this ultimately affected practice—how policy and theory played out in the classroom. Iserbyt skillfully demonstrates the interconnections between the international, national, regional, state and local plans for the transformation of American society via education. Iserbyt connects the evolution of education in the twentieth century to major significant geopolitical, social and economic events which have influenced education policy. This attention to detail adds important context to the events chronicled in the book, a dimension not found in other books critiquing education reform. For too many years the late Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner has been virtually ignored by conservative leaders, who focused their criticism exclusively on pervasive cultural influences of the humanistic psychologists (Rogers, Maslow, et al.). Skinner was written off as a utopian psychologist who represented no threat. Iserbyt’s premise, proven well, is that B.F. Skinner is comfortably alive and well—embedded within modern education methods. Direct Instruction, Mastery Learning and Outcome-Based Education are irrefutably the current incarnation of Skinner’s 1960s Programmed Instruction—a method of instruction which linked children to the computer and turned learning into a flow chart of managed behaviors. Interwoven throughout the book is the important theme of operant conditioning in education. Surprisingly, Iserbyt never debates the effectiveness of the method. Entry after entry in the book substantiates Iserbyt’s premise that the method is purposefully used to create a robotic child—one who cannot make connections, repeat an act, nor recall a fact unless provided with the necessary stimuli and environment (like a dog who learns to sit after the immediate receipt of a dog biscuit). Iserbyt reaches the inescapable conclusion that the method perfectly complements the reformers’ agenda for a dumbed-down global workforce. Iserbyt so effectively nails down her case that the debate noticeably shifts to the ethics of implementing such a method on children. The late Christian apologist and theologian, Dr. Francis Schaeffer, when discussing the evils of B.F. Skinner in his little booklet Back to Freedom and Dignity (1972), warned: “Within the Skinnerian system there are no ethical controls; there is no boundary limit to what can be done by the elite in whose hands control resides.” There is intriguing evidence in Iserbyt’s book that the “democratic” society of the

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