Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

192 as valid, however, as the instrument or process which produces the results....

Accountability is the central election issue in the race for Superintendent of Public In struction [Mr. Forthum is referring to reform opponent Ann Herzer’s bid to unseat Carolyn Warner as superintendent of public instruction, ed.]. The present administration has estab lished pilot programs throughout Arizona which can measure student progress as defined by the testing instrument, therefore making the school and instructor accountable. The evaluative program, developed nationally and piloted in other states before reaching Arizona, can in fact establish a criteria for testing accountability. That it works is not the issue. The issue is how it works. The issue is not “should education be accountable” but should education make B.F. Skinner methodology the model for establishing educational accountability? E DWARD C URRAN , DIRECTOR OF THE N ATIONAL I NSTITUTE OF E DUCATION , WAS DISMISSED by Secretary T.H. Bell in 1982 due to Curran’s recommendation to President Reagan that the National Institute of Education—the research and development arm of the U.S. Department of Education—be abolished. President Reagan was out of the country at the time of Curran’s dismissal. When President Reagan was elected Dr. Curran left his position as headmaster of the Cathedral School for Girls in Washington, D.C., first to work on the education department transition team and later to assume the directorship of the National Institute of Education. Curran’s courageous recommendation would not have required Congressional approval, as did the proposal to abolish the U.S. Department of Education; an executive order by Secretary Bell was all that was required. Abolishing NIE could have removed much of the controversial federal government influence in our local schools. In an article entitled “Success Eludes Old Research Agency,” Education Week (December 9, 1982) quoted Dr. Curran as follows:

NIE is based on the premise that education is a science whose progress depends on systematic “research and development.” As a professional educator, I know that this premise is false.

1983

“A R ELIGION FOR A N EW A GE ” BY J OHN D UNPHY , WRITTEN FOR THE J ANUARY /F EBRUARY 1983 issue of The Humanist , the journal of the American Humanist Association, lifts the veil of respectability from humanism and humanistic ethics. Excerpts follow: I am convinced that the battle for humankind’s future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers who correctly perceive their role as the proselytizers of a new faith: a religion of humanity that recognizes and respects the spark of what theologians call divinity in every human being. These teachers must embody the same selfless dedication as the most rabid fundamen talist preachers, for they will be ministers of another sort, utilizing a classroom instead of a pulpit to convey humanist values in whatever subjects they teach, regardless of the education level—preschool day care or a large university. The classroom must and will become an arena of conflict between the old and the new—the rotting corpse of Christianity, together with all its adjacent evils and misery, and the new faith of Humanism, resplendent in its premise of a world in which the never-real ized Christian idea of “love thy neighbor” will finally be achieved.