Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

195 education; technical and vocational education suffer from lack of prestige and high costs, and are often ill-suited to job market trends; higher education is often perceived as isolated from national life, from the demands of cultural and internal development.... There is growing realization of the role of education systems in the reproduction of inequalities—the social selection performed by the education system as it contributes to distri bution of social roles and jobs in a hierarchized society. The hierarchy of school results tends to match the job hierarchy; situations where expansion of the education system is not matched by changes in the job structure are perceived as a dysfunction requiring correction. The goals of equity laid down by educational policy can be made effective only if they are an integral part of development policies pursuing this aim through diverse and mutually coordinated measures. This has led to… an integrated development policy, in which the aim of education would be… achieving the social and economic goals of development.... Nevertheless, we may advance the following proposition: A policy of endogenous development to accord priority to the struggle against inequality, and to the participation of the population in decisions concerning it, ought also to be accompanied by fairly far-reach ing educational reforms, redefining the role and place of training in the overall system of socioeconomic objectives. Another important aspect of the New International Economic Order (NIEO)… will require substantial alterations in international relations and… public opinion will have to be prepared in order to understand and reconcile itself to the measures to be taken…. The extent of the changes in attitude made necessary by a new world order based on the values of the survival of humanity and respect for the dignity of all cultures constitutes a theme for reflection that accords a central role to education in the context of an NIEO. A new international order can be devised and implemented only by stages which cor respond… to those of a more deep-seated evolution in people’s thinking. United Nations bodies play a role that is by no means negligible in shaping world opinion. ...It now remains for us to find out where the children not attending school are in or der to prepare educational programs capable of reaching them and answering their needs. In addition, the priority aim of reducing disparities between town and country should lead to the measurement of schooling (and nonformal education) in the countryside, something existing school statistics do not permit. …Data on the level of instruction of workers would permit more accurate evaluation of the relations between education and employment. The "Effective" Eighties : c. 1983 F UNCTIONAL L ITERACY AND THE W ORKPLACE : T HE P ROCEEDINGS OF THE M AY 6, 1983 National Invitational Conference was published (Education Services, American Council of Life Insurance: Washington, D.C., 1983). Excerpts which highlight now-familiar ideas follow: “Defining Functional Literacy” by Paul Delker, Director of the Division of Adult Education in the U.S. Department of Education who has been involved with the Federal Adult Basic Education Program since its beginnings in 1966… headed the U.S. delegation to a UNESCO meeting that drafted Recommendations on Adult Education adopted by the [UN] General Assembly in 1976.... You may be familiar with the Adult Performance Level Study (widely known as the APL Study), funded by the then U.S. Office of Education and reported in 1975. Its objectives were to describe adult functional literacy in pragmatic, behavioral, terms and to develop devices for the assessment of literacy which would be useful on a variety of op erational levels. To date, the APL Study represents the most systematic and extensive effort to measure functional literacy.… “Some Responses to the Literacy Problem” by Willard Daggett, Director of the Division