Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

209 spilled over onto the playground with some of the blonds being told, “You can’t play with us.” At the end of the week, blonds were given candy bars as a reward for their suffering, but the browns, who in bullying were obeying the teacher’s instructions, were given noth ing. How does a child react to being punished or deprived for carrying out his assignment? How much learning went on in that classroom for five days? Some children enjoyed taunting and bullying. Was the week spent on such “experiential learning” quality time? What about the seven and one-half hours spent in taunting? Would this time have been better spent on academic learning?... Educators use the even more volatile psycho-drama for attitudinal change. One example is the concept that we must prune away defective persons in order to improve the quality of life for the remainder of the group. This drama involves murder. Many variations are found. I first came across this psychodrama theme in a federally funded home economics curriculum guide... containing the exercise “Whom Will You Choose?” It goes as follows: 11 people are in a bomb shelter with provisions sufficient to last 11 persons two weeks or six persons a month. The group is told that five persons must be killed. They are instructed to accept the situation as fact, that is, to concern themselves with life/death choices, not with attacking the logic or probability of the situation. A profile is given of each person in the shelter. Problem people, such as the athlete who eats too much, the religious type with “hang-ups,” the pregnant or ill are generally killed. Survivors tend to be those trained in medicine, engineers, and pacifiers. [Ed. Note: Jacqueline and Malcolm Lawrence had just returned from their Foreign Service assignment in Europe and were appalled to encounter what had happened to American edu cation in their absence. The Lawrences organized “Parents Who Care” and began to confront the school district with what they had discovered. Due to the broad publicity generated by the group’s assertions and activities, Edward Hunter, former intelligence service operative and author of two books on his coined word “brainwashing” as practiced pre- and post-World War II 13 — Brainwashing and Brainwashing in Red China: The Men Who Defied It —approached the Lawrences with a request to examine the curriculum materials about which they had become concerned. Hunter took the materials for a period of time and upon returning them, informed Jackie and Malcolm that they were indeed examples of methods and techniques used in Russian and Chinese brainwashing. (The Maryland State School Board also made a statement regarding the fact that Maryland’s teachers were not trained to use “psychoanalytical techniques in the classroom.”) The psycho-social technique for confronting prejudice (isolation of the blonds) should be especially disturbing in light of increased concern over schoolyard taunting and increased school violence at the close of this century.] The "Effective" Eighties : c. 1984 “E.C.S. AT 20: T HE C OMPACT ’ S P OTENTIAL I S S TILL TO B E R EALIZED ” BY T HOMAS T OCH was an article from Education Week (October 24, 1984) which covered the early history of the Educa tion Commission of the States. The excerpts warrant repeating: “Some degree of order needs to be brought out of this chaos,” wrote James B. Conant, the President of Harvard University, in 1964 in reference to education policymaking in this nation. “We cannot have a national educational policy,” he added in his book Shaping Educational Policy , “but we might be able to evolve a nationwide policy.” The solution, Mr. Conant concluded, was a “new venture in cooperative federalism,” a compact among the states to create an organization to focus national attention on the pressing education issues of the day. The following spring, the Carnegie Corporation and the Ford Foundation