Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

236 The Education Department’s decision to form a collaborative relationship with its new research and development center on reading has revived the debate over what control the government should have over the work of educational researchers receiving federal money.... …But the cooperative agreement outlined in the April 22 Federal Register announcing the competition for the new center on reading research and education mandates government involvement in all stages of the center’s work: “developing the agenda, specifying anticipated outcomes, setting research priorities, altering research objectives on the basis of preliminary finding, and receiving final results.” “There’s nothing we have heard that makes a cooperative agreement acceptable,” said Laurie Garduque, director of governmental and professional liaison at the American Educa tional Research Association. [Ed. Note: The above excerpts are important due to their identification of Secretary William Bennett’s U.S. Department of Education as the source of the Skinnerian “scientific research based” reading instruction ultimately used as the criteria necessary for funding of proposals under the Reading Excellence Act of 1998 .] “C ARNEGIE R EPORT ON E DUCATION : ‘R ADICAL B LUEPRINT FOR C HANGE ’” BY N ANCY G AR land was published in the Bangor [Maine] Daily News , June 28–29, 1986. The article stated in part: The leader of the 600,000-member American Federation of Teachers, [Al] Shanker said many Asian and European countries are changing the way they educate their children to meet the rapidly changing needs of industry. American industries will lose ground if schools cannot produce employees with skills useful in those industries. P AULO F REIRE ’ S INFLUENCE ON WORLD EDUCATION , INCLUDING EDUCATION IN THE U NITED States, is revealed in an interesting article entitled “Radical Theorist Takes His Message to the World” published in The New York Times August 19, 1986. Some excerpts follow: Within days of the triumph of the Sandinista Revolution in July 1979, Nicaragua’s new leaders had tracked down the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire at the university where he was lecturing in the United States and had issued him an invitation to come to Managua to help reorganize the country’s education system and design its new literacy program. When Portugal underwent its revolution in 1974 its new Government made a similar offer to Mr. Freire, as did Chile’s Institute for Agrarian Reform during the period just before the election of Salvador Allende Gossens there.” 17 Newly independent nations in Africa, ranging from Angola to Tanzania, have also sought the advice of the man regarded as perhaps the foremost literacy expert and radical educator in the world. “It’s something that pleases me,” Mr. Freire said recently as he passed through New York City, on his way to a series of workshops and seminars at American universities. “At times, I have been criticized by some philosophers of education, who place me in postures that they classify pejoratively as revolutionary....” Mr. Friere (pronounced FRAYree) first became widely known in this country with the publication Pedagogy of the Oppressed more than 15 years ago. He has argued that it is not education which shapes a society, but rather society which molds education to fit the ends