Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

247 the work in this field, Lauren Resnick (1987b) delineates four broad contrasts between in school and out-of-school mental activity that raise profound questions about the utility and effectiveness of schooling for all non-school activity, including work of all types and for all learners, whether at-risk, or not-at-risk. They stimulate us to rethink—radically rethink—how we teach in school. The first contrast is between individual cognition in school versus shared cognition outside. Although group activities occur in school, students are ultimately judged on what they can do by themselves. Much of the core activity of the school—homework or in class exercises—is designed as individual work. For the most part, students fail or succeed at a task independently of what other students do (aside from grading on a curve). By contrast, a great deal of activity outside of school is socially shared: work, personal life, and recreation take place in social systems in which what one person is able to do depends fundamentally on what others do and in which “successful” functioning depends upon the mesh of several individuals’ mental and physical performance. This contrast argues for much more team and co-operative learning, the student being accountable for both individual and team per formance. (p. 21) [Ed. Note: The above emphasis on group learning, group cooperation, etc., reminds me of a comment made by a lady in the audience when I was giving a speech on education restructuring with its emphasis on the need for cooperative learning and how cooperative learning is used in communist countries. She recounted an incident which occurred while visiting relatives in the Ukraine (part of the former Soviet Union). A fire broke out in the house one evening and, instead of her relatives using their individual brains and ingenuity to put it out, (assuming individual responsibility), everyone sat on the couch and franticly stared at one another, not knowing how to deal with the situation.] T HE E AST G IBSON C OUNTY (I NDIANA ) G ROUP , KNOWN AS “J EANNIE ’ S G ROUP ,” OPPOSED the use of Tactics for Thinking , developed by Robert Marzano in 1988. 19 After long and heated discussions with the school system, the superintendent suddenly notified the group that he had arranged for a debate to be held in two days! Short notice, considering the fact that he carefully ne glected to inform them until the day of the debate that they would be debating outside experts. And, experts they were—no less than Ronald Brandt of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) and Professor Ed Jenkins of Indiana University. A firsthand account of a portion of the debate follows: [Pat Burkhart, one of the East Gibson County Group debaters] “We would like to do some demonstrations for you.... The first one is yoga (demonstrated).... The second exercise is self hypnosis.... These instructions... came from an article in The Readers’ Digest (demonstrated).... The third exercise is a semi-trance. This is the semi-trance in the Norman-Lindsay book Hu man Information Processing referenced by Marzano in Tactics for Thinking , ‘Unit 1: Attention Control’ (demonstrated).... The fourth exercise is the Involuntary Attention-Orienting Reflex. These steps come from the book The Working Brain by Alexandr Luria [of Russia] which is also referenced in the Tactics for Thinking manual by Marzano (demonstrated). The last exercise is Marzano’s Attention Control in the Tactics manual. As a volunteer, we have an 8-year-old child who understands the difference between acting and reality. We thought this appropriate—to use a child—since Marzano does. The difference is, our child knows what we are doing, but Marzano’s victims don’t. “Please tell us what is the difference? The thing that is really silly is that we are sup The "Effective" Eighties : c. 1988