Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

259 riculum with essential skills at its core. A conceptual-based curriculum is structured around broad-based themes that allow for the integration of skills and subject matter rather than emphasizing disjointed, small, unrelated chunks of information. The "Effective" Eighties : c. 1989

Curriculum Strands How is the content of the curriculum organized?

In place of the eight traditional disciplines around which the former curriculum was orga nized, the Education 2000 Curriculum is organized around three curriculum strands.… 1) The Human Family, 2) Our Planetary Home and Its Place in the Universe, and 3) Understanding and Fulfillment of the Individual. Core Skills What skills are included in the curriculum? Core essential skills include physical, social, and thinking skills incorporating language arts and mathematics. Major Themes and Concepts What major themes and concepts are included? The Education 2000 Curriculum includes six major themes: Communities, Change, Power, Interactions, Form and Systems. Characteristics of the Curriculum What are some of the characteristics of the new curriculum? First, it expands the traditional understanding of “basic skills” to include dimensions of thinking as well as language arts, mathematics, physical and social skill development. It shifts what is required from many individual bits of content to major themes and related concepts.... With the former curriculum, elementary students were expected to mas ter 2,175 separate bits of information that included skills, concepts and content organized within eight discrete disciplines. The new K–5 Education 2000 Curriculum requires mastery of only six major themes, 60 concepts and 132 core skills organized within three curriculum strands. This revision greatly reduces the fragmented nature of the former curriculum and significantly decreases the number of specific requirements to approximately one-tenth of the original number. [Ed. Note: ASCD’s involvement in this local school district’s curriculum was a logical follow up to its involvement from the beginning in Robert Muller’s World Core Curriculum , upon which District 4J’s curriculum was based. According to an article entitled “Educator Proposes a Global Core Curriculum” by Susan Hooper which appeared in the November 27, 1985 issue of Education Week , Gordon Cawelti, executive director of ASCD, in an address to educators from twelve Western nations and Japan, urged them to press for the development of a world core curriculum based on knowledge that will ensure “peaceful and cooperative existence among the human species on this planet.” Education Week explained, “Cawelti’s world core curriculum would be based on... proposals put forth by Robert Muller, Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations, in his recent book New Genesis: Shaping a Global Spirituality .” Of additional significance is the fact that Willard Daggett’s International Center for Leadership in Education discussed the Eugene District 4J in an article entitled “Cyber High School” in its March 1998 issue of Model Schools News . Regarding the Center’s selection of Cyber High School, Eugene 4J School District, Eugene, Oregon as one of its model schools, the article states:

For the first time in human history, teacher, learner, and learning material do not have to