Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

261 S OVIETS IN THE C LASSROOM : A MERICA ’ S L ATEST E DUCATION F AD WRITTEN BY THIS WRITER in 1989 (published four years after the fact by America’s Future, Inc.), details the U.S.-Soviet and Carnegie-Soviet education agreements. (For full text of this pamphlet, see Appendix XXIII.) Two excerpts dealing with the specific agreements follow: The agreements call for “Cooperation in the field of science and technology and additional agreements in other specific fields, including the humanities and social sciences; the facili tation of the exchange by appropriate organizations of educational and teaching materials, including textbooks, syllabi and curricula, materials on methodology, samples of teaching instruments and audiovisual aids… exchange of primary and secondary school textbooks and other teaching materials... the conducting of joint studies on textbooks between appropriate organizations in the United States and the Ministry of Education of the U.S.S.R.”... 2. The Carnegie Corporation’s exchange agreement with the Soviet Academy of Sciences has resulted in “joint research on the application of computers in early elementary education, focusing especially on the teaching of higher level skills and complex subjects to younger children.” (“Higher level skills” is often a euphemism for “critical thinking skills.”) Carnegie’s 1988 one-year $250,000 grant is funding implementation of this program, coordinated on the American side by Michael Cole, director of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition at the University of California, San Diego. The "Effective" Eighties : c. 1989 A N ARTICLE IN THE S EPTEMBER 9, 1989 ISSUE OF T HE W ASHINGTON T IMES ENTITLED “C HINA Says Educators Sowed Seeds of Unrest” placed blame on teachers for the student democracy protests which resulted in the Tiananmen Square massacre. Excerpts follow: B EIJING (A GENCE F RANCE -P RESSE ) —In a front-page editorial, the intellectual Guangming Daily said teachers had used their classrooms to spread “bourgeois liberalization,” the standard code word for undesirable Western influences.… ...“We must clearly understand that the teaching rostrum is provided by the people and the Communist Party and that it is sacred,” the newspaper said. “The people’s teachers have the right to spread Marxist theory, communist morality and knowledge of the Four Modern izations,” it added. “Teachers have no right to spread bourgeois liberal tendencies.” Yesterday’s editorial came as efforts by the authorities to put fresh emphasis on political education have been moving into high gear and just days before the 40th anniversary of Communist China on October 1. On Tuesday, 40 teachers at Beijing University, which had been a hotbed of student unrest, were forced to take up shovels and clear scrub from a campus playing field as part of the push for political re-education through manual labor.… ...The premier also defended a new government plan to send graduating students to farms and factories for a year, saying it was meant to “improve feelings toward laboring people.” “We hold that young students should, first of all, work in ‘grassroots’ units to obtain practical experience,” Mr. Li said. Many students have privately said they dread and scorn the scheme.

O N S EPTEMBER 10, 1989 T HE W ASHINGTON P OST RAN AN ARTICLE ENTITLED “C HINA O R ders Manual