Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

272 (Perseus Books: New York, 1997) relate to the first steps taken to implement this new corporate fascist system of governance. Olson recalled Maine’s activity as follows: John Fitzsimmons, the President of the Maine Technical College System and former state labor commissioner in Maine during the 1980s, traveled to Germany and Denmark in the early 1990s, along with the then-Governor John R. McKernan, Jr. [husband of U.S. Senator from Maine Olympia Snowe], to get a first-hand view of European apprenticeships. The gov ernor and Fitzsimmons were so impressed by what they saw that they plotted the outlines for a Maine initiative on paper napkins on the transatlantic flight home. In February 1993 the Maine Youth Apprenticeship Program—now called Maine Career Advantage—accepted its first 12 students. By 1996 the initiative had spread to 276 students, 108 high schools, and 197 businesses. An additional 850 students were involved in career-preparation activities such as job shadows, developing portfolios, and summer internships. “I really believe, in my state, the future lies in the quality of the skilled workforce,” Fitzsimmons told me in 1994, a strong Rhode Island accent still lingering in his voice. “We will not compete with a North Carolina Research Triangle or with Massachusetts’s Harvard and M.I.T. and their ability to be international research areas. We will be the producers of goods. And I take great pride in that because if we’re able to produce high-quality products, it will mean high-wage jobs for our people.” P OLYTECHNICAL E DUCATION : A S TEP BY R OBERT H. B ECK , U NIVERSITY OF M INNESOTA , was pub lished in 1990. Beck was under contract to the National Center for Research in Vocational Education, University of California, Berkeley and was supported by the Office of Vocational and Adult Education through a U.S. Department of Education grant for $4 million [Carl D. Perkins Vocational Education Act , Grant #V051A80004–88A, September. 5 ] Had this report not cost $4 million in taxpayers’ money, one could dismiss it as just another effort by the federal government to keep its education researchers occupied. Why would the government spend such an enormous amount of money on a government project describing the Soviet polytech system unless the government was considering putting the same polytech system in place in the United States? Recent workforce training legislation in Congress does indeed call for the implementation of the Soviet/German/Danish polytech system. W ILLIAM S PADY PRESENTED “E NSURING THE S UCCESS OF A LL S TUDENTS T ODAY FOR Tomorrow’s Changing World” for the U.S. Department of Defense, Mediterranean Region in 1990. Excerpts follow: When addressing the issue of Exit Outcome development in one of our Illinois high school districts during the Spring, I too was forced to take a look at the “realities” that seem to surround us and that have the potential for shaping the character of the future in which we and our children will live. At first blush, ten somewhat interrelated trends seemed clear to me, some of which parallel “Theobold’s Eight Driving Forces,” and some of which resemble trends identified by John Naisbitt and his Future Trends colleagues. Others are simply my own.… [D]espite the historical trend toward intellectual enlightenment and cultural pluralism, there has been a major rise in religious and political orthodoxy, intolerance, fundamentalism and conservatism with which young people will have to be prepared to deal.