Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

280 which instructed educators how to “identify resisters” and how to sneak controversial sex, drug and death education into curriculum despite parental objections. The article reveals that the schools were highly successful in their efforts to indoctrinate students in non-absolutist, humanistic values. It should come as no surprise that the average American in 1991, sub jected to values clarification in the schools of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, is non-judgmental regarding immoral behavior. For example: in 1999 President Clinton, according to the polls, retained the confidence of 60–75% of the American people during his investigation and even after his impeachment trial revealed flagrant immoral activity.] “W EEK IN THE S UBWAY AS C ULTURAL E XCHANGE ” BY J ACQUES S TEINBERG WHICH APPEARED in the June 15, 1991 issue of The New York Times pointed out some of the interesting activities resulting from the exchanges signed between President Reagan and President Gorbachev. An excerpt follows: A hapless fare-beater was arrested today in the Chambers Street subway station, and he was suddenly surrounded by six Moscow police officers. This was not a scene out of a Cold War nightmare. The Soviets were not taking over the United States. This was a cultural exchange. THE LATE M ORTIMER A DLER ’ S BOOK H AVES W ITHOUT H AVE -N OTS : E SSAYS FOR THE 21 ST Century on Democracy and Socialism (Macmillan Publishing Company: New York, 1991) was published. The book’s dedication was to “Mikhail Gorbachev—whose perestroika opened the window to this vision of the future in the United States, Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union.” Haves Without Have-Nots takes on additional importance with the imminent approach of the year 2000 and the tragic upheavals in former communist countries, some of which seem to be reverting to communism. Excerpts follow: In the almost fifty years that have elapsed since 1943, I joined the World Federalists and campaigned for world government; I was appointed by President Robert M. Hutchins of the University of Chicago to his Committee to Frame a World Constitution, established by him immediately after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; I conducted a seminar for the Ford Foundation on war and peace, world peace, and world government in 1951; and I wrote two books ( The Common Sense of Politics , 1971, and A Vision of the Future , 1984), in which these subjects are treated with a maturity acquired by years of thinking about them.... Finally, in Section 5, I will close with a vision of the new world of the Twentieth Century, in which the conflict between the two great superpowers—the USA and its NATO allies vs. the USSR and its Warsaw Pact satellites—will be replaced by the USDR (a union of socialist democratic republics). This will be a penultimate stage of progress toward a truly global world federal union that will eliminate the remaining potentially threatening conflict between the have and the have-not nations. (pp. 250–251) [Ed. Note: Mortimer Adler can also be remembered as the author of The Paidea Proposal , an educational “innovation” used to introduce the concept of charter-type schools into main stream school reform along with humanistic emphasis on subject matter. Adler was also one of the most visible facilitators for the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies (established in