Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

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Uniform Standards Skills

MAIN SOURCE: McMurtry, John, Journal of Philosophy of Education , Vol. 25, No. 2, 1991. PD95–0016

[Ed. Note: Many of McMurtry’s tongue-in-cheek ideas are to be found in so-called “conser vative” think tanks’ papers on education restructuring. Number 6 under “Features” is particu larly offensive in that the idea of teachers becoming “private contractors” instead of school system employees is being discussed and proposed around many a policy maker’s table in this country. What a peculiar thing. If teachers are being trained not to concentrate on subject matter or “lower level skill development,” what would they have to market? The ability to “train” students to perform certain tasks in a certain way in a certain period of time? Market Model Maniacs?]

1992

T HE E FFECTIVE S CHOOL R EPORT ’ S F EBRUARY 1992 ISSUE CARRIED AN ARTICLE ENTITLED “Free Education in a Free Society” by Nick Zienau of England’s Educational Consultancy. It reads in part: This article describes a project which began at a conference organized in September 1991 to discuss possibilities for projects between East and West which might assist the process of educational reform in Russia and the other republics formerly of the USSR.... An important part of becoming convinced that this was worthwhile was to discover that there was a com mon set of values and ideas about the changes facing education systems whether in Russia, the U.S. or Europe.… A key theme for us was, therefore, that those ideas which hitherto have been seen as progressive alternatives and often dangerously radical in educational theory and practice will increasingly become part of mainstream education practice and thinking. A second key principle was the idea that increasingly education will cease to be a state monopoly and must have a relationship with the free market. This seems related to the idea of individual enterprise and choice. Our belief is that it is helpful to educational reform and therefore to this project to form collaborative relationships between the state and organizations acting in the free market. This will help to allow individual autonomy, enterprise, etc., to flourish and allow relationships between those involved in reform not to be based on fixed budgets and supply side economics. It will require us to have clear contracts between participants. If we have ideas about how to go about training teachers, we will learn these best from each other by doing it together and that only in this way can the project be effective as an educational intervention between nations, between innovators or between individuals. …We believe in an exchange of learning and in the idea that there is likely to be as much that the West can learn from eastern partners as the other way around. We believe that a key to what this learning might be about is that the West’s knowledge of how to do things in education, how to make changes for instance in the technology, is matched by pedagogic systems and theories which have been highly developed in Russia. We believe that these theories and practices can form the basis of radical curriculum innovation and organizational reform. Finally, we believe in a project that has an organic structure. It will have two nodes, one in the east and one in the west, and it will span three continents. It will have a core