Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

307 The technological society does not particularly depend on education. A glance at the record shows us that the rapid growth of the United States into the world’s greatest industrial power coincided with a steady drop in reading levels running from 1930 to the present. Regna Lee Wood a teacher, pointed out in an article in NR (Sept. 14th) that this falling off was followed by a related, long decline in SAT scores beginning in 1941. Technological society turns out to work in the opposite way from that usually supposed: namely, by actually requiring less rather than more education of its workers. This is because modern industry depends on re ducing human error, which means reducing dependence on the individual worker’s expertise and judgment. In building or maintaining electronic devices, workers who once installed or rewired electrical circuits now plug in modular components consisting of machine-printed circuit boards.... The future role of literacy in the workplace has been succinctly stated by Pierre Dogan, the president of Granite Communications, a company that is now “developing software for hotel housekeeping.” It seems that “so long as maids can read room numbers, they will be able to check off tasks completed or order supplies by simply touching pictures on the screen.” Dogan points out that “you can create a work program with prompting in cluding iconic [picture] messages.” In fact, he logically concludes, “you can use an illiterate workforce.” [Ed. Note: This article provides an excellent explanation of why large multinational corpo rations such as BMW’s owner, Mercedes-Benz, etc., are settling in those states which have for many years been used as national pilot/experimental laboratory states for Skinnerian mastery learning/training in leisure and life/work skills. Among those states are Southern states which were part of the early General Education Board’s “benevolent effort” to reform the South after the Civil War, including Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina (present Secretary of Edu cation Richard Riley’s home state which has produced the second lowest standardized test scores in the nation). These states are also a part of the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) consortium, which has produced and dispersed an educational approach called “techademics” outlined in a program and book entitled High Schools That Work , written by Dr. Gene Bottoms of the SREB. (Bottoms was once employed by the Georgia Department of Education when Georgia was implementing competency-based education, the forerunner of outcome-based education, and later ran for state superintendent, unsuccessfully.) In 1994 Dr. Bottoms addressed the Second Model Schools Conference in Atlanta—spon sored by the International Center for Leadership in Education, Inc. and directed by Dr. Willard Daggett—explaining how the High Schools That Work model operated through integrating academic and vocational studies. As Dr. Bottoms explained, a survey by the Committee for Economic Development had revealed that students preparing to go to work right out of high school had an inflated opinion of their abilities. “Techademics” seeks to integrate academic subjects with vocational subjects by eliminating the theoretical aspects of these courses (such as English, math and science) which would be taught in college preparatory classes, and uses instead Daggett’s “Application Model” to learn how to apply this information directly to work-related tasks. In Dr. Bottoms’s words: “To significantly improve the achievement of vocational completers, SREB and its partners believe that any model for integrating academic and vocational studies must change the high school’s focus from ability as the key to academic success to effort as the key” (direct quote from page 110 of the Second Model Schools Confer ence Proceedings ). Some additional quotes from Dr. Bottoms’s address to the participants at the Model Schools Conference bear repeating here for the light they may shed on the integration of educational The Noxious Nineties : c. 1993