Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

354 sociation: “Only the village idiot would consider letting the entire village in on the task of raising his children.”

“T HE L ANGUAGE OF OBE R EVEALS I TS L IMITATIONS ” BY G RETCHEN S CHWARZ WAS PUB lished in the September 1995 issue of Educational Leadership , Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development’s (ASCD) journal. Ms. Schwarz is assistant professor of curriculum and instruc tion at Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, Oklahoma. Excerpts from Schwarz’s refreshingly objective critique of OBE follow: In contrast, the language of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) seems limiting and dehu manizing. Many educators not associated with the Religious Right are highly critical of OBE, as am I, but for different reasons.... In response to the March 1994 issue of Educational Leadership , which portrayed OBE in a positive light, I would like to consider the language of OBE as revealed in Choosing Outcomes of Significance by William Spady. Individual words and phrases jump out at me as a reader. Following are terms that Spady used frequently and that particularly troubled me... “outcomes, generalizable, Discrete Content Skills, microforms of learning, Structured Task Performances, components in a larger block of curriculum, com petence, mental processing, performance enablers, execution, Higher-Order Competencies, technical and strategic Life Performance Roles.”... Such mechanistic, instrumentalist language has a constraining effect on me as a reader, just as OBE has a constraining effect on school reform. This list reads like the terminology of the CEO or the social engineer—very much in the management-oriented, positivist-be haviorist tradition.... …With OBE, outside experts prescribe what is best for students and teachers, who re main essentially voiceless. Uniform outcomes are designed and implemented in a curriculum that reduces thinking to mental processing.... All the bottom-line language reminds the reader of the boardroom. Of course, Spady’s High Success Network is a business. But children are neither customers nor products, and a school is not a business.... OBE language is the scientistic, industrial language of Tyler and Skinner as documented by Callahan (1962) in Education and the Cult of Efficiency . Ultimately, the language of OBE is controlling, narrow, mechanistic, and finally, impoverished. Our students and teachers deserve more than OBE has to offer. [Ed. Note: Professor Schwarz’s comment that OBE “reduces thinking to mental processing” calls to mind the Thomas Kelly quote: “The brain should be used for processing, not storage.”] A R EAFFIRMATION OF F AITH IN M AINE ’ S P UBLIC S CHOOLS , EDITED BY M ARGARET L. S TUBBS , Ph.D. of the Maine Department of Education in Augusta, Maine, was published in 1995. This docu ment revealed the extraordinary thrust towards a partnership between religious institutions and the public schools. Reaffirmation of Faith also describes the socialist (planned economy) nature of workforce training in Maine. Excerpts follow: Religious and spiritual institutions have the responsibility to cultivate within their organiz ations the values they hope will guide their constituents’ lives in a changing world that offers not only opportunity and beauty but also great danger, and in so doing have a complementary role to play as community participants in systemic school change....