Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

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The Noxious Nineties : c. 1995

of Margaret Thatcher in establishing a national curriculum.

[Ed. Note: The writer would like to repeat the quote from Theodore Dalrymple (pen name for Dr. Anthony Daniels), the British physician who wrote for The Wall Street Journal in 1988 the following observations concerning the deplorable condition of the English education system which Bush, Alexander and Finn wished to emulate: In eight years in medical practice in an English slum (in which lives incidentally a fifth of a population of the industrial English city where I work) I have met only one teen-ager of hundreds I have asked who knew when World War II was fought. The others thought it took place in the 1900s or the 1970s, and lasted up to 30 years.] National Issues in Education also includes a chapter by U.S. Secretary of Education Richard W. Riley. Riley provides two delicious morsels regarding the “bipartisan” atmosphere surrounding the birthing of Goals 2000 and the School-to-Work Opportunities Act : …Truth was the reform movement at the national level had no statutory basis. Even ten years after the report A Nation at Risk , there had been little federal response. The National Education Goals, three years after their announcement, had no legal standing of any kind. No federal initiative, no funding or flexibility had been enacted to provide states, communities, or schools with the assistance they needed to reach these important goals. Most troubling of all, as attractive as the goals were, as important as they were, as essential as they were, in the final analysis they represented nothing more than a political agreement between a former President and the nation’s governors. We decided to take the seeds of interest we had inherited and transform them into a national movement—a movement in which states and local districts with a clear vision of where they wanted to go could count on the American people and the federal government as partners in the journey. Thus the Goals 2000—Educate America Act was conceived. (p. 6) [Ed. Note: The reader by this time recognizes the fact that the American people did not buy into Goals 2000/School-to-Work , that the government was compelled to use its change agent manual—the bag of tricks in the Community Action Toolkit — to implement the restructuring and get key legislation passed. (See Appendix XIV.) The National Goals Panel was actively opposed by Congress which felt no ownership and resented the non-voting status of Congressional members.... (p. 5) I N D ECEMBER OF 1995 THE FOLLOWING INFORMATION WAS EXCERPTED FROM U NITED S TATES In formation Agency internet sources and put into summary form by education researcher and writer Joan Masters of Bowie, Maryland: D ECEMBER 3, 1995: M ADRID , S PAIN —U.S. President Bill Clinton, president of the European Com mission Jacques Santer, and Prime Minister of Spain Felipe Gonzalez, who is also president of the European Union’s Council of Ministers, formally endorse a New Transatlantic Agenda (NTA). The NTA would enable the two sides, the US and the EU, to join forces to deal with a wide range of international, political and economic issues. The New Agenda’s “joint action” has some one hundred “initiatives” aimed at achieving four broad objectives: 1. Promoting peace, development and democracy around the world; 2. Responding to global challenges;