Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

18 Stanford, Calif., 1931) was published. Excerpts from the foreword by Paul Mantoux of Paris, France follows: And the builder of this new world must be education. Education alone can lay the foundation on which the building is to rest. On this point a kind of consensus has been reached by those who trust the future of international cooperation and those who refuse to believe in it. When the latter go about repeating that to succeed in such a task one would have to change human nature, they do but exaggerate the acknowledged need for a gradual and patient reshaping of the public mind.... How can a well-prepared elite be raised throughout the world to spread its influence over the masses, who can then support them in their turn?... Here we encounter the real problem, and it is essentially a problem of education.... During the last decade of the nineteenth century, in England, a group of men devoted to the study of economic problems endeavored to prepare the public mind for broad changes which, in their view, must be effected if social peace is to be preserved. To this end they founded the London School of Economics and Political Science, which today ranks among the most famous institutions of education. In our day, the problem has become more far-reaching still. Brutal events have supplied evidence of a truth that had been slowly gaining ground, namely, the interdependence of nations and the need for establishing in the world an order and harmony hitherto lacking. Some [undertakings] have specialized in one branch of knowledge, like the Institute of Pacific Relations; others cover the whole field of political science, like the Ecole des Sciences Politiques, the London School of Economics, and the Deutsche Hochschule fur Politik. Some are debating or research centers, widely differing in character from one another according as their tendency is scientific rather than political; such are the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Social Science Research Council, and the American Academy of Political and Social Science.... the World Education Association and the International Bureau of Education are endeavoring to compare education in civilized countries and to bridge differences by a process of mutual borrowing of methods.... Plainly, the first step in the case of each country is to train an elite to think, feel, and act internationally. B RAVE N EW W ORLD (D OUBLEDAY , D OTAN : G ARDEN C ITY , N.Y., 1932) BY A LDOUS H UXLEY , the renowned English novelist and essayist, was published. In this famous work Huxley satirized the mechanical world of the future in which technology replaced much of the everyday activities of humans. P ROFESSOR G EORGE C OUNTS OF C OLUMBIA U NIVERSITY T EACHERS C OLLEGE WROTE D ARE the School Build a New Social Order? (John Day Company: New York, 1932). He and many other American educators traveling back and forth to Russia became completely convinced that the Soviet Communist system was the ultimate system. Counts was deeply involved in, and a member of, the Carnegie Foundation-financed Commission on the Social Studies which produced the American Historical Association’s Conclusions and Recommendations: Report of the Commission on the Social Studies in 1934. He was also the author of The American 1932