Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

391

The Noxious Nineties : c. 1998

the democracies, is that the internal policies of persecution by the rulers, and the rights of the governed, are not a primary moral or economic consideration of the world. The democracies, under these values, can protest some internal acts of the dictator ships—torture and such. But they must do so quietly, not allowing these acts, or often even security interests, to damage the new overriding value of the democratic leaders. That value is the trade and investment with the dictatorships that the democracies believe important to their national economies—which are sometimes called jobs, but usually interpreted as corporate profit. In exchange, dictatorships allow democracies to invest and trade in enterprises the capitalists consider profitable to their corporate strength, although not necessarily to their own employees or the national economic health of their countries. If the dictatorships, or authoritarian governments as some are known more pleasantly, find their economies collapsing through the corruption generic to such societies, the Inter national Monetary Fund and individual democracies rush to arrive with bailout. The explanation given is that otherwise the dictatorships’ economies would disintegrate, bringing revolution. Now, the people of the dictatorships may long for revolution. Obviously that cannot be allowed to overcome saving the dictatorship and thus rescuing the money invested by nationals of democracies. Accepting these values, the events described above become understandable and even neatly logical. The Indonesian dictator, for instance, was installed by the army 33 years ago and has been in power ever since. Now he needs scores of billions with which to overcome his own ineptitude and family corruption, and do the right thing by his foreign investors. Who can deny him? The U.S. gets to sell strategic material to China, offering as an extra a visit to China by the U.S. President to honor the Communist leaders and expand their power and political life span. Religious and political mavericks in the totalitarian partnership of the new world order get prison, or death, often both. The press of the democracies gets to write stories about the growth of order in the new world order. Other citizens of the democracies get to say costs of imported goods are down: how nice. Americans and Europeans may come to object for political or moral reasons, or because the new world order may after all cost them their jobs. But they will never be able to say they never knew; see above. T HE B OSTON G LOBE CARRIED AN ARTICLE ENTITLED “S USPICIONS ABOUT THE S TATEWIDE Tests” by Jeff Jacoby in the May 7, 1998 issue. The article contained such good information that much of it is included here: I was going to write a column expressing my reservations about the MCAS, a 15-hour long series of tests now being administered to fourth-, eighth-, and tenth-graders in every Massachusetts public school. I was going to point out that for all the ink and air time being devoted to the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, as it’s formally called, little is actually known about it. I was even going to suggest that with all the uneasy ques tions the MCAS raises, parents ought to exercise their legal right to keep their children from taking it.