Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

19 Road to Culture series (Quinn and Broden, Co., Inc.: Rahway, N.J., 1930–1934) and The Soviet Challenge to America (John Day Co.: New York, 1931). Excerpts from this entry’s major focus, Counts’s Dare the School Build a New Social Order? , follow: If property rights are to be diffused in industrial society, natural resources and all important forms of capital will have to be collectively owned.... This clearly means that, if democracy is to survive in the United States, it must abandon its individualistic affiliations in the sphere of economics.... Within these limits, as I see it, our democratic tradition must of necessity evolve and gradually assume an essentially collectivistic pattern. The important point is that fundamental changes in the economic system are imperative. Whatever services historic capitalism may have rendered in the past, and they have been many, its days are numbered. With its dedication [to] the principle of selfishness, its exaltation of the profit motive, its reliance upon the forces of competition, and its placing of property above human rights, it will either have to be displaced altogether or changed so radically in form and spirit that its identity will be completely lost. The Troubling Thirties : c. 1932 T OWARD A S OVIET A MERICA (E LGIN E NTERPRISES , I NC .: L OS A NGELES , 1932) BY W ILLIAM Z. Foster, national chairman of the Communist Party of the United States, was published. Foster died in 1961 in Moscow and was given a state funeral in the Kremlin. His book called for a U.S. Department of Education; implementation of a scientific materialist philosophy; studies revolutionized, being cleansed of religious, patriotic and other features of the bourgeois ideology; students taught on the basis of Marxian dialectical materialism, internationalism and general ethics of a new socialist society; present obsolete methods of teaching will be superseded by a scientific pedagogy. The whole basis and organization of capitalist science will be revolutionized. Science will become materialistic, hence truly scientific. God will be banished from the laboratories as well as from the schools. [Ed. Note: Everything called for by Foster has taken place. “Scientific pedagogy” is OBE/mastery learning/direct instruction (Pavlov/Skinner). See the 1973 entry for Foundations of Behavioral Research, Second Edition , for some of the implications of implementing “a scientific materialistic philosophy.”] P RESIDENT H ERBERT H OOVER APPOINTED A RESEARCH COMMITTEE ON RECENT SOCIAL TRENDS to implement the planned society in 1932. (In 1919 Franklin Roosevelt had told a friend that he personally would like to see Hoover in the White House.) The Research Committee was not approved nor funded by Congress; it became an Executive Action and was underwritten by the Rockefeller Foundation. No report was made to Congress or to the people during the time it functioned. The work of that committee has been called “a monumental achievement by the largest community of social scientists ever assembled to assess the social condition of a nation.” 1

T HE N ATIONAL E DUCATION A SSOCIATION CREATED THE E DUCATIONAL P OLICIES C OMMIS sion (EPC) in 1932 for the purpose of changing the Goals for American Education. In 1944 the EPC