Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

406 in the regular classroom, requiring group consensus decision making and problem solving. The violence problem has been advertised for quite some time, and the rigged survey results will be used to continue the media blitz to gain public acknowledgment of the problem. The solution to the problem was planned long before Goals 2000 , but the objective was state enforcement and control. Most of the plan has already been implemented. Remember, everything is to be in place by the year 2000. We already have alternative schools, after-hours programs, full-service schools, day care, peer mediation, community service, character education, health educa tion, uniforms in some schools, etc. Goal 6 data banks on violence and bias crimes open the public square to drowning in the flood waters of the collective. Laws will be of no importance as norms become dictated by the federal government via their data collection system. These norms are becoming very evident: a new type of family (the community), gun control… efforts to modify the values of Christians or any faith that disagrees with the norms of anti-individualism, population control, promotion of the world community over nationalism, with survival only through cooperation, collaboration and consensus. (pp. 14–23) 65 [Ed. Note: Lewis’s exposé of what is taking place in Michigan is a most valuable warning for all Americans. In order to fully understand the significance of her exposé, substitute the names of your children, your town, your county and your state and you will feel chills race down your spine.] D R . L AWRENCE W. L EZOTTE , SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT OF E FFECTIVE S CHOOLS , O KEMOS , Michigan, presented a paper entitled “Learning for All—What Will It Take?” at the Sixth Annual Model Schools Conference sponsored by Willard Daggett’s International Center for Leadership in Education, Inc., at the Renaissance Waverly Hotel and Cobb Convention Centre in Atlanta, Georgia, June 28–July 1, 1998. An excerpt from Dr. Lezotte’s paper follows: A single school, as a system, can control enough of the variables to assure that virtually all students do learn. The distinguished educational researcher Robert Gagne said that the es sential task of the teacher is to arrange the conditions of the learner’s environment so that the process of learning will be activated, supported, enhanced, and maintained. [Ed. Note: Quoting from the 1969 entry in this book entitled Improving Educational Assessment and an Inventory of Measures of Affective Behavior , the writer wishes to draw the reader’s at tention to a most revealing statement from “The Purposes of Assessment” by Ralph Tyler: Now, as the people from conditioning have moved into an interest in learning in the schools, the notions of behavioral objectives have become much more specific. As far as I know, one cannot very well teach a pigeon a general principle that he can apply to a variety of situations. The objectives for persons coming out of the Skinnerian background tend to be highly specific ones. When I listened to Gagne, who is an intelligent and effective conditioner, talk about human learning objectives, I wince a good deal because he sets very specific ones. I know that we can attain levels of generalization of objectives that are higher than that. Making the connection between Lezotte, Gagne, and Tyler should help the reader un derstand that the restructuring going on in this nation’s schools reflects the use of Skinner ian operant conditioning (OBE/ML/DI). Lezotte, one of the leaders of today’s restructuring