Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

410 perception of parakeets. That third-grader will wind up in some counselor’s office for analysis and reprogramming before you can say “Freud.” Paranoid? You bet. My own child—a kind, sensitive 13-year-old whose disinterest in guns rivals his in terest in hanging up wet towels—drew incredibly violent pictures during his grade-school years. The exploding ship with exploding bodies comes to mind. How might a newly trained teacher—especially a female teacher without sons—interpret such a drawing? Clearly a sociopath. Get that boy downtown! Will any child who talks about guns be sent to the “thought police”? What about playing cowboys and Indians, or “Star Wars” during recess? Does this qualify a child for re-education? What sort of records will be kept? Even Mr. Riley expressed concerns about the plan. “We need to be very cautious about the idea of sorting out our children and labeling them,” he said in the speech. “Too many children are already being sorted out in our schools and too often this approach to education has been harmful to minority youth.” Not to mention harmful to freedom. Can mandatory psychological profiling be far behind? The potential for abuse of power and thought control is the stuff of science fiction. But that’s just the thinking of a paranoid. I probably just need a little psychotherapy. And a big moat. I N THE J ULY 14, 1998 C ONGRESSIONAL R ECORD C ONGRESSMAN H ENRY H YDE (R., IL) IN cluded a very important article written by D.L. Cuddy, Ph.D., former senior associate with the U.S. De partment of Education and consultant to the North Carolina House Select Committee for Federal Education Grants. Cuddy wrote “Education: The New Transatlantic Agenda” which appeared in the July 2, 1998 issue of Dunn, North Carolina’s The Daily Record . Excerpts follow: The White House released a statement May 18 at the conclusion of the U.S.-European Summit in London, indicating that “through the New Transatlantic Agenda (NTA), created in 1995, the United States and the European Union have focused on addressing the challenges and opportunities of global integration.” One part of this “global integration” in 1995 was the agreement between the U.S. and the European Community establishing a cooperation program in higher education and vo cational education and training. The agreement, signed December 21, 1995, called for “improving the quality of human resource development... transatlantic student mobility... and thus portability of academic credits.” In this regard, a joint committee would reach decisions by consensus. As part of the NTA, the United States and European Union then convened a major con ference, “Bridging the Atlantic People-to-People Links,” May 5–6. 1997, calling for “thematic networks for curriculum development,” and further stating that in an information-based global economy, “governments too are obliged to adapt their economic, training and social welfare programs.” The conference final report noted that in the United States, ACHIEVE has been one of the organizations at the forefront of defining key issues in this regard and developing strategies to address them. ACHIEVE has been measuring and reporting each state’s annual progress in estab lishing internationally competitive standards and business leaders involved have indicated their commitment to consider the quality of each state’s standards when making business location or expansion decisions.