Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

23 At a time when schools should be particularly alert in helping to meet new conditions [Depression era], far too many of the individuals equipped to help in meeting these conditions have been removed from the payrolls, and in a vast number of communities schools have been reduced to the task of dishing out traditional subject matter. [Ed. Note: Read this quote at the next school budget meeting when taxpayers are being manipulated into paying more and more taxes to pay for controversial programs that have nothing to do with “traditional subject matter.” You might point out that children were compelled to receive a better academic (traditional subject matter) education during the Depression due to hard times (less money). See the 1946 entry dealing with Community Centered Schools: The Blueprint for another quote by Paul Mort regarding how long it takes to implement “change.”] D R . G EORGE H ARTMANN , PROFESSOR OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY AT P ENNSYLVANIA S TATE College, wrote “A New Definition of the Educated Man” for the December 1933 issue of Progressive Education . Hartmann was active in the League for Independent Political Action, the Farmer-Laborer Political Federation, and the Socialist Party. He was co-author of Readings in Industrial Psychology (Appleton) and a frequent contributor to psychological journals. Excerpts from “A New Definition of the Educated Man” follow: Some may at once protest, “What? Is education to have as one of its symptoms the acceptance of radical views?” The answer is “Yes,” if “radicalism” means any serious endeavor to alter our social arrangements for the better. We must consciously adopt and foster the position that it is the prime business of education to remake our institutions and our traditions—and learn to recognize the possession of this spirit as one of the main earmarks of the educated man.... The principal obstacle to the acceptance of this outcome is the persistence of a set of “inert” ideas (to use Whitehead’s phrase) which lingers to afflict our civilization. One of the most subtle and pernicious of these inherited and unexamined postulates is the view that the aim of education (or life, for that matter) is the development of the individual’s personality as such.... …For good or for ill, we must cease training people for what they are going to do, and point out instead what they should do. It will probably fall to our generation to resurrect the word “ought” to its rightful status in the affairs of men—for what else are values if not areas of experience with an imperious push or pull emanating from them? There are some purists who will be frightened by the indoctrination which must inevitably follow if this recommendation is effective.... Such an objection is silly, for since indoctrination of attitudes occurs anyhow, our sole concern must be to ensure that the right ones are established.... How any one with the least pretensions to higher education can fail to be thrilled by the ultimate prospects of a single world government, the abolition of war and poverty, the enhancement of beauty in daily life, and the enlightened practice of eugenics and euthenics, is a riddle which can be explained only by a blind, exclusive regard for the immediately practicable.... What nobler and more enlightened aim for education in this century can possibly be proposed than that it enlists the enthusiasms of youth for the attainment of more rational forms of group living. The Troubling Thirties : c. 1934