Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

25

The Troubling Thirties : c. 1939

1939

M EIN K AMPF BY A DOLPH H ITLER (S TACKPOLE S ONS P UBLISHERS : G ERMANY , 1939) WAS published. Excerpts follow: Academic school training, which today is the be-all and end-all of the State’s entire educational work, can be taken over by the populist state with but slight changes. These changes are in three fields.... In the first place, the childish brain must in general not be burdened with things ninety-five per cent of which it does not need, and which it therefore forgets [emphasis in original]. The curriculum of primary and grammar schools, in particular, is a hybrid affair. In many of the individual subjects the material to be learned has increased to such an extent that only a fraction of it sticks in the individual’s head, and only a fraction of this abundance can be used, while on the other hand it is not enough for the purpose of a man working and his living in a certain field. Take for instance the ordinary civil servant who has graduated from secondary school or from the upper realschule , when he is thirty-five or forty; and test the school learning which he once so painfully acquired. How little of all the stuff that was then drummed into him still remains! One will, indeed, be answered: “Yes, but the object of the amount that was learned was not simply to put a man in possession of a great deal of information later, but to train his power of intellectual absorption, and the thinking power, particularly the power of observation of the brain.” This is true in part. But still there is danger that the youthful brain may be drowned in a flood of impressions which it is very seldom able to master, and whose individual elements it can neither sift nor judge according to their greater or less importance; and on top of that, it is usually not the inessential but the essential which is forgotten and sacrificed. Thus the main object of learning so much is lost; for after all it cannot consist in making the brain able to learn by unmeasured piling-up of instruction, but in creating for later life a fund of knowledge which the individual needs, and which through him once more benefits society.... Summing up: the populist state will have to put general scholastic instruction into a shortened form, including the very essentials. Outside of that, opportunity must be offered for thorough, specialized scholarly training. It is enough if the individual person is given a store of general knowledge in broad outline, receiving a thorough detailed and specialized training only in the field which will be his in later life.... The shortening of the schedule and of the number of classes thus attained would be used for the benefit of the development of the body, the character, of will and resolution.... There should be a sharp distinction between general and specialized knowledge. As the latter threatens, especially today, to sink more and more into service of Mammon, general cultivation, at least so far as its more idealistic approach is concerned, must be preserved as a counter-weight. Here too the principle must be incessantly pounded in that industry and technology, trade and commerce can flourish only so long as an idealistically minded national community provides the necessary conditions. These conditions are founded not on materialistic egoism, but on self-denying readiness for sacrifice. [Ed. Note: This author has quoted extensively from Mein Kampf ’s chapter on education in order that the reader may see the similarity between Hitler’s views on education and workforce training and those of American government officials implementing OBE and school-to-work programs in the 1990s. The above quotations also bear a striking resemblance to Theodore Sizer’s Coalition of Essential Schools’ philosophy of “less is more” and to the 1988 Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development’s Robert Muller World Core