Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

A–41 educated is the man who has learned how to learn; the man who has learned how to adapt and change; the man who has realized that no knowledge is secure, that only the process of seeking knowledge gives a basis for security.” This clearly invalidates our conception of a successful student as one who simply gradu ates with a degree and a high grade point average—a molded, shaped figure ready to slip away from life and learning into the split-levels and station wagons of suburbia. (p. 161) [Ed. Note: There is no question in this writer’s mind that this one man bears much of the responsibility for the deliberate dumbing down of our schools. He set the stage for outcome based education through his early support for systems management, management by objectives (MBO), and Planning Programming Budgeting System (PPBS). These systems later evolved into full-blown Total Quality Management/OBE, having gone through the initial stage of Professor Benjamin Bloom’s mastery learning and ending up as William Spady’s transformational OBE. Outcome-based or results/performance/competency-based education requires mastery learn ing, individualized instruction, systems management, and computer technology. Bell’s earlier activities in the seventies as U.S. Commissioner of Education—including his role in supporting dumbed-down life role competencies for K–12 (See 1975 Adult Performance Level Study and 1983 Delker article) and Bell’s testimony before Congress in favor of a U.S. Department of Edu cation—should have kept his name off any list of potential nominees presented to President Reagan. Concerns regarding this nomination expressed by Reagan supporters were proven well founded when Bell, in 1984, funded William Spady’s infamous Utah OBE grant which promised to (and did) put OBE “in all schools of the nation”; spearheaded the technology initiative in the 1980s; predicted that schools would be bookless by the year 2000; recommended that all students have computers; and fired Edward Curran, the Director of the National Institute of Education, when Curran recommended to President Reagan that Curran’s office, the NIE, be abolished. According to a former member of the Utah Education Association, who was a close associ ate of Bell’s in the early 1970s, if the Senate Committee that confirmed T.H. Bell as Secretary of Education had read Bell’s A Performance Accountability System for School Administrators , it is unlikely Bell would have been confirmed.] Appendix IX