Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

Appendix XIII

“Psychology’s Best Kept Secrets”

“Psychology’s Best Kept Secrets,” the entire Chapter 9 from The Whole Language OBE Fraud , by Samuel Blumenfeld (Paradigm Company: Boise, ID, 1996) pp. 77–89, is reproduced here.

It is more than a little curious that in a nation where so much research has been done by psychologists on the nature of human cognition—how children learn—that these same psy chologists have shown virtually no interest in the greatest learning problem plaguing American education: the teaching of reading. It is true that there is much interest in diagnosing reading disability and exploring “dyslexia,” but no interest in the instructional cause of reading disability, despite the fact that Dr. Samuel T. Orton first drew attention to the problem back in 1929. Which brings us to the Center for Cognitive Studies where Frank Smith allegedly absorbed the wisdom of Noam Chomsky et al. The chief architect of the Center was Jerome Bruner who tells us in his autobiography, In Search of Mind , that cognitive psychology was born in 1956 at a symposium on the cognitive sciences held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Two of the key persons who participated in that symposium were Harvard behavioral psychologist George Miller and linguist Noam Chomsky. It was that symposium that convinced Miller to leave B.F. Skinner’s behaviorist camp at Harvard and join Jerome Bruner in developing cognitive psychology. Miller writes: I went away from the Symposium with a strong conviction, more imitative than rational, that experimental psychology, theoretical linguistics, and the computer simulation of cognitive processes were all pieces from a larger whole, and that the future would see a progressive elaboration and coordination of their shared concerns. (Bruner, p. 122) Three years later, in 1959, Chomsky was to give the coup de grace to the behaviorist theory about language by a devastating review of B.F. Skinner’s book, Verbal Behavior (1957). Skin ner had sought to explain language development in humans as a form of conditioned stimu lus-response behavior similar to the way that animals in psych labs could be trained through

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