Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

A–58 conditioning techniques. Pavlov’s famous experiments on dogs in Russia were the best known example of such experiments, the results of which were to permit psychologists to devise tech

niques that could be applied in changing and molding human behavior. J.B. Watson, the father of American behaviorism, had written in 1924:

Behaviorism…holds that the subject matter of human psychology is the behavior of the human being. Behaviorism claims that consciousness is neither a definite nor a usable concept.... (p. 2) The behaviorist asks: Why don’t we make what we can observe the real field of psychol ogy? Let us limit ourselves to things that can be observed and formulate laws concerning only those things. Now what can we observe? We can observe behavior—what the organism does or says. And let us point out at once that saying is doing—that is, behaving. (p. 6) Chomsky demonstrated that the behaviorists’ attempts to explain language in the limited terms of stimulus-response behavior were fundamentally flawed. He argued that “our inter pretation of the world is based on representational systems that derive from the structure of the mind itself and do not mirror in any direct way the form of the external world.” In other words, the human child is born with a brain that already contains certain innate knowledge that permits the child to learn language rapidly, without direct instruction from anyone. But the mystery is that the structure of the mind does indeed mirror the form of the external world, for function of language is to name the external world. The child’s ability to master the phonologi cal structure of the language, the abstractions of sound symbols, as well as syntax so rapidly and effortlessly suggested to Chomsky that man’s genetic makeup provided him with a highly developed language capability. What is ironic in all of this is that despite the fact that Chomsky is a radical socialist and believes in evolution, his views about innate knowledge are quite compatible with and even strongly confirms the Biblical view of man being created with the ability to use language. God gave Adam the ability to speak because He wanted Adam to be able to converse with Him. In other words, Adam was given the power of the word for the specific purpose of being able to know God. The second purpose of language was to enable Adam to know the world for God gave Adam the task of establishing dominion over all living creatures, which meant naming them and classifying them. In other words, God made Adam an observer, a scientist. After the creation of Eve, the third function of language became apparent: to know others. And since language is the tool of thought, the fourth function of language was to be able to think and thereby know oneself. In 1960 Miller and Bruner got an unrestricted grant of a quarter-million dollars from the Carnegie Corporation of New York to set up their Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard. Miller brought ideas about communication theory, computation, and linguistics to the Center whereas Bruner brought ideas about social psychology, developmental psychology, and anthropology to the mix. It was obvious that the new interest in the mind had been spurred by the new com puter technology. For, as Bruner writes, “You cannot properly conceive of managing a complex world of information without a workable concept of mind.” The result is that the Center brought together the ideas and theories of scholars and scientists working in many associated fields and drew graduate students from M.I.T., Harvard, and elsewhere. Bruner concentrated on early childhood mental development which brought him into contact with the work of the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget whose pioneering work in the field