Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

A–63 The Bruner-Luria connection was a very close one. Bruner attended psychological confer ences in Moscow, and, in 1960, Luria visited the Center for Cognitive Studies. Bruner writes: Appendix XIII

Luria and I became fast friends almost immediately. We were compatible temperamen tally and very much in agreement about psychological matters…. (p. 145)

In the fifteen or so years that I knew him well, I do not think that two months ever went by without a letter from him, a new book or translation of his.... He was the czar of Russian psychology, but a more benign czar would be hard to imagine! (p. 144) Why were they so compatible? Well, as a student Bruner not only sympathized with com munism, but in his senior year at Duke, he became a member of the Communist Party. He writes: That last year at Duke was 1938, the bitter winding down of the Spanish Civil War. My roommate, Irv Dunston, and I were invited to become members of a Marxist “study group” held at the home of a gifted young mathematics professor. Each week we would prepare by reading something of Marx or Lenin. I liked the slogans—that production was for use not for profit, to each according to his effort, and so on—but the turgid arguments of Marxist “thinkers” repelled me…. My fondness for the slogans must have been enough, for we were asked eventually to join a “cell” of the Communist Party in Durham, “with real working-class people.” After a late-into-the-night discussion, we decided that this was our duty…. The cell meetings, in that dingy apartment near the railroad station in Durham, were the intrinsic, the conspiratorial appeal—our code names included.... My “duties” were to take an active part on campus in the American Student Union, to put the “right” candidates into office…. The year ended; I departed Durham. I never even had to resign from the Party. I was given no names or contacts, but told simply that I would soon know who and how. I guess I didn’t make it. (pp. 29–30) Thus ended Bruner’s formal relationship with the Communist Party. But nowhere in his autobiography does Bruner indicate any loss of belief in socialism or Marxism. The fact that he felt so compatible with Luria and preferred Vygotsky to Piaget would lead one to believe that Bruner has remained sympathetic to communism throughout his professional life. He and his fellow psychologists thought nothing of attending psychological conferences in Moscow during the height of the Cold War while American soldiers were dying in Vietnam fighting communism. On matters of education, Bruner was instrumental in creating in 1965 the famous—or infamous, depending on your point of view—social studies curriculum for ten-year-olds, Man: A Course of Study , better known as MACOS. Bruner writes: [A]fter a year or two of very favorable notices… and widespread adoptions, the course came under attack from the extreme right-wing John Birch [Society] in league with newly emerging “creationists,” opposed to the teaching of evolution. Between them they mounted the now familiar right-wing harassment of any school district proposing to use the course....