Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

A–155 3. The Right to Read Foundation, formerly headed by Robert Sweet, supports Teaching Your Children to Read in 100 Easy Lessons , which is SRA’s DISTAR (Mastery Reading). Sweet recently became a consultant to the House Education and Workforce Committee and helped draft and promote the Reading Excellence Act . Several years ago when Tracey Hayes, a researcher, brought her concerns regarding the Carnine/Engelmann program to his attention, Sweet told her he saw nothing wrong with mastery learning. Good parents looking for traditional phonics-based reading instruction for their children have been had by the master manipulators’ use of the Hegelian dialectic. They (the internationalist change agents) created the whole language disaster (or took advantage of it) in order to get parents to scream so that parents could be offered the predetermined solution: the direct instruction Skinnerian program which can be applied to any other disciplines, including WORKFORCE TRAINING! And the desperate parents have bought into this shameful scam, thinking that the educational establishment really cared about their children learning to read. The corporate sector, which supports direct instruction, does not really want educated workers. Thomas Sticht, a member of the Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS) said as much when he was quoted in an August 17, 1987 Washington Post article as follows: Many companies have moved operations to places with cheap, relatively poorly educated labor. What may be crucial, they say, is the dependability of a labor force and how well it can be managed and trained—not its general educational level, although a small cadre of highly educated creative people is essential to innovation and growth. Ending discrimination and changing values are probably more important than reading in moving low-income families into the middle class. Sticht was also at one time associated with the “Hooked on Phonics” program. Oh, what a tangled web we weave! Harvard’s Professor Anthony Oettinger, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, which is bringing us STW, Free Trade and Global Governance, said in 1981: The present “traditional” concept of literacy has to do with the ability to read and write. But the real question that confronts us today is: How do we help citizens function well in their society? How can they acquire the skills necessary to solve their problems? Do we really have to have everybody literate—writing and reading in the traditional sense— when we have the means through our technology to achieve a new flowering of oral communication? It is the traditional idea that says certain forms of communication such as comic books are “bad.” But in the modern context of functionalism they may not be all that bad. [emphasis added] 1. Why would former California Commissioner of Education William Honig (who was at one time someone parents loved to hate) support something supposedly good for our children (DISTAR/ECRI) after years of implementing the progressive, humanistic agenda? Why would the leadership of the two major teacher unions support a method which supposedly is in the best interests of your children unless all of them have been walking down the road to Damascus? Appendix XXV All that one must do to smell one big rat is ask the following questions: