Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

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and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA), the most important piece of legislation to pass during Lyndon Johnson’s administration. Two of the major federal initiatives developed with funding from The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 which have contributed to the “deliberate dumbing down” of not only students but teachers as well, are listed below: 1. the 1965–1969 Behavioral Science Teacher Education Program (BSTEP), and 2. the 1969 publication by the federal government of Pacesetters in Innovation , a 584-page cata logue of behavior modification programs to be used by the schools. Pacesetters provided evidence of a concerted effort to destroy the last vestiges of traditional aca demic education, replacing it with a behavior and mind control system guaranteed to create the “New Soviet Man” who would be unlikely to challenge totalitarian policies emanating from his local, state or federal/international government. Professor John Goodlad, the nation’s premiere change agent who has been receiving federal and tax-exempt foundation grants for at least thirty years, said in 1969: The most controversial issues of the twenty-first century will pertain to the ends and means of modifying human behavior and who shall determine them. The first educational question will not be “what knowledge is of the most worth?” but “what kinds of human beings do we wish to produce?” The possibilities virtually defy our imagination. 1 Behavior change on such a massive scale necessitated the creation of many agencies and policy devices which would oversee the implementation of the necessary innovations. Three agencies were: (1) the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which tested students at various grade levels; (2) the Education Commission of the States (ECS), which enabled the states to become unified regarding education and its outreach—one entity supposedly controlled by its member states, but in reality controlled by its consensus policy which invariably reflected federal policy—and (3) the National Diffusion Network (NDN) which served as the transmission belt and advertising agency for federally funded programs, the majority of which were intended to destroy traditional right/wrong absolutist values through psychotherapeutic and behavioral techniques. 2 Congressman John M. Ashbrook of Ohio, to whose memory the writer has dedicated this book, expressed his concern over the above-described radical shift in the direction of education before the U.S. House of Representatives on July 18, 1961 in a speech he delivered entitled “The Myth of Federal Aid to Education without Control.” With extraordinary foresight, John Ashbrook warned that: In the report A Federal Education Agency for the Future we find the vehicle for Federal domi nation of our schools. It is a real and present danger.… The battle lines are now being drawn between those who seek control and uniformity of our local schools and those who oppose this further bureaucratic centralization in Washington. It is my sincere hope that the Congress will respond to this challenge and defeat the aid to education bills which will implement the goals incorporated in A Federal Education Agency for the Future .

Unfortunately, Congressman Ashbrook’s words of wisdom did not convince his fellow colleagues