Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

64 National Defense Education Act (NDEA) Amendment of 1961—Additional Views, which accompanied H.R. 7904, included very important testimony regarding the dangers of the NDEA and the recommendations made in the above Agency for the Future report. A discussion of the dangers of federal control follows: We [the undersigned] reject, furthermore, the philosophy that there can exist Federal aid to any degree without Federal control. We further hold that there should not be Federal aid without Federal control. It is the responsibility of the Federal Government to so supervise and control its allocations that waste and misuse is kept to a minimum. Since we do not desire such federal control in the field of public education, we do not desire Federal aid to education. We should never permit the American educational system to become the vehicle for experimentation by educational ideologues. A careful analysis of the writings and statements of vocal and influential spokesmen in the governmental and educational fields indicates a desire on the part of some of these individuals to utilize the educational system as a means of transforming the economic and social outlook of the United States. We point to a statement by Dr. Harold Rugg, for many years professor of education at Teachers College, Columbia University, who declared in Frontiers of Democracy on May 15, 1943 (pp. 247–254) concerning the teachers’ colleges: We could supply pages of documentation analyzing the type of new frontier planned. It is indeed a Socialist frontier. It had been hoped that the philosophy of education expressed by Dr. Rugg and his cohorts back in the early forties, had long since been repudiated. However, in April of 1961, the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare published a booklet entitled A Federal Education Agency for the Future . Anyone who doubts that the Federal aid to education bills now before Congress would mean eventual Federal control of education, should carefully read and analyze for himself what the Office of Education is planning for tomorrow’s schools. They openly predict their “need” for new powers on the passage of the multimillion-dollar aid legislation now before us. They recommend that their Office of Edu cation be elevated to the status of U.S. Education Agency, “to reflect the more active role of this unit of Government.” They envision the new Agency’s mission as one of “leadership” (p. 42), “national policymaking” (p. 43), “national planning” (p. 47), “to prepare students to understand the world of tomorrow” (p. 40). The Office of Education writers further say “along with these responsibilities should be included that of stimulating and participating in the process of formulation, examination, and reformulation of the goals of our society in the terms of educational objectives” (p. 43). [Ed. Note: A careful warning was sounded through the National Defense Education Act Amend ment of 1961—Additional Views when the Congressmen said, “We reject that there can exist Federal aid to any degree without Federal control. We further hold that there should not be Federal aid without Federal control.” This applies as well to all of the voucher and tax credit proposals before us today (in 1999) flying under the banner of “choice.” The Mission Statement of the Office of Education clearly called for the establishment of the National Center for Education Statistics, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and the “wholistic” approach to education through the inclusion of social scientists in the Let them become powerful national centers for the graduate study of ideas and they will thereby become forces of creative imagination standing at the very vortex of the ideational revolution. Let us make our teacher education institutions into great direction finders for our new society, pointers of the way, dynamic trailblazers of the New Frontiers.