Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

67

The Sick Sixties : c. 1962

may not wait until 2081!]

1962

I N THE S EPTEMBER 3, 1962 EDITION OF T HE D AN S MOOT R EPORT 7 (V OL . 8, N O . 36) S MOOT ’ S article “Stabbed in the Back on the Fourth of July” dealt with an Independence Day speech given in Philadelphia by President John F. Kennedy in which he said: But I will say here and now on this day of independence that the United States will be ready for a Declaration of Interdependence—that we will be prepared to discuss with a United Europe the ways and means of forming a concrete Atlantic Partnership—a mutually beneficial partnership between the new union now emerging in Europe and the old American Union founded here 175 years ago. Today Americans must learn to think intercontinentally.

On July 11, 1961, according to Smoot’s report:

James Reston (a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and an admirer of President Kennedy) commented on the President’s speech in a New York Times article :

This year... President Kennedy went to Independence Hall, of all places, and on the Fourth of July, of all days, and virtually proposed to repeal the Declaration of Independence in favor of a declaration of interdependence.... Maybe it is just the drowsy indolence of the summer, but American opinion seems remarkably receptive, or at least acquiescent, to President Kennedy’s proposal for a partnership of the Atlantic nations.... In Washington, there was not a whisper of protest from a single national leader.

1963

T HE R OLE OF THE C OMPUTER IN F UTURE I NSTRUCTIONAL S YSTEMS WAS PUBLISHED AS THE March/ April, 1963 supplement of Audiovisual Communication Review (Monograph 2 of the Techno logical Development Project of the National Education Association [Contract #SAE9073], U.S. Office of Education, Dept. of Health, Education and Welfare: Washington, D.C., 1963). James D. Finn of Los Angeles was the principal investigator and Donald P. Ely was the consulting investigator for this project. (Donald Ely also became project director for the U.S. Department of Education’s Project BEST: Basic Educational Skills through Technology , which will be discussed in a later entry in this book.) Excerpts from a chapter entitled “Effortless Learning, Attitude Changing, and Training in Decision-Making” follow: Another area of potential development in computer applications is the attitude chang ing machine. Dr. Bertram Raven in the Psychology Department at the University of California at Los Angeles is in the process of building a computer-based device for changing attitudes. This device will work on the principle that students’ attitudes can be changed effectively by using the Socratic method of asking an appropriate series of leading questions designed to right the balance between appropriate attitudes, and those deemed less acceptable. For instance, after first determining a student’s constellation of attitudes through appropriate