Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

68 testing procedures, the machine would calculate which attitudes are “out of phase” and which of these are amenable to change. If the student were opposed to foreign trade, say, and a favorable disposition were sought for, the machine would select an appropriate series of statements and questions organized to right the imbalance in the student’s attitudes. The machine, for instance, would have detected that the student liked President Kennedy and was against the spread of Communism; therefore, the student would be shown that JFK favored foreign trade and that foreign trade to underdeveloped countries helped to arrest the Communist infiltration of these governments. If the student’s attitudes toward Kennedy and against Communism were sufficiently strong, Dr. Raven would hypothesize that a positive change in attitude toward foreign trade would be effectively brought about by showing the student the inconsistency of his views. There is considerable evidence that such techniques do effectively change attitudes. Admittedly, training in decision-making skills is a legitimate goal of education in this age of automation, but the problem remains—does the educator know what values to attach to the different outcomes of these decisions?... What about students whose values are out of line with the acceptable values of democratic society? Should they be taught to conform to someone else’s accepted judgment of proper values? Training in decision-making is ultimately compounded with training in value judgment and, as such, becomes a controversial subject that needs to be resolved by educators before the tools can be put to use. U NIVERSITY OF P ITTSBURGH ’ S L EARNING R ESEARCH AND D EVELOPMENT C ENTER INTRO duced in 1963 the Individually Prescribed Instruction (IPI) model which would allow for the implementation of continuous progress programs necessary for value change and school-to-work training. A good example of what Individually Prescribed Instruction is designed to do is given in Planned Change in Education: A Systems Approach , edited by David S. Bushnell of Project Focus and Donald Rappaport of Price Waterhouse & Co. (Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, Inc.: New York, 1971). Excerpts from chapter 7, “Individualizing Instruction” by Robert G. Scanlon, program director for the Individualizing Learning Program of Research for Better Schools, Inc., and Mary V. Brown, assistant program director to the project, are reprinted below: IPI is an instructional system that permits the teacher to plan and conduct a program of studies tailored to the needs and characteristics of each student. Its procedures have been designed to enable the school to meet more of the needs of more individual pupils and take a new direction in the continuing search for ways to adapt instruction to individual pupils. The rate of learning, amount of practice, type of materials, and mode of instruction are the parameters of individual differences emphasized in IPI. During the school year 1963–64, the Learning Research and Development Center and the Baldwin-Whitehall public schools (a suburban Pittsburgh school system) initiated an experimental project to investigate the feasibility of a system of individualized instruction in an entire K–6 school (Oakleaf). This came as a result of a series of exploratory studies begun in 1951–1962 designed to test preliminary notions in a single classroom. The work started with the use of programmed instruction in an intact classroom. As work proceeded, it became apparent that the significant individualization feature of programmed instruction could not be augmented unless the organization of the classroom was changed to permit a more flexible context. Out of this experience grew the current Individu ally Prescribed Instruction project in which various combinations of instructional materials, testing procedures, and teacher practices are being used to accommodate individual student