Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

69

The Sick Sixties : c. 1963

differences. IPI is a system based on a set of specified objectives correlated with diagnostic instru ments, curriculum materials, teaching techniques, and management capabilities. The objec tives of the system are: 1. to permit student mastery of instructional content at individual learning rates; 2. to ensure active student involvement in the learning process; 3. to encourage student involvement in learning through self-directed and self-initiated activities; 4. to encourage student evaluation of progress toward mastery and to provide instruc tional materials and techniques based on individual needs and styles. (pp. 93–95) [Ed. Note: IPI is necessary to the success of outcome-based education because it does away with norm-referenced testing and the traditional grading system. The Carnegie Unit is also jeop ardized by the introduction of IPI. The federally funded laboratory Research for Better Schools, Inc., in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania field-tested IPI, thus setting the stage for Skinnerian mastery learning/direct instruction and the use of Skinner’s “box” (the computer) to be incorporated into curriculum. Homeschoolers and Christian educators should be reminded that this project is reflected in many of the curricular and organizational designs advocated for their use.] I N 1963 A NATIONAL PROJECT WAS INITIATED WHICH WAS THE FORERUNNER OF THE N A tional Assess ment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and became the model for individual state assessments which have created enormous controversy due to their focus on attitudinal and value change. This study was presented in A Plan for Evaluating the Quality of Educational Programs in Penn sylvania: Highlights of a Report from Educational Testing Service to the State Board of Education of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (Educational Testing Service: Princeton, N.J., June 30, 1965). The combination of the Skinnerian method of training and the assessments’ emphasis on change in attitudes, values and beliefs resulted in what the average parent considered a “lethal concoction,” absolutely guaranteed to create a “robotized citizen for the New Pagan Age.” Although Appendix IV of this book includes verbatim text from the Plan , the following excerpts provide a fairly clear picture of the intent of those involved in this seminal project: This Committee on Quality Education sought the advice of experts [including Dr. Urie Bronfenbrenner of the Department of Sociology, Cornell University; Dr. David R. Krathwohl of the College of Education, Michigan State University [a co-author with Benjamin Bloom of The Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: Affective Domain ]; and Dr. Ralph Tyler, director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto, California. These experts constituted a Standing Advisory Committee for the project.... It [the Committee] concluded that an educational program is to be regarded as adequate only if it can be shown to contribute to the total development of pupils.... The Committee recognizes that many of the desirable qualities that schools should help pupils acquire are difficult to define and even more difficult to measure. It feels, nevertheless, that any evalua tion procedure that leaves these qualities out of account is deficient as a basis for determining whether the program of any school district is educationally adequate.... The first step in judging the quality of educational programs is to decide on the purposes of education. What should children be and do and know [emphasis in original] as a conse quence of having gone to school? What are the goals of the schools? These questions have been high on the agenda of the Committee on Quality Education. Its members wanted a set