Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

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The Sick Sixties : c. 1966

1966

P SYCHOLOGY BY W ILBERT J AMES M C K EACHIE OF THE U NIVERSITY OF M ICHIGAN AND C HAR lotte Lackner Doyle of Cornell University (Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., Inc.: New York, 1966) was published. An excerpt from a chapter entitled “What Does a Psychologist Observe?” follows: Watson’s approach to psychology, with its emphasis on observable behavior, became known as behaviorism. The major problem with this approach was that it excluded from psychol ogy some of its major concerns. No one can directly observe the motives, feelings, percep tions, thoughts, and memories of others. Re-defining thought in terms of muscle movements made thought a measurable event, but ignored some of the properties of thought that make it psychologically interesting. The behaviorists became committed to the study of muscle movements in place of an analysis of thought. (pp. 4–5) T HE C OMPUTER IN A MERICAN E DUCATION EDITED BY D ON D. B USHNELL AND D WIGHT W . Allen (John Wiley & Sons: New York, 1967) was published. Excerpts follow: The technology for controlling others exists and it will be used, given the persistence of power-seeking motives. Furthermore, we will need to use it, since the necessary social changes cannot come about if the affected people do not understand and desire them.... How do we educate “run-of-the-mill” citizens for membership in a democratic society?... How do we teach people to understand their relationship to long range planning?... And how do we teach people to be comfortable with the process of change? Should we educate for this? We shall probably have to. But how?... The need for educating to embrace change is not limited to youngsters.... Education for tomorrow’s world will involve more than programming students by a computer; it will equally involve the ways in which we program... parents to respond to the education... children get for this kind of world. To the extent we succeed with the youngsters but not with the parents, we will have... a very serious consequence: an increasing separation of the young from their parents.... It will have psychological repercussions, probably producing in the children both guilt and hostility (arising from their rejection of their parents’ views and values in lifestyles). (p. 7) P ROJECT F OLLOW T HROUGH WAS INITIATED IN 1967, FUNDED UNDER THE E CONOMIC O P portunity Act of 1964 , and carried out as a part of President Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty.” Follow Through was administered by the U.S. Office of Education in the Department of Health, Edu cation and Welfare. One of the models of instruction examined in trial under Follow Through was the Direct Instruction (DI) model developed by W.C. Becker and Siegfried Engelmann. Direct Instruction is based on the work of the late B.F. Skinner of Harvard, Edward Thorndike of Columbia University, and Ivan Pavlov of Russia, even though their works are not directly quoted in the DI literature. Alice M. Rivlin, 8 a member of the Brookings Institute staff, in a lecture entitled “Systematic 1967