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The "Fix" That's Destroying Education In
America
By Tom DeWeese
We hear it all the time. Americans want something done about education.
Their children can't read or work math problems without a calculator. They
can't spell, find their own country on a map, name the president of the
United States or quote the founding fathers.
For the past decade or more, we have been focusing on a massive
national campaign to "fix" the schools. In some schools we can
find ultra high-tech, carpeted, air conditioned classrooms with computers
and television sets. We have education "programs" full of new
ideas, new methods, and new directions.
In the 1990's the education mantra became "national
standards" and accountability through "national testing"
with Goals 2000. Politicians and "educrats" declared that every
child would come to school "ready to learn", "no child
would be left behind." They pledged our kids would be "second to
none" in the world. Right now, the Bush administration, prior to
issuing its budget, is trying to get Congress to sign off on a program
based on these political slogans.
In the past, we spent money, money, and more money! The new
"fix" intends to spend more. The result: American students have
fallen further behind, placing 19th out of 21 nations in math, 16th in
science, and dead last in physics. With
all the programs, attention, and money lavished on education, how can that
be? The problem? It's the federal programs and the education bureaucracy
that run them.
Simply stated, over the past twenty years America's education system
has been completely restructured to
deliberately move away from teaching basic academics to a system that
focuses on training students for menial jobs.
The restructured education system has been designed to deliberately
dumb-down the children. Most Americans find that statement astonishing.
Believe it! Parents don't want to let
go of their child-like faith that the American education system is the
best in the world, designed to give their children the academic strength
to make them the smartest in the world.
None of the problems will go away, nor will children learn, until both
parents and politicians stop trusting the education establishment and
start ridding the system of its failed and subversive ideas and programs.
Politicians continue to offer old solutions of more money and more
federal oversight, almost stamping their feet, demanding that kids learn
something. Programs are being proposed that call for teacher testing to
hold them accountable for producing
educated children. More programs call for annual tests to find out if
children have learned anything.
The nation is in panic, but none of these hysterical responses will
improve education because none of them address the very root of the
problem.
Parents and politicians must stop believing the Education
Establishment's propaganda that says
teaching a child in the twenty-first century is different and must be more
high tech than in days past. It simply isn't so.
THE ROOT OF THE PROBLEM
Today's education system is driven by money from the federal government
and private foundations, both working hand-in-hand with the Education
Establishment headquartered in the federal Department of Education and
staffed by the National Education
Association (NEA).
These forces have combined with psychologists, huge textbook
publishers, teacher colleges, the healthcare profession, government
bureaucrats, big corporations, pharmaceutical companies and social workers
to invade local school boards, classrooms and private homes in the name of
"fixing" education.
The record shows that each of these entities has benefited from this
alliance through enriched coffers and
increased political power. In fact, the new education
restructuring is working wonders for everyone involved except for the
children and their parents. As a result of this combined invasion force,
today's classroom is a very different place from only a few years ago.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF EDUCATION SUBVERSION
The entire history of education restructuring and transformation would
fill a book.
It dates back to the early efforts by psychologists like John Dewey
whose work began to change how teachers were taught in the nation's
teacher colleges. The changes were
drastic. Education moved away from an age-old system that taught teachers
how to motivate students to accept the whole scope of academic information
available.
Instead the new system explored methods to manipulate students through
psychological behavior modification
processes. Once this power was established, the education process became
less of a method to instill knowledge and more of a method to instill
specific political and social agendas into the minds of children.
The entire history of the education restructuring effort is carefully
and thoroughly documented in a book called The Deliberate Dumbing Down
of America. The book was written by Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, a
former official at the Department of Education in the Reagan
Administration. While there in 1981-1982, Charlotte found the "mother
lode" hidden away at the Department.
She found all of the education establishment's plans for restructuring
America's classrooms. Not only did she find the plans for what they
intended to do, she discovered how they were going to do it and most
importantly why.
Since uncovering this monstrous plan, Charlotte Iserbyt has dedicated
her life to getting that information into the hands of parents,
politicians and the news media.
Iserbyt's book details how several wealthy families and their foundations
began to implement a goal for a seamless non-competitive global system for
commerce and trade.
Schools were transformed from institutions that produced well educated
individuals into training centers to produce compliant workers for a
collectivist society. The wealthy families and foundations included The
Carnegie Corporation and the Rockefellers. Their foundations today
continue to lead the way in the development and funding of programs that
are at the center of America's education system.
The process to restructure America's education system began in the
opening years of the twentieth century and slowly picked up speed over the
decades. The new system used psychology-based curriculum to slowly change
the attitudes, values and beliefs of
the students from those of earlier generations that identified strongly
with liberty, patriotism, the work ethic, and comparable American values.
The new school agenda was very different from most peoples'
understanding of the purpose of American education.
National Education Association leader William Carr, secretary of the
Educational Policies Commission, clearly stated that new agenda in 1947.
Writing the NEA Journal, he said, "The teaching profession
prepares the leaders of the future…The
statesmen, the industrialists, the lawyers, the newspapermen…all
the leaders of tomorrow are in schools today.
"The psychological foundations for wider loyalties must be laid…(to)
teach those attitudes which will result ultimately in the creation of a
world citizenship and world government…we can and should teach those
skills and attitudes which will help to create a society in which world
citizenship is possible."
Professor Benjamin Bloom, known as the father of Outcome-Based
Education (OBE) said: "The purpose of education and the schools is to
change the thoughts, feelings and actions of students."
B.F. Skinner determined that applied psychology in the class curriculum
was the means to bring about such changes in the students' values and
beliefs simply by relentlessly inputting specific programmed messages. The
education system is now a captive of the Skinner model of behavior
modification programming.
In 1990, Dr. M. Donald Thomas outlined the new education system in an
article that appeared in The Effective School Report entitled
"Education 90: A Framework for the Future."
"From Washington to modern times, literacy has meant the ability
to read and write, the ability to
understand numbers, and the capacity to appreciate factual material. The
world, however, has changed dramatically in the last 30 years.
The introduction of technology in information processing, the compression
of the world into a single economic system, and the revolution in
political organizations are influences never imagined to be possible in
our lifetime.
Dr. Thomas provided the blueprint for today's education system that is
designed to:
De-emphasize academic knowledge;
Establish the one-world agenda with the
United Nations as its center, moving students away from a belief in
national sovereignty, i.e., patriotism;
Replace individual achievement with
collectivist group-think ideology;
And invade the family authority with an
"It takes a village" mind-set.
These ideas permeate every federal program, every national standard,
every textbook and every moment of your child's school day. It explains
why today's children hasn't any time to actually learn the fundamentals we
call the Three R's.
Without a strong basic education, today's children are mere pawns in
the hands of those who have a far different world in mind than the one in
which the first generations of Americans set the nation on its path to
high achievement. It is not for nothing they are called Gen-X'rs, the
tenth generation of Americans and, for those setting educational policy,
perhaps the last to pledge allegiance to one nation, under God,
indivisible, with freedom and justice for all.
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