|
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.
|
