This is a 5-part thesis (links to parts #2-#5 at end of this article), for those of us who are concerned about the government schools system in the U.S.
By Charlotte Iserbyt
December 21, 2010
NewsWithViews.com
“To
extinguish the free will is to strike the conscience with death, for both have
but one and the same life.” – William Ellery Channing (American moralist,
Unitarian Clergyman and Author, 1780-1842)
Something is
drastically wrong with the present restructuring of education. I hope this
article will persuade parents and traditional public school administrators and
teachers to work together to stop the dismantling of what was once considered
the finest educational system in the world. The traditional system’s successful
administrative structure which allowed elected school boards (working with
superintendents, principals, and teachers) to provide our children with an
academic education, should not be changed to accommodate the needs of the
corporate fascist/socialist (government/business) partnerships and tax-exempt
foundations.
One must
understand that the situation with low academic test scores and unacceptable
behavior of students was deliberately created over a period of 80 years,
starting in the 1930s with the Carnegie Corporation’s plan to use schools to
bring about a Soviet-style (performance-based) planned economic system. See
reference to Carnegie Corporation's Conclusions and Recommendations for the
Social Studies (1934) and Carnegie-Soviet Academy of Science Agreement
(1985). The latter agreement was signed the same year Presidents Reagan and
Gorbachev signed the U.S.-USSR Education Exchange Agreement.
The first experiment with Outcomes/Performance-Based Education (the
restructuring system being implemented today) was Carnegie Corporation’s “Eight
Year Study” (1933-1941).
To get an idea
of the enormity and severity of the problems addressed by this article, see the
OECD-SSRC Stupski Next-Gen Data System Workshop (October 2010)
presentation which states the following: “We will
build capacity to leave a dying system and give birth to a new
one…”
Solution—the
following government agencies which control local education must be abolished:
U.S.
Department of Education, its laboratories and centers, and all federally funded
state departments of education. Also, legislation must be passed prohibiting
outside meddling in state or local education matters by corporations and tax
exempt foundations. Such legislation would prevent international, national or
corporate entities from administering attitudinal assessments and collecting
private data on students, their families, educators and/or members of small
businesses.
It is doubtful
that major conservative groups would help in this endeavor. Our best hope is to
enlist the help of traditional teachers and administrators, and small business
owners, who would have to go up against their prospective organization
leadership. It might work. It’s worth a try.
This
article is written for the benefit of parents, our children, and the teachers of
our children; it explains the following:
Link
1: Re-inventing Schools Coalition
Link 2: Back to Basics Reform or. . .OBE . . .Skinnerian International Curriculum and the deliberate dumbing down of america
Link 3: Jed Brown on Behavioral Conditioning
Link 4: Educators Push Back Against Obama’s “Business Model” for School Reform(If a link becomes broken, please do a Google search for the title.)
Link 2: Back to Basics Reform or. . .OBE . . .Skinnerian International Curriculum and the deliberate dumbing down of america
Link 3: Jed Brown on Behavioral Conditioning
Link 4: Educators Push Back Against Obama’s “Business Model” for School Reform(If a link becomes broken, please do a Google search for the title.)
The last nail
of so-called school reform is being struck in the coffin of traditional American
education which made our nation the envy of the Free World and which produced
famous scientists, engineers, mathematicians, writers, artists, musicians,
doctors, etc.
The reform is
not new. It started in the early 1900s when John D. Rockefeller, Jr.’s Director
of Charity for the Rockefeller Foundation, Frederick T. Gates, set up the
Southern Education Board. In 1913 the organization was incorporated into the
General Education Board. These boards set in motion “the deliberate dumbing down
of America”. In Frederick T. Gates’ “The Country School of Tomorrow”
Occasional Papers No. 1 (General Education Board, New York, 1913) was a
section entitled “A Vision of the Remedy” in which he wrote:
“Is there aught a remedy for this neglect of rural life? Let us, at least, yield ourselves to the gratifications of a beautiful dream that there is. In our dream, we have limitless resources, and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our moulding hand. The present educational conventions fade from our minds; and unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or of science. We are not to raise up from among them authors, orators, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians. Nor will we cherish even the humbler ambition to raise up from among them lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we now have ample supply.”
The above
quote sounds like something from one of the public/private
school-to-work/tax-exempt foundation partnerships involved in the Reinventing
Schools Coalition agenda, as well as other innocuous sounding current-day
initiatives that are being implemented across the nation.
The above
Rockefeller agenda was followed up by the Carnegie Corporation’s little volume
on education entitled Conclusions and Recommendations for the Social
Studies (Charles Scribner’s Sons: N.Y. 1934) — funded to the tune of
$340,000. This little book called for using the schools to turn the United
States into a socialist nation, ultimately to become a member of a
socialist/communist world government. Author Francis Gannon wrote that Harold
Laski, the philosopher of British socialism, said of this report:
“At bottom, and stripped of its carefully neutral phrases, the Report is an educational program for a Socialist America.”
Conclusions and
Recommendations for the Social Studies is the most important book I ever
laid my hands on. You
can find it here. Following are important and revealing excerpts from
Conclusions and Recommendations for the Social Studies:
“The Commission was also driven to this broader conception of its task by the obvious fact that American civilization, in common with Western civilization, is passing through one of the great critical ages of history, is modifying its traditional faith in economic individualism [free enterprise], and is embarking upon vast experiments in social planning and control which call for large-scale cooperation on the part of the people…” (pp. 1-2)
“. . . Cumulative evidence supports the conclusion that in the United States and in other countries the age of ‘laissez faire’ in economy and government is closing and that a new age of collectivism is emerging.” (p. 16)
In 1951,
Human Relations in Curriculum Change was published (Ed. Kenneth D.
Benne and Bozidar Muntyan, The Dryden Press, Inc., NY). The book contains
“Selected readings with an emphasis on group development.” Most works—written by
social scientists and philosophers of-the-day—appeared in publications during
the 1940s decade; some included references dating from the 1930s decade.
Human Relations in Curriculum Change discusses “social engineering”
(theory, methods); “re-education of personnel in knowledge, skills, and
attitudes”; schools as potential laboratories for “experimental social science”;
“human engineering”; “group thinking”; “change agents”; Kurt Lewin’s “change
process” theory; “consensus”; and more.
In
Critical Theory, Marxism, Dialectical Method and Total Quality
Management (2002), author Judy McLemore explains that the editors of
Human Relations and Curriculum Change selected for inclusion “the
research experiments and writings on group development and human engineering by
various transformational Marxists to create a blueprint for the ‘re-education’
or brainwashing of the masses and subsequent transformation of America. It is a
master plan for ‘inducing and controlling changes in social systems,’ that is,
changes in the individuals within schools, government, universities, industries,
etc. by way of the ‘group’ (Benne Preface, 24). . . . The plan includes a
dialectical method of ‘resolving’ personal individual beliefs and dispositions
of traditional Americans into a ‘common social outlook’ defined by these
Marxists (336). By common they mean of the same mind, feelings, habits,
knowledge, motivation, beliefs and values. In effect they mean to mold each
individual personality to conform to a facilitated group adaptable to
change.”
Conclusions and
Recommendations for the Social Studies (1934) and the old progressive
theories and practices that appeared in Human Relations in Curriculum
Change (1951) are accommodated by school/workforce reforms today that
promote so-called global competitiveness and global citizenship. (Note: the term
progressive was “in the middle of the last century, what socialists and
communists used for themselves because they believed they had the key to the
future."[1])
Please use
this article “The Death of Free Will” to fight state implementation of the
federal Common Core Standards. Use this article to fight the totalitarian
Pavlovian/Skinnerian performance-based workforce training agenda that will dumb
down students as well as teachers . . . which will pay teachers for students’
good grades (teach to the test/what are they testing?) and very likely also pay
children as well for good grades.
This agenda
MUST be stopped or all of us will suffer: our children, their teachers, and our
free political and economic system of government. Once FREE WILL is destroyed,
there is no protection from descending to the level of animals, subjected to
“training”. Only human beings can be educated. Why have we opted for animal
training, with or without the computer, rather than continuing to educate our
children in the traditional way for upward mobility?
This is the
ultimate war for our children’s minds and souls. No other war has ever been more
important. If you don’t have time to read this entire article, please at least
click on the links at the beginning of this article as well as their associated
links. Descriptions of the links follow. See Charlotte's 9 min. vedeo below. For
part two click below.
Endnote:
Charlotte Iserbyt is
the consummate whistleblower! Iserbyt served as Senior Policy Advisor in the
Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), U.S. Department of
Education, during the first Reagan Administration, where she first blew the
whistle on a major technology initiative which would control curriculum in
America's classrooms. Iserbyt is a former school board director in Camden, Maine
and was co-founder and research analyst of Guardians of Education for Maine
(GEM) from 1978 to 2000. She has also served in the American Red Cross on Guam
and Japan during the Korean War, and in the United States Foreign Service in
Belgium and in the Republic of South Africa.
Iserbyt is a speaker
and writer, best known for her 1985 booklet Back to Basics Reform or OBE:
Skinnerian International Curriculum and her 1989 pamphlet Soviets in the
Classroom: America's Latest Education Fad which covered the details of the
U.S.-Soviet and Carnegie-Soviet Education Agreements which remain in effect to
this day. She is a freelance writer and has had articles published in Human
Events, The Washington Times, The Bangor Daily News, and included in the record
of Congressional hearings.
E-Mail: dumbdown00@yahoo.com
Compliments of Royal Heir
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