On Deliberate Dumbing Down

In Charlotte Isebyt’s definitive text on the American education system, “The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America” (1999), she notes that social engineers have systematically gone about destroying the intellect of millions of American children by creating an education system devoted to training children to be come compliant human resources (human capital) to be used by government and industry for their own purposes. Recent article reported in The Australian shows how Britain’s new education has suffered a similar fate - see. “UK school exam system fails to pass test, The Australian, June 24, 2009

This according to Isebyt is how fascist and socialist societies train their children to become servants of their government masters. One of the insights revealed in her presentation of the actual documentation of these educators is how the social engineers deliberately create an education crisis to move the agenda forward by offering radical reforms that are sold to the public as fixing the crisis which provides the pretext for the next move forward. This is the dialectical process at work.

 
We see this here with the phony evaluation of Australia’s international performance on PISA, TIMMS and other international tests. Having not been able to show Australia is slipping back, the debate was shifted to the fact that we were a high scoring country with the greatest spread in scores between have and have not schools (socioeconomic areas in fact).

Charlotte Isebyt, one time Reagan appointee to the newly formed Federal Office of Educational Research under the US dept of Education resigned in disgust after 18 months once learning what the true agenda for American school children was. She has spent the last 30 years on a crusade to make the people of America and the rest of the world aware of the socialisation of education and the gradual erosion of our personal freedom. OERI was the centre from which emanated all controversial education techniques. In this time she has come to the conclusion that teaching children to become proficient at reading writing and mathematics will enable them to do just about anything they wish enabling them to control their destiny to the extent that God allows and that providing such basic proficiencies is not and should not be an expensive proposition. A proposition most Americans agree and wonder why the cost is destroying the economy. It becomes obvious that it is the radical agenda, the purpose of which is to change values and attitudes, that is costing so much. In other words brainwashing by schools and universities is the costly agenda. By the mid 1990’s, America was spending $6300 per year on educating children yet according to the TIMMS report, in 1998 US 12 graders scored below the international average and among the lowest of 21 TIMMS nations in both math’s and science general knowledge leading her to the conclusion that something is terribly wrong.

“I want parents to know that if government schools are allowed to teach children K-12 using Pavlovian and Skinnerian animal training  methods which provide tangible rewards only for “correct” answers there can be no freedom because people trained – not educated- by such techniques will be fearful of taking principled stands when called for because they have been trained to respond only to positive reward system”.(Isebyt, 1999)

For Charlotte Isebyt, it all started after 18 years away from the US in Europe when her young son attending a local public school brought home a piece of paper entitled “All about me”” which contained questions of a highly personal nature about him, his parents and brother and rather than discuss personal details of their family he lied. The purpose of such a questionnaire was to find out the students state of mind, how he felt, what he liked and disliked and what his values were. With this knowledge it would be easier for the school to modify his values and behaviour at will with out the knowledge of either the student or his parents. Next came the new social studies text book for K-3 students with the humanistic no right or wrong values.

Next came the Community Centered Schools Concept which turned out to be the precursor for the American school system.

Isebyt identifies Dr. Ronald Havelock of University of Michigan as the architect of  the training programs which were funded by the US Office of Education Research.The training taught teachers how to sneak in controversial programs including health education, sex education, alcohol education, death education, critical thinking education. Isebyt says only the controversial programs have “education” attached to them. A good rule of thumb she says, is to question any program with the word “education” in the title.

Havelock’s in-service training manual showed educators how to manipulate parents and taxpayers into accepting controversial programs and how to identify “resisters”. It showed how to go to highly respected members of the community and persuade them to endorse an apparently innocuous project for the public good and then use their misguided endorsement to leverage others into the program. They left the course with a valuable book, now being used by “Common Purpose” at a county level in the UK,  called “A Change Agents Guide to Innovations in Education”.

Havelock taught the ideas of Benjamin Bloom, the psychologist known as the godfather of “outcomes based education” whose philosophy was:

“The purpose of education and schools is to change the thoughts feelings and actions of students”

What was that! This, as far as I am able to divine, is exactly why parents want the freedom to choose the type of education their children receive.

Isebyt reports that while working in the Office of Educational Research, she discovered that unbeknown to the people, the US Govt. was engaged in a secret war against its own people for the hearts and minds of their children fought using psychological methods over the previous 100 years and which the average American hasn’t the foggiest idea about. The tools used to wage it are:

1. Hegelian Dialectic (Common ground consensus and compromise)
2. Gradualism (two steps forward one back)
3. Semantic Deception (redefining terms to get agreement without understanding what those terms mean. (This is where whole language can be dangerous because children learn the word as a symbol for a concept and when this is the case words can have their meanings changed with some basic neurolinguistic programming)

The Hegelian dialectic was proposed by German philosopher GWF Hegel along with
Karl Marx in codifying revolutionary communism basically: thesis (the proposition) antithesis (the fabricated crisis of opposition) and synthesis the outcome compromise but in fact the actual position to be arrived at. In my view all Western democracy works in the same way with a thesis (the government position), an antithesis,(the opposition rebuttal) and a synthesis which is what they planned to do in the first place now presented as a compromise solution.

In the US the international change agents needed to abolish local control of education (the thesis) in order to restructure the schools from academic based instruction to global work force training (the synthesis). Funding of local education through property taxes allowed for local control but it also allows educators and change agents to create higher and higher budgets putting the cost of education beyond the reach of local or state governments because higher and higher taxes need to be levied to fund education. Eventually,  the people and the states accept  the change agents’ radical proposals  to reduce the burden of tax at state or local level by transferring education  from local or state tax to the federal level further increasing federal control. The most recent alternative is for privatisation of a large proportion of the public system leading to the federal internationalist goal of implementing global workforce training through the schools (Synthesis). In Australia there is push to have the private sector run public schools while the govt. keeps control of the curriculum. (See SMH Nov 26, 2008 “Big business dominates educational planning” and “Australians agree: Joel Klein is a fraud” from New York City Public School Parents website which quotes Age and SMH articles).

Gradualism worked with a series of created crisis to lead parents to worry about education and see this as the solution in a series of graduated steps.

 
Semantic deception works by telling parents that a values changing program is a program for “good decision making”

This war is the war to end all wars because it seeks to remove the child from the authority of the parent and hand it to the state for the states use as “human capital”. You have heard that word thrown around haven’t you? It is often used by the new wave educators (change agents) including McGaw, and others from Melbourne University and elsewhere. The goal appears to be to create robotised automatons who will have no conscience and obey orders after being delivered a Skinnerian and Pavlovian style education. The only permissible conscience will be the United Nations' approved global conscience architected by a global government. “To withhold the tools of education can kill a person’s spirit just as surely as bullet his body”.

Isebyt takes descriptions from the training manuals she was given at the Dept of Education to detail the real purpose of American education:

1. To use schools to change America from a free individual nation to a socialist global state – just one of many socialist states subservient to the UN Charter.
2. To brainwash the children starting at birth to reject individualism in favour of collectivist reject high academic standards in favour of egalitarians standards.
3. To reject truth and absolutes in favour of internationalist values (globalism)
4. To reject freedom to choose one’s career in favour of K-12 school-to-work process aptly named limited learning for lifelong labor.

“Only when all children in public private and home schools are robotised – and think as one – will World Government be acceptable to citizens and able to be implemented without firing a shot. The attractive sounding choice proposals will enable the globalist elite to achieve their goal: the robotistion (brainwashing) of all children in order to gain acceptance of lifelong education and workforce training – part of the world management system to achieve a new global feudalism”.