The Delib­er­ate Dumb­ing Down of America

Char­lotte Iser­byt was a senior pol­icy adviser to Pres­i­dent Rea­gan on edu­ca­tion mat­ters. She went to work at the Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion (DOE) and after dis­cov­er­ing what they were up to, stayed after hours to copy and doc­u­ment what these peo­ple were doing to Amer­i­can chil­dren. Her work was later pub­lished as The Delib­er­ate Dumb­ing Down of Amer­ica. I strongly urge every­one read­ing this to go to her web­site and down­load and save a free copy of this PDF book to your hard drive (after you fin­ish read­ing this article :)).

While read­ing The Delib­er­ate Dumb­ing Down of Amer­ica (DDDoA), I came to real­ize that “Direct Instruc­tion” is not the same thing as “direct instruc­tion.” One is a pro­gram and the other is a method.

Siegfried Engle­mann cre­ated the DISTAR (Direct Instruc­tion Sys­tem for Teach­ing Arith­metic and Read­ing) pro­gram which fol­lowed a heav­ily scripted sequence where the teacher would read some­thing to the chil­dren and get con­stant feed­back to ensure they were on track and learn­ing what they were sup­posed to. As seen in Project Fol­low Through, this method was vastly supe­rior to con­struc­tivist philoso­phies, but it had its own draw­backs as well. Lit­tle case “direct instruc­tion” was sim­ply tra­di­tional edu­cat­ing and it was not part of the Project Fol­low Through study. Here’s a quote from DDDoA.

[Ed. Note: Although the eval­u­a­tion of [Project] Fol­low Through cited some aca­d­e­mic and self-esteem gains at some Direct Instruc­tion model sites, it would have been vir­tu­ally impos­si­ble for these gains not to have been made con­sid­er­ing the mod­els with which they were compared—the
non-academic focus of the “touchy-feely” open class­room. Had the Direct Instruc­tion model been in com­pe­ti­tion with a tra­di­tional phon­ics pro­gram which was not based on ani­mal behav­ioral psy­chol­ogy (“sci­en­tific, research-based”), it is most unlikely it would have been able to point to any gains at all. Unsus­pect­ing par­ents in the 1990s seek­ing more struc­tured aca­d­e­mic edu­ca­tion for their chil­dren than can be found in schools exper­i­ment­ing with con­struc­tivis­tic
devel­op­men­tal pro­grams (whole lan­guage, etc.) are turn­ing to DI, not real­iz­ing they are embrac­ing
a method based on mas­tery learn­ing and ani­mal psychology.]

Charlotte’s lengthy book exposed all these edu­ca­tional fads and rack­ets. One paper she wrote con­cerned Rea­gan and the DOE con­tained this clip about John Good­lad. (empha­sis mine)

One night, while look­ing for a type­writer rib­bon, I noticed in the cor­ner of a stor­age room a box enti­tled “The Good­lad Study“. I just about had a heart attack since I had been fol­low­ing this world famous inter­na­tional change agent’s sub­ver­sive activ­i­ties for many years, espe­cially when I served as a local school board member prior to going into the Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion. Much of the values destroy­ing cur­ric­ula and school orga­ni­za­tional restructuring could be laid at his feet. This par­tic­u­lar box held a gold mine of infor­ma­tion regard­ing the efforts of the tax-exempt foundations and the fed­eral gov­ern­ment to imple­ment the United Nations agenda, to restruc­ture Amer­i­can schools for global gov­ern­ment. I couldn’t believe what had landed in my lap! Four books, all published by McGraw Hill, were com­mis­sioned for this Study. They were:

John Goodlad’s “A Place Called School”; Don Davies’ “Communities and their Schools” which laid out the socialist/communitarian agenda to be imple­mented in Amer­ica through the schools, pointing to com­mu­nist coun­tries as mod­els; Jerome Hausman’s “Arts and the Schools” which dealt with how to use the arts to change stu­dents’ per­cep­tions and val­ues; and the worst one of all, James Becker’s “School­ing for a Global Age” which con­tained the Fore­ward by John Good­lad from which par­ents love to quote: “Par­ents and the gen­eral pub­lic must be reached also. Oth­er­wise, chil­dren and youth enrolled in glob­ally oriented pro­grams may find them­selves in con­flict with values assumed in the home. And then the edu­ca­tional institution fre­quently comes under scrutiny and must pull back.“

As an aside: when I returned home I called McGraw Hill to order the books and was told they were not yet pub­lished but that they would put me No. 1 on their list which they did. Later, when I checked back with them, they said: “Don’t worry, Mrs. Iser­byt, we’ll get them

to you as soon as they are received; you are No. 1, even ahead of each of the 50 Chief State School Offi­cers.” That sure told me something about how impor­tant these books were and exactly who would be car­ry­ing out the rad­i­cal agen­das pro­moted in each one of them.

Con­tin­ued in Part 3

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• House of Tomor­row: Tar­get­ing Behav­ior Change Requires Move Away from Declar­a­tive Knowledge
• Gain­ing Access To and Then Guid­ing Each Student’s Sub­jec­tive Per­cep­tion of Real­ity to Change the Here and Now
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• Why Con­struc­tivism and Direct Instruc­tion will Dam­age Your Child’s Brain – Part 1
  Source: http://agenda21news.com/2014/10/constructivism-direct-instruction-will-damage-childs-brain-part-2/#more-2949