- Last week, we began to look at a book entitled the deliberate
dumbing down of america (Ravenna, Ohio, The Conscience Press, 2000) by
educator Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt. The title has no capital letters, to
dramatize the deliberate dumbing down of children in the nation's government
(public) schools. Again, the thing that makes Mrs. Iserbyt's book so stupendous
was her ability to plow through a couple of mountains of garbage extruded
by the (mis)educators who are deliberately doing this, so you don't need
to guess what they mean. You can see for yourself.
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- This week, let's look at some things they are doing.
Please remember that when I use the word "they," I am not necessarily
talking about the teachers. Yes, many teachers in the government (public)
schools are part of the problem, but many are not. The ones who are not
do try to protect the children, even to educate them, but those good teachers
do not run the schools and must do as they are told. No, we are talking
about the administrators, the people who do run the schools, the academics
who come up with the educational theories, the people in the state and
federal departments of education.
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- For instance, in Conditioned Reflex Therapy, Andrew Salte
writes this: "We are meat in which habits have taken up residence.
We are a result of the way other people have acted to us. . . . Where there
is a conditioned reflex, there is no will. Our 'will power' is dependent
on our previously learned reflexes." (P. 49) N.B.: All pagination
is taken from Mrs. Iserbyt's book.
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- This is what the (mis)educators think of your children.
Your children are "meat," lumps of quivering protoplasm in a
petri dish, without soul, without will, without individuality, without
choice. Would you bother trying to "educate" protoplasm in a
dish? No, you would condition it, you would create reflexes that bypass
the brain.
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- Another book Mrs. Iserbyt suffered through is William
E. Martin's Rediscovering the Mind of the Child: "A science of behavior
emphasizes the importance of environmental manipulation and scheduling
and thus the mechanization and routinization of experience. Similarly,
it stresses performance in the individual. Doing something, doing it efficiently,
doing it automatically - these are the goals. It is the mechanization of
man .... The result is the triumph of technology: a push button world with
well-trained button-pushers." (P. 120)
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- The "mechanization of man!" Mechanical children
who respond when buttons are pushed! Most parents probably still believe
that their children go to school to learn "subjects." No, in
the government (public) schools today, what you may think of as learning
is mere window-dressing, is coincidental, is a cover for the (mis)educationists'
real purpose. In his 1981 book, All Our Children Learning, Professor Benjamin
Bloom wrote, "The purpose of education and the schools is to change
the thoughts, feelings and actions of students." (P. 160)
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- Notice, from their own mouths: Academic learning is not
the purpose of education and the schools. Obviously, Bloom is unhappy
with the thoughts, feelings and actions children learn at home. According
to Thomas A. Kelly, Ph.D., in The Effective School Report, "The brain
should be used for processing, not storage." (Loc. Cit.) If your brain
isn't used for storage, you don't and can't know anything. You have no
reservoir of learning. You are an automaton, trained, not educated, to
respond to buttons.
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- Your Intrepid Correspondent was talking in a high school
to a class of seniors about the career of Adolf Hitler, but there was a
problem. I wasn't discussing Hitler the way I was supposed to. For instance,
I was explaining that Hitler was of course a far leftist, a Socialist,
a National Socialist, that he believed in total government and therefore
that he and the Communists were natural allies, an affinity that found
expression in the Hitler-Stalin Non-Aggression Pact.
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- The immensely curious and fascinating thing about the
confrontation was that these seniors could not understand what I was saying,
not even enough to disagree. They never did figure out whether I was a
good guy or not. They responded not to the ideas I was voicing but to the
names I spoke. Whenever I mentioned Hitler, they booed. When I mentioned
FDR, they applauded. I realized that the names were buttons. They had been
trained, not educated, to respond when those buttons were pushed.
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- Much of this training derives from Harvard Professor
B.F. Skinner, one of the (dead) gods of the (mis)educationists. Skinner
trained pigeons for the military during World War II, and, "I could
make a pigeon a high achiever by reinforcing it on a proper schedule."
(P. A-143) Skinner thought your child was nothing more than a pigeon. "For
the purpose of analyzing behavior, we have to assume man is a machine."
(Loc. Cit.) "We want him [the student-Iserbyt] to come under the control
of his environment rather than on verbal directions given by members of
his family." (Loc. Cit.)
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- How would all this play out in math, for instance? In
December, 1928, O.A. Nelson, then a teacher of math, was invited to attend
a meeting. John Dewey, founder of "progressive education" was
there. Dewey of course was a Stalinist, as were the other leading "educators"
present. Nelson tells us that he objected to the way they wanted to teach
math. The man who had invited him responded: "Nelson, wake up! That
is what we want. . . . a math that the pupils cannot apply to life situations
when they get out of school!" Nelson comments: "That math was
not introduced until much later, as those present thought it was too radical
a change. . . . The radical change was introduced in 1952. . . . So, if
pupils come out of high school now, not knowing any math, don't blame them.
The results are supposed to be worthless." (Pp. 14-15)
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- The result is that The New York Times of August 31, 1986
reported as follows on a study conducted by the Educational Testing Service
and the National Assessment of Educational Progress: ". . . In testing
basic skills at various levels, the study found that one in three young
adults with a college degree from a two- or four-year school failed to
answer this question correctly: If one purchased a sandwich for $1.90,
a bowl of soup for 60 cents, and gave the cashier $3, how much change should
he receive? . . . (P. 238) Could you believe that a full one-third of college
graduates can't figure the answer?
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- Here's just one example of what we're talking about.
One of my sons and I were next in line at a checkout counter in a huge
chain drugstore. When your obedient servant worked a cash register a century
ago, it showed the purchase price and we had to figure out the change.
Today, it shows the cashier how much change to give. But it happened that
the victimized government (public) high school teenager working the register
accidentally hit the wrong button, so the amount of change she was supposed
to hand the man in front of us disappeared from the screen. The poor child
stared at the cash in her hand that the man had given her and stared at
the numberless screen, in a state of helpless terror and frustration. Would
she be chastised? Would she be fired? She had no idea how to figure the
change. The man ahead of us didn't notice this little, heartrending crisis;
he was looking around, oblivious, waiting for the cashier to put something
in his hand, so there was a moment of respite before the approaching doom.
But soon he would turn to find out what was happening and the sword would
fall.
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- The son who was with me is today a handsome, hulking
brute under whom the ground shakes when he walks. Some teenage females
even think he's a "hunk." At the time, he was a pipsqueak, whose
head barely cleared the top of the counter. At this crucial point in the
melodrama, the pipsqueak piped up: "Thirty eight cents."
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- Wondering, the benighted cashier gave the man ahead of
us $.38 and held her breath. He looked at the coins, nodded and left. The
pipsqueak had been right! Thirty-eight cents was the right amount! The
cashier totaled our purchase, and we paid and walked away. As we did so,
she stared at my son in continuing wonderment. How could this pipsqueak,
barely tall enough to clear the counter, know the right change? Was he
a dwarf? An elf? A disciple of Yoda in possession of occult knowledge?
No, he was simply a normal child educated at home, who had never seen the
inside of a "school." The country today is full of academically
challenged victims such as that cashier, and remember that she has been
crippled by design.
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- What about reading? Thomas Sticht, Ph.D., says as follows
(paraphrased from the Washington Post): "Ending discrimination and
changing values are probably more important than reading in moving low
income families into the middle class. . . ." How would you get into
the middle class if you can't read?
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- Always keep in mind that when George W. Bush talks about
leaving no child behind, he is not talking about changing all this. He
is talking about spending a lot more money to finance a lot more of it.
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- Again, to order Mrs. Iserbyt's staggering book, send
$39.95 (Maine residents add 5.5% tax=$2.19) plus $6.00 shipping and handling
to 3D Research Co., 1062 Washington St., Bath, ME 04530. And be with your
Intrepid Correspondent next week for more.
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- "Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication
allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact."
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- http://www.etherzone.com/2002/stang112902.shtml
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