The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America

During the Reagan administration, US Department of Education Senior Policy Advisor was Camden, Maine school board director Charlotte Iserbyt. Iserbyt has long been an appreciated voice of opposition to outcome-based education and Skinnerian methodology. She recently compiled a mammoth, informative expose on the devolution of American education called “The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America.” She explains how, “An alien collectivist (socialist) philosophy, much of which came from Europe, crashed onto the shores of our nation, bringing with it radical changes in economics, politics, and education, funded - surprisingly enough - by several wealthy American families and their tax-exempt foundations. The goal of these wealthy families and their foundations - a seamless non-competitive global system for commerce and trade - when stripped of flowery expressions of concern for minorities, the less fortunate, etc., represented the initial stage of what this author now refers to as the deliberate dumbing down of America. Seventy years later, the carefully laid plans to change America from a sovereign, constitutional republic with a free enterprise economic base to just one of many nations in an international socialist (collectivist) system (New World Order) are apparent. Only a dumbed down population, with no memory of America’s roots as a prideful nation, could be expected to willingly succumb to the global workforce training planned by the Carnegie Corporation and the John D. Rockefellers, I and II.” (7)

John Taylor Gatto, author of “The Underground History of American Education,” was New York “Teacher of the Year” for the 3^rd time in 1991 when he quit his 30 year teaching career saying that he was “no longer willing to hurt children.” He wrote, "I feel ashamed that so many of us cannot imagine a better way to do things than locking children up all day in cells instead of letting them grow up knowing their families, mingling with the world, assuming real obligations, striving to be independent and self-reliant and free …I don’t mean to be inflammatory, but it’s as if government schooling made people dumber, not brighter; made families weaker, not stronger … The training field for these grotesque human qualities is the classroom. Schools train individuals to respond as a mass. Boys and girls are drilled in being bored, frightened, envious, emotionally needy, and generally incomplete. A successful mass production economy requires such a clientele. A small business, small farm economy like that of the Amish requires individual competence, thoughtfulness, compassion, and universal participation; our own requires a managed mass of leveled, spiritless, anxious, familyless, friendless, godless, and obedient people who believe the difference between Cheers and Seinfeld is a subject worth arguing about. An executive director of the National Education Association announced that his organization expected ‘to accomplish by education what dictators in Europe are seeking to do by compulsion and force.’ You can’t get much clearer than that. WWII drove the project underground, but hardly retarded its momentum. Following cessation of global hostilities, school became a major domestic battleground for the scientific rationalization of social affairs through compulsory indoctrination.”
 

It is very important for both governments and corporations that schools constantly churn out unquestioning, uninformed sheeple crushed of creativity and individuality, who are emotionally needy, respond in group-think patterns, and find their only reprieve in materialism/advertising. As Gerald Bracey, leading promoter of government schooling wrote in his 1991 annual report to business clients, “we must continue to produce an uneducated social class.” Lifetime Learning Systems, a new corporation helping advertisers infiltrate our schools, said to its clients, “School is the ideal time to influence attitudes, build long-term loyalties, introduce new products, test-market, promote sampling and trial usage – and above all – to generate immediate sales.” Suzanne Cornforth of Paschall and Associates public relations consultants was quoted in the New York Times on July 15^th, 1998 saying, “Today’s corporate sponsors want to see their money used in ways to line up with business objectives …This is a young generation of corporate sponsors and they have discovered the advantages of building long-term relationships with educational institutions.”

“The secret of American schooling is that it doesn’t teach the way children learn, and it isn’t supposed to; school was engineered to serve a concealed command economy and a deliberately re-stratified social order. It wasn’t made for the benefit of kids and families as those individuals and institutions would define their own needs. School is the first impression children get of organized society; like most first impressions, it is the lasting one. Life according to school is dull and stupid, only consumption promises relief: Coke, Big Macs, fashion jeans, that’s where real meaning is found, that is the classroom’s lesson, however indirectly delivered … Advertising, public relations, and stronger forms of quasi-religious propaganda are so pervasive in our schools, even in ‘alternative’ schools, that independent judgment is suffocated in mass-produced secondary experiences and market-tested initiatives.” -John Taylor Gatto, “The Underground History of American Education”

Scientifically subjecting young children to factory-style seating, standardized testing, and government textbooks bring “order out of chaos,” and make for manageable populations. Modern schools create uniformity, while suppressing skepticism and creativity. They over-develop competitive spirit while undermining compassion and curiosity. They promote cliques, gangs, small group mentalities, and “small-picture” thinkers. Grading and testing procedures hinder “big-picture” understanding of any subject and force students to focus on more simple, gradable aspects. True education and mastery of the subjects at hand are not encouraged or even feasible. Students are merely required to memorize trivial information like names, dates, places, events etc. just long enough to regurgitate for standardized multiple-choice tests. Then after examination, the trivial info stored in their short-term memory disappears along with their superficial understandings of each subject.

“We are students of words; we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson

“That erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all, it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else.” –H.L. Mencken

“A general state education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mold in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government…it establishes a despotism over the mind” -John Stuart Mill, “On Liberty”

“The Brotherhood has also structured the ‘education’ system and the media to lock people in what I call the left brain prison. The left brain is the area which deals with the physical world view, ‘rational’ thought and all that can be seen, touched, heard and smelled. The right brain is our intuition and our connection with higher dimensions. This is where you find the artist and creativity, inspired by our uniqueness of thought and expression. The education system and its offshoots, like the media and science, are designed to speak to the left brain and to switch off right brain thinking. This is why spending on the arts in schools is being cut back all over the world and rigid, left brain programs imposed. ‘Education’ fills the left brain with information, much of which is untrue and inaccurate, and it demands that this is stored and then regurgitated on the exam paper. If you do this like a robot you pass. If, however, you filter the information through the right brain and say ‘Hey, this is piece of shit’, you won’t pass even though you will be telling the truth. Isn’t education just wonderful?” -David Icke, “The Biggest Secret” (481-2)

It has been demonstrated if you read the brain-waves of a typical American, left-brain neurons are constantly more active than right. And with the constant suppression of creativity and right-brained sympathies, we crank out a population of students who want to be musicians, actors, artists, painters, and poets, but are forced into the “real world” jobs of accounting, business, economics, advertising etc.

“What's the difference between a bright, inquisitive five-year-old, and a dull, stupid nineteen-year-old? Fourteen years of the British educational system.” –Bertrand Russell

“Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” –Vladimir Lenin

”Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.” –Joseph Stalin

“Schools have not necessarily much to do with education. They are mainly institutions of control, where basic habits must be inculcated in the young. Education is quite different and has little place in school.” –Winston Churchill

“A tax supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state.” –Isabel Paterson

Every day all over the world, millions of bright young minds are spending the best years of their lives being herded around by governments like cattle, responding to bells, whistles and other Pavlovian/Skinnerian conditioning.  Millions of children are locked into this program Monday to Friday from 9-5 performing boring/arduous tasks against their will because society has deemed it necessary.  Just like the workplace, only unquestioning compliance is rewarded and your only reprieves are snack breaks and lunch time, which are withheld from you like salivating dogs until the bell rings.  Meanwhile you anxiously sit in rigid rows all facing the big boss and the blackboard, focused on fantasy objectives, conditioned to view other students as competitors and hindrances.   

“By bells and other concentration-destroying technology, schools teach that nothing is worth finishing because some arbitrary power intervenes both periodically and aperiodically … Love of learning can’t survive this steady drill. Students are taught to work for little favors and ceremonial grades which correlate poorly with their actual ability. By addicting children to outside approval and nonsense rewards, schools make them indifferent to the real power and potential that inheres in self-discovery reveals. Schools alienate the winners as well as the losers … By stars, checks, smiles, frowns, prizes, honors, and disgraces, schools condition children to lifelong emotional dependency. It’s like training a dog. The reward/punishment cycle, known to animal trainers from antiquity, is the heart of a human psychology distilled in late nineteenth-century Leipzig and incorporated thoroughly into the scientific management revolution of the early twentieth century in America. Half a century later, by 1968, it had infected every school system in the United States … Each day, schools reinforce how absolute and arbitrary power really is by granting and denying access to fundamental needs for toilets, water, privacy, and movement. In this way, basic human rights which usually require only individual volition, are transformed into privileges not to be taken for granted … [school] teaches how hopeless it is to resist because you are always watched. There is no place to hide. Nor should you want to. Your avoidance behavior is actually a signal you should be watched even more closely than the others. Privacy is a thought crime. School sees to it that there is no private time, no private space, no minute uncommanded, no desk free from search, no bruise not inspected by medical policing or the counseling arm of thought patrols.”  -John Taylor Gatto, “The Underground History of American Education” (245-6)

"It seems to me that much of what we call education is really socialization. Consider what we do to our kids. Is it really a good idea to send your 6-year-old into a room full of 6-year-olds, and then, the next year, to put your 7-year-old in with 7-year-olds, and so on? A simple recursive argument suggests this exposes them to a real danger of all growing up with the minds of 6-year-olds. And, so far as I can see, that's exactly what happens. Our present culture may be largely shaped by this strange idea of isolating children's thought from adult thought. Perhaps the way our culture educates its children better explains why most of us come out as dumb as they do, than it explains how some of us come out as smart as they do.”  -Marvin Minsky

“There has never in the history of the civilized world been a cohort of kids that is so little affected by adult guidance and so attuned to a peer world. We have removed grown-up wisdom and allowed them to drift into a self-constructed, highly relativistic world of friendship and peers.”  –William Damon, Stanford University Center on Adolescence

“Don’t let a world of funny animals, dancing alphabet letters, pastel colors, and preachy music suffocate your little boy or girl’s consciousness at exactly the moment when big questions about the world beckon.  Funny animals were invented by social engineers; they knew something important about fantasy and social engineering that you should teach yourself.”  -John Taylor Gatto, “The Underground History of American Education” (298-9)

Does all this age-graded, childish “edutainment,” serve to make education more fun, or more trivial and superficial?  As cute as they may be, are Disney, Barney, Sesame Street and others what are best for our children?  Are textbooks with bright color pictures helpful or distracting?

“Men had better be without education than be educated by their rulers.”  –Thomas Hodgskin, 1823

“Take at hazard one hundred children of several educated generations and one hundred uneducated children of the people and compare them in anything you please; in strength, in agility, in mind, in the ability to acquire knowledge, even in morality - and in all respects you are startled by the vast superiority on the side of the children of the uneducated.”  -Count Leo Tolstoy, "Education and Children," 1862

“My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself.”  –George Bernard Shaw

“Samuel Johnson entered a note into his diary several hundred years ago about the powerful effect reading Hamlet was having upon him. He was nine at the time. Abraham Cowley wrote of his infinite delight’ with Spenser’s Faerie Queen—an epic poem that treats moral values allegorically in nine-line stanzas that never existed before Spenser (and hardly since). He spoke of his pleasure with its ‘Stories of Knights and Giants and Monsters and Brave Houses.’ Cowley was twelve at the time. It couldn’t have been an easy read in 1630 for anyone, and it’s beyond the reach of many elite college graduates today. What happened? The answer is that Dick and Jane happened. ‘Frank had a dog. His name was Spot.’ That happened …There are many ways to burn books without a match. You can order the reading of childish books to be substituted for serious ones, as we have done. You can simplify the language you allow in school books to the point that students become disgusted with reading because it demeans them, being thinner gruel than their spoken speech. We have done that, too. One subtle and very effective strategy is to fill books with pictures and lively graphics so they trivialize words in the same fashion the worst tabloid newspapers do - forcing pictures and graphs into space where readers should be building pictures of their own, preempting space into which personal intellect should be expanding. In this we are the world’s master.”  -John Taylor Gatto, “The Underground History of American Education” (252) 

George Washington attended only 2 years of formal schooling in his life.  Abraham Lincoln had only 50 weeks of schooling and even that was seen as a waste of time by his relatives.  In 1840 the rate of complex literacy in the US was incredibly high, between 93 and 100 percent.  The Connecticut census showed only 1 of every 579 people was illiterate.  Over a century and a half later in 1993, the National Adult Literacy Survey reported that 1 in every 5 Americans was illiterate!  The 1993 survey represented 190 million US adults over age 16 with an average school attendance of 12.4 years.  42 million were completely illiterate, 50 million read at a 4^th – 5^th grade level, 55-60 million read at a 6^th – 8^th grade level, 30 million at a 9^th – 10^th grade level, and less than 10 million at a University level.

“All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education.”  –Sir Walter Scott

“In 1882, fifth graders read these authors in their Appleton School Reader: William Shakespeare, Henry Thoreau, George Washington, Sir Walter Scott, Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Bunyan, Daniel Webster, Samuel Johnson, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others like them. In 1995, a student teacher of fifth graders in Minneapolis wrote to the local newspaper, ‘I was told children are not to be expected to spell the following words correctly: back, big, call, came, can, day, did, dog, down, get, good, have, he, home, if, in, is, it, like, little, man, morning, mother, my, night, off, out, over, people, play, ran, said, saw, she, some, soon, their, them, there, time, two, too, up, us, very, water, we, went, where, when, will, would, etc. Is this nuts?’”  -John Taylor Gatto, “The Underground History of American Education”

Dr. Seuss, the children’s author, wrote many best-sellers admittedly using a controlled "scientific" vocabulary supplied by his publisher.  He said in a 1981 interview that, “I did it for a textbook house and they sent me a word list. That was due to the Dewey revolt in the twenties, in which they threw out phonics reading and went to a word recognition as if you’re reading a Chinese pictograph instead of blending sounds or different letters. I think killing phonics was one of the greatest causes of illiteracy in the country.  Anyway they had it all worked out that a healthy child at the age of four can only learn so many words in a week. So there were two hundred and twenty-three words to use in this book. I read the list three times and I almost went out of my head. I said, ‘ I’ll read it once more and if I can find two words that rhyme, that’ll be the title of my book.’  I found ‘cat’ and ‘hat’ and said, the title of my book will be The Cat in the Hat.”

“Far from failing in its intended task, our educational system is in fact succeeding magnificently, because its aim is to keep the American people thoughtless enough to go on supporting the system.”   –Richard Mitchell, "The Underground Grammarian"

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