DUMBING DOWN SOCIETY: A SHORT HISTORY

By Eleanor Byrd

Since the 1990’s the American people have seen a change in their public school curriculums. The change, when perceived by parents, questioned school administrators and teachers who responded with wonderfully sounding catch phrases, such as “higher order thinking skills”, “real life projects”, “cooperative learning”, “school/business partnerships” and “self directed learning”. Although parents did not understand exactly what these phrases meant, they seemed to sound good. Slowly, though, their children were displaying disturbing results from this new education. Children were not learning to read, as phonics was no longer used in the classroom. Basic math skills were not being taught, classroom structure and discipline was gone, books were replaced with work sheets that had no sequential order, facts in history were replaced by opinions. Behaviorally students’ became frustrated as their ability to learn was undermined. Today as many as 60 percent of incoming college freshmen need remedial education just to be able to function at the college level.

Goals 2000 and Common Core

            Where did this new education come from? Originally known as “Goals 2000: The Educate America Act,” it was signed into law by President Clinton in 1994. This law became known as, “A Strategy for Reinventing Our Schools”. Nowhere in our Constitution does it give the federal government any right to dictate our educational system. Historically, education was funded and controlled locally. Why? Our forefathers felt that if one political party became dominant that it could manipulate children’s beliefs to suit that party’s agendas when they grew up. This is what has happened to us.

When parents began speaking out against Goals 2000, it was renamed/reformatted into “Common Core (CC)” in 2009. The wealth and leadership of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation backed much of this reform. The Gates Foundation spread money across the political spectrum including Teachers Unions, the American Federation of Teachers, and the National Education Association. To top it off, The U.S. Chamber of Commerce (previously against Common Core) become a vocal backer of these standards. Money flowed to policy groups on the right and left, funding varying political associations who would promote Common Core. Money also went to state and local groups to help influence policymakers and civic leaders. Finally, on July 24, 2009 President Obama and his new administration, populated by former Gates staffers, and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, announced the “Race to the Top” – school competitive grants, as a motivator for education reform. Astoundingly, within just 2 years, Common Core was implemented across the nation, enacted without a single vote taken by an elected lawmaker. Here again, against the warnings of our forefathers, big money and government had taken control, manipulating our children, parents and young teachers.

Anti Common Core sentiment has since intensified with much coming from the Republican Party. Indiana, Oklahoma and South Carolinas Governors repealed the CC initiative. Liberals in many sectors are also angry and question Gates involvement due to Microsoft benefitting through programs sold to schools. So today, we have another name change to, “The Common Core Standards Initiative (CCSI).” CCSI is an effort amongst 48 states to develop national standards for math and English skills that all students should have when they graduate from a public high school in the United States. An example in Math – “Add two whole numbers with sums up to 100 with procedural reliability. Subtract a whole number from a whole number, each no larger than 100, with procedural reliability. Example: The sum 41 + 23 can be found by using a number line and “jumping up” by two tens and then by three ones to “land” at 64. Example: The difference 87 − 25 can be found by subtracting 20 from 80 to get 60 and then 5 from 7 to get 2. Then add 60 and 2 to obtain 62.” Why not do this the old fashioned (faster) way with basic adding and subtracting skills?

The Problem

Some educators and researchers say that Common Core and its successor CCSI stress the social, emotional and psychological growth of children over empirical data and time tested and successful teaching tools. Instead of basic academic knowledge, the new primary purpose is to instill in children, learning attitudes that deemphasize facts and emphasize politically correct social, psychological and globalist thinking.

Eight general subjective goals and vague outcomes are given to schools to teach, as they will. Teachers are no longer referred to as “teachers” but as “facilitators” in this process. Schools are teaching the “whole child”; it is up to the schools to choose whatever subject matter they consider appropriate. The reality is that as a “facilitator”, teachers have free range in teaching his/her own ideas and opinions on any given subject. The next year’s “facilitator” may put down what thoughts and opinions learned one year through one facilitator then implement his own twist to the children. This is a confusing and personally intrusive form of education and it interferes with parental roles in teaching values as much of what is discussed in the classroom is politically correct doctrine.

            Interestingly, in 1979, Governor Bill Clinton initiated the restructuring reform in Arkansas schools, which promptly dropped to 45^th in literacy and 44^th in standard achievement tests. He also started the Governors School, a model for statewide school reform. The school took the best and the brightest students in the state and sent them to summer school for six weeks. The idea was to identify the four or five exceptional student suited for political careers.

Mark Lowry, the former director of publicity of the school said, “The school does not deal in traditional academic excellence, but political correctness. It uses isolation from the outside world, to instill moral relativity and disintegration of family values.” Students reported that, “We were encouraged to do what we felt like doing, to be hostile to the Western Civilization and culture.” Lowry stated, “The greatest influence of the school is to promote the thought that in order to be “considered and intellectual” by your peers, you have to be a liberal thinker. This is not teaching or learning. It is indoctrination.” Parents reported that their children came back terribly changed and that it took up to two years to deprogram their children.

B.K. Eakman, author of Educating for the New World Order said, “Supporting federalization of education has been a massive invasion of the family and the rights of individual students through curricula utilizing psychological programming and experimentation, as well as a broad spectrum of behavior modification techniques.” Add to this, “data gathered through invasive testing and the illegal demand for students social security numbers, now compiled on computer systems storing vast amounts of intimate and private information, is in violation of their constitutional rights.”

Thanks to this reform and Hillary Clinton’s book, It Takes a Village, Eakman says, “traditional interests and right of parents have been trampled upon, as educators have proceeded on the proposition that professionals know better than parents how to raise children…The results create a further attack upon the already weakened family units. Both the assessment tests and the related curriculum increasingly reinforce the message that conformity to government-established values and attitudes is the key to future success in life…”

Final thoughts

            Let us remember, our forefathers felt that if one political party became dominant through education, it could manipulate children’s beliefs to suit that party’s agendas. Slowly, since the 1990s, we have been indoctrinated. We are there and we are losing our freedom.