Charlotte Iserbyt Speaks: The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America

Charlotte Iserbyt is the consummate whistleblower! Iserbyt served as Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), U.S. Department of Education, during the first Reagan Administration, where she first blew the whistle on a major technology initiative which wo... (read more)

Charlotte Iserbyt is the consummate whistleblower! Iserbyt served as Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), U.S. Department of Education, during the first Reagan Administration, where she first blew the whistle on a major technology initiative which would control curriculum in America's classrooms. Iserbyt is a former school board director in Camden, Maine and was co-founder and research analyst of Guardians of Education for Maine (GEM) from 1978 to 2000. She has also served in the American Red Cross on Guam and Japan during the Korean War, and in the United States Foreign Service in Belgium and in the Republic of South Africa. Iserbyt is a speaker and writer, best known for her 1985 booklet Back to Basics Reform or OBE: Skinnerian International Curriculum and her 1989 pamphlet Soviets in the Classroom: America's Latest Education Fad which covered the details of the U.S.-Soviet and Carnegie-Soviet Education Agreements which remain in effect to this day. She is a freelance writer and has had articles published in Human Events, The Washington Times, The Bangor Daily News, and included in the record of Congressional hearings.
Source: http://www.deliberatedumbingdown.com/pages/author.htm
THE NORTH AMERICAN SOVIET UNION
By Charlotte Iserbyt

February 27, 2007

NewsWithViews.com

There is one common thread running through all articles and speeches by elected officials, well-known writers, and commentators in opposition to the merging of the United States into a political and economic regional arrangement known as the North American Union. To my knowledge, not one of them has chosen to use the “C” word (communism) when warning Americans of the dangers of this unconstitutional merger about to be foisted upon us without proper hearings in Congress. Excellent speeches and articles are being given and written warning us of all sorts of bad things related to this merger, including the fact that we will lose our sovereignty, but we are not being told that all these bad things are necessary for the full implementation of The North American Soviet Union (communistic/regional system). Isn’t the “C” word the one and only word which might shock Americans out of their state of conditioned apathy, thereby bringing about citizen activism which might result in killing this “regional” monster?

Morris Zeitlin, a communist writer for the Communist Party’s Daily World said in an article entitled “Planning is Socialism’s Trademark,” November 8, 1975: “We (USA) have no regional government and no comprehensive regional planning to speak of. Regional government and planning remain concepts our urban scholars and planners have long advocated in vain…In socialist countries, metropolitan regions enjoy metropolitan regional government and comprehensive planning. The economic and functional efficiencies and the social benefits that comprehensive national, regional and city planning make possible in socialist society explain the Soviet Union’s enormous and rapid economic social progress…”

Of interest regarding Zeitlin’s comment about “the Soviet Union’s enormous and rapid economic social progress…” is the following admission made by former President Gorbachev at the 2005 National School Board Association conference that “half the world’s population and two-thirds of Russia’s lives in poverty.”

The United States Government, at all levels, has since 1975 accepted wholeheartedly Zeitlin’s advice, to the extent that our country is, believe it or not, almost 100 percent socialist in its political, economic, social and environmental (sustainable development) policies. For documentation please read “Walks Like a Duck, Talks Like a Duck.”

The regionalization (consolidation) of the world is quite similar to the three-stage plan outlined by Stalin at the 1936 Communist International. At that meeting, the official program proclaimed:

“Dictatorship can be established only by a victory of socialism in different countries or groups of countries, after which there would be federal unions of the various groupings of these socialist countries, and the third stage would be an amalgamation of these regional federal unions into a world union of socialist nations.” (Ed note: The third stage is taking place right now as we in the United States of America become part of a federal union, the North American Union, which will in the near future become part of a world union of socialist nations.)

Former President of the Soviet Union Gorbachev on March 23, 2000, in London, referred to the European Union (EU) as "the New European Soviet.” If he refers to the EU in that way, it only stands to reason that he would refer to the North American Union (NAU) as the “New American Soviet,” since the NAU is modeled on the EU. Gorbachev also said in his speech to the Soviet Central Committee on November 2, 1987, published by Novosti Press Agency Publishing House:

“We are moving toward a new world, the world of communism. We shall never turn off that road.”

How is it possible that if American citizens or United States officials involved in putting us under the North American Union were aware of Gorbachev’s statements, they would not be very concerned regarding our nation becoming part of a communist world? Have we forgotten the many hundreds of millions of innocent people tortured, starved, murdered and incarcerated by communist regimes around the world? Authorities say “over 20 million people suffered in purges under Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin -- and that more than 10 million died before Stalin's death in 1953. Some put the number even higher.”

Do we really believe the communists have changed or gone away?

United States government officials, elected and unelected, with enormous financial assistance from the tax-exempt foundations, have for many years been working to implement unconstitutional regional planning at the local, state, national and international level, all of this required for full implementation of a One World Socialist Government. For the 3000-page transcript of 1953 Congressional (Reece and Cox Committee) Hearings to Investigate the Tax-Exempt Foundations and for superb research on the history of regional government, go to americandeception.com and type the following into its search engine: Reece Committee, Don Bell Reports, Maureen Heaton, the Mantooth Report, and The Emerging North American Union.

One very important government official in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, Under Secretary of State George W. Ball, spelled out very clearly what the Insiders were planning for our nation in The New York Times, 1/24/88: “…If we could internationalize by using the United Nations in conjunction with the Soviet Union, because we now no longer have to fear in most cases a Soviet veto, then we could begin to transform the shape of the world and might get the UN back doing something useful. …Sooner or later we’re going to have to face restructuring our institutions so that they’re not confined merely to the nation states. Start first on a regional, and ultimately you can move to a world, basis.” (emphasis added).

Has our education system so successfully conditioned and dumbed down Americans that they no longer are able to apply logic to the above quotes? Are they no longer capable of transferring that knowledge, processing it into new knowledge and conclusions which might help them understand and oppose the present destruction of our Constitutional Republic?

Since all regional groupings being set up around the world are based on the communistic Free Trade “redistribute the wealth” philosophy, why is it that the adjective “Communist” is never used when discussing GATT, NAFTA, CAFTA and the NAU? Those patriotic writers could at least describe those agreements as “Communism LITE,” couldn’t they?

For those Americans who recall the days of elected officials, not unelected, appointed task forces and “councils” (soviets, according to most dictionaries), running our towns, schools, counties, states, nation and world, recognizing this change in our form of government should not be too difficult.

However, for those younger Americans denied an education in American history and government due to the activities of the tax-exempt foundations, especially the Rockefeller, Ford, and Carnegie Foundations, the loss of elected officials through regionalism does not seem to bother them. Go to americandeception.com and type into search engine “Kenny Hignite” and you will see a most astonishing six-page 1954 “Test on the United States Constitution” on which Hignite received a grade of 99 – “Excellent!” There is absolutely no way that Kenny Hignite, now 66 years old, having received such an excellent education on the U.S. Constitution in a public school in Central California in 1954, would not be questioning the present deliberate destruction of our representative form of government through the implementation of communistic regional government!

Those Americans under fifty years old, and too often those over 50 years old (!), will ask you “What’s wrong with members of the community or faceless state bureaucrats being appointed to assist our elected officials in their work which has become increasingly complicated?” The simple answer is “If you don’t approve of what those unelected officials are doing, you can’t get rid of them at the polls.”

Uneducated Americans will also ask you:

“What’s wrong with consolidation of school districts, services, the merging of individual school and town budgets to “save taxpayers money?” (Ed note: In Maine our Senate Education Committee is about to approve Governor Baldacci’s proposal to slash school districts by proposing 26 regional school units statewide with 26 superintendents, compared to the existing 152 superintendents and 290 school units!);

“What’s wrong with merging 16 towns under one county council as was recently proposed in Cumberland County, Maine, thereby eliminating representative government?”;

“What’s wrong with getting rid of local school boards and having our schools run by city Mayors, or contracting education out to private organizations connected with the corporations?”;

“What possible objection could you have to public school morals and values education even if those programs are forbidden to teach ‘absolute’ morals and values based on the Ten Commandments?”;

“What’s wrong with publicly-funded charter schools which have no elected school boards?”;

“What’s wrong with Cuban-style school-to-work job training replacing a K-12 liberal arts curriculum? Even if my child can’t read, I sure want him/her to be able to get a job.”;

“What’s wrong with public/private partnerships?”

“What’s wrong with the federal government mandating mental health screening for my child?”;

“What’s wrong with members of the community assisting the local police in monitoring citizen activities and/or the police handing out awards to citizens who do good deeds, as is the case with the Community-Oriented Policing System (COPS) in Maine?”;

“What’s wrong with putting the UN’s lifelong learning agenda, all community services (birth through death), under the umbrella of the school district? (Go to americandeception.com and type “Feld” into search engine for a remarkable research paper on the history of Community Education)

“What’s wrong with a National I.D. card reportedly designed by two Russian ex-KGB Chiefs?”;

“What’s wrong with students being required to perform community service in order to graduate?”;

“What’s wrong with federal funding of religious organizations (faith-based initiative)?”;

“What’s wrong with federally-funded school choice proposals?”;

“What’s wrong with dropping borders between states?” as is in the offing.

And, the subject of this article: “What’s wrong with regional government?” And many more “What’s Wrong With?” questions from good Americans who have, over many years, through no fault of their own, been deliberately dumbed down and didn’t receive the public education which required the likes of Kenny Hignite to know their Constitution and form of government.

How many Americans realize that almost all the programs mentioned in the above “What’s Wrong With” section have already been implemented in our schools, communities, and states and that they are based on communist/socialist collectivist philosophy? The planners are waiting only for the full implementation of the North American Union (final nail in coffin) which will allow them to write and approve, as was done in Europe, the North American Union’s Constitution (Communist Manifesto) which will include all the above “What’s Wrong With?” programs. That will be the infamous day when the U.S. Constitution is formally relegated to history’s trash bin. And, as with the EU Constitution, or the Communist Manifesto, the practice of Christianity will be outlawed… a thing of the past. All religions will be considered equal and inevitably superior to Christianity. Go to americandeception.com and type into search engine “Religion and Governance” an important position paper by Harlan Cleveland, notorious supporter of global government, long-time member of the internationalist Aspen Institute, and first U.S. Ambassador to the Common Market (1960), and Marc Luycx, a Belgian change agent bureaucrat. This paper was prepared by the Foreward Study Group of the European Commission and was undoubtedly used by those drafting the EU Constitution. It will give you a picture of the non-role of Christianity in world region constitutions.

Our elected officials in Congress, who have sworn to uphold the Constitution, should not be immune to multi-million dollar lawsuits for injuries sustained by the citizens of this country. Is not the loss of our freedoms due to elected officials’ malpractice (lying to us in regard to putting us under the communistic regional North American Union and not holding hearings on the subject) even more important than the death of one patient due to a doctor’s malpractice, the scalding of a woman who spilled her “too-hot” coffee at a McDonald’s takeout, or the death from cancer of a woman who smoked too many cigarettes? How can we ignore the fact that 651,008 Americans have died in battle to protect and defend the constitutional freedoms which will vanish under this new international regional arrangement? Is there really no penalty to be exacted of these highly-paid Congressional traitors other than voting them out of office, which it seems is impossible to do due to both political parties having the same agenda, controlled media, manipulated political conventions, and election fraud?

Americans have been conditioned to NEVER, NEVER, NEVER, since the days of McCarthyism and the phony fall of communism, mention the “C” word. The word must, as George Orwell might have said, be removed from the dictionaries of all languages, especially English. Otherwise, we might wise up and tackle this treason with all our might and brains since we surely don't want our children and grandchildren living under any “ism” form of government, much less “communism.” The Insiders know that “communism” is the one and only word that must be banished from use. They are not concerned over excellent anti-North American Union rantings and ravings as long as the “C” word is NOT used.

The Insiders, most if not all of whom are corporate communists, have no fear of the coming totalitarian system since they have been assured they will be sitting in the catbird seat, having eliminated all economic competition and self-government (elected officials), and will have the world as their playground. The majority of the world’s population, the Insiders’ “human resources”, will be their highly trained and conditioned serfs, lifelong.

One might ask, how can this be? It is a well-known and documented fact that Wall Street funded the Bolshevik Revolution and the corporate communists and our government have been supporting the communist regime in Russia since 1917. Extensive exchange agreements covering political, municipal, cultural, economic, legal, law enforcement, education, science, sports, medicine, etc. have been signed since 1958 between the USSR and the USA, including of special importance the 1985 education agreements signed by Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev which merged our two education systems and caused to be implemented the Soviet polytechnical work force/job quota system and the Pavlovian outcomes-based method of conditioning/training. Go to americandeception.com for full text of “Agreement between U.S.A. and USSR.”

Regionalism is communism no matter how you slice it. The sooner Americans get that unpleasant fact permanently entered into their brains, and process that information into appropriate action, the sooner we will be able to escape what Orwell described so well in his novel 1984:

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on the human face--forever...and remember, that is forever."

Forward this article to your friends and to your elected officials at the local, state, and national level. Of equal importance restore the "C" word to your vocabulary and use it often.

© 2007 Charlotte T. Iserbyt - All Rights Reserved

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Charlotte Iserbyt is the consummate whistleblower! Iserbyt served as Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), U.S. Department of Education, during the first Reagan Administration, where she first blew the whistle on a major technology initiative which would control curriculum in America's classrooms. Iserbyt is a former school board director in Camden, Maine and was co-founder and research analyst of Guardians of Education for Maine (GEM) from 1978 to 2000. She has also served in the American Red Cross on Guam and Japan during the Korean War, and in the United States Foreign Service in Belgium and in the Republic of South Africa.

Iserbyt is a speaker and writer, best known for her 1985 booklet Back to Basics Reform or OBE: Skinnerian International Curriculum and her 1989 pamphlet Soviets in the Classroom: America's Latest Education Fad which covered the details of the U.S.-Soviet and Carnegie-Soviet Education Agreements which remain in effect to this day. She is a freelance writer and has had articles published in Human Events, The Washington Times, The Bangor Daily News, and included in the record of Congressional hearings.
Source: http://www.newswithviews.com/iserbyt/iserbyt36.htm
Website: www.deliberatedumbingdown.com
E-Mail: dumbdown00@yahoo.com
REVOLUTION IN EDUCATION - SOVIET STYLE
PART 1 OF 2

By Charlotte Iserbyt

August 29, 2005

Important note from the author: The next time you attempt to discuss with a friend or acquaintance a serious issue (such as illegal immigration, the Iraq War, our loss of constitutional rights under the Patriot Act, or the latest Supreme Court Decision doing away with private property rights) and you get that “glazed, blank, mindless, couldn’t care less expression,” refer back to this article which attempts to explain the cause of that glazed expression: Pavlovian/Skinnerian conditioning, be it through operant conditioning programs in the schools, computers at school or at home, the television, radio, music, video games, or plain print media. It is important for Americans to become aware of the effects of conditioning, the brain and soul (conscience) killer, which is silently at work in our society 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year.

If the reader of this article wants to go to what author considers the crown jewel related to the subject of conditioning, he should read “The Leipzig Connection”, ISBN 0-89739-001-6, by Paolo Lionni, a slim 103- page paperback. (Contact: Delphian Press, 20950 SW Rock Creek Road, Sheridan, Oregon 97378.) Lionni has explained in clear language the difference between education and conditioning. The first few pages of his book are helpful for the purposes of this article. Lionni’s important information taken from Chapter 1, entitled “A New Domain”, follows in much abbreviated form:

Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt, the founder of experimental psychology, was born in 1832 in Neckarau, Germany, graduated as a medical doctor from Heidelberg University in 1856. He worked at Heidelberg for the next seventeen years, ultimately becoming a professor in the field of psychology. Psychology, at that time, meant simply the study (ology) of the soul (psyche), or mind. In 1874, Wundt left Heidelberg to take a position as professor of philosophy at Zurich, stayed there only one year, and then accepted a chair in philosophy at the University of Leipzig where he spent the rest of his academic career. He died in 1920. Wundt was the founder of experimental psychology and the force behind its dissemination throughout the western world. To Wundt, a thing made sense and was worth pursuing if it could be measured, quantified, and scientifically demonstrated. Seeing no way to do this with the human soul, he proposed that psychology concern itself solely with experience. As Wundt put it:

“…it truly appears to be a waste of energy to keep returning to such aimless discussions about the nature of the psyche, which were in vogue for a while, and practically still are, instead, rather of applying one’s energies where they will produce real results."

In his Philosophical Studies, which became the official organ of both the new laboratory and the newly redefined “science” of psychology, he stated “The work which I here present to the public is an attempt to mark out a new domain of science.”.. Wundt asserted that man is devoid of spirit and self-determinism (free will, ed) He set out to prove that man is the summation of his experiences, of the stimuli which intrude upon his consciousness and unconsciousness.

From Wundt’s work, it was only a short step to the later redefinition of the meaning of education. Originally, education meant the drawing out of a person’s innate talents and abilities by imparting the knowledge of languages, scientific reasoning, history, literature, rhetoric, etc.—the channels through which those abilities would flourish and serve. To the experimental psychologist, however, education became the process of exposing the student to ‘meaningful’ experiences so as to ensure desired reactions: “…the situation-response formula is adequate to cover learning of any sort, and the really influential factors in learning are readiness of the neurons, sequence in time,belongingness, and satisfying consequences.” (Rudolph Pintner, et al, An Outline of Educational Psychology, 1934, page 79).

Wundt’s thesis laid the philosophical basis for the principles of conditioning later developed by Pavlov (who studied physiology in Leipzig, in 1884, five years after Wundt had inaugurated his laboratory there) and American behavioral psychologists such as Watson and Skinner…”

Public Schools Adopt Soviet Techniques, Part 1

An AP article “Arizona High School Trades Textbooks for Laptops", August 15, 2005, opens the door for a long- overdue discussion of the dangers of the Pavlovian/Skinnerian method of instruction also known as mastery learning, outcomes/performance/results-based education, and direct instruction. This programmed learning (stimulus/response/bells+whistles animal training method), has been in use for over thirty years in the nation’s schools, primarily in urban schools and special education classrooms. Now that it has been incorporated into computer software programs, it will replace textbooks as the primary instructional media. As the reader will see from many quotes in this article this type of computer assisted instruction is essential for value and attitude change and for work force training.

The AP article states in part "Students at Empire High School here started class this year with no textbooks--but it wasn't because of a funding crisis. Instead, the school issued IBooks--laptop computers by Apple Computer Inc. -- to each of its 340 students, becoming one of the first U.S. public schools to shun printed textbooks...Empire High, which opened for the first time this year, was designed specifically to have a textbook-free environment....Schools typically overlay computers onto their instruction 'like frosting on the cake,' Baker said. 'We decided that the real opportunity was to make the laptops the key ingredient of the cake...to truly change the way that schools operated.’"

(Parents and teachers in the State of Maine should be especially interested in Empire High School's decision to "chuck the textbooks" since Maine was the first state to move towards the computerization of schools, thanks to the aggressive lobbying of the business community and former Governor Angus King. All middle school students in Maine have been provided with Apple computers, over the strenuous objections of many well-informed persons within the education community and in the Maine Legislature. This innovation will soon have extended itself up into Maine's high schools and down into its elementary schools, if parents and teachers do not mount a major resistance to this radical change in education pedagogy. Fortunately Maine has not yet “chucked the textbooks!” )

The plan to get rid of textbooks and to computerize instruction dates back to at least 1971. The February 22, 1971 Individualized Learning Letter, An Administrator's Guide to Improve Learning, stresses on its letterhead the need for "Individualized Instruction Methods, Flexible Scheduling, Behavioral Objectives, Study Units, Self-Directed Learning, and Accountability" and states under "Quotes You Can Use":

"Down With Books. Textbooks not only encourage learning at the wrong level (imparting facts rather than telling how to gather facts, etc.), they also violate an important new concern in American education--individualized instruction......A good start would be to...declare a moratorium on textbook use in all courses." Dwight D. Allen, Dean of Education, University of Massachusetts, writing on The Decline of the Textbook, Change, Jan.-Feb., 1971."

The same newsletter advertised "First National Educational Technology Conference, April 5-8, 1971, Americana Hotel, New York City. Conference seminars and workshops will cover curriculum design, use of computers, programmed instruction, simulation, innovation theory, etc.”

Three years later, in 1974, Leon Lessinger, superintendent of schools in Beverly Hills, California and former associate commissioner of education in the U.S. Office of Education, called for the implementation of Skinnerian behavior modification and discussed environmental influence when he said:

“…Would that we had such a system; a system of accountability.” Lessinger went on to recommend “Use of contingency rewards. May make you feel uncomfortable… Does me, but he who shirks this responsibility does a disservice to the children of the United States. Behavior Modification is here. Better for us to master and use wisely. Powerful…powerful…powerful.”

Fast forward eight years to the Annual Meeting of the Council of Chief State School Officers in 1982, during which Dr. Elam Hertzler, Secretary of Education T. H. Bell’s top assistant in the U.S. Department of Education, told the State Superintendents of Instruction:

“One of the elements of an effective school was to monitor, assess, and feed back…As little as 5 percent of a school budget K-12 would be needed over a period of 12 years to enable each student to have his own computer, and this is within our cost range.”

As indicated above, this plan to get rid of textbooks and implement Pavlovian/Skinnerian computerized instruction has been on the drawing board for many years just like everything else in "the deliberate dumbing down" of our schools. This is the education (training) system for "The Brave New World Order", the system which denies "free will" and will assure that your child no longer receives a traditional academic education, but that he be "trained" with rewards and punishments to be a docile, accepting, non-thinking, atheistic "performer" (robot) in Lenin's International Socialist System, euphemistically referred to by our controlled media as “democratic socialism” which is being implemented, world region by world region, as I write.

The admission by Empire High School, one of the first schools to implement this textbook-free schooling, allows education researchers who have focused on the dangers of the Skinnerian behaviorist method to finally be listened to. The old saying applies here: "You'll know it's true when it happens to you."

Now that parents will be faced with their children learning exclusively from computers, which are operant conditioning (attitude and value-changing machines), perhaps they will be willing to listen to those teachers and education researchers who have been issuing warnings ever since the early eighties when the Skinner method and the proposed use of computer technology was carved in stone by the Reagan Administration's Department of Education, commencing with The National Commission on Excellence's Nation At Risk Report; continuing with its major computer technology initiative, Project BEST: Basic Education Skills Through Technology, The infamous 1984 Utah grant to Professor William Spady to pilot outcomes-based education in Utah and then to “put it in all schools of the nation;” and ultimately with the Bush Administration's support for Skinnerian Direct Instruction to teach reading.

The No Child Left Behind Act virtually mandated the “scientific research based” Skinner reading method be used in the classrooms of our nation, to the exclusion of other non-behaviorist methods of reading instruction which have successfully taught children to read for over one hundred years.

Siegfried Engelman’s federally-funded “Teaching Your Children to Read in 100 Easy Lessons (SRA’s DISTAR Mastery Reading program) is probably the most extensively used Direct Instruction program in the nation, and is best known for its controversial results in Houston, Texas. It has a teacher training video which instructs teachers on the use of hand signals with children, the same hand signals one uses when training dogs! The Exemplary Center for Reading Instruction (ECRI) a federally-funded to the tune of $848,536 (1966 dollars!) mastery learning/direct instruction program, is the fraternal twin of DISTAR. It has been used extensively across the country since 1966 (its published reports listed its use by 3,000 schools as of 1985!).

According to doctors, teachers, and parents it causes sickness and stress for students and turns teachers into robots. Its pre-training Manual lists the following teacher and resource materials: Adaptation of Birds, Monitoring Forms Before and After Instruction (observation data sheet records), How to Teach Animals by Skinner, How to Teach Animals: A Rat, A Pigeon, A Dog, by Kathleen and Shauna Reid. The late Dr. Jeanette Veatch, internationally known in the field of reading, called the ECRI program “a more modern version of breaking children to the heel of thought control.” She added, “it is so flagrantly dangerous, damaging and destructive I am appalled at its existence.”

The following quotes should help Americans understand the importance of the Pavlovian/Skinnerian method and how the use of computers (Skinner's Box) has been planned for over fifty years, and how it will affect the education and behavior of their children and of utmost importance, how such education denies free will. Don't forget it was Professor B.F. Skinner who said:

"I COULD MAKE A PIGEON A HIGH ACHIEVER BY REINFORCING IT ON A PROPER SCHEDULE." and

“OPERANT CONDITIONING SHAPES BEHAVIOUR AS A SCULPTOR SHAPES A LUMP OF CLAY.”

Also, most frightening and significant, is the following 1984 quote from Dustin Heuston of Utah's World Institute for Computer-Assisted Teaching (WICAT):

"We've been absolutely staggered by realizing the computer has the capability to act as if it were ten of the top psychologists working with one student...You've seen the tip of the iceberg. Won't it be wonderful when the child in the smallest county in the most distant area or in the most confused urban setting can have the equivalent of the finest school in the world on that terminal and no one can get between that child and that curriculum? We have great moments coming in the history of education."

This comment should come as a shocker to parents who have been battling openly and usually unsuccessfully at school board meetings to have certain controversial textbooks and social engineering programs removed from the schools. At least before, sometimes, parents had access to what their children were learning in school. Dustin Heuston explains that such a privilege will no longer be granted to parents.

And, in case parents don't really believe that operant conditioning/behavior modification programs, which now will primarily use the computer for reinforcement, are dangerous and are designed to destroy your children's traditional values, read on:

The late Professor Benjamin Bloom, internationally known behaviorist, father of Pavlovian/Skinnerian mastery learning and outcomes based education, said in his Taxonomy of Educational Objectives:

"The evidence points out convincingly to the fact that age is a factor operating against attempts to effect a complete or thorough-going reorganization of attitudes and values. (Taxonomy, p. 85) The evidence collected thus far suggests that a single hour of classroom activity under certain conditions may bring about a major reorganization in cognitive as well as affective (attitudes, values and beliefs) behaviors." (Taxonomy, page 88)

Bloom also said the purpose of education was to "change the thoughts, actions and feelings of students" (All Our Children Learning, 1982) and defined good teaching as "challenging the students' fixed beliefs." (Taxonomy, page 55)

Additional proof of the computer's ability to change attitudes is found in "The Role of the Computer in Future Instructional Systems" which was published as the March/April, 1963 supplement of Audiovisual Communication Review [Monograph 2] of the Technological Development Project of the National Education Association [Contract #SAE9073], U..S. Office of Education, Dept. of Health, Education and Welfare.) Excerpts from a chapter entitled "Effortless Learning, Attitude Changing, and Training in Decision-Making" follow:

"Another area of potential development in computer applications is the attitude changing machine. Dr. Bertram Raven in the Psychology Department at the University of California at Los Angeles is in the process of building a computer-based device for changing attitudes. This device will work on the principle that students' attitudes can be changed effectively by using the Socratic method of asking an appropriate series of leading questions designed to right the balance between appropriate attitudes, and those deemed less acceptable. For instance, after first determining a student's constellation of attitudes through appropriate testing procedures, the machine would calculate which attitudes are 'out of phase' and which of these are amenable to change.

"If the student were opposed to foreign trade, say, and a favorable disposition were sought for, the machine would select an appropriate series of statements and questions organized to right the imbalance in the student's attitudes. The machine, for instance, would have detected that the student liked President Kennedy and was against the spread of Communism; therefore, the student would be shown that JFK favored foreign trade and that foreign trade to underdeveloped countries helped to arrest the Communist infiltration of these governments. If the student's attitudes toward Kennedy and against Communism were sufficiently strong, Dr. Raven would hypothesize that a positive change in attitude toward foreign trade would be effectively brought about by showing the student the inconsistency of his views. There is considerable evidence that such techniques do effectively change attitudes.

"Admittedly, training in decision-making skills is a legitimate goal of education in this age of automation, but the problem remains--does the educator know what values to attach to the different outcomes of these decisions?...What about students whose values are out of line with the acceptable values of democratic society? Should they be taught to conform to someone else's accepted judgment of proper values? Training in decision-making is ultimately compounded with training in value judgment and, as such, becomes a controversial subject that needs to be resolved by educators before the tools can be put to use."

The operant conditioning method is an animal training method. Since the top behaviorist educators consider man an animal, without a soul, mind, or conscience, it makes sense to them that man be trained, not educated. One can train an animal but one cannot educate an animal. Dogs sit upon command when they know there is a reward (biscuit) for doing so. Since this type of stimulus/response computer education does not transfer (dogs are unable to make connections between different commands), your children will not be able to learn. They will simply respond, as would an animal, to bells and whistles which are nothing but neurological stimuli. Yes, "it works."

Yes, it is "effective", since it allows for the precise measurement (behaviorist term) of all your child’s thoughts and behaviors. Yes, it provides for "accountability" (through computerized data collection of your child’s behaviors) to the federal and international government and to UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization). It is not, however, accountable in any way to you, the parent, or to the teacher (now known as a "facilitator" of learning, not a transmitter of knowledge). This method, in conjunction with computers, can be counted on to train and brainwash your children and their teachers to become members of the collective (group), to perform like robots/ animals, lifelong, in the social and career roles identified for them by the multinational corporate and global elite, and to never, ever speak out in opposition to the government for fear of punishment. Yes, it is an invasion of privacy.

How easy it will be for the government schools to maintain records on every aspect of your child's personality and behavior: his individuality or willingness to conform to the group; his tolerance or lack thereof of any and all lifestyles; his religious beliefs or lack thereof, his global mindedness or lack thereof; his intelligence, his mental health, his sexual proclivities, and to make such information available upon request to any corporation, government or private "snoop" agency without written, informed parental consent. The U.S. Department of Education already collects such information through the mandated National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), but the collection of information will be facilitated when the schools' administrative offices (central computer data bases) are connected to the content of each individual student's computer hard drive. (President Bush's Mental Health Screening Initiative can be easily implemented simply through the computerization of the NAEP) Sixty percent of the test items included in the mandated NAEP, upon which most state assessments are based, are already attitudinal (politically correct)!

The General Agreement between the United States of America and the United Soviet Socialist Republic on Contacts, Exchanges and Cooperation in Scientific, Technical, Educational, Cultural and Other Fields, signed by Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev in 1985, which are still in effect, virtually merged the two countries' education systems and called for cooperation in furthering this type of Pavlovian computerized education. The agreement signed between the Carnegie Corporation and the Soviet Academy of Science in 1985 was even more specific and resulted in "joint research on the application of computers in early elementary education, focusing especially on the teaching of higher level skills and complex subjects to younger children." "Higher level skills" is often a euphemism for "critical thinking skills".

N. Landa "Lenin: On Educating Youth," published by the state-controlled Novosti Press, quotes Lenin on "thinking" as follows: "To pose a real question means to define a problem which demands a new approach and new research....sometimes accepted truth no longer answers as a solution for a serious and pressing problem. The school should cultivate in pupils the ability to perceive scientifically-evolved truths as stages along the endless road of cognition -- not as something stationary and set." But you, dear parent, will not know how your second grader's values are being changed (“are evolving on Lenin’s endless road of cognition”) since, as Heuston says above: "you will not be able to get between your child and that [computer] curriculum."

Not only are your children being conditioned in the Pavlovian/Skinnerian schools of America. Their teachers, who, as stated before, are now known as “facilitators of learning” not as “transmitters of knowledge”, have been even more victimized than your children. The May, 1985 issue of The Effective School report entitled “Principals Expectations as a Motivating Factor in Effective Schools” says the following regarding the conditioning of teachers:

“The principal expects specific behavior from particular teachers which should then translate into achievement by the students of these teachers; because of these varied expectations, the principal behaves differently toward different teachers, i.e., body language, verbal interactions and resource allocations. This treatment also influences the attitudes of the teacher toward the principal and their perception of the future utility of any increased effort toward student achievement. If this treatment is consistent over time, and if the teachers do not resist change, it will shape their behavior and through it the achievement of their students…With time teachers’ behavior, self-concepts of ability, perceptions of future utility, attitude toward the principal, and students’ achievement will conform more and more closely to the behavior originally expected of them.”

Do the above quotes reflect your views and/or what you want for your children? Do the above quotes reflect how good American teachers want to be trained to teach in the Orwellian Classroom of the Future?

Additional most legitimate concerns regarding the computerization of education are addressed in an excellent article entitled "The Computer Delusion" by Todd Oppenheimer which was published in the July 1997 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. Excerpts from that article follow:

Oppenheimer: "Opinions differ in part because research on the brain is still so sketchy, and computers are so new, that the effect of computers on the brain remains a great mystery."

"I don't think we know anything about it," Harry Chugani, a pediatric neurobiologist at Wayne State University, told Oppenheimer. "This very ignorance makes skeptics wary. "

"Nobody knows how kids' internal wiring works," Clifford Stohl wrote in Silicon Snake Oil, "but anyone who's directed away from social interactions has a head start on turning out weird... No computer can teach what a walk through a pine forest feels like. Sensation has no substitute."

In Silicon Snake Oil Michael Fellows, a computer scientist at the University of Victoria, in British Columbia, says:

"Most schools would probably be better off if they threw their computers into the Dumpster."
 
PREPARING CHILDREN FOR VIRTUAL/WORLD CLASSROOMS

PART 2 OF 2

By Charlotte Iserbyt

August 29, 2005

Stimulus/Response, Rewarding & Punishing

The following quotes from overseas are included as proof that the "restructured" American education system is part of the international (lifelong) computerized work force training system. These quotes were taken from an important Australian research paper, published on the Internet in March of 2000. They document the fact that the computerization of the classroom is the model for the international system to which all the world's children and adults will be subjected...and brainwashed. (As you read them, please remember that the Bush Administration strongly supports the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO’s) plans for world education (brainwashing and training). Mrs. Laura Bush and Secretary of Education Spellings addressed UNESCO’s Education for All Conference in February 2005. Secretary Spellings said: “The No Child Left Behind Act and UNESCO’s Education for All Campaign complement each other…”)

"Preparing for Virtual /World Classrooms: Globalization of Education and Training---a Learning Web Approach along the Information Superhighway" by Dell Campbell, 1997, Department of Further Education and Training, Australia.

Excerpts:

Computers and the World Wide Web as Skinner’s Teaching Machine

"Probably the most influential theorists in the development of web-based teaching are the behaviourists, especially B. F. Skinner, Robert Gagne and Benjamin Bloom and his associates. Over a long lifetime and through half a century of experimentation and writing, Skinner developed behaviourist theories into a conceptual structure for teaching machines. Skinner's theory of operant conditioning - that anyone could be taught as long as instruction is broken down into short sequenced steps and appropriately reinforced - Gagne's task analysis, and the later work by Bloom and his associates on taxonomies of educational objectives, provided conceptual frameworks for developing positively-reinforced computer-based education (programmes such as typing tutors provide good examples), frame-sequenced, web-based information presentation (Andy White, 1996) and broad principles of self-paced learning (Penn State University). Gagne's task analysis (Penn State University) developed concepts of hierarchies of learning tasks which Bloom and his associates elaborated into the well-known Taxonomies of Educational Objectives.

"Unlike Romantic theory which was derived from theory of learning through sensory perception (Berkeley) and discovery (Rousseau), behaviorist theory is based on scientific investigation and measurement. Early theory in behavioural psychology has been reinforced and modified by discoveries in cognitive psychology, especially discoveries related to the understanding of cognition needed to develop Artificial Intelligence. Developments in cyber technology, therefore, are likely to reinforce the scientific approach to computer-and Internet-based education. It is worth noting that web-based resources for computer-based Distance Education (e.g. Penn State University) and Instructional Design are primarily behaviourist.

"Perusal of national qualifications frameworks, standards-based vocational (e.g. U.S. Department of Labor, NCRVE) and school curricula (e.g. Putnam Valley Schools, UK DFEE), and national qualifications frameworks (AOAB, DFEE) indicates the influence of behaviourist theory on current education and training curricula. Statements of standards and benchmarks such as the UK national curriculum in science, a combination of science and life skills standards and benchmarks from the USA and the West Australian Year 11 Chemistry Syllabus) (SEA) show not only remarkable similarity, but a consistency of structure reflecting general behaviourist principles and more specific cognitive and other objectives from Bloom et al's taxonomies.

Behaviourist educational structures as compatible with international ideologies and industry trends.

"The U.S. Compendium of Standards and Benchmarks, highlights another trend reinforcing the use of behaviourist structures in educational/curricular frameworks and syllabi - the extent to which a behaviourist approach can be manipulated to match economic rationalist demands for demonstrably quality teaching and learning outcomes. Behavioural emphases on general objectives stated in terms of learning and performance outcomes, and of short sequenced steps can readily be identified as general and specific benchmarks and specifications demanded by industry; as student performance on internationally standardised testing can be used to demonstrate continuous improvement. Behaviourist educational structures, therefore, being compatible with current management procedures and quality systems, are likely to remain international systems in states where economic rationalism is a dominant ideology of government.

"Behaviourist structures, therefore, facilitate the internationalisation of education by providing comparable international benchmarking; and enhance the possibility of such system's being entrenched by the congruence between behaviourist structures and the techniques of Total Quality Management. Behaviourism speaks the language businesses committed to TQM understand."

Curricula for the Global Classroom - The emergence of generic national curricular frameworks.

In Australia and the United States, existing federally funded programs provided a bridge to the development of national curricular systems. The Australian Commonwealth Schools Commission's Reports, provided a vehicle for the advocacy of unified national approaches to secondary schooling, and its final report In the National Interest (CSC 1987) the shell about which the new Department of Employment, Education and Training (DEET) was able to launch its new policy (Pusey 1990). In the United States, the National Commission on Excellence in Education launched the national educational debate with A Nation at Risk (1983). These reports, and similar reports in other English-speaking and European countries fostered a sense of crisis and urgency which allowed national governments to dominate educational policy making (Odden and Marsh in Hanaway and Crowson 1989), even in nations in which educational policy was constitutionally a state not national responsibility."

Show me one parent or teacher in this country who wants his child to be trained like a rat for the global workforce, rather than educated like a human being for his own individual upward mobility. Show me one parent or teacher who wants his child to be subjected to operant conditioning which bypasses the brain with all the important functions which distinguish man from an animal: memory, conscience, imagination, insight, and intuition, functions by which human beings know absolutes and truths and are able to know God.

Now is the time for parents and public and private school teachers, to DEMAND that our schools be restored to their original intent: to provide a strong traditional academic education, focusing on reading (good literature, not the depressing, politically correct, values-changing literature promoted by the American Library Association), writing, with a strong emphasis on spelling and grammar, mathematics, traditional United States and world history, geography, science, foreign languages, including Latin, art, music, and an understanding of the need for sound morals and values, the invaluable support structure for all major (successful) civilizations. (Note: Some Christian schools and home schoolers have unfortunately adopted this Skinnerian, individualized, proceed at your own pace, continuous progress, computer curriculum, which is dangerous no matter what it teaches. I wouldn't want my children taught The Ten Commandments using dog training methods! There is no free will involved in this type of education!)

If parents and teachers allow our schools and universities to become computerized operant conditioning, attitude-changing/workforce training centers for lifelong learning, we can look forward to the realization of the following disastrous prediction advocated by Professor Skinner in his 1968 book Technology of Teaching:

"Absolute power in education is not a serious issue today because it seems out of reach. However, a technology of teaching will need to be much more powerful if the race with catastrophe is to be won, and it may then, like any powerful technology, need to be contained. An appropriate counter control will not be generated as a revolt against aversive measures but by a policy designed to maximize the contribution which education can make to the strength of the culture. The issue is important because the government of the future will probably operate mainly through educational (Skinnerian/Pavlovian, ed) techniques." (page 260)

IMPORTANT NOTE: For those who do not understand the technology of teaching to which Skinner refers (especially positive reinforcement), let me explain how "the government of the future will probably be operated through educational techniques". An article entitled "People Control Blueprint" by Carol Denton was published in the May, 1972 issue of The National Educator. It states in part:

"A Top Secret paper from the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, now in the hands of The National Educator, reveals a plan for total control of the people of the United States through behavioral modification techniques of B.F. Skinner, the controversial behaviorist author of Beyond Freedom and Dignity...According to the 'Dialogue Discussion Paper', a conference was held at the Center on January 17 through 19, 1972, at which time a discussion on 'The Social and Philosophical Implications of Behavior Modification' was held.

"The paper in question is one prepared by four individuals for presentation at that conference entitled 'Controlled Environment for Social Change.' The authors are Vitali Rozynko, Kenneth Swift, Josephine Swift and Larney J. Boggs...The second page of the paper carries the inscription, 'To B.F Skinner and James G. Holland.'...The authors of this tome are senior staff members of the Operant Behavior Modification Project located at Mendocino State Hospital in California and the project is partially supported by a grant from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse...On page 5 of this blueprint for totalitarianism, the authors state that 'We are presently concerned with controlling upheavals and anarchic behavior associated with social change and discontent.'...The authors go on to say that they believe an 'Orwellian world' is more likely under presently developing society than under the kind of rigorous controls of a society envisioned by Skinner...On page 6, the authors deplore the growing demands for 'law and order,' stating that the population is now more apt to support governmental repression than previously, in response to 'their own fears.'...They add that 'with the rising population, depletion of natural resources, and the increase of pollution, repressive measures may have to be used to guarantee survival of our species.

"These measures may take the form of forced sterilization, greatly restricted uses of energy and limits on population movement and living location.'... Skinner, on the other hand, they allege--'advocates more sophisticated controls over the population since punishment (by the government) for the most part works only temporarily and only while the punishing agent is present.'...On the other hand, the authors allege, operant conditioning (sensitivity training) and other behavioral techniques can be used to control the population through 'positive reinforcement.'"

(Charlotte's Note: The use of rewards and punishment by a totalitarian government ultimately leads to atrocious abuses. An article in The Washington Post, 8/27/05 titled “Who Controls the Family?…Blind Activist Leads Peasants in Legal Challenge to Abuses of China’s Population-Growth Policy” by Philip P. Pan states in part “The government adopted the law granting citizens the right to make an ‘informed choice’ in family planning, and in recent years it has moved toward a system of economic rewards for couples with only one child and fines or fees for those with more. But many local officials continue to rely on forced abortion and sterilization, in part because the ability to limit population growth remains a top consideration in party deliberations about promotions and raises. In much of China, an official who misses a population target, even if he or she excels in other fields, is dismissed, according to researchers and family planning officials.)

Fast forward to 1981 and Project BEST: Basic Education Skills through Technology. BEST’s Informational Brochure recommended what Skinner predicted in his 1968 book “Technology of Teaching”: “The government of the future [various government agencies, not just education, ed], will probably operate mainly through educational techniques.”

The informational brochure for Project BEST: Basic Education Skills through Technology, stated: "In addition, the State Team approach and the communications network with professional associations and other groups established by the project will serve as a model for the states in implementing similar efforts in other areas of education, or in such program areas as health, human services, housing, transportation, etc."

Twenty-two years later an article entitled "Extraordinary Acts of Kindness" published in the January 27, 2003 issue of The Times Record, Brunswick, Maine illustrates exactly what Project BEST called for above: the use of the Skinnerian operant conditioning method in government programs, not exclusively in education:

"Beginning on Saturday, police officers on patrol in the two communities (Bath and Brunswick, Maine) will carry with them coins embossed with their department's patch. When an officer witnesses someone aiding a fellow citizen or committing a noteworthy act, the officer can award the coin in immediate (behaviorist term, ed) recognition of the kind deed..."

This particular use of the technology of teaching (operant conditioning to modify behavior) in my home town of Bath, Maine is not an isolated incident. The federal and state governments are deeply involved in rewarding and punishing individuals and state and local agencies, by withholding funds (punishment) or by providing additional funding or perks (rewards) depending on whether the agency or person in question has or has not performed as mandated by the government. (Such rewards and punishment remind one of the Chinese Communist population control policy referred to earlier in this article.)

If we are trained as animals, only doing good deeds when a reward is forthcoming, and refraining from doing what is right, according to our conscience, (like vocally opposing the Iraq War) for fear of government reprisal (punishment), who can say that we are any different from animals who are not expected to know right from wrong? If human beings are trained like animals, why should we be surp (read less)

Charlotte Iserbyt is the consummate whistleblower! Iserbyt served as Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), U.S. Department of Education, during the first Reagan Administration, where she first blew the whistle on a major technology initiative which wo... (read more)

Video Lectures

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1	Charlotte Iserbyt on the Deliberate Dumbing Down of America	Play Video
2	Charlotte Iserbyt speaks at Freedom Law School's 2006 Conference	Play Video
3	Charlotte Iserbyt Speaking At The Zombie Country Conference	Play Video