This article is by a guest author who, for the time being, wishes to remain anonymous. We may see more pieces from them. If you have any comments on the article we will be happy to pass them on.
Update October 2020: Another article on “dumbing down of America”: https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/article/paglia-dumbing-down-america-began-public-schools/?fbclid=IwAR3_PyAncic6txghQMjw_L0YgA08QfF-2RoDPJngKacB7R9mYUnSDgq71tM
I was quite surprised in my researches into the history of American education, upon receiving a tip from Dr. Reisman, that Charlotte Iserbyt had put her finger on a conference made about 1934 of the Carnegie Foundation (for the Advancement of Education?) that decided the course of America Education for the next 100+ years. This program is still in effect today, and its consequences have been disastrous for the US, particularly our public school students. Today I find the Carnegie Foundation for Advancement of Teaching pushing their “improvement science” through “networked improvement communities”, a new verbage, I admit, of Karl Marx’s “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”, prompted by our improvement in technologies, no doubt.
I took a step back further and read into the history of Andrew Carnegie and then bumped into John D. Rockerfeller Jr. as part of that look-back. It was becoming obvious that the wealthy at the start of the 20th century played a key part in the form, structure, and growth of modern public education.
From https://www.thenewamerican.com/reviews/opinion/item/10929-dyslexia-and-the-rockefellers, I was astonished to read this quote from David Rockerfeller’s memoirs –
David Rockefeller writes of his experience at the Lincoln School in his Memoirs, published in 2002:
It was Lincoln’s experimental curriculum and method of instruction that distinguished it from all other New York schools of the time. Father was an ardent and generous supporter of John Dewey’s educational methods and school reform efforts. … Teacher’s College of Columbia University operated Lincoln, with considerable financial assistance in the early years from the General Education Board, as an experimental school designed to put Dewey’s philosophy into practice.
David Rockefeller writes further:
Lincoln stressed freedom for children to learn and to play an active role in their own education. … (my emphasis)
The 4 younger brothers were made dyslexic by attending Lincoln School, and later on in life the Rockerfellers lamented that. Such is the product of modern education, dyslexic philanthropists pushing a failed philosophy in the vain hope that someday (millenia?) they might succeed.
Only today we’ve carried it further, letting children select a gender change at school, but keeping this private from the parents.
So we find John Dewey was probably the kingpin in the dumbing down of American Education and this started very early, perhaps 1910’s – 1920’s.
We read about this Lincoln School further –
According to Education Encyclopedia, StateUniversity.com:
The Lincoln School (1917–1940) of Teachers College, Columbia University, was a university laboratory school set up to test and develop and ultimately to promulgate nationwide curriculum materials reflecting the most progressive teaching methods and ideas of the time. Originally located at 646 Park Avenue in New York, one of the most expensive pieces of real estate in the city, the Lincoln School was also a training ground for New York City’s elite, including the sons of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who provided the funding for the school. Among the school’s chief architects were Charles W. Eliot, a former president of Harvard University and an influential member of the New England Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools; his protégé Abraham Flexner, a member of the controversial Rockefeller philanthropy, the General Education Board; Otis W. Caldwell, a professor of science education at Teachers College and the school’s first director; and the dean of Teachers College, James E. Russell.
So we find that the philanthropists, such as Andrew Carnegie who founded the Carnegie Foundations, and the Rockerfellers were instrumental in giving a shove down the slippery slope to American education, barking the promises of education reform as advocated by John Dewey and his philosophy. The Flexner report was significant as it formed the structure of modern medical education in America today (producing 100,000’s of doctors, etc).
As a person who has experienced the failed promises to reform American education the past 3 or 4 decades, sadly watching science and math SAT scores continually decline and now watching the insidious corruption of the children by transgender ideology and CSE material, and STD’s rates dangerously spiraling out of control, I no longer believe the promises, I will label them as carefully crafted lies to perpetuate a flawed philosophy(ies), some morally fatal.
If an 8th grade final exam test given to rural children in Salinas Kansas in 1895 cannot be answered by college graduates today, what does that say about our education today? See http://www.indiana.edu/~p1013447/dictionary/8thgradeexam.htm for this test and try to take it yourself and see if you can get at least 20 items correct? I would do badly on the orthography part of this test. Based upon this test, I conclusively say that we Americans today are dumbed down, deliberately, just as Charlotte Iserbyt has said. Her book “The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America” http://deliberatedumbingdown.com/ddd/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/DDDoA.pdf rightfully deserves to be mandatory reading for every high school student and college student of America.
Now we find a massive push for SEL (Social-Emotional Learning) is taking place. This is proverbially the last straw, for it takes character development and training completely from the hands of the parent, and puts it into the hands of the (so-called) state, but which we know as the international bankers and global intellectual elite who desire to mold children, so that 90% will have to toil at menial tasks for their whole life. Such is the bright future that they continually window paint to the naive as preparing every child for the global community. Even the quote on the Battle Ground School District website “Inspiring excellence by connecting every student to a positive future in a competitive global economy” irks me like a wood splinter pushed under a finger nail.
I found a great quote from the video “Global Road to Ruin Through Education – Preview” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BD_Yds81n2w which Charlotte quotes from C.S. Lewis and incredibly applies today more than ever before:
“If education is beaten by training, civilization dies” he [C.S. Lewis] writes, for the “lesson of history” is that “civilization is a rarity, attained with difficulty and easily lost”[1]
Yes, we are facing the loss of civilization and the mantra that sex-ed must be done for the good of the children is one of its death rattles.
Civilization is based upon each person’s knowledge and respect of truth, and apparently that is hard-won, difficult to attain, requiring self-discipline and easily let go, into a slip back into apathy, depression, ignorance, impoverishment and slavery. I pray that this is not America’s future in the 21st century.
Part of the fix for CSE is going to involve fixing the broken American Education system, hence my commentary, as I was forced to take a look at this.
Your homework assignment is to carefully read the article on World Net Daily https://www.wnd.com/2001/05/9208/ and understand what Charlotte Iserbyt has to say about all this and why American education went the way it has. (my writing to you is prompted in part by Rebecca Friedrich’s wake up)
Thank you for your time and patience in reading this too long appeal to become informed. If we are going to fix CSE and SEL and other failed philosophies, it will have to start with fixing the American public education system too!
Reference
1. Gregory Dunn, C.S. Lewis on Liberal Arts Education, on Principle, Vol 7, #2, April 1999
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