Deliberately dumbing us down

Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt's new book, "The Deliberate Dumbing Down of
America," is without doubt one of the most important publishing events
in the annals of American education in the last hundred years. John
Dewey's "School and Society," published in 1899, set American education
on its course to socialism. Rudolf Flesch's "Why Johnny Can't Read,"
published in 1955, informed American parents that there was something
terribly wrong with the way the schools were teaching children to read,
and my own book, "NEA: Trojan Horse in American Education," published in
1984, explained in great detail how and why the decline in public
education was taking place.

But Iserbyt has done what no one else wanted or could do. She has
put together the most formidable and practical compilation of
documentation describing the well-planned "deliberate dumbing down" of
American children by their education system. Anyone who has had any
lingering hope that what the educators have been doing is a result of
error, accident, or stupidity will be shocked by the way American social
engineers have systematically gone about destroying the intellect of
millions of American children for the purpose of leading the American
people into a socialist world government controlled by behavioral and
social scientists.

This mammoth book is the size of a large city phone book: 462 pages
of documentation, 205 pages of appendices, and a 48-page Index. The
documentation is "A Chronological Paper Trail" which starts with the
Sowing of the Seeds in the late 18th and 19th centuries, proceeds to The
Turning of the Tides, then to The Troubling Thirties, The Fomentation of
the Forties and Fifties, The Sick Sixties, The Serious Seventies, The
"Effective" Eighties, and finally, the Noxious Nineties. The educators
and social engineers indict themselves with their own words.

Iserbyt decided to compile this book because, as a "resister" to what
is going on in American education, she was being constantly told that
she was taking things out of context. The book, she writes, "was put
together primarily to satisfy my own need to see the various components
which led to the dumbing down of the United States of America assembled
in chronological order -- in writing. Even I, who had observed these
weird activities taking place at all levels of government, was reluctant
to accept a malicious intent behind each individual, chronological
activity or innovation, unless I could connect it with other, similar
activities taking place at other times."

And that is what this book does. It connects educators, social
engineers, planners, government grants, federal and state agencies,
billion-dollar foundations, think tanks, universities, research
projects, policy organizations, etc., showing how they have worked
together to advance an agenda that will change America from a free
republic to a socialist state.

What is so mind boggling is that all of this is being financed by the
American people themselves through their own taxes. In other words, the
American people are underwriting the destruction of their own freedom
and way of life by lavishly financing through federal and state grants
the very social scientists who are undermining our national sovereignty
and preparing our children to become the dumbed-down vassals of the new
world order.

One of the interesting insights revealed by these documents is how
the social engineers use a deliberately created education "crisis" to
move their agenda forward by offering radical reforms that are sold to
the public as fixing the crisis -- which they never do. The new reforms
simply set the stage for the next crisis, which provides the pretext for
the next move forward. This is the dialectical process at work, a
process our behavioral engineers have learned to use very effectively.
Its success depends on the ability of the "change agents" to continually
deceive the public, which tends to believe any lie the experts tell
them.

Iserbyt's long journey to becoming a "resister," started in 1973 when
her son, a fourth grader, brought home from school a purple ditto sheet,
embellished with a smiley face, entitled, "All About Me." She writes,
"The questions were highly personal; so much so that they encouraged my
son to lie, since he didn't want to 'spill the beans' about his mother,
father and brother. The purpose of such a questionnaire was to find out
the student's state of mind, how he felt, what he liked and disliked,
and what his values were. With this knowledge it would be easier for
the government school to modify his values and behavior at will --
without, of course, the student's knowledge or his parents' consent."

From that time on, Iserbyt became an activist in education. She
became a member of a philosophy committee for a school, was elected as a
school board member, co-founded Guardians of Education for Maine (GEM),
and finally became senior policy advisor in the Office of Educational
Research and Improvement (OERI) of the U.S. Department of Education
during President Reagan's first term of office.

As a school board member she learned that in American education, the
end justifies the means. "Our change agent superintendent," she writes,
"was more at home with a lie than he was with the truth." Whatever good
she accomplished while on the school board was tossed out two weeks
after she left office.

It was during her tenure in the Department of Education in
Washington, D.C., where she had access to the grant proposals from
change agents, that she came to the conclusion that what was happening
in American education was the result of a concerted effort on the part
of numerous individuals and organizations -- a globalist elite -- to
bring about permanent changes in America's body politic. She was
relieved of her duties after leaking an important technology grant -- a
computer-assisted instruction proposal -- to the press.

Another reason why Iserbyt decided to publish this book is because of
the reluctance of Americans to face unpleasant truths about their
government educators. She wants parents to have access to the kinds of
documents that were only circulated among the change agent educators
themselves. She wants parents to see for themselves what has been
planned for their children and the kind of socialist-fascist world their
children will have to live in if we do nothing to counter these plans.

Therefore, getting this book into the hands of thousands of Americans
ought to be a major project for lovers of liberty in the year 2000. It
will do more to defeat the change agents than anything else I can think
of.

Samuel L. Blumenfeld is the author of eight books on education,
including "Is Public Education Necessary?" and "The Whole Language/OBE
Fraud," published by The Paradigm Company, 208-322-4440. His reading
instruction program, "Alpha-Phonics," is available by writing The
Tutoring Company, P.O. Box 540111, Waltham, MA 02454-0111.