The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America
Monday, February 25, 2013
During the Reaganadministration, 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 3rd
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 15th,
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
”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 4th – 5th grade level, 55-60 million
read at a 6th – 8th grade level, 30 million at a 9th
– 10th 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"
Illuminati: The Hidden Agenda for World Government (PAST
RESEARCH)
Friday, February 16, 2018
This is a very interesting
video. "The man who tells this story is none other than Mr. Norman Dodd,
who in 1954 was the staff director of the Congressional Special Committee to
Investigate Tax-exempt Foundations, sometimes referred to as the Reece Committee,
in recognition of its chairman, Congressman Carol Reece." He is here
interviewed by Ed Griffin back in 1982. Dodd is telling us about his research
into the tax-exempt organization and what they REALLY stand for. He shows us that the Carnegie Endowment, the
Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation
joined together to alter American history and take over the whole education
system in America, so the children can be indoctrinated into accepting a World
Government. Wes Penre, www.illuminati-news.com.
