The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America
Chapter 5

Soviet educators define their system as an all-round training whereby youth can participate in creating the conditions for a socialist, and ultimately, Communist society. Such participation can become possible, they hold, only as students cultivate all the basic disciplines and only through a “steady rise in the productivity of labor”... which is linked closely with the educative process. School children and students are engaged in a total educational program which aims to teach all the same basic subjects, morals and habits in order to provide society with future workers and employees whose general education will make them socialist (Communist) citizens and contribute to their productivity upon learning a vocation (profession).

The essential task involved is to evoke the specific forms of behavior from the student and through appropriate reinforcement bring them under the control of specific subject matter stimuli… Our present knowledge of the learning process points out that through the process of reinforcement, new forms of behavior can be created with a great degree of subtlety. The central feature of this process is making the reinforcement contingent upon performances of the learner.

• A declaration that the coming decade would see the American education system forming close relationships with international Ministries of Education, and groups like UNESCO.
• The claim that the Federal government "must play a major role" in the aforementioned "international educational cooperation," "since only the Federal Government can enter into agreements with other governments."
• A plan to gather centralized statistical records on all students from all states.
• A plan to hire "Economists, sociologists, and other social scientists."

to take “the necessary steps... to establish an effective system of international control, or to create and strengthen international organizations for the maintenance of peace.

But I will say here and now on this day of independence that the United States will be ready for a Declaration of Interdependence—that we will be prepared to discuss with a United Europe the ways and means of forming a concrete Atlantic Partnership—a mutually beneficial partnership between the new union now emerging in Europe and the old American Union founded here 175 years ago. Today Americans must learn to think intercontinentally.

In 1999 NAEP is funded by the federal government and widely used across the United States. Individual states are passing legislation to use NAEP as a state test and parents and legislators are mistakenly believing that these “tests” (assessments) will give them information about the performance of their children in academic subjects. This is a misconception; NAEP tracks conformity to government-generated goals.

We invented a little device to get the compact approved quickly,” Mr. Sanford, now the President of Duke University, said recently. “We didn’t need money from the legislatures, we had plenty of foundation funding, so we agreed that the governors could ratify it by executive order. 

The technology for controlling others exists and it will be used, given the persistence of power-seeking motives. Furthermore, we will need to use it, since the necessary social changes cannot come about if the affected people do not understand and desire them.... How do we educate “run-of-the-mill” citizens for membership in a democratic society?... How do we teach people to understand their relationship to long range planning?... And how do we teach people to be comfortable with the process of change? Should we educate for this? We shall probably have to. But how?...

The need for educating to embrace change is not limited to youngsters.... Education for tomorrow’s world will involve more than programming students by a computer; it will equally involve the ways in which we program... parents to respond to the education... children get for this kind of world. To the extent we succeed with the youngsters but not with the parents, we will have... a very serious consequence: an increasing separation of the young from their parents.... It will have psychological repercussions, probably producing in the children both guilt and hostility (arising from their rejection of their parents’ views and values in lifestyles). 

• [F]or the purpose of analyzing behavior we have to assume man is a machine.
• You can induce him to behave according to the dictates of society instead of his own selfish interest.
• I should like to see our government set up a large educational agency in which specialists could be sent to train teachers. 

In short, we are likely to do better by building our “house of world order” from the bottom up rather than the top down. It will look like a great, “booming, buzzing confusion,” to use William James’s famous description of reality, but an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, is likely to get us to world order faster than the old-fashioned frontal attack.

The most controversial issues of the twenty-first century will pertain to the ends and means of modifying human behavior and who shall determine them. The first educational question will not be “what knowledge is of the most worth?” but “what kinds of human beings do we wish to produce?” The possibilities virtually defy our imagination. 

1.  "Equal rights" for "every man and woman," including the "right" to education, employment, home ownership, etc. While we can agree that these are great things, and that people should have them, only under Socialism/Communism can these be "rights" because each one requires forcefully taking property from one person and giving it to another
2.  Under the heading "The Democratic Process," we read: "While stressing private responsibility, the Commission also forthrightly favors government action at all levels whenever necessary to achieve the national goals." This openly advocates against the limited powers of the federal government laid out in the Constitution! This section also advocates for drastically increased pay for top government employees, and for the president to have sole authority "to develop a true senior civil service." The problem is that "civil service is a collective term for a sector of government composed mainly of career civil servants hired on professional merit rather than appointed or elected… Civil servants work for central government and state governments, & answer to the government, not a political party."[1]
3.  Under "Education," the paper calls for the doubling of federal education spending.
4.  There is an entire section devoted to disarmament, which it says should be our ultimate goal. This would have one effect: to make our nation unable to defend itself against our enemies, who will not be disarming. This would also be an explicit violation of the Constitution, which imposes on Congress the duty to "provide for the common defense."[2]
5.  In a section entitled "Less Developed Nations," we are told that "The success of the underdeveloped nations must depend primarily on their own efforts." The only thing truer than this would be to have said that their success depends entirely on their own efforts. Unfortunately, the chosen words were intended, as they are immediately followed by telling us that Americans "should assist by providing education, training, economic and technical assistance, and by increasing the flow of public and private capital," along with a specific goal of doubling the rate of economic growth for these other nations "within five years." This is nothing but "spreading the wealth," pure and simple.
6.  There is also a section devoted to "A key goal" of "the preservation and strengthening of the United Nations." Simply put, this is another government–unelected!–placed above that authorized in our Constitution. This is treason, because, for one thing, it removes the representation from our representative form of government.
7.  Finally, attached to this report was a pamphlet which described how to hold meetings on the goals, and to reach consensus. The author points out that the "consensus" described in the pamphlet is actually "group dynamics," and that "[c]onsensus is not consent!" Project management consultant Manuel Mehring, on his blog, gives the following definitions:[3]

The central feature of this process is making the reinforcement contingent upon performances of the learner. (Often the word “reward” is used to refer to one class of reinforcing events.)