THE
DEATH OF FREE WILL
PART 1 of 5
By Charlotte Iserbyt
December 21, 2010
NewsWithViews.com
“To extinguish the free will is to strike the conscience with death, for both have but one and the same life.” – William Ellery Channing (American moralist, Unitarian Clergyman and Author, 1780-1842)
Something is drastically wrong with the present restructuring of education. I hope this article will persuade parents and traditional public school administrators and teachers to work together to stop the dismantling of what was once considered the finest educational system in the world. The traditional system’s successful administrative structure which allowed elected school boards (working with superintendents, principals, and teachers) to provide our children with an academic education, should not be changed to accommodate the needs of the corporate fascist/socialist (government/business) partnerships and tax-exempt foundations.
One must understand that the situation with low academic test scores and unacceptable behavior of students was deliberately created over a period of 80 years, starting in the 1930s with the Carnegie Corporation’s plan to use schools to bring about a Soviet-style (performance-based) planned economic system. See reference to Carnegie Corporation's Conclusions and Recommendations for the Social Studies (1934) and Carnegie-Soviet Academy of Science Agreement (1985). The latter agreement was signed the same year Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev signed the U.S.-USSR Education Exchange Agreement. The first experiment with Outcomes/Performance-Based Education (the restructuring system being implemented today) was Carnegie Corporation’s “Eight Year Study” (1933-1941).
To get an idea of the enormity and severity of the problems addressed by this article, see the OECD-SSRC Stupski Next-Gen Data System Workshop (October 2010) presentation which states the following: “We will build capacity to leave a dying system and give birth to a new one…”
Solution—the following government agencies which control local education must be abolished:
U.S. Department of Education, its laboratories and centers, and all federally funded state departments of education. Also, legislation must be passed prohibiting outside meddling in state or local education matters by corporations and tax exempt foundations. Such legislation would prevent international, national or corporate entities from administering attitudinal assessments and collecting private data on students, their families, educators and/or members of small businesses.
It is doubtful that major conservative groups would help in this endeavor. Our best hope is to enlist the help of traditional teachers and administrators, and small business owners, who would have to go up against their prospective organization leadership. It might work. It’s worth a try.
This article is written for the benefit of parents, our children, and the teachers of our children; it explains the following:
Link
1: Re-inventing
Schools Coalition
Link 2: Back
to Basics Reform or. . .OBE . . .Skinnerian International Curriculum
and the deliberate dumbing down of america
Link 3: Jed
Brown on Behavioral Conditioning
Link 4: Educators
Push Back Against Obama’s “Business Model” for School
Reform
(If a link
becomes broken, please do a Google search for the title.)
The last nail of so-called school reform is being struck in the coffin of traditional American education which made our nation the envy of the Free World and which produced famous scientists, engineers, mathematicians, writers, artists, musicians, doctors, etc.
The reform is not new. It started in the early 1900s when John D. Rockefeller, Jr.’s Director of Charity for the Rockefeller Foundation, Frederick T. Gates, set up the Southern Education Board. In 1913 the organization was incorporated into the General Education Board. These boards set in motion “the deliberate dumbing down of America”. In Frederick T. Gates’ “The Country School of Tomorrow” Occasional Papers No. 1 (General Education Board, New York, 1913) was a section entitled “A Vision of the Remedy” in which he wrote:
“Is there aught a remedy for this neglect of rural life? Let us, at least, yield ourselves to the gratifications of a beautiful dream that there is. In our dream, we have limitless resources, and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our moulding hand. The present educational conventions fade from our minds; and unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or of science. We are not to raise up from among them authors, orators, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians. Nor will we cherish even the humbler ambition to raise up from among them lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we now have ample supply.”
The above quote sounds like something from one of the public/private school-to-work/tax-exempt foundation partnerships involved in the Reinventing Schools Coalition agenda, as well as other innocuous sounding current-day initiatives that are being implemented across the nation.
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The above Rockefeller agenda was followed up by the Carnegie Corporation’s little volume on education entitled Conclusions and Recommendations for the Social Studies (Charles Scribner’s Sons: N.Y. 1934) — funded to the tune of $340,000. This little book called for using the schools to turn the United States into a socialist nation, ultimately to become a member of a socialist/communist world government. Author Francis Gannon wrote that Harold Laski, the philosopher of British socialism, said of this report:
“At bottom, and stripped of its carefully neutral phrases, the Report is an educational program for a Socialist America.”
Conclusions and Recommendations for the Social Studies is the most important book I ever laid my hands on. You can find it here. Following are important and revealing excerpts from Conclusions and Recommendations for the Social Studies:
“The Commission was also driven to this broader conception of its task by the obvious fact that American civilization, in common with Western civilization, is passing through one of the great critical ages of history, is modifying its traditional faith in economic individualism [free enterprise], and is embarking upon vast experiments in social planning and control which call for large-scale cooperation on the part of the people…” (pp. 1-2)
“. . . Cumulative evidence supports the conclusion that in the United States and in other countries the age of ‘laissez faire’ in economy and government is closing and that a new age of collectivism is emerging.” (p. 16)
In 1951, Human Relations in Curriculum Change was published (Ed. Kenneth D. Benne and Bozidar Muntyan, The Dryden Press, Inc., NY). The book contains “Selected readings with an emphasis on group development.” Most works—written by social scientists and philosophers of-the-day—appeared in publications during the 1940s decade; some included references dating from the 1930s decade. Human Relations in Curriculum Change discusses “social engineering” (theory, methods); “re-education of personnel in knowledge, skills, and attitudes”; schools as potential laboratories for “experimental social science”; “human engineering”; “group thinking”; “change agents”; Kurt Lewin’s “change process” theory; “consensus”; and more.
In Critical Theory, Marxism, Dialectical Method and Total Quality Management (2002), author Judy McLemore explains that the editors of Human Relations and Curriculum Change selected for inclusion “the research experiments and writings on group development and human engineering by various transformational Marxists to create a blueprint for the ‘re-education’ or brainwashing of the masses and subsequent transformation of America. It is a master plan for ‘inducing and controlling changes in social systems,’ that is, changes in the individuals within schools, government, universities, industries, etc. by way of the ‘group’ (Benne Preface, 24). . . . The plan includes a dialectical method of ‘resolving’ personal individual beliefs and dispositions of traditional Americans into a ‘common social outlook’ defined by these Marxists (336). By common they mean of the same mind, feelings, habits, knowledge, motivation, beliefs and values. In effect they mean to mold each individual personality to conform to a facilitated group adaptable to change.”
Conclusions and Recommendations for the Social Studies (1934) and the old progressive theories and practices that appeared in Human Relations in Curriculum Change (1951) are accommodated by school/workforce reforms today that promote so-called global competitiveness and global citizenship. (Note: the term progressive was “in the middle of the last century, what socialists and communists used for themselves because they believed they had the key to the future."[1])
Please use this article “The Death of Free Will” to fight state implementation of the federal Common Core Standards. Use this article to fight the totalitarian Pavlovian/Skinnerian performance-based workforce training agenda that will dumb down students as well as teachers . . . which will pay teachers for students’ good grades (teach to the test/what are they testing?) and very likely also pay children as well for good grades.
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This agenda MUST be stopped or all of us will suffer: our children, their teachers, and our free political and economic system of government. Once FREE WILL is destroyed, there is no protection from descending to the level of animals, subjected to “training”. Only human beings can be educated. Why have we opted for animal training, with or without the computer, rather than continuing to educate our children in the traditional way for upward mobility?
This is the ultimate war for our children’s minds and souls. No other war has ever been more important. If you don’t have time to read this entire article, please at least click on the links at the beginning of this article as well as their associated links. Descriptions of the links follow. See Charlotte's 9 min. vedeo below. For part two click below.
Click here for part -----> 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,
Endnote:
1- Project MUSE - Sewanee Review, Vol. 118, No. 2, Spring 2010, The John Hopkins University Press.
� 2010 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.
Website: www.deliberatedumbingdown.com
Website: www.americandeception.com
E-Mail: dumbdown00@yahoo.com
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