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Nov. 2007Edition 99

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Part 3: The Dynamics of Power

This is a full length book and will be presented in four installments.

Part 4 Will be Posted In December

A Chronological Paper Trail

Chapter 6

THE SERIOUS SEVENTIES

"Concerned with grave, important, or complex matters, problems" and "giving cause for concern" are two out of five definitions given in Webster’s Dictionary for the word "serious" which definitely apply to this chapter, "The Serious Seventies." Unfortunately, since the average American was purposely kept in the dark about what was taking place, being able "to be concerned" was an impossibility. To the change agents roaming the education landscape, "change" was the goal, and the end justified the means, even if it meant misleading through semantic deception the parents and taxpayers who paid the bills and provided the resources—the children and teachers upon whom the change agents would experiment.

"The Serious Seventies" contains excerpts from important government documents, education journal articles, professional papers, and critiques by key educationists regarding the major components of reform planned for the end of the century as a result of federal legislation passed in the 1960s. From a study of the key documents one detects a vigorous tug-of-war taking place at the highest decisionmaking levels in education. Stringent debate was carried on regarding the pros and cons of the use of systematic planning and technology in an area of human endeavor (education) which until this time had had relatively little interference from political, social and economic planners (social engineers).

State commissioners of education, local education agency superintendents, and especially teachers and school boards had been able to make decisions at the state and local level—decisions which they considered to be in the best interest of students and the communities in which they lived and worked.

But "change" was the name of this serious new game.

A careful reading of "The Serious Seventies" documents, especially the 1972 Association for 94 Educational Computing and Technology (AECT) report entitled The Field of Educational Technology:

A Statement of Definition (October, 1972), has convinced this writer that significant resistance to goal setting, systems management, computer-assisted instruction, etc., which existed at the beginning of the 1970s was, unfortunately, overcome. For instance, the above-referenced document contained the following most important warning regarding the use of technology in the classroom; a warning that, evidently, was not heeded in the years to come. The warning read in part:

It should be clear that the concerned professional does not have to be a "liberal," or a "conservative." The concerned professional must, however, show moral sensitivity to the effect of what he or she does [in the field of technology]. It does not matter what position an individual comes to as long as it is not "I’ll do it because it can be done."

The above recommendation relating to the ethical use of technology in the classroom was evidently ignored by the change agents who decided instead that "We’ll do it because it can be done."

In 1971 Phi Delta Kappan published a paper entitled Performance-Based Teacher Education [PBTE]: What Is the State of the Art? This paper spelled out the raison d’etre for the transition from teacher education based on knowledge of subject matter to teacher education based on the ability to "perform" in the classroom. Skinnerian methods adopted by Madeline Hunter and others would become the foundation for future teacher training and accreditation, and ultimately the method for workforce training. This paper makes it all too clear that the purpose of PBTE was to "lower standards" so that the teaching profession could be more "inclusive"—or so "they" said. However, this writer believes inclusion was more than likely the cover (excuse acceptable to those who believed in equal opportunity) to install the performance-based system necessary for the eventual implementation of the school-to-work polytech system planned in 1934 and activated in the 1990s. From this time forward, the deliberate dumbing down would proceed with a vengeance.

During "The Serious Seventies" the ship of education set a new course. Navigating these new waters would require a new chart, one entirely different from that used in the past.

1970

A PROHIBITION AGAINST FEDERAL CONTROL OF EDUCATION, SECTION 432,GENERAL EDUcation Provisions Act (GEPA), was enacted in 1970 and reads as follows:

Sec. 432. No provision of any applicable program shall be construed to authorize any department, agency, officer, or employee of the United States to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction, administration, or personnel of any educational institution, school, or school system, or over the selection of library resources,

textbooks, or other printed or published instructional materials by any educational institution or school system, or to require the assignment or transportation of students or teachers in order to overcome racial imbalance. (20 U.S.C. 1232a) Enacted April 18, 1970, P.L. 91–230, Title IV, sec. 401(a)(10), 81 Stat.169.

[Ed. Note: The interpretation of the above prohibition lies in the eyes of the beholder. Parents and traditional teachers have held that all curriculum and teaching based on the federally funded Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory Goals Collection, National Diffusion Network Programs, and "scientific research-based" reading programs funded under the Reading Excellence Act of 1998 should be covered by GEPA and are consequently illegal. Educrats, on the other hand, have held that the only way for a program to be covered by GEPA would be for the secretary of education to sit on the sidewalk outside the U.S. Department of Education, developing curriculum, and passing it out to interested passersby.]

THE SHREVEPORT [LOUISIANA] JOURNAL OF JANUARY 20, 1970 CARRIED AN ARTICLE ENtitled "And t Came to Pass" in its Views from Other Newspapers section in which the author asked:

JACKSON (MISS.) DAILY NEWS—Has HEW Replaced NRA [National Recovery Act]?

Thirty-seven years ago an unbelieving editor sat down and wrote an editorial for his paper, The Monroe Evening News of Monroe, Michigan, USA. The date was Wednesday, September 13, 1933.

Under the Lead Line, "Not That!", that incredulous American newspaper editor went on to ask his readers of three decades ago, "Are the schools of America to be used as a propaganda agency to mould public opinion into conformity with the policies of the administration?"

Still in a tone of utter disbelief that editor went on to quote from an interview with one Louis Alber, chief of the speakers division of the National Recovery Act. "Just read these stounding utterances by Mr. Alber," the editor challenges his subscribers.

The rugged individualism of Americanism must go, because it is contrary to the purposes of the New Deal and the NRA which is remaking America.

Russia and Germany are attempting to compel a new order by means of their nationalism- compulsion. The United States will do it by moral persuasion. Of course we expect some opposition, but the principles of the New Deal must be carried to the youth of the nation. We expect to accomplish by education what dictators in Europe are seeking to do by compulsion and force.

Mr. Alber went on to explain that a "primer" outlining methods of teaching to be used, along with motion pictures on the subject, were being prepared for distribution to all public and parochial schools and commented that: "NRA is the outstanding part of the President’s program, but in fact it is only a fragment. The general public is not informed on the other parts of the program, and the schools are the places to reach the future builders f the nation."

From our vantage point in history we know that the notorious NRA was laid to rest early in its incubation period by the United States Supreme Court.

What is important to each and all of us today is what has transpired in the intervening years since 1933. That editor of long ago remarked, "So as sweeping and revolutionary as NRA is, it is only a fragment of a greater program of which the public knows nothing, and his unknown program is to be inculcated into the minds of pupils in the schools everywhere, by official efforts and at government expense.... Now our schools are to become—like those of Germany and Russia—an agency for the promotion of whatever political, social, and economic policies the administration may desire to carry out. And the taxpayers, whether they like it or not, are to pay for having their children converted to those policies."

The Editor closed by stating: "The whole proposition is so amazing, and so alarming in its implications, that we refuse to take it seriously."

Take a look about you today, with the Washington-directed school policies. Is the Health, Education and Welfare Department doing exactly what the defunct NRA started out to do?

REPORT OF THE STUDY, TITLE III, ESEA BY EMERY STOOF WAS PRODUCED BY THE EDUCAtional Innovation Advisory Commission and the Bureau of Planning and Development of the California State Department of Education in 1970. Excerpts follow:

Origin of the Bureau... An Instructional Program Planning and Development Unit was established by State Board action in 1965 and was funded through a Title V, ESEA project.

 This unit was comprised of persons responsible for the state level administration of Title III, ESEA, and co-ordination of Title V, ESEA. A general conceptual model for effective planned change n education, as well as a management model for the administration of Title III, ESEA, was submitted to the State Board’s Federal Aid Committee in 1965, with November 10, 1965 as the first deadline for receiving applications for funds.…

Two significant developments early in the state administration of Title III, ESEA, were

(1) the project to Prepare Educational Planners (Operation PEP), and (2) the funding of twenty-one regional planning centers. "PEP" sessions trained administrators in systematic planning procedures, systems analysis techniques, "planning, programming and budgeting system" and cost-benefit analysis. PACE (Projects to Advance Creativity in Education) was to encourage school districts to develop imaginative solutions to educational problems, to utilize more effectively research findings, to translate the latest knowledge about teaching and learning into widespread educational practice, and to create an awareness of new programs. Through the regional centers, the Bureau has endeavored to (1) encourage the development of creative innovations, (2) demonstrate worthwhile innovations in educational practice through exemplary programs, and (3) supplement existing programs and facilities.

[Ed. Note: This is an example of how the Federal government began its takeover of all state and local education agencies, removing any semblance of what could be considered local control. The California report explains exactly what happened in every single state due to our elected officials’ inability to resist taking federal money and their trust of education change agents (administrators, principals, superintendents, etc.). How many American children have been severely handicapped academically and morally by experimental, "innovative" programs which had absolutely nothing to do with academics, but everything to do with attitude, value nd belief change?]

IN 1970 LEONARD S. KENWORTHY, PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION AT BROOKLYN COLLEGE OF the City of New York, wrote The International Dimension of Education: Background Paper II Prepared for the World Conference on Education (Asilomar, California, March 5–14, 1970), edited by Norman V. Overly. The conference was sponsored by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, National Education Association, and the Commission on International Cooperation in Education. Excerpts from the report follow:

III. The International Dimensions of Our Schools: Some Overall Considerations Here and there teachers have modified individual courses.... Schools have rewritten syllabi or added courses.... But nowhere has there been a rigorous examination of the total experiences of children and/or youth in schools and the development of a continuous, cumulative, comprehensive curriculum to create the new type of people needed for effective living in the latter part of the 20th century....

…All the work we do in developing internationally minded individuals should be directed to improved behavior.

That means that all the efforts in this dimension of education must be predicated on the research in the formation, reinforcement, and change of attitudes and on the development of skills. Knowledge is tremendously important, but we should be clear by now that it must be carefully selected knowledge, discovered by the learners rather than told to them, and organized by them with the help of teachers or professors around concepts, generalizations, r big ideas. Teaching, therefore, becomes the process of helping younger people to probe, discover, analyze, compare, and contrast rather than telling.

There is a rich mine of data now on attitude formation, change, and reinforcement which teachers need to study carefully and apply to this dimension of education as well as to others. For example, we know that most basic attitudes are learned very early but that attitudes can be changed at any age. We know that times of personal and societal crisis are the best times to bring about change. But we also know that people must not be threatened by changes. They must be relatively secure and much of their resistance to change recognized and tolerated as a manifestation of an inner struggle to reject the old and accept the new.

Therefore, the acceptance of the old views with equanimity is important, so that the threat to a person is minimal. We know, too, that appeals to pride and self-interest may be helpful in bringing about change. So are the statements and actions of prestige persons. Membership in new groups is often helpful in insulating a person from slipping back into old patterns.

We also know that changing a total group is easier and more likely to produce results than trying to change individuals. And it is clear that concentration upon specific areas of change rather than general approaches is usually most effective....

Changed behavior is our goal and it consists in large measure of improved attitudes, improved skills, and carefully selected knowledge—these three—and the greatest of these is attitudes....

The program emphasizes feelings as well as facts. In some parts of the world in the field of education today, the emphasis is upon cognitive learning or intellectual development.

This is especially true in the United States.… But in the international dimensions of education, as in other dimensions, the affective domain or emotional development is just as important....

We need to get at the "gut level" in much of our teaching. We need to use music, art, powerful literature, films and other approaches which get at the feeling level of learning.

For example, the writer has found tremendously effective a 10-minute film on the United Nations, entitled "Overture." There is no narrative in this film; the pictures are shown against a background of music, with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra playing the Egmont Overture. It is a powerful learning device and moves its viewers in a way few other approaches touch them. (pp. 23–39)

1971

EDUCATION: FROM THE ACQUISITION OF KNOWLEDGE TO PROGRAMMED, CONDITIONED REsponses was submitted by Assemblyman Robert H. Burke (70th California Assembly District) to the California Legislature in 1971. An excerpt follows

INTRODUCTION

Several months ago, my office began accumulating material which had particular significance The Serious Seventies : c. 1971 98 in the area of Planning, Programming, Budgeting Systems because of its potential use as a tool of fiscal accountability in the field of education. As we searched into the information available on the application of this subject in education, it became increasingly difficult to see any relationship between the proposed programs and fiscal accountability. It was apparent after a study of the methods proposed for use by the schools for accountability purposes that fiscal accountability was being minimized and that techniques were being promoted for achieving behavioral objectives. Other seemingly unrelated organizations, projects, and programs were uncovered because of their influence on the application of accountability methods. They were as parts in a puzzle—analyzed by themselves, each of these projects appeared to be either harmless or an expression of someone’s "dream." When linked together with other "harmless" programs, they were no longer formless but could be seen as an entire package of plans outlining methods of implementation, organization structures (including flow-charts), computerization, use of behavioral profile catalogs, and goals and objectives determination.

CONTROVERSIAL SEXOLOGISTS LESTER A. KIRKENDALL AND RUTH F. OSBORNE DEVELOPED in 1971 a program entitled "Sex Education—Student Syllabus No: 216786, correlated with M.I.P. 180800" which was one of the first sex education programs to use a mastery learning approach. This program was published by the National Book Company, owned by Carl W. Salser, executive director of Educational Research Associates, a non-profit educational research corporation in Portland, Oregon. Mr. Salser is also the owner of Halcyon Press and is a long-time advocate of individualized instruction and mastery learning.

Carl Salser is the author of a pamphlet entitled "The Carnegie Unit: An Administrative Convenience, but an Educational Catastrophe" and is a supporter of outcome-based education/ mastery learning. Full implementation of OBE/ML calls for the removal of the Carnegie Unit—the "seat time" measure of subject exposure for students which determines graduation and college entry eligibility. Salser was a member during 1981–1982 of the presidentially appointed National Council on Educational Research which had oversight of the activities at the former National Institute of Education of the U.S. Department of Education.

IN 1971 THE SECRETARIAT OF THE UNITED NATIONS EDUCATIONAL, SCIENTIFIC, AND CULtural Organization (UNESCO) called upon George W. Parkyn of New Zealand to outline a possible model for an education system based on the ideal of a continuous education process throughout the lifetime of the learner—a means of bringing an existing national school system into line with lifelong learning. The result of this effort was a book entitled Towards a Conceptual Model of Life-Long Education, published in 1973 by UNESCO (English Edition ISBN 92–3–101117–0).

The preface of the book contained the following interesting biographical sketch of the littleknown Dr. Parkyn:

The Secretariat called on George W. Parkyn of New Zealand to prepare this first study. Dr. Parkyn has rendered extensive service to education in many parts of the world: in New Zealand, as a teacher in primary and secondary schools, as a senior lecturer at the University of Otago, and as director of the New Zealand Council for Educational Research, 1954–1967; at UNESCO, where he made substantial contributions to the World Survey of Education; at Stanford University, California, as a visiting professor; in New Zealand again, as a visiting lecturer in Comparative Education at the University of Auckland; and as Professor of Comparative

Education at the University of London, Institute of Education.... Dr. Parkyn was asked to review the available literature in this field and to involve several of his colleagues at Stanford University, California, in discussions on the basic concept. Psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists, as well as professional educators took part in the conceptual stage, contributing a rich variety of views. Among those who helped the author in the preparation of the study were his research assistants, Mr. Alejandro Toledo and Mr. Hei-tak Wu, and his colleagues, Dr. John C. Bock, Dr. Martin Carnoy, Dr. Henry M. Levin and Dr. Frank J. Moore.

[Ed. Note: The Dr. Henry M. Levin mentioned above is the same Henry Levin whose K–8 Accelerated Schools Project is one of the seventeen reform models that schools may adopt to qualify for their share of nearly $150 million in federal grants, according to the January 20, 1999 edition of Education Week (p. 1). The article "Who’s In, Who’s Out" listed Accelerated Learning as being used in urban schools. It is based on a constructivist philosophy which has echoes of and references to Maria Montessori’s and John Dewey’s philosophies of education and incorporates the controversial Lozanov method of Superlearning.]

PSYCHOLOGY APPLIED TO TEACHING BY ROBERT F. BIENTER (HOUGHTON MIFFLIN CO.: BOSton, 1971) was published. This popular psychology text was recommended for use in Introduction to Educational Psychology courses in universities in the early 1970s. Chapter 5, under the subheading of "S-R Associationism and Programmed Learning," is excerpted here:

Watson [John B.] (who did the most to popularize Pavlovian theory in the United States) based one of his most famous experiments (Watson and Rayner, 1920) on the observation that young children have a "natural" fear of sudden loud sounds. He set up a situation in which a two-year-old boy named Albert was encouraged to play with a white rat. After this preliminary period, Watson suddenly hit a steel bar with a hammer just as Albert reached for the rat, and the noise frightened the child so much that he came to respond to the rat with fear. He had been conditioned to associate the rat with the loud sound. The success of this experiment led Watson to believe that he could control behavior in almost limitless ways, by arranging sequences of conditioned responses. He trumpeted his claim in this famous statement:

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well formed, and my own special world to bring them up in, and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and yes, even beggarman and thief—regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestry. (pp. 152–3)

Later on in the chapter, Skinner’s contributions are discussed:

An even more striking example of Skinner’s overwhelming enthusiasm for programmed learning is his claim that mere manipulation of the teaching machine should be "reinforcing enough to keep a pupil at work for suitable periods every day."... Thus it is apparent that Skinner’s enthusiasm has prevented him from seeing some of the deficiencies of programmed instruction. Many critics have been especially dissatisfied with his attempt to refute the charge that programs limit creativity. Clearly when the person composing a program decides in advance what is to be learned and how it is to be learned, a student has no opportunit0y The Serious Seventies : c. 1971 100 to develop in his own way. He is limited by what the programmer knows and by how the programmer learned....

It is true that the student might use the material in an original way after he had finished the program, but there is the possibility that programmed instruction interferes with this process. For example, some students who have completed programs report that although they have progressed quickly and satisfactorily and feel that they have learned something, they aren’t sure where to go from here. Typically, the next step is to take an exam, usually of the multiple-choice type, which is highly similar to the program in which that stimuli are presented and responses are chosen. But what happens after the exam? If the student cannot respond unless he is stimulated in the same way he was in the program or exam, he will rarely be able to apply what he has learned to real life situations.

What we are dealing with here is the subject of transfer… which is basic to education.

Ellis has pointed out that little research has been done on the transferability of programmed learning; in almost all studies the experimenter determines the degree of learning solely on the basis of each child’s performance on a test given immediately after the completion of the program. Skinner maintains that the student can be taught to transfer ideas through separate programs designed for this purpose and that a properly written program will wean the student from the machine, but there is little evidence to back up this contention. On logical grounds alone it seems reasonable to question the transfer value of programmed instruction.

Markle notes that in order to ensure that approximately 95 percent of the answers will  lowest common denominator—the slowest students in the group. This eventually leads to programs which most students can complete fairly easily, but it also leads to programs which are oversimplified and repetitious. (pp. 168–171)

THE INDIVIDUALIZED LEARNING LETTER (T.I.L.L.): ADMINISTRATOR’S GUIDE TO IMPROVE Learning; Individualized Instruction Methods; Flexible Scheduling; Behavioral Objectives; Study Units;

Self-Directed Learning; Accountability, Vol. I (February 22, 1971: T.I.L.L., Huntington, N.Y.)1 was published and circulated. Excerpts follow:

Opting to become a greater force in promoting I.I. (Individualized Instruction), The Northeast Association for Individualization of Instruction (Wyandanch, N.Y.) has gone national—by substituting the word "national" for "northeast.".... The enlarged 2–1/2 day convention is geared to give registrants more time to watch I.I. in action in live classrooms. Several of the nation’s I.I. leaders already lined up to run workshops include: Dr. Lloyd Bishop, NYU; Dr. Sid Rollins, Rhode Island College; Dr. Robert Scanlon, Research for Better Schools [Research for Better Schools and University of Pittsburgh Learning Research and Development Center (Robert Glaser) were instrumental in development of IPI in the early 1960s, ed.]; Dr. Edward Pino, Superintendent of Cherry Creek Schools (Englewood, CO); Dr. Robert Anderson, Harvard University; Dr. Leon Lessinger, Georgia State University; Dr. Robert Sinclair, University of Massachusetts; Jane Root, Stanford Research Associates; and Dr. Glen Ovard, Brigham Young University. Representatives of USOE, NEA, NY State Department of Education will be present. (The latter supports the conference with an annual grant.)....

QUOTES YOU CAN USE:

DOWN WITH BOOKS. "Textbooks not only encourage learning at the wrong level (imparting facts rather than telling how to gather facts, etc.), they also violate an important new concern in American education—individualized instruction.... Textbooks produce superficially knowledgeable students... who know virtually nothing in depth about anything.... A good start would be to... declare a moratorium on textbook use in all courses." Dwight D. Allen, Dean of Education, University of Massachusetts, writing on "The Decline of Textbooks, Change."2

RECOMMENDED BOOKS: Behavioral Objectives: A Guide for Individualized Learning. Fourvolume set covering more than 4000 objectives representing four years’ work of more than 200 teachers. Arranged by subject area. Covers language arts, social studies, math and science.

A comprehensive collection. Westinghouse Learning Corp., 100 Park Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10017.

MEETINGS STRESSING INDIVIDUALIZED INSTRUCTION: Ninth National Society for Programmed Instruction Convention, March 31–April 3, 1971. University of Rochester, Rochester, N.Y. Heavy emphasis on applying principles and processes of individualized instruction.

Session on redesigning schools of tomorrow. Contact Dr. Robert G. Pierleone, College of Education, University of Rochester, Rochester, N.Y. First Educational Technology Conference.

April 5–8, 1971. Americana Hotel, N.Y. City, N.Y. Conference seminars and workshops will cover curriculum design, use of computers, programmed instruction, simulation, innovation theory, etc.

IN FORTHCOMING ISSUES: Update of 46 Case Studies of Individualized Instruction as originally reported by Jack V. Edling, Oregon State System of Higher Education.

"REVISED REPORT OF POPULATION SUBCOMMITTEE, GOVERNOR’S ADVISORY COUNCIL ON Environmental Quality" for the State of Michigan, to be used at the April 6, 1971 meeting of the subcommittee, was filed in the Library, Legislative Service Bureau in Lansing, Michigan. Excerpts from this disturbing report follow:

I. Concept of a Population Goal In general, the Subcommittee was in agreement with U.S. Senate Resolution No. 214, as follows:

That it is the policy of the United States to develop, encourage, and implement at the earliest possible time, the necessary policies, attitudes, social standards, and actions which will by voluntary means consistent with human rights and individual conscience, stabilize the population of the United States and thereby promote the future well-being of the citizens of this Nation and the entire world.

It was the feeling of the Subcommittee that the intent of the above Resolution should be encouraged by voluntary means and due consideration given to human rights. However, in order to accomplish the above goal, state and federal legislation must accompany this intent to provide disincentives.

II. Optimum Goal

An optimum goal is to be considered in preference to a maximum carrying capacity. As a starting point, zero population growth is the recommended goal for the citizens of Michigan.... That the human population on a finite "space ship" cannot increase indefinitely is The Serious Seventies : c. 1971 102 obvious. What is not so obvious is what constitutes an "optimum" level of population and the methods by which it is to be limited.... III. How Does Society Obtain Population Control?

Constraints on population size can be divided into two types, biological and social. Biological constraints include the limitation of those energies and chemicals required to drive human society as a biological system.... Societal constraints are more appropriate since the human  population explosion is basically a social problem. There are three classes of social institutions which can be utilized to obtain population control. These are the political, economic and education systems. Each of these represent powerful control systems which help to regulate the behavior of our society.

A wide range of public policies are available by which man can affect population size. Some policies can seek to change man’s basic values and attitudes with respect to the issues of population size. Other policies can seek to directly affect man’s behaviors which have consequences for population size. Some suggested policy goals are listed.

General Public Understanding

Having children is a public interest as well as a private interest. Likewise, the use of the environment must be understood to be a collective responsibility rather than a private or individual responsibility, since the costs and the benefits of the use of the environment are indivisible to all members of the collectivity. This idea runs counter to the underlying ethic of individualism and privateness of our society, but is basic if we are to mobilize the collective will which is necessary for social action. To change such a basic set of attitudes and values requires cooperation from the full range of opinion leaders in the society. A program of education for leaders in all sectors of society, such as religious, economic, political, educational, technical, etc., is therefore called for.

Since basic attitudes and values are formed early in life, and since it is the youth of society who are yet capable of determining the size of future families, a program for all levels of formal education can be a powerful way to change society’s attitudes and values on the question of population size as outlined above.

The idea that family size is a collective, social responsibility rather than just an individual responsibility can be fostered both directly by exhortations by opinion leaders and in the schools, and indirectly by the actions that government and other institutions in society take. For example, the proposal to eliminate the income tax exemption for children in excess of the two-child family limit can be a powerful way for government to symbolize its determination that family size is a collective responsibility.

Public understanding of the interdependent nature of our natural and man-made environment is also important for enlightened public support for population control policies.

A state-wide education program concerning ecology and population biology is needed for both student and adult segments of our society. This will require vigorous action to remove the topic of sex from the closets of obscurity in which conservative elements in our society have placed it....

Cultural Changes

Two types of cultural changes are needed in order to reduce the population increase: reduce the desired size of families, and reduce the social pressure to marry and have a family.

Large families can be changed from an economic asset to an economic liability if all members of society can be offered the prospect that through work, saving, and deferred spending they can achieve economic security for themselves and their children. For the  lready affluent middle class, larger families can be made an economic liability by increasing the incentives for and the costs of advanced education for their children....

Cultural changes to reduce the social pressure to marry and have a family can be pursued by changing educational materials which glorify married life and family life as the only "normal" life pattern, by granting greater public recognition to non-married and non-family life styles, by facilitating careers for single women....

[Ed. Note: The above recommendation regarding reducing the social pressure to marry and have a family was successfully carried out over a period of 25 years according to an article entitled "Institution in Transition" by Michelle Boorstein which appeared in The Maine Sunday Telegram’s August 30, 1998 issue, Home and Family Section, G–1. This Associated Press article said in part:

They [Pam Hesse and Rob Lemar] share a home and a future but not a formal vow—just one couple caught up in the seismic shifts taking place in American attitudes toward marriage and childbearing.

A soon-to-be-released Census Bureau report shows Hesse is far from an exception; in fact, she’s in the majority. The report, the bureau’s first compilation of all its 60 years of data on childbearing and marriage, finds that for the first time, the majority of "first births"—someone’s first child—were either conceived by or born to an unmarried woman.

That is up from 18 percent in the 1930s.

This is connected to an erosion of the centrality of marriage, said Stephanie Coontz of Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, who studies the family and its role in history.]

Returning to the Population Subcommittee’s report:

Direct Behavior Changes

Two general types of public policies are distributive policies and regulative policies. Distributive policies involve the distribution of resources and opportunities to people who choose to modify their behavior to conform with the socially desired patterns. They thus operate as incentives rather than as official constraints. Examples include the elimination of tax incentives for larger families, monetary incentives for sterilization or adopted families, and removing the income tax discrimination against single citizens....

Regulative policies involve direct constraints on behavior and necessarily generate greater political conflict than distributive policies. This is because regulative policies eliminate the element of voluntary choice and apply automatically and categorically to a whole class of people or of behaviors. Examples of such regulative policies designed to control population growth include forced sterilization and restrictive licensing procedures to marry and to have children. However, it does not seem necessary, desirable, or feasible to involve regulative policies for population control at this time. One regulative type policy which is now in effect and which allows population increase is the law forbidding abortion. Restrictions against abortions should be removed to allow individual choice in the use of this back-up method of birth control....

A general acceptance of birth control to obtain population stability will create a more static ethnic, cultural and racial structure in society. Minority groups will continue to stay at a numerical minority. Minority problems are basically social and should be solved in that manner. An equilibrium condition will also alter the structure of our economic relationship both within our society (a shift from an expanding economy to a competitive displacement economy) and between other countries that will still be experiencing increasing popula-

Immediate consideration must be given to (1) the development of an integrated social control of our population size and growth, and (2) the impact of a steady stable condition on our society. The scope and complexity of this task requires the attention of a highly professional team whose talents and professional training are equal to the challenge. It is the recommendation of the Council that such a team be brought together and charged with the prompt development of the details of this program and reporting back to the Council.

Approved by the Population Subcommittee, March 30, 1971.

Present: Dr. C.T. Black, Mr. Robert Boatman, Professor William Cooper, Dr. Ralph MacMullan, and M.S. Reisen, M.D., Chairman.

Surely it is no coincidence that the above-mentioned Michigan and U.S. Senate recommended policies on population control were being discussed at the same time (1971) that the United States was engaged in "Ping Pong" diplomacy with Communist China, the international leader in mandatory population control. Some excerpts follow from "The Ping Heard Round the World" which appeared in the April 26, 1971 issue of Time magazine:

Dressed in an austere gray tunic, Premier Chou En-Lai moved along a line of respectfully silent visitors in Peking’s massive Great Hall of the People.... Finally he stopped to chat with the 15-member U.S. team and three accompanying American reporters, the first group of U.S. citizens and journalists to visit China in nearly a quarter of a century. "We have opened a new page in the relations of the Chinese and American people," he told the U.S. visitors.

...Yet in last week’s gestures to the United States table tennis team, the Chinese were clearly indicating that a new era could begin. They carefully made their approaches through private U.S. citizens, but they were responding to earlier signals that had been sent by the Nixon Administration over the past two years.

...Probably never before in history has a sport been used so effectively as a tool of international diplomacy.

[Ed. Note: Back to family planning, Michigan-style. Population and Family Planning in the People’s Republic of China, 1971, a book published by the Victor-Bostrom Fund and the Populaion Crisis Committee, has a table of contents that includes: "A Letter from Peking" by Edgar Snow, author of Red Star Over China; "Family Planning in China" by Han Suyin, M.D.; and "Why Not Adopt China’s Population Goals?" In other words, it looks like Ping Pong Diplomacy may have been used to open up the dialogue between Communist China and "private" American groups supporting population control. These would, in turn, lobby in Congress for more liberal family planning policies and for the legalization of abortion as recommended in the U.S. Senate Journal Resolution #214 and the Michigan paper. Here again, as was the case with the 1985 Carnegie Corporation-Soviet Academy of Sciences education agreement, diplomacy is being conducted by private parties: table tennis teams and groups such as the non-profit Victor-Bostrom Fund and the Population Crisis Committee.]

PERFORMANCE-BASED TEACHER EDUCATION: WHAT IS THE STATE OF THE ART? BY STANLEY Elam, editor of Phi Delta Kappa Publications (AACTE Committee on Performance-Based Teacher 105

Education, American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education: Washington, D.C., 1971), was published. This paper was originally prepared in 1971 pursuant to a contract with the U.S. Office of Education through the Texas Education Agency, Austin, Texas. Excerpts follow:

The Association is pleased to offer to the teacher education community the Committee’s first state of the art paper.... In performance-based programs... he [the teacher] is held accountable, not for passing grades, but for attaining a given level of competency in performing the essential tasks of teaching.... Acceptance of this basic principle has program implications that are truly revolutionary.

The claim that teacher education programs were not producing people equipped to teach minority group children and youth effectively has pointed directly to the need for reform in teacher education.... Moreover, the claim of minority group youth that there should be lternative routes to professional status has raised serious questions about the suitability of generally recognized teacher education programs.

[Ed. Note: The above paper was one of the first—and perhaps the most influential—professional papers setting the stage for full-blown implementation of Skinnerian outcome-based/ performance-based education. The definitions, criteria, assessment, etc., are identical to those found in present professional OBE literature. (See Appendix VII for fuller excerpts from this paper.)]

CONCERN REGARDING THE DELIBERATE DUMBING DOWN OF AMERICA IS NOT CONFINED TO this author according to an article entitled "Young People Are Getting Dumber," by David Hawkins, editorial staff writer, in the August 26, 1971 issue of The Dallas Morning News. Excerpts from this interesting article, which discusses the importance of acquiring a large vocabulary, follow:

John Gaston, who bosses the Fort Worth branch of the Human Engineering Laboratory (half his clients are from Dallas), dropped a bomb on me as we discussed aptitude testing.

"Do you know," he said, "that the present generation knows less than its parents?"

"You mean to say that young people aren’t smarter than we are—that all we’ve heard about this generation being the last and best isn’t so?"

Gaston nodded solemnly: "Young people know fewer words than their fathers. That makes them know less." He fixed me with a foreboding eye: "Can you imagine what a drop in knowledge of 1 per cent a year for 30 years could do to our civilization?"

The question answered itself. And though I could hardly believe what Gaston was saying, I knew it wasn’t instant sociology.

What he says is based on hundreds of thousands of tests given in several parts of the country since 1922 by what is probably the most prestigious non-profit outfit in the field of vocational research. The Human Engineers don’t even advertise.

But Gaston wasn’t through: "We also believe," he was saying, "that the recent rise in iolence correlates with the drop in vocabulary. Long [range] testing has convinced us that crime and violence predominate among people who score low in vocabulary. If they can’t express themselves with their tongues, they’ll use their fists."

"We test many gifted people who are low in vocabulary and we tell them all—we tell the world—to learn the words. Swallow the dictionary. Brilliant aptitudes aren’t worth much without words to give them wings."

Gaston paused and then dropped another bomb. "The one thing successful people have in common isn’t high aptitudes—it’s high vocabulary, and it’s within everybody’s reach. uccess actually correlates more with vocabulary than with the gifts we’re born with."

"Aptitudes will only show them which road to take. Vocabulary will determine how high they climb. Right now, the present generation is headed downwards."

SOME IMPORTANT STATEMENTS BY PROFESSOR JOHN I. GOODLAD, PRESIDENT OF EDUCAtional Inquiry,  Incorporated, appeared in A Report to the President’s Commission on School Finance (Schooling for the Future: Toward Quality and Equality in American Precollegiate Education) October 15, 1971. Goodlad makes the following comments under "Issue #9—Educational Innovation:

What changes in purposes, procedures or institutional arrangements are needed to improve the quality of American elementary and secondary education?":

The literature on how we socialize or develop normative behavior in our children and the populace in general is fairly dismal.... [T]he majority of our youth still hold the same values as their parents.... In the second paradigm... the suggestion is made that there are different targets for the change agent. For example, in a social system such as a school probably five to fifteen percent of the people are open to change. They are the "early majority" and can be counted on to be supportive. A second group, sixty to ninety percent, are the resisters. They need special attention and careful strategies need to be employed with them. Also, there are the leaders, formal and informal, and their support is critical. In his research, for example, Demeter noted some time ago the special role of the school principal in innovation:

Building principals are key figures in the (innovation) process. Where they are both aware of and sympathetic to an innovation, it tends to prosper. Where they are ignorant of its existence, or apathetic if not hostile, it tends to remain outside the bloodstream of the school.

Few people think in these ways today. Rather, as a people, we tend to rely upon common sense or what might be called conventional wisdom as we make significant decisions which, in turn, seriously affect our lives.... More often than not, school board members, parents and the public make important decisions about what should happen in their schools based upon these past experiences or other conventional wisdom.... The use of conventional wisdom as a basis for decision-making is a major impediment to educational improvement....

The child of suburbia is likely to be a materialist and somewhat of a hypocrite. He tends to be a striver in school, a conformist, and above all a believer in being "nice," polite, clean and tidy. He divides Humanity into the black and white, the Jew and the Christian, the rich and the poor, the "smart" and the "dumb." He is often conspicuously self-centered. In all these respects, the suburban child patterns his attitudes after those of his parents.... If we do not alter this pattern, if we do not resocialize ourselves to accept and plan for change, our society may decay. What may be left in the not too distant future is what other formerly great societies have had, reflections on past glories....

In the social interaction model of change, the assumption is made that the change agent is the decision-maker about the innovation. That is, it is assumed that he decides what the adopter will change to. This is a serious problem for two very good reasons. First, as we have shown, people cannot be forced to change until they are psychologically ready.

Thus, at every stage, each individual is, in fact, deciding how far he is ready or willing to move, if at all.

[Ed. Note: As a former school board member, this writer can relate to the above quote. Principals who resisted innovation eventually ended up being forced out of the system undergoing radical change. Their trials and tribulations were known only to them, and what they underwent during the change agents’ activities in their schools could be described as inhumane treatment.]

THE TRI-COUNTY K–12 COURSE GOAL PROJECT, THE RESULTS OF WHICH WERE LATER PUBlished by the Northwest Regional Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Education and used extensively throughout the nation as the formulaic sample for "goals setting," was initiated in 1971. In the appendix entitled "Classification System for the School Curriculum" for her Practitioner’s Implementation Handbook [series]: The Outcome-Based Curriculum (Outcome Associates:

Princeton, N.J., 1992), Charlotte Danielson, M.A., a prominent educator and proponent of outcome-based education, said: "The knowledge and inquiry and problem-solving skills sections of this taxonomy were first developed by the Tri-County Goal Development Project, Portland, Oregon."3 Assistant superintendent Victor W. Doherty, Evaluation Department of the Portland Public Schools in Portland, Oregon, in a November 2, 1981 letter to Mrs. Opal Moore, described this Goal Development Project as follows:

The Tri-County Goal Development Project was initiated by me in 1971 in an effort to develop a resource for arriving at well-defined learning outcome statements for use in curriculum planning and evaluation. At that time the only language available was the behavioral objective, a statement which combined a performance specification with a learning outcome often in such a way as to conceal the real learning that was being sought. By freeing the learning outcome statements from performance specification and by defining learning outcomes of three distinctly different types (information, process skills, and values), we were able to produce outcome statements that served both the planning and evaluation functions.

The project was organized to include 55 school districts in Multnomah, Clackamas, and Washington Counties and writing was done initially by teachers whose time was donated to the project by member districts.

[Ed. Note: The writer believes that this very controversial project which provided the goals framework for OBE was illegal—in clear violation of the 1970 GEPA prohibition against federal government involvement in curriculum development.]

1972

THE NEWPORT HARBOR ENSIGN OF CORONA DEL MAR, CALIFORNIA CARRIED AN ARTICLE entitled "Teachers Are Recycled" in its January 20, 1972 issue. The following are excerpts from this important article:

Education in California is finally going to catch up with the "innovative" Newport-Mesa Unified School District. With the passage of the Stull Bill, AB 293, all school districts are mandated to evaluate their classroom teachers and certificated personnel through new guidelines. Another portion of the bill will allow a district to dismiss a teacher with tenure, without going to court.

A teacher will no longer have the prerogative of having his own "style" of teaching, The Serious Seventies : c. 1972 108 because he will be held "accountable" to uniform expected student progress. His job will depend on how well he can produce "intended" behavioral changes in students.

"School districts just haven’t had time to tool up for it," explained Dr. William Cunningham, Executive Director of the Association of California School Administrators (ACSA).

Until recently, he was superintendent of the Newport-Mesa district.

The Newport-Mesa district, under the guidance of Dr. Cunningham, accomplished this task years ago. In fact we have warned of this appraisal plan in many of our columns throughout the past 2 years. Its formal name is "staff performance appraisal plan," at least in this district, and was formulated as early as 1967.

In 1968 five elementary schools in our district (California, Mariners, Presidio, Victoria, Monte Vista) and one high school (Estancia) were selected from schools that volunteered for the project. They were accepted on the basis that at least 60% of the teachers were willing to participate in the "in-service training sessions" and to "apply" the assessment processes learned at these sessions in their own classroom situations. A total of 88 teachers participated in all aspects of the pilot study....

FORMAL TRAINING SESSIONS: participants attended two 2–1/2 hour sessions to acquire the prerequisite tools. Evidence was collected to show that by the end of the final training session, 80% of the participants had acquired a minimal level of ability to apply these competencies.

PREREQUISITE TOOLS: Teachers learning how to identify or diagnose strengths and weaknesses, learning to write and use behavioral objectives, learning new teaching techniques and procedures, etc. Teachers learn these through workshops and in-service training, having acquired these skills, teachers had to go through the "appraisal" technique.

APPRAISAL TECHNIQUE: During the observation phase, observation teams composed of teacher colleagues and a resource person from UCLA or the District collected data regarding the execution of the previously planned lessons. The observation team recorded both the verbal behavior of pupils and teacher (e.g., teacher questions and pupil responses) and non-verbal behavior which could be objectively described....

What all this amounts to is "peer group" analysis. Group dynamics would be the term used in other circles. To be more blunt, others would call it sensitivity training in its purest form—role-playing, to say the least....

The teacher must cooperate and learn the new methods of teaching, writing behavioral objectives, playing psychologist.

THE NEW YORK TIMES CARRIED A LENGTHY FRONT PAGE ARTICLE ON APRIL 30, 1972 BY William K. Stevens entitled "The Social Studies: A Revolution Is on—New Approach Is Questioning,

Skeptical—Students Examine Various Cultures." This article explained the early history of the twenty-six-year controversy which has raged across the United States between those desiring education for a global society versus those desiring education in American History and Western Civilization; i.e., the question of "social studies" versus traditional history, and "process" education versus fact-based education. Excerpts follow:

When C. Frederick Risinger started teaching American History at Lake Park High School near Chicago, he operated just about as teachers had for generations. He drilled students on names and dates. He talked a lot about kings and presidents. And he worked from a standard text whose patriotic theme held that the United States was "founded on the highest principles that men of good will and common sense have been able to put into practice."

That was ten years ago, but it might as well be 50. For the social studies curriculum at Lake Park has changed almost beyond recognition. The 32-year-old Mr. Risinger, now head of the department, has abandoned the traditional text and set his students to analyzing all revolutions, not just the American, and from all points of view, including the British one that George Washington was both a traitor and an inept general.

AN ARTICLE ENTITLED "PEOPLE CONTROL BLUEPRINT" BY CAROL DENTON WAS PUBLISHED in the May, 1972 issue (Vol. 3, No. 12) of The National Educator (Fullerton, CA).

Recommendations made in the top secret paper discussed in this article echo those mentioned in the April 6, 1971 Michigan Governor’s Advisory Council on Population paper. Excerpts follow:

A "Top Secret" paper from the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, now in the hands of The National Educator, reveals a plan for total control of the people of the United States through behavioral modification techniques of B.F. Skinner, the controversial behaviorist author of Beyond Freedom and Dignity....

According to the "Dialogue Discussion Paper," marked "Top Secret" across the bottom of the cover page, a conference was held at the Center on January 17 through 19, 1972, at which time a discussion on "The Social and Philosophical Implications of Behavior Modification" was held. The paper in question is the one prepared [by] four individuals for presentation at that conference entitled "Controlled Environment for Social Change." The authors are Vitali Rozynko, Kenneth Swift, Josephine Swift and Larney J. Boggs....

The second page of the paper carries the inscription, "To B.F. Skinner and James G. Holland."... Page 3 of the paper states that the "Top Secret" document was prepared on December 31, 1971....

The authors of this tome are senior staff members of the Operant Behavior Modification Project located at Mendocino State Hospital in California and the project is partially supported by a grant from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse....

On page 5 of this blueprint for totalitarianism, the authors state that "we are presently concerned with controlling upheavals and anarchic behavior associated with social change and discontent."... The authors go on to say that they believe an "Orwellian world" is more likely under presently developing society than under the kind of rigorous controls of a society envisioned by Skinner....

On page 6, the authors deplore the growing demands for "law and order," stating that the population is now more apt to support governmental repression than previously, in response to "their own fears."...

They add that "with the rising population, depletion of natural resources, and the increase of pollution, repressive measures may have to be used to guarantee survival of our species. These measures may take the form of forced sterilization, greatly restricted uses of energy and limits on population movement and living location."...

Skinner, on the other hand, they allege—"advocates more sophisticated controls over the population, since punishment (by the government) for the most part works only temporarily and only while the punishing agent is present."...

On the other hand, the authors allege, operant conditioning (sensitivity training) and other behavioral techniques can be used to control the population through "positive reinforcement."

MARY THOMPSON, SECRETARY AND MEMBER OF THE SPEAKERS’ BUREAU OF THE SANTA CLARA, California Republican Women’s Federation, gave a very important speech regarding Planning,

Programming, Budgeting Systems (PPBS) on June 11, 1972. Following are key excerpts:

When I was first asked to speak to you about PPBS (Planning, Programming, Budgeting Systems), I inquired whether it was to be addressed to PPBS as applied to education. I shall deal with it at the education level today, however you should remember that PPBS is a tool for implementing the very restructuring of government at all levels in every area of governmental institutions. What is involved is the use of government agencies to accomplish mass behavioral change in every area....

PPBS is a plan being pushed by Federal and State governments to completely change education....

The accountability involved in PPBS means accountability to the state’s predetermined education goals....

One leader of education innovation (Shelly Umans—Management of Education) has called it "A systematic design for education revolution."...

In a systems management of the education process, the child himself is the product.

Note: the child... his feelings, his values, his behavior, as well as his intellectual development....

PPBS is the culmination of the "people planners" dreams....

Then in 1965 the means for accomplishing the actual restructuring of education was provided in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). President Johnson has said that he considered the ESEA the most significant single piece of legislation of his administration. Recall that it was also the same year of 1965 when the presidential order was given to introduce PPBS throughout the entire federal government. 1965 was the year which unleashed the actual restructuring of governmental processes and formally included education as a legitimate Federal government function....

PPBS is the systems management tool made possible by technology of computer hardware to affect the planned change....

In order to make an explanation of PPBS intelligible, you must also know that education itself has been redefined. Simply put, it has become the objective of education to measure and diagnose the child in order to prescribe a program to develop his feelings and emotions, values and loyalties toward predetermined behavioral objectives.... Drawing it right down to basics, we are talking about conditioned responses in human terms. Pavlov experimented on dogs!...

Taking each element of PPBS will show how the process is accomplished. PLANNING —Planning phase (please note that the process involved with a systems approach is always described in terms of "phases") always includes the establishment of goals committees, citizens committees, needs assessment committees.... These are referred to as "community involvement." The committees are always either self appointed or chosen—never elected.

They always include guidance from some trained "change agents" who may be administrators, curriculum personnel or local citizens. Questionnaires and surveys are used to gather data on how the community "feels" and to test community attitudes. The ingeniousness of the process is that everybody thinks he is having a voice in the direction of public schools.

Not so... for Federal change agencies, specifically regional education centers established by ESEA, influence and essentially determine terminology used in the questionnaires and surveys. The change agents at the district level then function to "identify needs and problems for change" as they have been programmed to identify them at the training sessions sponsored by Federal offices such as our Center for Planning and Evaluation in Santa Clara County. That is why the goals are essentially the same in school districts across the country.

It also explains why three years ago every school district was confronted with the Family Life Education issue at the same time....

Unknowing citizens’ committees are used by the process to generate acceptance of goals already determined. What they don’t realize is that professional change agents are operating in the behaviorist’s framework of thought and Mr. or Mrs. Citizen Parent is operating in his traditional education framework of thought. So, the local change agents are able to facilitate a group to a consensus in support of predetermined goals by using familiar, traditional terms which carry the new behaviorist meanings....

Another name for this process is Participatory Democracy, a term by the way, which was coined by Students for a Democratic Society in their Port Huron Manifesto to identify the process for citizen participation in destruction of their own political institutions....

Richard Farson of Western Behavioral Sciences Institute made a report to the Office of Education in Sacramento in 1967. He said it this way:

The application of systems analysis is aided by several phenomena that would be of help in almost any situation of organizational change. First, it is relatively easier to make big changes than to make small ones—and systems changes are almost always big ones.

Because they are big, it is difficult for people to mount resistance to them, for they go beyond the ordinary decision-making, policy-making activities of individual members of an organization. It is far easier to muster argument against a $100 expenditure for partitions than against a complete reorganization of the work flow....

Teachers, you have professional organizations to protect your professional interests. Use them to protect your personal privacy and professional integrity. Encourage organizations of teachers to take positions publicly in opposition to PPBS....

We believe the time has come to establish private schools to keep our children from falling victim to the behaviorists while there is still opportunity to do so. BE AWARE OF THE FACT THAT THE VOUCHER SYSTEM IS LURKING IN THE WINGS TO BRING THE PRIVATE SCHOOLS INTO THE NATIONAL CONTROL [emphasis in original].

THE LEDGER OF TALLAHASSEE FLORIDA ON JULY 27, 1972 IN AN ARTICLE ENTITLED "SCHOOLS to Try New Program" quoted Florida state education officials as saying that a new program being field-tested in Florida will tell teachers and parents not only why Johnny can’t read, but why the school can’t teach him and how much it’s costing to try. Excerpts follow:

"We’re putting all the various components together now," said Associate Education Commissioner Cecil Golden. "What we’re doing should soon become very visible." However, he estimates it will take seven to ten years before the program is completely operational....

Golden says it may sound like a lot of gibberish at this point, but "when we bring it all together" it should produce a more flexible and relevant educational system....

He said many people in the State Department of Education are working independently on various facets and aspects of the program and, like those assembling the atom bomb, "very few of them understand exactly what they are building, and won’t until we put all the parts together."

[Ed. Note: This article refers to PPBS/MBO—the early years. The Atlanta Constitution published an article entitled "Georgia Schools OK Tracking System" in its July 1, 1998 issue which describes later PPBS implementation and which is included in this book’s entry of the same THE DON BELL REPORT OF SEPTEMBER 8, 1972 REPORTED ON A WHITE HOUSE CONFERence on the Industrial World held February 7 of that year. The conference title was "A Look at Business in 1990." Excerpts follow:

As one of the participants in that conference, Roy Ash, President of Litton Industries and Chairman of the President’s Advisory Council on Executive Organization, later appeared before the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce to tell West Coast businessmen what was decided at the White House Conference. The billing for this latter event is impressive reading:

The Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Commerce and the White House Staff, is presenting The White House Conference, The World Ahead: A Look at Business in 1990, Thursday, May 18, 1972. Los Angeles Hilton. 3:00–6:30 p.m.

Following is part of what Roy Ash told his Los Angeles audience:

The answer is that increasing economic and business interdependence among nations is the keynote of the next two decades of world business—decades that will see major steps toward a single world economy....

Some aspects of individual sovereignty will be given over to international authority....

As importantly, international agreements between the socialist and the private property economies add a different dimension to the problems for which solutions need to be found over the years ahead. But as Jean Frere, Managing Partner of Banque Lambert, Brussels, forecasts, the socialist countries will take major steps toward joining the world conomy by 1990. He goes so far as to see them becoming members of the International Monetary Fund, the sine qua non for effective participation in multilateral commerce.

Then also, by 1990 an imaginative variety of contractual arrangements will have been devised and put into operation by which the socialist countries and the private capital countries will be doing considerable business together, neither being required to abandon its base idea....

These powerful factors of production—that is, capital, technology and management —will be fully mobile, neither contained nor containable within national borders....

As a framework for their [multinational corporations] development and application will be the establishment of more effective supranational institutions to deal with intergovernmental matters and matters between governments and world industry. A key intergovernmental institution that needs to work well in a world economy is the International Monetary Fund. The IMF will become, in Robert Roosa’s [Brown Bros. Harriman & Co.] words, the most advanced embodiment of the aspirations that so many have for a world society, a world economy. The IMF, he forecasts for 1990, is going to be the source of all of the primary reserves of all the banking systems of the world....

For, in the final analysis, we are commanded by the fact that the economies of the major countries of the world will be interlocked. And since major economic matters in all countries are also important political matters in and between countries, the inevitable consequence of these propositions is that the broader and total destinies—economic, political, and social—of all the world’s nations are closely interlocked. We are clearly at that point where economic issues and their related effects can be considered only in terms of a total world destiny, not just separate national destinies, and certainly not just a separate go-it-alone destiny for the United States.

"THE FIELD OF EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY: A STATEMENT OF DEFINITION" BY DONALD P. Ely, editor and chairman of the Definition and Terminology Committee of the Association for Educational Computing and Technology (AECT, a spin-off of the National Education Association), was circulated in October, 1972. In this paper leading specialists in the field of educational technology warn of the potential dangers of computers and the need for ethics in programming. One of the participants in the production of this position paper said: "If it is decided the work will bring about negative ends, the concerned professional refuses to perform it." (See Appendix VIII for fuller excerpts.)

DR. CHESTER M. PIERCE, M.D. OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY WROTE AN ARTICLE ENTITLED "Becoming Planetary Citizens: A Quest for Meaning" which appeared in the November 1972 issue of Childhood Education. Excerpts follow which include alarming recommendations for "education":

Creative Altruism

In the past forty years social science experimentation has shown that by age five children already have a lot of political attitudes. Regardless of economic or social background, almost every kindergartner has a tenacious loyalty to his country and its leader. This phenomenon is understandable in the psychological terms of loyalty to a strong father-figure and of the need for security. But a child can enter kindergarten with the same kind of loyalty to the earth as to his homeland....

Systems Analysis

Children can be taught to integrate knowledge of systems in ever-widening circles. I don’t know how to tell you to do it, but as professionals you will be challenged to find ways. Just because no one yet knows how doesn’t mean it can’t be done....

New Views of Parenting

Another essential curricular decision you will have to make is what to teach a young child about his future role as a man or a woman. A lot will depend on what you know and what your philosophy is about parenting.... Already we are hearing about experiments that are challenging our traditional views of monogamous marriage patterns....

Learning to Relinquish

Finally—perhaps most difficult of all—you will have to teach children how to unlearn, how

to re-learn and how to give up things....

Public Problem Number One

If we truly accept that today’s child must grow [up] to be a cosmopolite and "planetary citizen," we face major problems. How do you get a child to see that the whole world is his province when every day on television he sees people who can’t live next door to their neighbors, who argue about things like busing?... Before the horizon I think the major problem to be solved in America if we are to enable people to grow as super-generalists and "planetary citizens" is the elimination of racism. Paradoxically, both the two chief deterrents and the two chief facilitators to this goal are the public school system and the mass media....

Early childhood specialists have a staggering responsibility but an unrivaled importance in producing "planetary citizens" whose geographic and intellectual provinces are as limitless as their all-embracing humanity.

BRUCE JOYCE AND MARSHA WEIL OF COLUMBIA TEACHERS’ COLLEGE WROTE MODELS OF Teaching (Prentice Hall, Inc.: Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1972). The book was the product of research funded by the U.S. Office of Education’s Bureau of Research under a contract with Teachers’ College, Columbia University, in 1968. Models of Teaching’s importance lay not only in the fact that the book itself would be used extensively for in-service teacher training in behavior modification, but that the book would serve as the foundation from which Joyce would develop his "Models of Teacher Repertoire Training," which has been used extensively (since the 1970s to the present) in order to change the teacher from a transmitter of knowledge (content) to a facilitator of learning (behavior modifier). Several excerpts from Models of Teaching follow:

Principles of teaching are not conceived as static tenets but as dynamically interactive with social and cognitive purpose, with the learning theory underlying procedures, with available support technology, and with the personal and intellectual characteristics of learning groups. What is emphasized is the wide range of options the teacher may adopt and adapt to his unique situation.

In the preface, which has a subtitle, "We Teach by Creating Environments for Children," Joyce and Weil explain:

In this book we describe models which represent four different "families" of approaches to teaching. Some of the models focus on the individual and the development of his unique personality. Some focus on the human group and represent ways of teaching which emphasize group energy, interpersonal skills, and social commitment. Others represent ways of teaching concepts, modes of inquiry from the disciplines, and methods for increasing intellectual capacity. Still others apply psychological models of operant conditioning to the teaching-

learning process. For the teacher we provide some advice on how to learn the various models based on our experiences in the Preservice Teacher Education Program at Teachers College, Columbia University. For curriculum and materials designers we include chapters on systematic planning using a variety of models of teaching. For both, we present a system for deciding what approaches to teaching are appropriate for what ends and how models can be selected to match the learning styles of children. (pp. xiii–xiv) Excerpts from the table of contents of Models of Teaching include:

(2) Group Investigation—Democratic Process as a Source. The school is considered as a model of an ideal society. This chapter explores a variety of democratic teaching designed by Herbert Thelen to bring about a new type of social relationship among men.…

(5) The Laboratory Method—The T-Group Model. The National Training Laboratory has developed approaches to train people to cope with change through more effective social relationships. This model is the father of the encounter-group strategies.

(6) Concept Attainment—A Model Developed from a Study of Thinking. This model was developed by the authors from a study of work by Jerome S. Bruner and his associates.

[Bruner will be encountered in a later entry as a developer, along with B.F. Skinner, of the humanistic social studies curriculum, Man: A Course of Study, ed.]

(7) An Inductive Model—A Model Drawn from Conceptions of Mental Processes and General Theory-Building. The late Hilda Taba developed a series of models to improve the inductive thinking ability of children and adults. Her strategies are presented in this chapter.... [In 1957 a California State Senate investigative committee exposed the work of Hilda Taba as harmful to children, ed.]

(12) Non-Directive Teaching—Rogerian Counseling as a Source. From his studies of counseling and therapy, Carl Rogers has developed a flexible model of teaching emphasizing an environment which encourages students to create their own environments for learning.

(13) Classroom Meeting Model—A Model Drawn from a Stance toward Mental Health. Another therapist, [William] Glasser, has also developed a stance toward teaching—one which emphasized methods easily applicable to the classroom situation.... [In 1971 the Citizens Committee of California, Inc., presented "A Bill of Particulars" for the abolition of Dr. William Glasser’s theory from the Orange County Unified School District which stated in part: "Dr. Glasser has developed a method of education which negates a desire to achieve and compete; destroys respect for authority; expounds a ‘situational ethics’ philosophy; and develops group thinking." William Glasser’s philosophy is a component of Outcome-Based Education, ed.]

(15) Awareness Training—A Model to Increase Human Awareness. Gestalt therapists and other humanistic psychologists have focused on strategies for increasing the awareness and sense of possibilities of individuals. A number of models for sensitivity training have been developed by William Schutz.

(16) Operant Conditioning—The pioneering work of B.F. Skinner has been followed by a mass of approaches to teaching and training based on the shaping of learning tasks and use of reinforcement schedules. Several such models are explored here.

(17) A Model for Matching Environments to People—The psychologist David Hunt has  generated a "model of models"—an approach to teaching which suggests how we can match teaching styles to learning styles so as to increase growth toward personal flexibility.

(18) The Models Way of Thinking—An Operational Language. The chapter explores the philosophical and practical implications of a stance toward education and includes a spectrum of models which have different uses for different students.

One finds the following information in chapter 16 under the title "Operant Conditioning":

The person most responsible for applying behavioral principles to education is B.F. Skinner, whose Theory of Operant Conditioning provided the basis for programmed instruction.

The Theory of Operant Conditioning represents the process by which human behavior becomes shaped into certain patterns by external forces. The theory assumes that any process or activity has observable manifestations and can be behaviorally defined, that is, defined in terms of observable behavior. Either or both of the theory’s two major operations, reinforcement and stimulus-control, are emphasized in the educational applications of operant conditioning theory.

Conditioning refers to the process of increasing the probability of occurrence of existing or new behavior in an individual by means of reinforcement. In operant conditioning the response (behavior) operates upon the environment to generate consequences.

The consequences are contingent upon the emission of a response, and they are reinforcing.

For example, the response "Pass the butter" operates upon the environment, another The Serious Seventies : c. 1972 116 person, to obtain the butter. The response is reinforced by the receipt of the butter. In other words, the probability that a future desire for butter will elicit the same response is increased by its initial success.... The stimulus and reinforcement are independent variables upon which the response is dependent. As Skinner phrases it "the stimulus acting prior to the emission of the response, sets the occasion upon which the response is likely to be reinforced."

(1) A stimulus is "any condition, event or change in the environment of an individual which produces a change in behavior." (2) It may be verbal (oral, written) or physical. A response may be defined as a unit of behavior.... According to Skinner, reinforcement must immediately follow a response if it is to be effective. Delayed reinforcement is much less effective in modifying behavior. (pp. 271–273)

An official overview of the "Models of Teacher Repertoire Training" program, made available to the author while working in the U.S. Department of Education, states under "Brief Description of Intervention" the following:

The objective of the intervention is to prepare teachers who can choose from a number of available alternatives the most appropriate strategy to be used with a particular group of students in a particular situation at a particular time. "Most appropriate" refers to the effectiveness of the strategy selected vs. the alternatives in terms of the probability that the students will learn what the teacher has predicted for them. The feasibility of achieving this objective in a clinical, or controlled situation has been long established. This intervention establishes that feasibility in the real world of the elementary and secondary school settings and offers a reliable, cost effective plan to do so.... The models which have been selected for this system are ones for which there is empirical evidence and/or theoretical grounding which supports the probability that students will learn what is predicted from them. Teachers learn to select the models and match them to the objectives they seek.... The families include: (1) Behavior Modification and Cybernetic Models which have evolved from attempts to develop efficient systems for sequencing learning tasks and shaping behavior by manipulating reinforcement.... Clinical analysis guides are useful to provide feedback about performance and to support on-site coaching. In addition to print material there are more than thirty hours of video tapes to support the training system.... The principal criterion of effectiveness rests upon existing empirical evidence that pre-specified changes in teaching behavior will produce predictable changes in pupil performance.

This information suggests that Skinner—and, evidently, Joyce and Weil—believe that man is truly only a response organism with no intrinsic soul or intellect, definitely a product of evolution. During a U.S. Department of Education Joint Dissemination Review Panel meeting at which Bruce Joyce and Jim Stefansen submitted application for funding, some of the participants made the following statements:

JOYCE: "It has been difficult in the past to bring about curriculum change, behavior change. In California we are establishing a network of 100 school districts. New strategies for teaching and exporting programs."

COULSON: "Couldn’t agree more that what you are doing needs to be done. Maybe we are not ready yet to talk about selective use of repertoire. You must gather data supporting selective use of methods."

STEFANSEN: "Primary claim is we do know how to train teachers to make ultimate choices so that when those behaviors take place students are affected. Question is, can you train teachers to accept strategies each of which we know are the better of two or more choices?"

JACKSON: "No question in my mind that Joyce is onto something of great importance.

Problem here has to do with claims of effectiveness rather than evidence of effectiveness.

Relationship between teacher behavior and student achievement."

(UNKNOWN PANEL MEMBER) "There are thousands of investigations to support Skinner strategies."

The following excerpt from the "Models of Teacher Repertoire Training"—which includes most of the highly controversial behavior modification methods in existence—is taken from Models of Teaching by Joyce and was furnished to this writer by the Maine Facilitator Center in Auburn, Maine in 1985.4

(1) Information Processing—how do students acquire and act on information?

Concept Attainment—Jerome Bruner, Goodnow, Austin Inductive Thinking—Hilda Taba Direct Instruction—Benjamin Bloom, Madeline Hunter, James Block and Ethna Reid [How interesting that Joyce identifies the four most influential developers and promoters of Skinnerian "Mastery Learning/Teaching" with "Direct Instruction," which is the method attributed to Siegfried Engelmann and called for in the Reading Excellence Act of 1998, ed.]

(2) Personal Family—How does each person develop his/her unique possibilities?

Nondirective Teaching—Carl Rogers

Synectics—Thomas Gordon

Classroom Meetings—William Glasser

(3) Social Models—How does the individual relate to society or other people?

Jurisprudential Inquiry—Oliver and Shaver

Role Playing—Shaftel, Chesler and Fox

(4) Behavioral Models—How is visible behavior changed?

Training Model

Stress Reduction—Decker

Assertiveness Training—Wolpe, Lazarus

[Ed. Note: The writer has given extensive coverage to Models of Teaching since these teacher behavior modification training programs have been in effect for thirty years and are probably the most inclusive. It includes many, if not all of the controversial methods about which parents complain, if they are lucky enough to find out they are being used. Most parents are unaware of these manipulative methods intended to change their children’s behavior. Considering the prevalence of behavior modification in the schools it is a wonder our schools and our children are not in worse shape than they are. There has obviously been immense teacher and student resistance to this type of manipulation.]

PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON CREATED THE NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF EDUCATION (NIE) IN 1972.

Serving as a presidential assistant at that time, Chester Finn (who would later be appointed assistant secretary of education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement under The Serious Seventies : c. 1972

Secretary William Bennett in the Reagan administration) was one of the principal authors of Nixon’s proposal for NIE. The December 8, 1982 issue of Education Week contained an  interesting article on the history and purpose of NIE entitled "Success Eludes 10-Year-Old Agency."

An excerpt which pertains to the redefinition of education from academic/content-based to scientific, outcome-/performance-based follows:

"The purpose of a National Institute of Education," said Daniel P. Moynihan who was the agency’s principal advocate in the Nixon Administration, "is to develop the art and science of education to the point that equality of educational opportunity results in a satisfactory equivalence of educational achievement."

For those who have difficulty understanding Daniel Moynihan’s education jargon, "develop the art and science of education to the point that equality of educational opportunity results in a satisfactory equivalence of educational achievement" means that education from that time on would be considered a "science." In other words, with education becoming a "science," behavioral psychology (Pavlov/Skinner) would be used in the classrooms of America in order to equalize results which would be predictable and could be scientifically measured. The teacher and student would be judged not on what they know, but on how they perform—like rats and pigeons—facilitating the "redistribution of brains." Professor James Block, a leader in Skinnerian/mastery learning circles, discussed this redistribution of brains in an article published in Educational Leadership (November 1979) entitled "Mastery Learning: The Current State of the Craft." Block explained that:

One of the striking personal features of mastery learning, for example, is the degree to which it encourages cooperative individualism in student learning as opposed to selfish competition. Just how much room is there left in the world for individualists who are more concerned with their own performance than the performance of others? One of the striking societal features of mastery learning is the degree to which it presses for a society based on the excellence of all participants rather than one based on the excellence of a few. Can any society afford universal excellence, or must all societies make most people incompetent so that a few can be competent?

Returning to the Education Week article referenced above, the story of NIE continued:

Among the serious, continuing obstacles to the Institute’s attainment of its goals, those interviewed for this article cited the following three: Understanding, Funding, and Leadership....

Under "Understanding" one reads: "Because educational research is a relatively young area of social science, it does not enjoy wide respect among scholars, and its relationship to teaching and learning is poorly understood by many of those who work in the schools."

The first director chosen by the current [Reagan] Administration to head the institute, Edward A. Curran, articulated the conservatives’ position in a memorandum to the President last May that called for dismantling the institute. "NIE is based on the premise that education is a science whose progress depends on systematic ‘research and development.’

As a professional educator, I know that this premise is false," wrote Mr. Curran, who was dismissed from the agency shortly thereafter.

[Ed. Note: Ed Curran was the first "shoe to drop"; he would be followed by some of the nation’s finest academic teachers who also held Curran’s view that education is not a science.

Of interest to this writer is the extensive influence NIE’s research has on local classroom practice considering its rather paltry budget. The reason for this lies in the fact that 90% of all education research is federally funded, thus guaranteeing that NIE controls 90% of the national research product—teaching and learning. When the National Institute of Education was finally abolished none of its functions were eliminated since it was subsumed by the Office of Educational Research and Improvement.

"Equivalence of educational achievement," described by Patrick Moynihan, equals Performance-

Based Education (PBE) and Outcome-Based Education (OBE), which in turn equal a deliberate dumbing down of American teachers and youth—necessary in order to implement the performance-based workforce training agenda planned since the early nineteen hundreds.

Good academic- and content-oriented teachers understand that education is not social science. In 1999 efforts are being made to encourage these good teachers to get out of the way so that teachers trained in performance-based Skinnerian teaching and Total Quality Management can be hired to replace them.]

1973

SCHOOLING IN THE UNITED STATES BY JOHN GOODLAD, M. FRANCES KLEIN, AND JERROLD M. Novotney (Charles F. Kettering Foundation Program: McGraw-Hill Co., New York, 1973) was published. Excerpts follow:

CONDITIONING OR BEHAVIOR MODIFICATION:

Several experimental preschool programs make extensive use of behaviorist theory (now called "operant conditioning" or "behavior modification") as a means of instruction in both the cognitive and socioemotional realms. [Professor Lawrence] Kohlberg notes:

In general, such a program implies a play for shaping the child’s behavior by successive approximation from responses. At every step, immediate feedback or reward is desirable and immediate repetition and elaboration of the correct response is used. A careful detailed programming of learning is required to make sure that (a) each response builds on the preceding, (b) incorrect responses are not made since once made they persist and interfere with correct responses, and (c) feedback and reward are immediate.

The Liverpool Laboratory School at the Research and Development Center in Early Childhood Education at Syracuse University is a program based directly on reinforcement theory.… The school is to determine whether children can learn cognitive skills during the preschool years and to identify techniques which will be successful in bringing about such learning. The program is built around a highly detailed schedule of reinforcement. Skills to be taught are broken down into specific components, each of which is immediately reinforced when it appears correctly. Teachers reinforce in four steps: in the first, raisins or candies are awarded for each correct response; in the second, the candies are replaced by tokens which can be traded for a small prize; the third involves distributing tokens which can be exchanged for more valuable tokens. Two or more of the latter may be traded for a prize. In the fourth step, four valuable tokens are required to receive a prize....

Bereiter and Engelmann [Direct Instruction/DISTAR/Reading Mastery (SRA)] also use operant conditioning in their program. Their reinforcement program contains both verbal and tangible rewards. Weber describes a rapid-fire sequence in language training in which the teacher verbally reinforces each response of the students:

Teacher: What is the same as beautiful?

Children: Pretty.

Teacher: Good. You are so good. If someone is beautiful they are pretty. What is the

opposite of pretty?

Children: Ugly.

Teacher: I’ll have to shake everyone’s hand....

She also speaks of an arithmetic lesson in which the children were given a cracker for each correct response....

Teaching and managing behavior by means of operant conditioning does not appeal to all and raises several moral issues. In the first place, it postulates an image of the learner as passive and receptive and leaves little room for individuality and creative thinking. According to William E. Martin in Rediscovering the Mind of the Child:

A science of behavior emphasizes the importance of environmental manipulation and scheduling and thus the mechanization and routinization of experience. Similarly, it stresses performance in the individual. Doing something, doing it efficiently, doing it automatically —these are the goals. It is the mechanization of man as well as the mechanization of the environment. The result is the triumph of technology: a push button world with well-trained button-pushers. (pp. 40–43)

[Ed. Note: Surely, if American parents understood this dehumanizing method being implemented in the nation’s schools under whatever label—OBE, ML, DI in conjunction with computers —they would see the many dangers to their children. One of those dangers being that after twelve years of rewards for correct answers, will their children ever have the courage or be motivated to do anything on their own—to take a stand when what is left of their "principles" is challenged? If this method is implemented in all schools of the nation, and I mean ALL—public, private, religious and home school (in many cases due to the use of computers or "Skinner’s box") as is happening right now—our nation will become a nation of robotic drones responding to whomever wishes to control them for whatever purpose.]

RONALD G. HAVELOCK’S THE CHANGE AGENT’S GUIDE TO INNOVATION IN EDUCATION WAS published (Educational Technology Publishing: Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1973). This Guide, which contains authentic case studies on how to sneak in controversial curricula and teaching strategies, or get them adopted by naïve school boards, is the educator’s bible for bringing about change in our children’s values. Havelock’s Guide was funded by the U.S. Office of Education and the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, and has continued to receive funding well into the 1980s. It has been republished in a second edition in 1995 by the same publishers.

[Ed. Note: Why is it that the change agents’ plans and their tools to "transform" our educational system never change, while parents and teachers are told, repeatedly, that they must be ready and willing to change?]

FOUNDATIONS OF BEHAVIORAL RESEARCH, SECOND EDITION BY FRED N. KERLINGER OF New York University (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc.: New York, 1973) was published. Describing the purpose of writing this textbook, Dr. Kerlinger wrote in his preface:

The writing of this book has been strongly influenced by the book’s major purpose: to help students understand the fundamental nature of the scientific approach to problem solution....

All else is subordinate to this. Thus the book, as its name indicates, strongly emphasizes the fundamentals or foundations of behavioral research [emphasis in original].

To accomplish the major purpose indicated above, the book... is a treatise on scientific research; it is limited to what is generally accepted as the scientific approach.

Kerlinger’s treatise on scientific research, from which the writer quotes, would have been strengthened considerably had he included the following description of Wilhelm Wundt’s theory:5

A thing made sense and was worth pursuing if it could be measured, quantified, and scientific cally demonstrated. Seeing there was no way to do this with the human soul, he proposed that psychology concern itself solely with experience.

Hence, behavioral psychology and scientific research were born. With such a heavy emphasis on quantifiable, measurable, and scientifically demonstrable performance as a base for psychological research, the writer felt it important to use an instructive text which would help the reader understand the complexities of what is known as "the scientific method," since it is being so widely proclaimed as the be-all and end-all of educational curriculum development and methodology today. Fred Kerlinger states in his Foundations of Behavioral Research textbook that:

Scientific research is a systematic, controlled, empirical and critical investigation of hypothetical propositions about... the presumed relations among natural phenomena.... If such and such occurs, then so-and-so-results....

The scientist... systematically builds his theoretical structures, tests them for internal consistency, and subjects aspects of them to empirical test. Second, the scientist systematically and empirically tests his theories and hypotheses.

These statements lead one to believe that the true scientific method so often employed by scientists dealing with experimental material which can be replicated and tested is being employed by behavioral psychologists. However, the following quotes from Kerlinger’s textbook will quickly dispel this misconception:

Many people think that science is basically a fact-gathering activity. It is not. As M. Cohen says:

There is... no genuine progress in scientific insight through the Baconian method of accumulating empirical facts without hypotheses or anticipation of nature. Without some guiding idea we do not know what facts to gather... we cannot determine what is relevant and what is irrelevant. [From A Preface to Logic (Meridian: New York, 1956) by M. Cohen.]

The scientifically uninformed person often has the idea that the scientist is a highly objective individual who gathers data without preconceived ideas. Poincare pointed out how wrong this idea is. He said:

It is often said that experiments should be made without preconceived ideas. That is mpossible. Not only would it make every experiment fruitless, but even if we wished to do so, it could not be done. [From Science and Hypothesis (Dover: New York, N.Y., 1952) by H. Poincare.] (p. 16)

In other words, if we as parents and citizens believe that the same "scientific, research based" standards applied to research in education and psychology are those applied to medicine,

geology, or engineering, we are sadly mistaken. If we believe that objective criteria are employed when evaluating educational curriculum or behavioral analysis, we are likewise mistaken. Therefore, when presented with proposals in academic curricula that purport to be founded in "scientific, research-based" evaluation, we should take them with a grain of salt!

For instance, Kerlinger, as a psychological researcher, wrote about "Science and Common Sense":

Common sense may often be a bad master for the evaluation of knowledge…. [One] view would say that science is a systematic and controlled extension of common sense, since common sense, as [J.] Conant points out, is a series of concepts and conceptual schemes satisfactory for the practical uses of mankind. But these concepts and conceptual schemes may be seriously misleading in modern science—and particularly in psychology and education.

It was self-evident to many educators of the last century... to use punishment as a basic tool of pedagogy. Now we have evidence that this older common sense view of motivation may be quite erroneous. Reward seems more effective than punishment in aiding learning.

The reader by now may recognize the fact that B.F. Skinner’s behavioral theories have conclusively influenced psychological and educational theory, based on the last statement above—the fact that "rewards are more effective than punishment in aiding learning." This is vintage Skinner, who also did not believe in punishment. Skinner thought that a person could be controlled by the environment—psychologically facilitative "school climate"—to do what is best for him. Bad behavior should be ignored, according to Skinner. Good behavior should be rewarded. A very good method of dog training!

Kerlinger went on to point out that:

A final difference between common sense and science lies in explanations of observed phenomena.

The scientist, when attempting to explain the relations among observed phenomena, carefully rules out what have been called "metaphysical explanations." A metaphysical explanation is simply a proposition that cannot be tested. To say, for example, that people are poor and starving because God wills it, that studying hard subjects improves the child’s moral character, or that it is wrong to be authoritarian in the classroom is to talk metaphysics.

The New World Dictionary (Merriam Webster: New York, 1979) defines "metaphysics" as follows: "the branch of philosophy that deals with first principles and seeks to explain the nature of knowledge, nature of being or reality; metaphysical; beyond the physical or material; incorporeal, supernatural, transcendental." Most parents and even teachers are very well acquainted with what behavioral scientists call "metaphysics" in this context. The fact that behavioral researchers discount this important aspect of man’s personality and being is  consistent with what this writer perceived when gathering the research for this book—particularly in the chapter entitled "The Fomentation of the Forties and Fifties" when Kinsey, Bloom and Skinner brought together the powerful tools for the deconstruction of the God-fearing, educated man of the early twentieth century. There is no place for this brand of "science" when dealing with educational theories and methods which will influence forever the character and concept of man.

The bottom line for understanding this conflict between science and psychology is that the application of statistical methods to human behavior in the name of science is misdirected and inappropriate. When we measure natural phenomena, we get results that will vary depending upon the environmental factors affecting the thing being measured. For example, we can measure the speed at which a rock falls from a certain height. Although the rock’s speed may be affected by external factors, such as air resistance, there is nothing the rock can do, no decision it can make that will change the speed at which it falls. However, when we attempt to measure a person’s attitudes or opinions, that person can change his or her attitude, opinion, or belief at any time—often because of a conscious, deliberate decision to do so, as an act of will. Such deliberate assertion of a person’s will is extremely difficult, if not impossible to measure.

The social "sciences" and psychology have long yearned for the respectability of scientific disciplines, and have touted themselves as science for many decades. However, both fields emerged from the same humanistic cesspools of the last century. In discussing the shift to modern "naturalistic" or "materialistic" science, the late Dr. Francis Schaeffer warned:

When psychology and social science were made a part of a closed cause-and-effect system, along with physics, astronomy and chemistry, it was not only God who died. Man died. And within this framework love died. There is no place for love in a totally closed cause-and-effect system. There is no place for morals in a totally closed cause-and-effect system. There is no place for the freedom of people in a totally closed cause-and-effect system. Man becomes a zero. People and all they do become only a part of the machinery.6

1974

THE NATIONAL DIFFUSION NETWORK (NDN), THE TRANSMISSION BELT FOR FEDERALLY FUNDED and developed innovative and/or behavior modification programs, was established in 1974. This network, which bears much of the blame for the dilution of absolute values of those children and parents exposed to NDN programs from the mid-seventies to the present, was created to facilitate the adoption by local schools of innovative programs which had been approved by the Joint Dissemination Review Panel (JDRP), a federal panel of educators.

Most, if not all, states received funding from the U.S. Department of Education to set up Facilitator Centers staffed by educators familiar with NDN programs. These individuals who had contacts in school districts throughout the individual states promoted the programs and arranged for the "developers," or other staff associated with the program, to visit the state to conduct in-service training at schools which had adopted the programs.

Often these programs were described in benign NDN program terms and flew under the banner of "basic skills." Local school boards accepted them since they were subsidized and less expensive to implement than programs developed by private sector textbook companies.

The NDN’s penetration of the national educational landscape in the early 1980s is exemplified by the fact that Texas alone had approximately seventeen NDN offices which facilitated the adoption of programs. The State of Maine received some sort of "gold medal" for being the number one state in its number of program adoptions.

There is no question that the National Diffusion Network programs have caused more controversy among parents than any other programs developed with federal funds. The  regional hearings held by the U.S. Department of Education in 1984 to take testimony from citizens regarding the need for regulations to enforce the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment (PPRA) consisted of emotional and angry testimony from teachers and parents regarding the value destroying programs in the NDN. The two most destructive programs developed prior to 1984 were Curriculum for Meeting Modern Problems, which contained The New Model Me for the high school level, and Positive Attitude toward Learning. Both of these curricula employed behavior modification techniques, values clarification, role playing and, specifically, such games as "The Survival Game"—sometimes known as "The Lifeboat Game"—where students were enlisted to decide who is worthy of survival in a shipwreck: the priest, the lawyer, the pregnant mother, angry teenager, etc.—pure humanistic curricula.7

[Ed. Note: Critiques of many of the most controversial NDN programs can be found in the testimonies given during the hearings for proposed regulations for the Hatch Amendment in 1984 contained in Child Abuse in the Classroom edited by Phyllis Schlafly (Pere Marquette Press: Alton, Illinois, 1984).8 Mrs. Schlafly took it upon herself to publish these important testimonies due to the U.S. Department of Education’s unwillingness to do so. As late as 1994 the NDN continued to list T