About the author of this following excerpt~

“Charlotte Iserbyt is the consummate whistleblower! Iserbyt served as Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), U.S. Department of Education, during the first Reagan Administration, where she first blew the whistle on a major technology initiative which would control curriculum in America’s classrooms.” (more…)

Revolution in Education – Soviet Style

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“Now that parents will be faced with their children learning exclusively from computers, which are operant conditioning (attitude and value-changing machines), perhaps they will be willing to listen to those teachers and education researchers who have been issuing warnings ever since the early eighties when the Skinner method and the proposed use of computer technology was carved in stone by the Reagan Administration’s Department of Education, commencing with The National Commission on Excellence’s Nation At Risk Report; continuing with its major computer technology initiative, Project BEST: Basic Education Skills Through Technology, The infamous 1984 Utah grant to Professor William Spady to pilot outcomes-based education in Utah and then to “put it in all schools of the nation;” and ultimately with the Bush Administration’s support for Skinnerian Direct Instruction to teach reading.

The No Child Left Behind Act virtually mandated the “scientific research based” Skinner reading method be used in the classrooms of our nation, to the exclusion of other non-behaviorist methods of reading instruction which have successfully taught children to read for over one hundred years.”

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The General Agreement between the United States of America and the United Soviet Socialist Republic on Contacts, Exchanges and Cooperation in Scientific, Technical, Educational, Cultural and Other Fields, signed by Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev in 1985, which are still in effect, virtually merged the two countries’ education systems and called for cooperation in furthering this type of Pavlovian computerized education. The agreement signed between the Carnegie Corporation and the Soviet Academy of Science in 1985 was even more specific and resulted in “joint research on the application of computers in early elementary education, focusing especially on the teaching of higher level skills and complex subjects to younger children.” “Higher level skills” is often a euphemism for “critical thinking skills”.

N. Landa “Lenin: On Educating Youth,” published by the state-controlled Novosti Press, quotes Lenin on “thinking” as follows: “To pose a real question means to define a problem which demands a new approach and new research….sometimes accepted truth no longer answers as a solution for a serious and pressing problem. The school should cultivate in pupils the ability to perceive scientifically-evolved truths as stages along the endless road of cognition — not as something stationary and set.” But you, dear parent, will not know how your second grader’s values are being changed (“are evolving on Lenin’s endless road of cognition”) since, as Heuston says above: “you will not be able to get between your child and that [computer] curriculum.”

Not only are your children being conditioned in the Pavlovian/Skinnerian schools of America. Their teachers, who, as stated before, are now known as “facilitators of learning” not as “transmitters of knowledge”, have been even more victimized than your children. The May, 1985 issue of The Effective School report entitled “Principals Expectations as a Motivating Factor in Effective Schools” says the following regarding the conditioning of teachers:

“The principal expects specific behavior from particular teachers which should then translate into achievement by the students of these teachers; because of these varied expectations, the principal behaves differently toward different teachers, i.e., body language, verbal interactions and resource allocations. This treatment also influences the attitudes of the teacher toward the principal and their perception of the future utility of any increased effort toward student achievement. If this treatment is consistent over time, and if the teachers do not resist change, it will shape their behavior and through it the achievement of their students…With time teachers’ behavior, self-concepts of ability, perceptions of future utility, attitude toward the principal, and students’ achievement will conform more and more closely to the behavior originally expected of them.” (more…)

There is really a whole lot in this article. Unfortunately, I am about to head out to a event I will have to wait until later to add some additional comments.