ACADEMIC
QUESTIONS
A PUBLICATION OF THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF SCHOLARS WINTER 1998-99 VOL.12, NO.1
Cloning of the American Mind: Eradicating Morality Through Education, by B.K. Eakman. Lafayette, La.: Huntington House Publishers, 1998, 606 pp., $22.99 paperback.
Gary Crosby BrasorWhile it is commonly known that psychological testing of students in public schools has increased considerably in the past thirty years, the current depth of inquiry into children's thinking and the lack of safeguards on students' personal privacy are probably news to many. In Cloning of the American Mind: Eradicating Morality Through Education, B.K. Eakman describes an education establishment that collects vast amounts of information on school children nationally and uses it to promote a radical restructuring of the public education system, to be accomplished through a paradigm shift away from the traditional academic approach to an outcome-based model. As the new paradigm becomes installed nationally, students enter higher education with values increasingly hostile (not merely indifferent) to traditional content-based learning and personal accountability, and the results of this early indoctrination may not be reversible in one year, or even four.
Pennsylvania's Educational Quality Assessment (EQA) test, as one example among many, shows that students are often required to answer intimate questions about themselves and their family. Tests and their results are shrouded in secretiveness. The goals of most psychological tests are hidden from parents, and even from teachers and principals. When parents complain about test procedures and ask to see results, testing organizations typically refuse to respond, or deliberately misrepresent their activities. Meanwhile, testing companies surreptitiously identify individual students by requiring teachers to keep sheets linking student names with identifying numbers that appear on test booklets. A bureaucrat at the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) replied to parents complaining about invasion of privacy by distinguishing between "individually identified" and "individually identifiable" data (69). The test companies were correct in saying that students were not identifiable, in the sense that their names did not appear on the test booklets, but students had already been identified by the numbers linking booklets with student names. Such semantic deceptions, a conscious technique of those devising the tests, are exemplified in the replacement of "achievement," which limited testing to content, by "assessment," which additionally (and often primarily) allows testing for attitudes and values.
Student psychological tests are now in the domain of psychographics, a relatively new field combining elements of demo graphics and marketing research, defined as "the study of social class based upon the demographics... income, race, color, religion, and personality traits." (Chapter 2 is titled. "Psychographics and the Curriculum Connection.") Results of each student's psychological test; are merged with demographic data and sometimes information on other family members to create a personal file that goes into computer data banks. The data are then sold to businesses and accessed by a number of institutes, universities, and government agencies, of which Eakman lists twenty-nine. Government education agencies in particular use psychographic research to construct curricula intended to change students' values and attitudes. "Psycho-behavioral educators and curriculum development specialists are doing precisely what New Age advertisers are doing: inserting their messages unobtrusively into programs--learning programs. Subtle political messages increasingly are becoming part of the content" (54). This "psychologized education," which would be called "brain washing" if practiced on individuals, because it is practiced on groups of students, goes under the rubric "scientific coercion" (196). By allowing schools to get inside students' belief systems through psychological tests and attempt to change those belief systems through canned curricula, says Eakman, "we have incurred a whole new threat to our children's, and our nation's, freedoms" (204). Another tactic likely to upset parents of school-age children and civil libertarians alike (over- lapping categories) is the use of results of psychological tests coupled with greatly expanded categories of mental illness to label certain normal behavior as "sick" or "at risk," thus permitting the state to intervene in the family and attaching a "psychologically disturbed" label to the child for life (95-100).
Eakman traces the history leading to our present predicament to the complex interaction earlier this century among Marxists of the Frankfurt School (also known as the Institute of Social Research), Nazi-inspired eugenicists, and socialist-leaning American educators. Theodore Adorno's influential The Authoritarian Personnality, emanating from the Institute of Social Research and building on Marxist antifamily bias, attacked traditional parental role models under the guise of "anti-authoritarianism" and succeeded in associating "authoritarianism" with fascism in the public mind (151). The concept was carried further in the works of Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse, among others, with support from A.S. Neill of Summerhill fame in England. Adding to the mix, the American eugenics movement, inspired by the ideas of Ernst Rudin of the Task Force of Hereditary Experts under SS officer Heinrich Himmler, became interested in fostering eugenics through the schools (170-171). According to Paul Popenoe, board member of the American Eugenics Society (AES) and editor of The Journal of Heredity,
[C]ompulsory education is of service to eugenics. The educational system should be a sieve, through which all the children of the country are passed--or more accurately, a series of sieves, which will enable the teacher to determine just how far it is possible to educate each child so that he may lead a life of the greatest possible use fulness to the state and happiness to him self.... [C]ompulsory education makes it certain that none will be omitted. (174) [Eakrnan's italics omitted]Receptivity to such ideas within the education establishment had been pre pared by the fact that "Dewey, Thorndike, Potter, Russell, and their 'progressive' colleagues clearly were regurgitating the socialistic rhetoric of Marx and Lenin" and assumed the existence of compulsory education in their plans to prepare young minds for the new social order. After a visit to the Soviet Union at the invitation of the commissar of education, Dewey wrote glowingly in the New Republic in 1928 about "the marvelous developments of progressive educational ideas and practice under the fostering care of the Bolshevist government... . The great task of the school is to counteract and transform those domestic and neighborhood tendencies . . . the influence of the home and Church." Dewey insisted that the Soviet Union be the model for education in the West (143).Given the disposition of the "father of American Education," it is not surprising that the education establishment in the ensuing years spent considerable energy on concentrating control of curricula at state and then national levels, in the process finding ways to circumvent parental involvement. With help over the years from the faculty of Columbia University's Teachers College (which in included Dewey, Thorndike, and Russell), the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations, and the National Education Association, by 1984 the U.S. Office of Education was supporting Outcome-Based Education (OBE), the basis of the current Goals 2000. Developed by William Spady of Far West Lab and called "Mastery Learning" in an earlier version, OBE assumes a value system rooted in psychology, emphasizing group learning and emotional adjustment over content-based individualized learning. In Spady's words, the key concepts to the OBE program are "affective education, social compliance, and behavior modification," and he wanted the program "implemented in schools across the nation" (315). Using the "whole-child" approach assumed by OBE objectives, schooling becomes a process of "changing students' fixed beliefs" (28, Eakman's emphasis) and the age groups in K-12 are especially vulnerable to such change.
With Goals 2000, Outcome-Based Education was transformed into a national program. Though states are free to implement their own versions of Goals 2000, the results are startlingly similar, giving the impression of an effectively nationalized education curriculum. Consider the goals of several states: Illinois: "Work cooperatively in groups, understand and appreciate the diversity of our world and the interdependence of people"; Ohio: "Participate as productive members of a global society, value diversity"; Indiana: "Survival skills, intercultural skills, under standing others"; Pennsylvania: "Self- Worth, Learning Independently and Collaboratively, Adaptability to Change" (325).
Goals 2000 and Workforce 2000, as their names imply and as the federal government acknowledges, are closely linked. Composed of the Workforce Development Act and the Careers Act, Workforce 2000 is the successor to the 1994 School-to-Work Act (STW), whose premises it largely duplicates. According to a report by Marc Tucker, "America's Choice, High Skills or Low Wages," considered a blue print for STW legislation, "The States should take responsibility for assuring that virtually all students achieve the Certificate of Initial Mastery [CIM].
Once the Youth Centers are created, children should not be permitted to work before the age of 18 unless they have a Certificate of Initial Mastery or are enrolled in a program to attain it" (352). Businesses would be obliged, through threats and tax incentives (354), to hire approved workers, who would naturally be those meeting OBE objectives. Students who demonstrated proficiency in teamwork, critical thinking, problem solving, and communicating with diverse populations-OBE objectives--would be approved. Individualists, free thinkers, daydreamers, gifted students, and oddballs in general would likely not be certified.
Representative Henry Hyde of Illinois, in a letter to his colleagues urging them to repeal Goals 2000, the School-to-Work Act, and associated legislation, wrote:
Behavior modification is a significant part of restructuring our schools. School children will be trained to be "politically correct ... to accept alternative lifestyles, to contribute to the community through mandatory community service. . . . In Marc Tucker's letter to Mrs. Clinton, laying out the plan for Goals 2000, he states, "Radical changes in attitudes, values, and beliefs are required to move any combination of these agendas." (353)Ms.J. D. Hoye, originally from Oregon (where an STW-based program was piloted as a model for national change) and since 1994 at President Clinton's National School-to-Work office, when asked about student testing in an interview in the Northwest Regional Education Laboratory's newsletter, replied, "Our issue is it's for all kids. And all means all-all does not mean some." When asked specifically about children not in state schools, Ms. Hoye responded, "Most of those kids we've got through other agencies: ... adult and family services, teen parent programs, corrections programs, and other alternative learning programs... We're serious. All means all" (357). "Thus will private school youngsters and homeschooled children be roped into Workforce 2000" [Eakman's emphasis]. "STW and its two successors," writes Ms. Eakman, gave the Labor Department power not only to intervene in local education, but to channel individuals directly into specific industries within the work force. The language in the initiatives being considered and implemented by our nation's leaders... will maximize central government planning rather than individual options" (348-349).Eakman's themes-that public school children are subjected to invasion of privacy and psychological abuse; that material attacking traditional values has been systematically inserted into nationally disseminated curricula; that powerful forces in government, with the aid of part of the business community, are working through the education system to control our children's minds and future careers--have been expressed in earlier works like Rousas John Rushdoony's The Messianic Character of American Education, Samuel L. Blumenfeld's NEA: Trojan Horse in American Edneation, Herbert London's Armageddon in the Classroom, Phyllis Schiafly's Child Abuse in the Classroom, and Thomas B. Smith's Educating for Disaster. Eakman's merit is to have brought the themes together, corroborated and up dated earlier revelations about the influence of government-initiated programs and the role of organizations like the Carnegie Foundation and the NEA, and revealed the recent influence of the psychographics industry in public education. She gives credit to efforts to combat "curricular atrocities," praising the work of Walter McDougall (389), Mary Lefkowitz (393-394), and Alan Cromer (399-400), and quoting the findings of the National Association of Scholars' study, The Dissolution of General Education: 1914-1993, at length (405-406). Finally, to combat the new order for education and work that she has warned of, Eakman offers a how-to manual for anyone willing to be an activist in the cause of traditional education, beginning with "the principles of psych-war" and proceeding to "favorite attack strategies" (419-503).
The effect of this book and others like it focusing on forces seeking to reform K-12 suggests that the traditional relationship of higher to lower levels of education has broken down. Whereas thirty years ago the university curriculum largely determined that of the lower levels, now, as a result of curricular anarchy in higher education and the university's abdication of responsibility toward K-12 standards, the lower levels have been cut loose and have increasingly set their own curricular standards, oblivious to the concerns and priorities of higher education. Open admissions and affirmative action have exacerbated the situation by allowing K-12 operatives to pursue their own objectives in the knowledge that students would not be penalized for failing to meet university entrance standards. As the primary and secondary levels of education have assumed more control over their own standards, they have formed the new values that entering freshmen bring to the college classroom, despite the disapproval of many professors. Teaching is forced to adapt to student interests, entertainment replaces learning, authority is questioned (including the professor's subject matter superiority), and consumer satisfaction is demanded, especially in terms of grades.
None of the above changes was the result of 1960s-style protest on the part of students. Each was rather the result of a mindset, created at the elementary and secondary levels, that made most students feel that their interests should naturally be indulged (as they had been for twelve years prior to college), that their opinions were as important as those of their teachers (having been taught so in K-12), and that they deserved good grades and social promotions (having received them for the previous twelve years). The inflated self-esteem of entering freshmen, their disrespect for scholarship, and their sense of entitlement, all of which often shock college professors, are attitudes that the grade schools and high schools have been purposefully inculcating in students for years.
Under the scenario Eakman describes, mere accusations that K- 12 education is being "dumbed down" seem to miss the point. As the educational establishment works to replace an academic approach assuming individualism and objective knowledge with an outcome-based model stressing affect and collectivism, "dumbing down" is simply a by-product (and perhaps the least objectionable one, when compared with invasion of privacy and mind control) of the shift to a new paradigm. If current trends are to be reversed, or even effectively opposed, concerned faculty will have to turn their attention to the long-neglected K-12 arena and dedicate themselves to intervening forcefully on behalf of traditional, content-based education. Ms. Eakman's book is a good starting point for understanding the scope and seriousness of the threat posed by the new model for public precollege education.
Gary Crosby Brasor is associate director of the National Association of Scholars, 575 Ewing Street, Princeton, NJ 08540-2741; <gbrasor@nf.nas.org>.