Reviewing ‘Deliberate Dumbing Down of America’ – Part One
Sometimes a book recommendation sits un-followed for months before you get to it. Sometimes, five minutes after registering it, you find out that the PDF is offered by the author’s website, for free (which is good, because the print version seems to be about $40). That second experience, as you’ve already realized, is what I went through with Charlotte Iserbyt’s the deliberate dumbing down of america [sic]. Then, over more than a month, I read through the book, a worthwhile investment of time.
This book is worth your time if you are interested in its topics. Those topics are: American education, behaviorism, the process by which liberalism’s children degraded the West, education in general, and government/ NGO malfeasance. The particular focus of the book is on the process by which sub-college American public education (and private) has been thoroughly debased over the past century, starting in the early 1900s and working up until right about 2000 (if you read the supplementary PDF). Iserbyt has done valuable work here. The book collates excerpts from a vast number of sources, demonstrating the trends and actors and ideologies, giving sufficient for a basic understanding of the history while also providing a spring-board for more in-depth study. Iserbyt’s work overall is well worth your time, even if she’s wrong on some of what she thinks education should be.1
Because this is a 500 page nonfiction book, the summary will be 4 articles long. See: I, II, III, IV.
The Core
The book’s purpose is to show how American education became thoroughly accommodated to a malicious agenda. That agenda can be described by its component tools, as I will shortly do, or by summary: making a pliable populace, pliable both to major economic actors (corrupt corporations) and the government (Iserbyt 373). I’m shocked, of course, having never, ever suspected this.
B.F. Skinner was a Behaviorist psychologist, the Behaviorist psychologist. He posited that, “What was needed was a new conception of man, compatible with our scientific knowledge, which would lead to a philosophy of education bearing some relation to educational practices. But to achieve this, education would have to abandon the technical limitations which it had imposed upon itself and step forth into a broader sphere of human engineering. Nothing short of a complete revision of a culture would suffice” (Iserbyt 41). The tool to reshape that culture? Operant conditioning.
In Skinner’s own words, “Operant conditioning shapes behavior as a sculptor shapes a lump of clay” (Iserbyt 48). The idea of operant conditioning is simple, familiar to anybody who knows about Pavlov’s dog (because Pavlov was experimenting with operant conditioning). The conditioner provides a repeated stimulus or places the recipient in the way of such a stimulus. Then, if the recipient reacts to the stimulus as the conditioner desires, the recipient is rewarded; if he reacts badly, he receives no reward. The goal is to alter the recipient’s mechanism so that the stimulus automatically and consistently produces the desired output.
Before we continue, we must carefully distinguish this from ‘learning’ in the tradition sense. Operant conditioning is predicated on Behaviorism’s assertion that people are merely input-output machines, wherein the proper set of levers produce a certain output every time. People are mechanisms, to this psychology, and ‘thought’ is an epiphenomenon. Just as you can program a computer, you can program a person; just as with a computer, what happens between input and output is irrelevant, so long as the output is what the programmer desired.
(Transpersonalist psychology, with all its mysticism, does not fundamentally alter this idea; it merely posits more magical ways of achieving the programming. To understand what I mean, reference this article.)
The utility of such conditioning (brainwashing) is clear, if you’re in the business of controlling people. Ideally, persons so trained are perfectly predictable, as long as you control the inputs. This conditioning intentionally cripples the subject’s capacity for independent thought. He is given a set of proper outputs to correspond to the prescribed in-puts; the reasoning for these relationships is avoided. The teaching is both direct and indirect. For an instance of the second, the examples he reads in an English class will teach him, while he isn’t inspecting them, to accept cannibalism, utilitarianism, and more as merely facts of life, with the unacknowledged shock of the material serving to help ingrain the conditioning (Iserbyt 158).
Such people are taught not to think but to react. If the government or corporation knows the levers, the people can be operated, given the input which produces the desired output. Want a particular social program? Frame it with the words the populace have been taught to regard positively, and they’ll support it. Want to spike a social movement? Depict it in the pattern they have been taught to revile.
One example of this type of learning can be found in Michigan’s 1994 “Assessment Framework for the Michigan High School Proficiency Test in Reading” (Iserbyt 323-4). The language here is highly elusive, but the meaning becomes clear once it is grasped at all. The report quotes another source to this effect: “Reading is the process of constructing meaning through the dynamic interaction among the reader, the text, and the context of the reading situation” (323). In the light of this, the following quotes become more understandable: “… knowledge is socially constructed as learners engage in holistic and authentic activities…. What is called for is a vision of curriculum that incorporates a socioconstructivist view of reading into a curriculum framework that defines the context for constructing meaning in a way that is consistent with the Model Core Curriculum…. For too long a period of time the reading/communication arts area has avoided the question: Is there a content to reading/communication arts?… In [the current curriculum] the primary goal is to understand a novel, short story, poem, or play; the result is that the literary work becomes the end rather than a means to the end. What is absent from both the process and content perspectives is the application of knowledge in authentic ways.”
If that’s unclear to you, let me explain, then check me against not only the parts I’ve quoted but the full section re-printed in Iserbyt’s work (the PDF, remember, is free– I’m citing book pages, not PDF pages). In the constructivist view, the reader constructs meaning by his interaction with the text and with society; he understands it, in other words, not by what the author intended (remember, the understanding the content is a bad thing) but by “holistic and authentic activity”, i.e. by using it for a purpose in his current situation (finding meaning by redefining). His circumstances and opinions don’t merely change how he applies the text, the way they always should; no, they form a component of the meaning he perceives in the text.
If you’re a Christian who has heard of certain heresies, this method should sound familiar. Certain modern teachers argue that we understand Scripture only when we add experience; the Bible is ‘instant truth, just add experience.’ Christ is meaningful, in this view, only when we contextualize him in a way useful to our priorities.
Note, however, that in teaching the constructivist method of reading, where a text’s meaning has more to do with the reader’s preference than the author’s intention, the school will also be providing the experiences and the way to understand those experiences. In other words, the school will be providing the inputs and then demanding certain outputs, using the books as stimuli for the operant conditioning. In this way, students will be trained to see ideas like ‘Christianity’ and ‘America’ as automatically negative things, words which trigger negative associations without need for any thought or reference to reality. (I go a little past Iserbyt, here, as she largely leaves this point to the reader’s interpretation.)
(As a matter of fact, people aren’t programmable, not in this way. You can brainwash certain responses, but the more successful you are, the more the people so shaped start to fracture. Eventually, the damage is too great, and the society starts to disintegrate. This leaves aside how the brainwashing already broke society by crippling its relationships.)
The programs which turn out to follow Skinner’s ideas are many, weighted with names that are intentionally chosen to avoid association with their kin (A-69-A-702). Names include: Behavior Modification (the grand-pappy), Master Learning, Outcome-Based Education, Direct Instruction, Effective Schools, Integrated Thematic Instruction (367). The goal of all of these is Skinner-style alteration of thought, complete with an inveterate hostility to parental opinions (213, 305, 335).
If you really want to understand this all, though, there’s one book you absolutely must read: The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis. I don’t know if he names Skinner or Behavior Modification, but these are precisely what he addresses in speaking of those men who would determine other men.
For Now….
Next week, we’ll look at some other highlights and worthwhile points in Iserbyt’s presentation.
Till then, I’ll leave you with this quote of C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, as quoted by Iserbyt: “FEVERSTONE: ‘Man has got to take charge of Man. That means, remember, that some men have got to take charge of the rest—which is another reason for cashing in on it as soon as one can. You and I want to be the people who do the taking charge, not the ones who are taken charge of.’” (60).
God bless.
Part II <> Part III <> Part IV
