Last week’s introduction to this 4-part series¹ focused on Iserbyt’s main thesis: the morphing of the American education system, particularly its governmental elements, into a Behaviorist, input-output system designed to produce people that react rather than think. Today, we’ll go over a number of subsidiary areas, some more important or more striking than others, giving an overview of some important points Iserbyt brings up alongside that core thesis.

Borrowing from the USSR and China

Iserbyt establishes a number of at least peripheral connections between the United States educational establishment and the Soviet Union. The most significant of these institutional connections is a 1985 agreement between Pres. Reagan (of the US) and Pres. Gorbachev (of the USSR) to exchange curricula and teaching materials and (what is harder to excuse) to conduct “joint studies on textbooks” via US “organizations” and the Soviet “Ministry of Education” (229). Simultaneously, the Carnegie Organization, influential since the 1910s in American organization and the predecessor to NGOs like the Gate Foundation, made an agreement with the Societ Academy of Sciences to work together in researching the use of technology in education (more on that later).

A quote from the December 10, 1985 New York Times, as Iserbyt relays it, will illustrate the danger here: “The initial American-Soviet exchange is intended as a first step toward cooperation among education reformers from a number of countries, including Britain and Japan” (228). Any educational reform Communist Russia approved of would naturally be quite left-wing; any educational reformer who saw the USSR’s work as positive and helpful, a thing to be cooperated with, undoubtedly had remarkably un-Christian ideas of what education should be reformed towards.

Iserbyt references this and other US-Soviet connections (such as the trip by US Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander² and Effective Schools advocate Don Thomas to the USSR, where they communicated ideas which the still-Soviet educators found quite interesting (this trip was prior to December 1991, when the USSR dissolved)). She also draws connections between the then-nascent social credit system in China and the attempts by various US governments to create files on citizens which start in school and never leave them, being meant for use by employers as a government-assigned resume (294, 408). In this and other places, she lays out a convincing case that our educational system is not so removed from the Soviet or CCP system in its core ideas, however much American resistance has reduced the implementation of these ideas (85).

Using Technology

Iserbyt’s hostility to the use of technology in education may seem backwards and primitivist, until you understand precisely why she’s worried. Technology, as seen in the USSR’s interest in its use, has immense potential in shaping education. For the Skinnerian instructor, technology provides a chance to make an unchanging, responsive script, a series of precise and consistent inputs combined with a system that responds positively only to the proper output (and otherwise responds not at all). If you don’t believe my summary, consider what An Educator’s Guide to Schoolwide Reform, a proponent of the Skinnerian approach published by a variety of national organizations (including federal institutions like the NEA): “Success for All tells schools precisely what to teach and how to teach it—to the point of scripting, nearly minute by minute, every teacher’s activity in every classroom every day of the year.” With a computer, that job gets so much easier; the computer does precisely what it is programmed to do.

(The computer, as it turns out, is the end-goal which Behaviorism desires from it subjects: an input producing an output consistently, without agency to think for itself, responding without deciding.)

This links to an apprehension Iserbyt expresses about homeschooling, expressed by this NASDC³ education proposal (unaccepted at the time by the government) that “’Home School Families’ would be linked to ‘Public Schools, Communities, Private Schools, Businesses, Alternative Schools, and Higher Education’ with the New West Learning Center serving as the ‘hub’ of the wheel, or community” (179). Distance learning via technology obviously presents a path for centralized education to re-integrate homeschoolers. While I’m not quite in agreement with Iserbyt (more on that at the end of the series), the data should make homeschoolers very wary of such re-integration efforts, no matter how benign or helpful they appear, no matter how affordable.

Participatory Democracy

One question Iserbyt spends significant time on is: how did this get implemented? In fact, she spends enough time that, due to the prevalence of the facts on the ground, my notes contain less salient instances than is convenient for writing this article (c’est la vie). The answer to that comes in three parts, two for this section and one for the next, though really it’s much more complicated than I’ll get into here, as all historical processes are.

The first part is the use of ‘change agents.’ These agents, trained for the purpose (85, 277), are people whose work it is to alter how the school is run, from within or without. It is integral to these efforts that the system be destabilized and even sabotaged, fraught with uncertainty and outright trauma (277). “Paradigm change is therefore not only traumatic in and of itself, but also challenges other attributes and disintegrates the relationship among all domains. The eventual outcome of such change is “transformed” or “renewed” organization” (277). The reader may recognize this language; it is in fact highly reminiscent of cultural Marxism and critical theory, of the theory that once society is torn down completely it can be restructured into utopia (though Iserbyt does not draw this connection).

Incidentally, one training ground for the ‘facilitators’ who advised many school districts had the following to say about education: “The advent of this new age, and the discovery that human beings now have both the capacity and the inclinations to re-create themselves in their own image according to their own imaginations… specifically it has demanded a redefinition of the human being…” (Iserbyt 353). This claim to re-create man is all but blasphemy.

The second part is “participatory democracy—moving from a left versus right politics to a politics of the radical center” (Iserbyt 194 (quoting McCune, a major fed-funded researcher in education)). In this system, “polls, unelected councils, and task forces” are made the authority rather than morals or representatives of the people (Iserbyt G-15⁴). In truth, Iserbyt’s description of it is a little hard to get a hold on.

As I understand it- and if I’m inaccurate here, it’s in extending the term to cover more real phenomena than it is meant to, not in asserting the phenomena-, the idea of ‘participatory democracy’ is essentially to manage what happens so the people have the impression they are being represented and have a say, without actually giving them a say. Representative government does the mushroom (sit in the dark and eat shit), and unelected bureaucracies, open or opaque or even hidden, carry out the real work, impervious to elections. Marc Tucker, head of the National Center for Education and the Economy, wrote as much to Hilary Clinton upon hearing of her husband’s victory in 1992, writing “We propose, first, that the President appoint a national council on human resource development…. It would be established in such a way to assure continuity of membership across administrations, so that the consensus it forges will outlast any one administration…” (302).

Polls, you see, can say whatever the pollster likes (if you disagree, follow Richard Baris’s work for a while). Particularly vivid in my memory is the marvelous UK poll results from the government poll- always 71%⁵ in favor of the government position. Meanwhile, councils and various officials can hold hearings and listen to people. After all, just because they hear doesn’t mean they have to listen. The appearance of responsiveness is what they’re after; if they have the appearance, they need not worry about the reality. Even the loss of popular credibility can be stomached in the short term or on a small scale, given the lack of actual direct accountability. Worst comes to worst, they can just use Chesterton’s old trick of offering the choice between red paint and green, ignoring that nobody particularly wants to drink paint.⁶ Controlling the terms of the debate is a dominating power.

Consensus

In such a system, consensus has replaced conclusion, consent, and accountability. The basic meaning of this distinction is best shown by understanding what I mean by ‘consensus.’ Consensus, as reached through procedures like the Delphi Technique (whose ilk is described on pages 52-53), is designed to be manipulated; it represents a position which everybody has ostensibly been involved in creating, but which the participants had no direct hand in designing and cannot modify (G-9).

In the aforementioned example (52-53), for instance, a conference was run on the following system: 20 discussion tables, each with a provided discussion leader; these discussed, and then the discussion leaders (not the participants) took the ‘consensus’ and the ‘dissents’ to another two tables, discussed there, and then sent those tables’ discussion leaders with the same consensus-dissent to a final table, whose ‘consensus’ was the conclusion of the conference. Exploiting such a system is so easy it must suggest itself as desirable largely for that exploitability. All the conference-holder needs to do is be careful that he appoints discussion leaders who hold his opinions, and the ‘consensus’ they come to will shape quickly towards what he believes- because the consensus is defined by the discussion leaders who are chosen by the conference holder. All the contribution made by the persons discussing is of their credibility; any dissent from the consensus is eventually thrown out, and the consensus was set from the beginning.

(Iserbyt is right to identify this as a Hegelian model of thought in some structure, thesis and antithesis becoming synthesis repeatedly, though I hesitate to press that over-far.⁷)

Note that such a structure does not seek truth, even ostensibly. The end-goal is not the Right Position; it is a blend or blur of everybody’s opinion. Consent and accountability, meanwhile, are made a mockery of- because ‘consensus,’ being by design nobody’s opinion, need not adhere to strict reality. It is fundamentally a narrative to be pushed (postmodernism!), not a truth. Imagine a school board meeting. You, your friends, those people you think are a bit weird, and several others have all spoken up against the inclusion of pornography in your children’s education [immoral]. Then the school board chairman, being unsympathetic to your cause, makes a summary statement, setting the tone for his allies on the board. He has heard you, he says, and he perceives a clear consensus among you: you want your kids to be safe. He hears, and he agrees. You agree with him totally. After all, didn’t you say just that, just now? And then, once you file out, wondering if you got him to listen (except those of you who are veterans of the politicking), he speaks to the rest of the board. The consensus is clear: we must protect the children. We must protect them, he says, from bigotry and from entering the world insufficiently educated. If we listen to the consensus, therefore, we must keep these books on the shelves. It’s what their parents want.

I made that example up. I won’t vouch for its accuracy in any particular case. What I will avow is this: it demonstrates how ‘consensus’ can skip truth, avoid accountability, and manufacture the perception of consent. As Philip Hamburger puts it on page 113 of Is Administrative Law Unlawful?,⁸ “One way or another, agencies use the devolution of lawmaking to co-opt potential opposition before a rule is even issued, thus securing a unified front for regulation that might otherwise have been opposed by the interests not included at the table,” using “[governmentally] selected members of the affected industries.” What is done in the administrative state is done also in the similar bureaucracies of the public and private schools across the nation.

 Watch out for this.

Conclusion

So, it looks like this will be a four part series (I, III, IV), with the length of six to seven of my usual articles. Today I covered half, thereabouts, of the sub-points I wanted to highlight in Iserbyt’s work. Next week will cover the rest, starting with the third major component of how these changes overtook the school system (besides, you know, the massive amounts of money and activist labor put into the project).

God bless.

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Footnotes

1. Lengthwise, it could easily be 6-part, but the topics didn’t divide in a manageable way. ↩︎
2. Former Tennessee governor. I feel so much better about my state knowing this…. ↩︎
3. “NASDC is the private, non-profit corporation set up by American business leaders at the request of President Bush to develop a new generation of American schools by contracting with and supporting the most promising “break the mold,” “start from scratch,” curricula design teams.” Iserbyt quoting Lyon, 297 ↩︎
4. The glossary ↩︎
5. It may have been another number in the 70s; it’s been years. ↩︎
6. A Miscellany of Men, “The Voter and the Two Voices” ↩︎
7. It’s unclear how it matches the Hegelian idea that each thesis implies and thus contains its antithesis, for instance. ↩︎
8. A book I recommend, based on the part I’ve read so far. ↩︎