http://deliberatedumbingdown.com/

Free E-book, audio interviews and pdf's for down-loading...

"Charlotte 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. Iserbyt is a former school board director in Camden, Maine and was co-founder and research analyst of Guardians of Education for Maine (GEM) from 1978 to 2000. She has also served in the American Red Cross on Guam and Japan during the Korean War, and in the United States Foreign Service in Belgium and in the Republic of South Africa. Iserbyt is a speaker and writer, best known for her 1985 booklet Back to Basics Reform or OBE: Skinnerian International Curriculum and her 1989 pamphlet Soviets in the Classroom: America's Latest Education Fad which covered the details of the U.S.-Soviet and Carnegie-Soviet Education Agreements which remain in effect to this day. She is a freelance writer and has had articles published in Human Events, The Washington Times, The Bangor Daily News, and included in the record of Congressional hearings."

Thank you, Magmak1... I look forward to reading this...

Toward the end of the book she discusses the privatization of education as turning over educational decision making to corporate CEOs who will give priority to training a global workforce-----an educated underclass----to provide an abundant source of cheap and compliant labor.

Her contemptuous language about "socialist" and "collectivist" conspiracies is reminiscent of McCarthyism or Ayn Rand's philosophy. She admits a conservative bias but she acknowledges how Reaganomics and globalization have contributed to the dumbing down process in the 80s ans 90s.

Has she written on this topic since 1999?

With 600 channels of cable TV, as well as XBox players, TiVos, DVD players, etc, we have become a nation that is as overentertained as it is undereducated.

We are bombarded as never before with commercials to buy crap we don't otherwise need (no ACTUAL demand), charge it on plastic we can ill afford, because we don't have the money to buy it.

But... buying it will make us happy.

They tell us.

We have stopped being citizens. We are now merely consumers.

Gore Vidal said it best over a year ago:

"...CP: Has the media played a role in transforming citizens into spectators of this process?

Vidal: Well, they have been transformed, by design, by corporate America, aided by the media, which belongs to corporate America. They are no longer citizens. They are hardly voters. They are consumers, and they consume those things which are advertised on television. They are made to sound like happy consumers. Listen to TV advertising: This one says, "I had this terrible pain, but when I put on Kool-Aid, I found relief overnight. You must try it too." All we do is hear about little cures for little pains. Nothing important gets said. There used to be all those talk shows back in the '50s and '60s, when I was on television a great deal. People would talk about many important things, and you had some very good talkers. They're not allowed on now. Or they're set loose in the Fox Zoo, in which you have a number of people who pretend to be journalists but are really like animals. Each one has his own noise--there's the donkey who brays, there's the pig who squeals. Each one is a different animal in a zoo, making a characteristic noise. The result is chaos, which is what is intended. They don't want the people to know anything, and the people don't. .."

http://www.citypages.com/databank/26/1268/article13085.asp

Or, listen to Howard Beale, the "mad prophet of the airwaves:"

"...I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth; banks are going bust; shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter; punks are running wild in the streets, and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it.

We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat. And we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be!

We all know things are bad -- worse than bad -- they're crazy.

It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we're living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, "Please, at least leave us alone in our own living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials, and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone."

Well I'm not going to leave you alone.

I want you to get mad!

I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot. I don't want you to write to your Congressman, because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street.

All I know is that first, you've got to get mad.

You've gotta say, "I'm a human being! My life has value!"

So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell,

"I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!!"

- Howard Beale (Peter Finch), fictitious TV newscaster, the movie Network. US, 1976.."

I don't know... you can check the web sites for other material and pdf's...

I know she did a radio interview over at RBN recently
( http://mp3.rbnlive.com/Stadt06.html )

I read the first several chapters of the book, and the last two, last night.

I find the material terribly unsettling... it challenges a lot of "givens" or assumptions .... and yes, there are some biases that sneak in, including one that I'm uncomfortable with regard to religion ...

but, at the same time, the material is consistent with my understanding of what is going on in education (I'm not an educator, and have no professional orientation or preparation in that field, though I've read a bit about some theories and approaches), and the material is consistent with some other "stuff" found here at CGCS and elsewhere in terms of what is happening in the world.

I haven't finished reading this, or forming a solid or final opinion about it.
One of the questions I have for her is this:

What does a sound and solid education for K-12 look like in her mind?

I should add that my daughter is an inner city elementary school teacher in Mass. and my brother is now doing some high school teaching for a wide range of kids (prison schools through AP History) as a substitute teacher in Oklahoma. (He has a BS in business, and two master's in hotel administration and facilities management, and awaits his entry into law school, and he's 62).

My own orientation to this subject is this: there isn't a more criticial focus for us, in the long run, than the one on the quality and effectiveness of our schools.

I've read much of Richard Strozzi Heckler, about Gardner and multiple intelligences, The Art of Possibility, the flow theory etc., lots of mind/body and sports psychology stuff, a fair bit on educational technology (ex: Architect for Learning), The Everyday Work of Art by Eric Booth (highly recommended), Laurence Boldt, Ellen Langer on mindfullness, Dr. Mel Levine's A Mind at a Time, George Leonard's Education and Ecstasy, One Kid at a Time: Big Lessons from a Small School (Eliot Levine, Teachers College Press), Reclaiming Our Children: A Healing Plan for a Nation in Crisis (Peter R. Breggin, M.D., Perseus Books), about Eurhythmics and music and the brain, Smart Moves: Why Learning is Not All In Your Head (Carla Hannaford, Ph.D., Great Ocean Publishers), Stand by Me: The Risks and Rewards of Mentoring Today’s Youth (Jean Rhodes, Harvard University Press), Teaching as a Subversive Activity by Postman and Weingartner, and Teaching With Feeling (Herbert Greenberg).

This list isn't to impress anyone... but maybe IStoodforYou has some further ideas for my library.



"Input... input!"

Good question! Her book cites a lot of sources that she takes issue with, but she doesn't cite or advocate for any comprehensive theory of education.

The interview was June 2001---hardly recent.

Impressive list!

What attracted my attention abour DDD is the discussion about corporate privatization of education. The campus where I teach was recently acquired by a for-profit corporation to secure our accreditation for online degree programs staffed exclusively by adjunct (part time faculty). The business plan is to reduce overhead by dispensing with buildings, full-time faculty salaries, and benefits.

Sorry, maybe that date was when the interview got posted to the web site. At any rate, it is clear that someone is advancing this line of thought pretty intensively, and not just on the education front, because it's showing up in multiple places and ways.

What I want to spend some more time on within this DDDoA book is this issue of Skinnerian, Pavlovian or rewards-based education. I understand that it can be functional at some limited way or level for teaching a finite set of information or skills, though I'd agree that it's not optimal for producing a well-rounded, thinking, caring individual over a long period of time.

My brother asked me about educational technology and thought there ought to be a way to harness computer-based machinery to handle a lot of the rote and routine. Agreed, though I don't think, even as advanced as it may seem to be, that educational technology has beguin to meet its promise. I've produced and written some educational video programs, helped design a multi-player computer learning game, and I've had some personal experience with online seminars.

I said to him that I am deeply worried about a train of thought that would replace a living, breathing human being at the head of the class with a machine. The machine will outperform the human in many ways, and this is especially true if we wish to teach machines. But if we wish to teach humans, I'd rather have, for me and my kids (and yours), someone who's been in touch with the breadth and depth of life, work, learning, community... someone who has some passion for something. Anyone I've ever talked to can tell you a story or two (and I've written up my own) of the times that a human teacher (almost without regard to the subject being taught) made a powerful impression on them that is forever memorable and able to be recalled in detail. I don't think many of us would wax so ecstatic about a game or a machine or an online module of readings and exercises.

Don't mean to go off topic here but... so much of the educational experience is the ability to interact fully with others- immersion in an academic
environment. I realize that there are many who have no choice but to use distance learning in order to achieve their desired degrees, but I would hate to see this become a norm.

In 2000 there was a Mo Jo article about online education that suggested that online education would eventually lose interest among students like correspondence courses did several decades earlier. The reasoning was that face to face contact on campus provides more sufficient social support to sustain efforts to complete an education and online degrees would never achieve the same credibility as degrees earned on campus.

Are you interested in a new topic on distance learning?