From the Radio Free Michigan archives ftp://141.209.3.26/pub/patriot If you have any other files you'd like to contribute, e-mail them to bj496@Cleveland.Freenet.Edu. ------------------------------------------------ 4 Dec 93 17:32 John Covici: The British Racists Behind America's School Reforms: part 3 The racist roots of OBE: Nazi doctors in the classroom by Suzanne Rose In the 1960s, proponents of the ``post-industrial society'' united with eugenicists to produce what we know today as outcome-based education (OBE). The policy shift into a ``post-industrial age'' was announced by University of Chicago President Robert Hutchins, with the publication of {The Triple Revolution.} According to the proponents of this view, American science and industry would not continue the buildup of the Kennedy years. The economy would shrink, and there would be a need for fewer scientists, engineers, and skilled workers. The image of man appropriate to the age of industrial production was declared to be outmoded. Man as a producer, who is created in God's image to achieve dominion over nature, to be fruitful and multiply, was to be replaced by man as a ``steward,'' a guardian of shrinking physical resources. Social engineers were brought on line to attack the values of western Christian civilization and to promote outlooks which better reflected the consumer-driven paganism of the New Age. Education policy would reflect this change. At the same University of Chicago where the thesis of the ``post-industrial society'' was born, psychologist Benjamin Bloom cooked up the theory of ``Mastery Learning,'' which later came to be known as OBE. In 1964, Bloom authored the book {Stability and Change in Human Characteristics,} in which he wrote that intelligence is a stable characteristic like other physical characteristics, such as height, with its own specific rate of growth and development. It is therefore relatively fixed in potential. Five years later, eugenicist Arthur Jensen used Bloom's description of the intellect as a stable or ``fixed'' inheritable characteristic in support of his racist theories of education, arguing that genetically inferior blacks and other lower-class people should simply be taught a skill and put to work. In 1983, this philosophy was implemented by the Boston school system, acting on the recommendations of behaviorist educators at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and the University of Chicago. Boston businesses established contracts with cash-starved schools under a program known as ``The Boston Compact,'' and took ninth and tenth graders out of classrooms to learn on the job. This racist philosophy is a fraud. In 1981, a group of black Chicago parents became aware that their children were not being taught to read at the local elementary school. They investigated the new method of teaching reading which the Chicago school system had adopted in 1974, and decided that that was the problem. Angry, they charged that they were victims of racism, and mobilized a boycott of the school. They filed a lawsuit against the school district, demanding that the program be removed as ``education malpractice.'' What the Chicago school system had adopted was Benjamin Bloom's ``Continuous Progress-Mastery Learning'' program. When tests of reading comprehension were administered in Chicago the following year to high school students, the first time that students had been tested since the program had been introduced into the elementary school system in 1975, the parents were proven correct. The results showed a 5% drop. It seems that the new method, which consisted of breaking down the act of reading into discrete skills and testing the students on their mastery of the skills, resulted in the mastery of those specific skills or ``outcomes,'' but without developing reading comprehension. The Bloom program was eventually thrown out of the Chicago schools after a protracted fight, only to be replaced by an updated version of the same method, when the Illinois State Board of Education adopted ``goals for learner outcomes'' in 1985, spreading the same poison, now known as ``outcome-based education,'' into every school district in the state. - The Cozi `feel good' method - In 1988, OBE was introduced into a black elementary school in Norfolk, Virginia. Busing to end segregation had been stopped for lack of funds, and the community was promised that the new educational methods would help their children learn. The program introduced at the school is called the Cozi method, named after its two authors, Dr. James Comer, professor of child psychiatry at the Yale University Child Study Center, and Dr. Edward Zigler, professor of psychology at Yale. Cozi is a pilot project for early childhood intervention. Social engineers had discovered that for the new education methods to be accepted, it is necessary to involve the parents and the community. The Cozi method includes a School Planning and Management Team, a Parent Organization run by the Cozi ``facilitator,'' and a Mental Health Team. It is funded by grants from the state and federal government, as well as the Carnegie Institute. Yale psychologist Sharon Kagan, speaking to an education conference organized by the Carnegie Institute in 1990, ``Preparing American Youth for the Twenty-First Century,'' emphasized the aspect of community involvement. ``While tacit endorsement of the importance of parents in child development has always existed, it is not a routine component of all early childhood/child development training.'' Not only do Zigler and his cohorts believe that the vast and growing number of poor children can't learn through traditional methods, but they think that the families of these children are incapable of raising children, and that therefore the school should take over child-rearing from the family. They think that the emotional, social, physical, and intellectual development of the child is the responsibility of the school and the larger community. Some might respond with alarm: This is socialism! The New Age oligarchs behind this idea do not even believe that it is elected government officials who should control the child; they assert, rather, that mental health professionals and psychiatrically trained ``facilitators'' should be the ones to indoctrinate the child with the values of their New Age sponsors. The Cozi method, Norfolk's Bowling Park Principal Dr. Herman Clark explained at a press conference on Oct. 26, means that children have to ``feel good'' about themselves before they can learn. But to be made to ``feel good'' without being subjected to the standards of real achievement, is to be brainwashed. Zigler was challenged at the press conference by an associate of Lyndon LaRouche, to explain how Cozi methods are different from the practices of Nazi doctors, because not only are his subjects chosen on the basis of race and social class, but Zigler's teaching methods will destroy their minds. The day after the press conference, the {Virginia Pilot} newspaper reported that since the introduction of Cozi into the school, test scores have declined sharply. - Race `science' - The idea that disadvantaged minorities learn differently, is racist. In fact, as the above cases demonstrate, the new learning methods result in a decline in cognitive levels. Outcome-based education, or the idea that learning can be measured as a performance or behavioral skill, is being applied not only to ethnic minorities, but to the vast majority of schoolchildren. The idea that the nation had to develop a new method of teaching people who supposedly can't learn by traditional methods, was given currency by the alarm raised through national studies like the 1983 ``Nation at Risk,'' showing that the literacy levels of U.S. schoolchildren are dropping. President Bush called an education summit in 1989 of the nation's governors to deal with the problem. The governors adopted six national goals for learning, which were to be the basis for a new education reform effort. The goals involved measuring student progress by outcomes. Where does the idea come from that learning methods have to be adapted to the particular needs of the child? In 1964, Benjamin Bloom convened a group of psychologists and educators at the University of Chicago for a conference on ``Education and Cultural Deprivation,'' to discuss the new economic realities and come up with appropriate education methods. The report issued by the group says that because of the needs of minorities, and the fact that education is facing new requirements from a changing society and global economy, public education must be transformed. The report attacks traditional education as focusing too much on the small percentage of the school-age population which would go on to college. Instead, it said that we must offer options to all children, not just to the scholastic achievers. It then lays out the new direction education has to take, an emphasis on ``problem solving,'' less emphasis on subject matter and imparting information, and more on finding ways in which the subject fields ``relate to the real world,'' more stress on helping the individual to grow as a person and find satisfaction in the face of the harmful effects on the character supposedly produced by the ``industrial age.'' The report calls for new teaching methods and new approaches to the teacher, student, and parent, and more emphasis on the needs of one-third of the student body that will not go on to attend college. Among the participants in the conference was the eugenicist Arthur Jensen, whose article published in the {Harvard Education Review} five years later, ``How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?'' would shock the nation by claiming that race and social class determine IQ, and that because blacks and lower-class people measure lower on IQ tests, they are genetically inferior. Jensen contributed a research study to the Bloom conference which showed that rats raised in a stimulating environment perform better in mazes than those raised in plain cages. Cozi founder Zigler, also a founder of Head Start, contributed a study which demonstrated that lower-class and retarded subjects perform better when their behavior is reinforced with tangible rewards, whereas middle-class subjects perform effectively under ``intangible'' reward conditions. In his 1969 piece, Jensen, who had previously operated in what passed for the mainstream of behaviorist educators, argued that the alleged genetic inferiority of blacks and lower-class individuals has implications for education. He wrote that we must find non-traditional ways of teaching these people, and must look critically at the traditional grading system, and the relationship between teacher and student, where the teacher is viewed as an authority imparting information. Jensen continued: ``And in the post-Sputnik era, education has seen an increased emphasis on cognitive and conceptual learning, much to the disadvantage of many children whose mode of learning is predominantly associative. Many of the basic skills can be learned by various means, and an educational system that puts inordinate emphasis on only one mode or style of learning will obtain meager results from the children who do not fit this pattern.... It may well be true that many children today are confronted in our schools with an educational philosophy and methodology which were mainly shaped in the past, entirely without any roots in these children's genetic and cultural heritage. The educational system was never allowed to evolve in such a way as to maximize the actual potential for learning that is latent in these children's patterns of abilities. Educational researchers must discover and devise teaching methods that capitalize on existing abilities for the acquisition of those basic skills which students will need in order to get good jobs when they leave school.'' - The destruction of cognitive powers - The economist and political prisoner Lyndon LaRouche recently commented that our nation is paying the price today for reinforcing the associative/affective in culture and education, rather than the cognitive. He said that the demand that educators address the associative forms of intelligence rather than the cognitive, is the essence of outcome-based education, and it means an emphasis on the emotional and irrational to the point of demanding the destruction of the cognitive. ``OBE is feminism,'' he said, ``in the sense of magic, in the sense of irrationality, in the sense of the worship of the associative emotional/irrational, and placing it above and demanding the destruction of the cognitive.'' It represents the destruction of children's minds. Comer, Zigler, Bloom, and Jensen share the view that the post-Sputnik era put too much emphasis on the cognitive learning of children. When the associate of LaRouche challenged Zigler at the Bowling Green, Va. press conference to confess that he shared the theories of avowed eugenicist Jensen, Zigler responded, ``I believe in cognitive learning, but I also know there are other forms.'' Today's classrooms are engulfed in the education theories which sprang from the revival of eugenics thinking, alongside of the drift to a post-industrial society. Educators promote the idea that there are three, four, seven, nine, types of intelligence, all of equal value, each with its own pathway to learning. Indeed in his book {Head Start,} which documents his role in founding the program, Zigler says that although the IQ is fixed, the child can increase his performance level in the proper environment, one which gives him an experience of success. Zigler writes, ``I thought that instead of trying to improve children's intellectual capacities, we would be better off trying to improve their motivation to use whatever intelligence they had.'' He attacks the golden age of ``cognitive psychology'' which prevailed during the period of the Kennedy administration, and the ``high hopes'' it engendered. From Executive Intelligence Review V20, #44. If you would like more articles from these publications directly, then subscribe to the LaRouche Issues mailing list. To subscribe to the LaRouche Issues Mailing list send a 1 line message to listserv@ccs.covici.com with the command subscribe lar-lst To get an index of available files send the command index lar-lst ---- John Covici covici@ccs.covici.com 4 Dec 93 17:33 John Covici: The British Racists Behind America's School Reforms: part 4 Will Big Brother take your child away? by Scott Thompson