Failure of Outcome Based Education In The United States

Below is a little bit more on the debacle of Outcome Based Education.

Please note that this experiment with the minds of U.S. youth has been going on for a LONG time, and whenever the public cries out for real education, the "reforms" implemented by the educational establishment serve only to perpetuate the farce that our educational system has become. The educators have become more concerned with the "way" their students think than in their fund of knowledge. If they simply stuck to education, the educational establishment would not be able to brainwash the children in preparation for the "Brave New World" as envisioned by these social engineers. The molding of American thought processes is the only way that the theory of evolution and the socialist philosophy could be made acceptable to a large percentage of the formerly proud and independent citizens of the U.S. One of the most notorious failed OBE experiments is the one that demolished the Chicago public schools. Back in 1977 when the Chicago fiasco was launched it was hailed as "a program that may be a pacesetter for the nation." Chicago dubbed its "pacesetter" Continuous Progress-Mastery Learning (CP-ML). Five years later, Learning magazine reported the grim results:

"A growing number of students, many teachers said, were entering high school having successfully completed the CP-ML program without ever having read a book and without being able to read one."

Author and educator Samuel Blumenfeld described the outcome of Chicago's program, as assessed on the Tests of Academic Progress (TAP), as "appalling." "Only 4 of 64 high schools scored above the 50th percentile, 34 scored below the 20th percentile, and 5 schools, with a total enrollment of more than 7,500, scored at the 10th percentile (a score students could have achieved by simply answering the questions at random)," he noted.

The public schools in our nation's capital embarked on an OBE program around the same time that Chicago did -- with the same tragic results.

The Washington Post of August 1, 1977 reported that Washington, DC Associate Superintendent of Schools James T. Guines, who led the design of the program, "said the new curriculum is based on the work in behavioral psychology of Harvard University's B.F. Skinner, who developed teaching machines and even trained pigeons during World War II to pilot and detonate bombs and torpedoes."

This is the same Skinner, of course, who proposed a despotic society where "experts" (like himself) play God and "shape behavior as a sculptor shapes a lump of clay." Professor Skinner proposed that government institute a "technology of behavior" to radically alter man and the environment. In Skinner's view, "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" are outmoded and invalid goals that have no place in the 20th century.

Harvard professor Anthony Oettinger tells us that teaching reading and writing is probably a waste of time anyway:

"The present "traditional" concept of literacy has to do with the ability to read and write. But the real question that confronts us today is: How do we help citizens function well in their society? ... Do we really want to teach people to do a lot of sums or write in a fine round hand when they have a five-dollar hand-held calculator or a word processor to work with? Or do we really have to have everybody literate -- writing and reading in the traditional sense -- when we have the means through our technology to achieve a new flowering of oral communication? It is the traditional idea that says certain forms of communication, such as comic books, are "bad." But in the modern sense of functionalism they may not be all that bad."

The National Institute of Education's Thomas B. Sticht apparently agrees. "Many companies," he told the Washington Post, "have moved operations to places with cheap, relatively poorly educated labor. What may be crucial, they say, is the dependability of a labor force and how well it can be managed and trained -- not its general educational level, although a small cadre of highly educated creative people is essential to innovation and growth. Ending discrimination and changing values are probably more important than reading in moving low-income families into the middle class."

Phyllis Schlafly hit the mark in her Eagle Forum newsletter when she wrote: "The education elitists who are promoting OBE are perfectly content to have the schools turn out quotas of semi-literate workers who can be trained to perform menial tasks under supervision in order to serve the demands of the global economy. OBE graduates will never be able to aspire to enjoy the great literature in the English language." We might add that neither will they be mentally or morally equipped to challenge the oppressive authority of the elitists. As Schlafly has noted, "OBE is converting the three R's to the three D's: Deliberately Dumbed Down."

Questions:

• Do Americans still believe in functionalism?