The importance of a good education cannot be denied.  One must be able to read and write, add and subtract in order to truly succeed in life. The real question then becomes not why we teach our children, but how and, even more importantly, what?

What constitutes  a good education and how do we impart this to our children? Too many of us here have come to the rude awakening  that our children and grandchildren are not receiving what we would consider to be a "good education". The big question is how do we rectify that situation?

I recently came across a book called The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America by Charlotte Thompson Iserbyt. You can obtain it from your local library, or you can download it free in PDF file from this website: http://www.deliberatedumbingdown.com/MomsPDFs/DDDoA.sml.pdf

I urge Seniors who truly care about your children's and grandchildren's education to read the book, or at the least, to print it out and use it as a reference for our Super Seniors grand undertaking --- that of educating the children we love and cherish.

Let this book be our starting point. The basic premise is one I am sure we can all agree on: our education system in the United States is broken; and, if our nation and our children are to survive, we must immediately begin the task of remedying this problem.

A few quotes from the book that will astound you:

"Anyone interested in the truth will be shocked by the way American social engineers have systematically gone about destroying the intellect of millions of American children for the purpose of leading the American people into a socialist world government controlled by behavioral and social scientists." (Iserbyt)

The traditional definition of education is listed as "the drawing out of a person's innate talents and abilities by imparting the knowledge of languages, scientific reasoning, history, literature, rhetoric, etc.--- the channels through which those abilities would flourish and serve."

In 1934 in a book entitled An Outline of Educational Psychology by Rudolph Pintner, et al, that definition was altered or "dehumanized" as Iserbyt puts it, by social psychologists to say "Learning is the result of modifiability in the paths of neural conduction. Explanations of even such forms of learning as abstraction or generalization demand of the neurones only growth, excitability, conductivity, and modifiability. The mind is the connection-system of man; and learning is the process of connecting. The situation-response formula is adequate to cover learning of any sort, and the really influential factors in learning are readiness of the neurones, sequence in time, belongingness, and satisfying consequences."

Iserbyt translates for us that, "education in the twenty-first century will, for the majority of youth, simply be workforce training." And thus we have the often-touted and often repeated sciences of Pavlovian responses and Skinnerian theories, all of which are dominant in college level educational psychology classes.

Here is one more shocking piece of information before you rush off to locate the book and explore its depths.  Remember when we heard all about the Fabian Socialists on Glenn Beck a few weeks ago?  Through Iserbyt we learn that John Dewey, the so-called Father of Progressive Education, was himself a Fabian Socialist. John Dewey has long been regarded as the one who made our educational system what it is today.

Sadly, what our education system is today, is unacceptable.  We can do better.  So our Seniors who have volunteered to shape our educational initiative can download Iserbyt's book and read it as a common starting point for our education challenge.

Mary Jo Schroeder
Director of Education Initiatives