The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America: A Chronological Paper Trail by Iserbyt Charlotte Thomson

Author:Iserbyt, Charlotte Thomson [Iserbyt, Charlotte Thomson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Education, General, Political Science, Public Policy, Social Policy
ISBN: 9780966707106
Google: 65A-vgAACAAJ
Amazon: 0966707109
Publisher: Conscience Press
Published: 1999-01-15T15:21:11.908149+00:00

The Noxious Nineties : c. 1994

341

educators. However, he maintains that application of this research is an important step for educators even though the applications are not clear, the issues are complex, and educators generally lack the scientific background to understand or build a curriculum utilizing the research.

The Education Commission of the States has held 16 workshops in the last year on the implications that neuroscience may have for state policymakers who may be getting carried away on brain research. (“Education Policymakers Embrace Brain Findings—Scientists Question Rush to Apply Brain-Research Findings,” by Linda Jacobson, Education Week, April 8, 1998)

[all emphases in original]

JOHN OMICINSKI, GANNETT NEWS SERVICE, WROTE “MULTICULTURALISM IS A WORTHY Goal, but America Still Needs Americans” which appeared in the Sunday, November 20, 1994 issue of the Detroit News. Omicinski’s article covered a speech by Librarian of Congress James Billington at the 75th anniversary of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.43 A few interesting excerpts from the article follow:

Will America lead the world into the 21st century? Not the way things are going, says Librarian of Congress James Billington. [Not] in a country afflicted with a lazy, ill-defined multiculturalism filling up with African Americans, Korean Americans, Japanese Americans, he suggests. And his bottom line is simple: America doesn’t work without Americans.

As a custodian of the library and its 105 million items, Billington is caretaker of the world’s largest depository of human culture. He also is one of Washington’s sharpest minds, an expert on Russian history as well as America’s heritage, and an even rarer breed—a straight talker.

The arsenal of information we command ought to qualify the United States as an unchallenged cultural superpower, Billington says. But this imposing mother lode of words isn’t of much use if U.S. residents are too indolent, too self-satisfied, too culturally balkanized to use it, he says….

Is America an idea or a nation?

The sharpening split between left and right makes that a cutting-edge question in the current cultural wars. And Billington comes down on the side of nationhood largely because America’s good ideas don’t much matter if there’s no nation to push them.

Gathering the world’s civilization to itself, the United States should be primed to set a model for the world. But it isn’t working that way, said Billington. A gaggle of voices—all given equal weight in a society that may have forgotten its traditional values—has turned America into a dizzy spin. “Unfortunately, we seem to have lost our national compass somewhere on the road to the next millenium,” Billington said. “We are getting ever more lazy....

Many of our great institutions of higher learning seem to have become indifferent to—even contemptuous of—their historic function of transmitting a basic understanding of their own culture from one generation to the next.

“In place of the expanding, inclusive America, which adds without subtracting, the ideological multiculturist would create a balkanized America and a continuous process of subtraction from any sense of common tradition or shared values.... This kind of multiculturalism is the denial rather than the fulfillment of true

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.