As discussed in author and former US Education Department Senior Policy Advisor Charlotte Thompson Iserbyt’s informative book, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, putting computers in the classroom is part of a larger agenda which has been in motion for decades, the ultimate goal of which is to create an educational system that pumps out a nation of mindless worker drones. “The call for a socialist America, of course, requires that the schools abandon traditional academic ‘teaching’ and substitute ‘workforce training’ or ‘technademics’ to accommodate the needs of a planned economy,” writes Iserbyt in the latest rendition of her work. As evidence that the upper echelon believes technology is an essential factor for fundamental educational transformation, Thompson points to a statement made by former Florida governor and chairman of the Foundation for Excellence in Education Jeb Bush – via education blogger Kathryn Baron – speaking at an education reform meeting, in which he advocated “a combination of school choice (vouchers), Common Core standards, rigorous assessments, consequences for anything less than excellence and using technology to transform education.” [emphasis added] Iserbyt also highlights a 1972 article by education researcher Mary Thompson which outlined how technology in the classroom, among other things, is part of a system ultimately intending to bring about “Distance Learning,” an “innovation” which would lead to the eventual “offshoring” of teaching jobs and relegate “teachers” to mere “tutors, monitors or overseers.“ From Thompson’s article: “The warning bears repeating that teachers had better leave their concentration on the minutia of each maneuver in the process being carried by all of the above and others, to concentrate on the big picture of plans afoot for the function of teachers being planned and programmed for extinction or demotion to becoming tutors, monitors, or overseers to keep students on task in front of their computer screens with ‘direct instruction’ being imparted from anywhere in the world. I repeat, wake up teachers, your jobs are about to be ‘offshored’ just as manufacturing, engineering and other professions have been. Your unions won’t be able to counteract it any more than industry unions were able to do for the unemployed of empty factories and lost professional positions. Students will be phased into ‘programmed’ curricula designed to produce worker bees for global economies. The authority of those selected to represent the voters and taxpayers is already being undermined as charter schools, with their unelected boards, are being used as a transmission belt to the final objective of Distance Learning.”
Posted on: Mon, 15 Sep 2014 22:13:41 +0000
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