Education: A Brief History and Cause of Decadency (Part 4)

New Age prophetess Alice Bailey wrote about the education system: “I have suggested that the textbooks be rewritten in term of right human relations and not from the present nationalistic and separative angles…. To all of these I would like to add that one of our immediate educational objectives must be the elimination of the competitive spirit and the substitution of the cooperative consciousness.”¹⁾ Alice Bailey, Education in the New Age, Lucis Trust, 1954, p. 74 Samuel Blumenfeld did not recognize the influence of the New Age spirituality behind this change in the textbooks, but he did understand the magnitude of this event. “Those who reengineered primary education in America did so in order to carry out a political and social agenda that had nothing to do with what the parents want for their children. These were men determined to carry out Revolution, to change America, to change human behavior, to change human nature, to change our economic system, to change our values.”²⁾ Samuel Blumenfed, Victims of Dick and Jane, and Other Essays, Chalcedon, 2002, p. 73 In an earlier book Blumenfeld wrote: “By 1952, behavioral psychology had not only become the ‘scientific’ foundation of American pedagogy, but it had changed our textbooks, revised the classroom curriculum, and redesigned the American school building. If you detect something mindless about American education, it’s because the mind has been taken out of it.”³⁾ Samuel Blumenfeld, NEA, Trojan Horse in American Education, The Paradigm Company, p. 83 The revision of the curriculum was due to the works of Benjamin Bloom. “Bloom taught that the highest form of intelligence has been reached when an individual no longer believes in right or wrong. Bloom proclaimed that the purpose of education and the schools is to change the thoughts, feelings, and actions of students.”⁴⁾ Brannon Howse, Grave Influence: 21 Radicals and Their Worldviews that Rule America from the Grave, Worldview Weekend Publishing, 2009, p. 194 Bloom wrote, “The purpose of education is to change the thoughts, feelings and actions of students.”⁵⁾ Benjamin Bloom, All Our Children Learning, Mcgraw–Hill, 1982, p. 180 He also wrote, “The curriculum may be thought of as a plan for changing students’ behavior and as the actual set of learning experiences in which students, teachers, and materials interact to produce the change in students.”⁶⁾ Benjamin Bloom, All Our Children Learning: A Primer for Parents, Teachers, and Other Educators, McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1981, p. 180
Under the name of Outcome Based Education, the “higher order thinkers” learn “critical thinking skills” which cause them to excel above their parents authority, morals, and beliefs, to determine his own truth. Dean Gotcher expressed the error of this kind of humanistic thinking.

Know, Comprehend, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, Evaluation when used on rocks, plants, and animals is a true scientific method. The laws of nature will reveal whether your theory is right (discovering a pre-set law, established by God, through the use of a scientific method) or wrong (just a theory). But when this method is used on man (Bloom’s Taxonomies are a “taxonomy of psychology” Cognitive Domain: Book 1 p.6), it can only define man as material i.e. the laws of the flesh becomes the basis of all his behavior.⁷⁾ Dean Gotcher “Concerning Bloom’s Taxonomy,” http://www.authorityresearch.com/2008-09-06%20Concerning%20Bloom%27s%20Taxonomies.htm accessed 4/26/2015

Tim LaHaye also notice one reason teachers in the public schools persist in teaching reading methods (such and Dewey’s “look-say” method instead of traditional phonics) even though they are well known to be inferior. “Some educrats jam look-and-say into the minds of our schoolchildren because of their addiction to the unscientific theory of evolution…. So they give the impression that a really progressive person or educator will be subject to change and that change brings advancement.”⁸⁾ Tim LaHaye, The Battle for the Public Schools: Humanism’s Threat to our Children, Fleming H. Revell Company, 1983, p. 48
Wikipedia, a humanistic bent internet encyclopedia, explains Bloom’s Taxonomy in favorable terms.

Bloom’s taxonomy refers to a classification of the different objectives that educators set for students (learning objectives). It divides educational objectives into three “domains”: cognitive, affective, and psychomotor (sometimes loosely described as “knowing/head”, “feeling/heart” and “doing/hands” respectively). Within the domains, learning at the higher levels is dependent on having attained prerequisite knowledge and skills at lower levels. A goal of Bloom’s taxonomy is to motivate educators to focus on all three domains, creating a more holistic form of education.⁹⁾http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_taxonomy

Samuel Blumenfeld spoke of this “affective domain” (the subtitle of Bloom’s Taxonomies, Book 2), saying: “Conservatives called for getting back to basics, for teaching reading by intensive phonics, for strengthening all of the academic subjects, for greater discipline, more homework, etc. The liberal education establishment had other ideas. Besides calling for more money, higher teacher salaries, all of which they got, their view of reform included whole language in primary reading, invented spelling, no memorization in arithmetic but lots of calculators, a breakdown of traditional subject matter into relevant topics, and, above all, a greater emphasis on the affective domain, that is, more emphasis on feelings, beliefs, values, socialization, sexuality, group learning, group therapy, peer counseling, death education, drug education, etc.”¹⁰⁾ Samuel Blumenfeld, Victims of Dick and Jane, and Other Essays, Chalcedon, 2002, p. 92, (underline added) Dean Gotcher describes Bloom’s Taxonomies as follows: “Bloom’s taxonomies are Marxist training manuals used to educate teachers in the United States of America and around the world, including Communist China to think and teach dialectically, to praxis the dialectic. These books have been used from the 50s on. They are the foundation for teacher certification around the world.”¹¹⁾ Dean Gotcher, The Dialectic & Praxis: Diaprax and the End of the Age, Institute for Authority Research, 2004, Vol. 2, p. 6-7 John Taylor Gatto, an award winning New York teacher writes favorably of this dialectic method of teaching with Bloom’s “affective domain.” He falsely accuses the early American Congregationalists church of being dialectic because they were local church orientated, thus equating them as rebels against the patriarchal paradigm. He writes:

Well, what I’ve just described is the process that Aristotle or Karl Marx or Thomas Hobbes or any of a large number of creative thinkers have called “the dialectic.” The Congregational procedure was dialectical down to its roots, in a way acutely hostile to hierarchical thinking.
Central planners of any period despise the dialectic because it gets in the way of efficiently broadcasting “one right way” to do things. Half a century ago Bertrand Russell remarked that the United States was the only major country on earth that deliberately avoided teaching its children to think dialectically.¹²⁾ John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, New Society Publishers, 1992, p. 84

America is now fully given over to dialectic thinking for the past few generations. The problem is evident, even as John Taylor Gatto expresses how such thinking affected the Congregationalist. “They [the Congregationalists] even changed their conservative ways to the point where Massachusetts gained a national reputation as the most liberal state in the Union…. Something mysterious inside the structure of Congregationalism worked to have them abandon some of the exclusivity adherence to Biblical elite dogma had taught them.”¹³⁾John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, New Society Publishers, 1992, p 90 He also mentions, “If you consider the tremendous stresses the dialectical process sets up anyway-where all people are their own priests, their own final master- it’s hard to see how a congregational society can do otherwise.”¹⁴⁾ John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, New Society Publishers, 1992, p 86 But the Bible says we are “kings and priests unto God” (Revelation 1:6, 5:10), not unto ourselves as our “own final master” as if we are our own gods. The Bible gives us an obvious patriarchal structure commanding us to obey authorities, whether civil (1 Peter 2:13-14), pastoral (Hebrews 13:17), occupational (Colossians 3:22), and parental (Colossians 3:20). Such commands are repeated over and over throughout the Bible (Exodus 22:28; Romans 13:1-2; Titus 3:1), and to murmur against authorities is to ultimately murmur against God Himself (Exodus 16:8). As John Stormer stated, “In the family, children first develop concepts of obedience to authority. This establishes the foundation for obeying school, church, work and governmental authorities through life. Textbooks, in undermining parental authority, set the stage for a life of rebellion.”¹⁵⁾ John A. Stormer, None Dare Call It Education, Liberty Bell Press, 1999, p. 100
The affective domain essentially brings all things to revolve around relationships as equality from the philosophy of collectivism. John Taylor Gatto refers to “The common causes and purposes that mark human association at its best…”¹⁶⁾ John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, New Society Publishers, 1992, p. 86 This is what Dean Gotcher called “common-causie” as a swing on the term kamikaze. Tim LaHaye explains how this works in the classroom of the public school: “Values clarification is an ingeniously evil technique of applying peer pressure to questions, selected by atheistic humanist educators, that are usually far too advanced for the group. When no moral absolutes are permitted in a discussion, the group usually comes to the lowest common-denominator values, just as the educrats intended.”¹⁷⁾ Tim LaHaye, The Battle for the Public Schools: Humanism’s Threat to our Children, Fleming H. Revell Company, 1983, p. 196-197
Bloom’s third point is the psychomotor which is focusing schooling on getting jobs, which in turn depletes the time spent on the cognitive teachings. This essentially produces dumbed down children who are forced into the work environment – ideal for the communist ideology. Dean Gotcher wrote, “The School to Work bill is a federal law to replace didactic with dialectic thinking,”¹⁸⁾ Dean Gotcher, The Dialectic & Praxis: Diaprax and the End of the Age, Institute for Authority Research, 2004, Vol. 2, p. 13 The law specifically states, “(E) Developing new models for remediation of basic academic skills, which models shall incorporate appropriate instructional methods, rather than using rote and didactic methods.”¹⁹⁾ S 143 RS, p. 187, lines 21-24 If parents are uncomfortable with the direction the public schools are going, they should be reminded that in Texas, Federal Judge Melinda Harmon ruled in January 1, 1997 Supreme Court’s decision, “…parents give up their rights when they drop children off at public schools.”²⁰⁾ cited by John A. Stormer, None Dare Call It Education, Liberty Bell Press, 1999, p. 34