Frank Brown is a professor of economics at De
Paul University and the chairman of the National Association for
Personal Rights in Education.
It is difficult to believe that an American
legislature could enact Goals 2000, a bill ill-equipped to attain its
stated purpose of helping reform American schooling, but yet both the
U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate have passed versions
of this bill and now are in conference to draw up a compromise. There
are compelling reasons to defeat this bill and, if it is passed, to
challenge it in federal and state legislatures and courts and in the
public forum. Three main criticisms will be given here.
FEDERALIZATION OF SCHOOLING
Through Goals 2000 the federal government, having
no constitutional authority over schooling but yet having often usurped
power in this field, would take a giant step toward seizing sweeping
control over the schooling of American children, a goal for which
educational nationalists have fought since the 1820s and toward which
the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) is such a significant
Goals 2000 would establish national goals,
curriculum, testing, and teacher certification in a discipline that
cries out for parental and local control.
Goals 2000 would give federal bureaucrats authority
to restructure state education and thus ultimately to minimize the
independence of state public schooling. The bill speaks often about the
voluntary participation of states in federal programs, but who can doubt
that the weight of federal funding the present billions in ESEA money and
the dollars expected to flow from Goals 2000 will bring the state schools under
Goals 2000 would shamefully interfere with the
family, compounding with federal regulations the burdens parents and
students now endure under state control. A meddlesome aspect is its
"school-to-work" program, which mandates that each secondary
school student will have a government facilitator employed at the school
to follow the student through school and into a job.
Senatorial and other champions of Goals 2000 deny
that the federal government will take over state schooling, but the
government teachers and their legislative friends are too well- known
for writing laws that can later be expanded to justify further-reaching
policies. Furthermore, many senators believe that Goals 2000 spells
federal control over state schooling, with Sen. Moynihan asking 'Why
UNAWARENESS OF REASONS FOR SCHOOLING DECLINE
Goals 2000 shows no awareness of the real reasons
for the decline in the quality of the schooling of American children.
The state public school system was a product of
mid-19th century America, with its model being the Massachusetts program
engineered by Horace Mann and his Unitarian allies in Harvard University
and the Boston business community.
In its earlier decades this system had some
worthwhile achievements, but in recent decades the quality of schooling
has declined dramatically.
The early state schooling was based primarily on
the following values: that the child has an intellect and a free will;
that the child should be educated and not manipulated; that the school
is to be a partner with the family in the formation of the character of
the students; that moral and Protestant religious influences, including
prayer and the reading of the Bible, should be an integral part of the
life of the school; that the human capital of the students should be
developed through intensive work and firm discipline; and that the
students should be given a sense of responsible individualism.
But such values have largely been eliminated and deliberately so from public schools by the
psychological and behavioristic teachings of such professors as Wundt,
Hall, Dewey, Skinner, Watson, Simon, Rogers, Maslow, Kohlberg, Spady,
and others, many of them at one time or other members of the psychology
departments of such influential universities as Harvard, Columbia, and
Chicago, and many of them secular humanists or atheists or agnostics.
This victory of what can be called a
"psychology revolution" has brought into the public schools
(and many private ones) the following developments: the expansion of
behaviorism and the stimulus response (S-R) technique, with students to
be manipulated rather than educated; the establishment of an atheistic
or agnostic or relativistic religious environment, with the former
Protestant morality and religious practices being eliminated; confusion
about or even denial of the view that the student has an intellect and a
free will as these faculties have been traditionally understood; the
freedom of students to do their own thing; emphasis on the socialization
of the children in preparation for a socialistic order in this country;
and the growth of a playground mentality.
The preparation of teachers has been weakened
through the displacing of courses in academic content with those in
methods of teaching. If American students are near the bottom in
achievement in mathematics and science in competition with the students
of other industrialized cultures, it is because many of their teachers especially at the elementary school
level have been overloaded with courses in
methods of teaching and do not know enough mathematics and science to
teach at a high-quality level.
Values clarification is promoted as a method for
students to clear up their own thinking and values, but is designed to
break the bond between the student and the parents. There are many other
psychological techniques, moral dilemmas, and games unacceptable to
parents, as detailed in Phyllis Schlafly's Child Abuse in the
In recent years the psychological orthodoxy has
been the untested Outcome-Based Education (OBE), which like Mastery
Learning and earlier versions elevates affective learning (emotions,
psychologizing) over cognitive learning (reading, writing, arithmetic).
A particularly tragic development has been the
abandonment of the phonics method of teaching reading, with which
previous generations attained a commendable national literacy, for a
whole word process now producing a shameful array of illiterates.
Many American parents complain about the
intellectual and moral failures within the schools, but the deeply
entrenched system survives, holding fiercely to its monopoly of the
education taxation, praising itself, blaming families, condemning
legislatures for not supplying more funds, and organizing politically to
defend its preferential but undeserved position in this society.
Nothing seems capable of uncovering for this
society the reasons for the decline in state schooling stemming from the
wide scale loss of intellectual and moral values in the schooling of
teachers and students alike.
One might reasonably expect the highly publicized
report A Nation at Risk with its conclusion that if a foreign
nation had done what this nation has done to American schools it would
be an occasion for a declaration of war might have jarred this country into an
awareness of the academic sickness in the government school system.
Goals 2000 speaks glowingly of great reforms, of
every child being ready for school by 2000, and of 90% high school
graduation rates by 2000, but such statements are largely publicity
claims with but little substance.
Who is going to bring about the reforms? Will it be
the same people who have largely destroyed the present system? Will it
be the National Education Association (NEA) and allies salivating at the
expectation of the coming flow of federal dollars? Will it be some
national board members speaking about quality education, but yet without
the slightest idea of what the problems are? Will it be politicians
under the control of teachers' unions?
UNCONSTITUTIONALITY OF THE SYSTEM
In assessing the constitutionality of the state
public school system and of its growing federalization, two principles
must be highlighted.
First, every individual parent and student every family has in the area of schooling personal
civil and constitutional rights to academic freedom, to religious
liberty, and to equal protection of the laws. These personal rights
stand on their own and should not be minimized or destroyed by reason of
any relationship between the state and any church or school.
Second, with schooling a matter of religious
conscience for many families, the state school may not give preferential
tax support to one religion over others.
Horace Mann's school failed on both counts. He
overran the rights of parents and students by making the state the sole
tax-supported schoolteacher of the children of the public, taking as his
model the Prussian state school system. He used public taxation to
benefit one religion over another by enshrining Unitarianism in the
state school in order to undermine the Congregationalism then-dominant
in the local common schools.
Adopting Mann's model, the mid-19th century
Protestant hegemony mainly Unitarians, Methodists,
Baptists in cooperation with Masons and Know-Nothings filled the land with the
Protestantized state public school.
The Protestant power called its new institution a
public school, declared it open to all children, appropriated for it a
monopoly of the schooling taxation collected from the public, and told
dissenting families that if they enrolled in private schools, even one
in accord with their conscience, they had to forfeit a share of the
education taxation, even their own, and that if they could not find
alternative schooling they had to turn their children over to the state
This Prussian import violated American principles
of democracy and constitutionality by denying the personal rights of
dissenting parents and students to education tax equity and violated the
rights of dissenting educators, including churches, by giving
Protestantism preferential tax support in an alleged public school.
Today many Protestants have fled the public school
while others doggedly support it, but even they should realize that
Protestantism has largely been ousted from the public schools by the
secular humanistic psychological takeover.
Now the question: Is the present academically weak
and psychologically damaged state public school constitutional and
deserving of government tax preference?
The answer is no.
The present state school would have the public
believe that, since it has removed almost all of the Protestant
religious values, including such practices as prayer and Bible reading,
it has reached a neutral, secular, and constitutional status, one that
is reasonably acceptable to all the families of this society, but this
is not so.
There are theological, religious, and moral
dimensions in the values that fill schools. Is the human being a
creature of God or the product of a long evolutionary line without
reference to a deity? Is there a true God or is there no god or many
gods and does it make any difference or are we all gods together with
the animals and trees as the pantheism of the New Age religion propounds
in some of the schools? Is there sin? What is a family? When does life
begin? Is there a right or wrong and, if so, on what grounds?
Whether the secular humanism or atheism which is
winning in the state schools is considered as a religion or as neutral
to religion or as an opponent of religion, it is irreconcilably hostile
to the once dominant Protestantism and to Catholicism and to other
In his book Psychological Seduction, William
Kirk Kilpatrick asserts that the dominant secular humanistic psychology
is a faith competing with religion. It has indeed become a new
established religion. It violates the constitutional rights of families
(parents and students) and competing educators.
What is so ironic in this matter is that while this
society speaks about having done away with an established church, it has
through its public school system created one of the most dangerous
establishments one hostile to traditional religions in history. That this establishment
has as well contributed so heavily to the breakdown of the academic
development of the students makes it all the more undesirable and
nonproductive. That it also bears a heavy responsibility for the
lessening of the moral tone in this society is also a matter for intense
Why does the state public school system which in so
many important ways is intellectually and morally bankrupt still
survive? Why is it considered for expansion through Goals 2000?
For one thing, it has been allowed to exist for 150
years with the privilege of monopolizing the education tax dollar to
fill the minds of children with its claims.
But, despite all the tax dollars put into it, this
institution is not capable of doing a highly effective job for the
children and for this society and this nation.
This country must seriously reexamine the history,
validity, efficiency, and constitutionality of this system.
Drastic changes are needed. American families must
be provided with tax-supported choice as they sometimes had before the
Mann state program. Choice worked magnificently with the GI Bill of
Rights. It is working magnificently for many college and university
students on the federal and state levels.
Goals 2000 is not the answer. It should be stopped.
But if it does pass, then the process of dismantling its preferential
tax status should be started in the federal and state legislatures and