Saturday 16 November 2013

OUTCOME BASED EDUCATION IS POISON IN WRONG HANDS

As a devotee of Mastery Learning, I am saddened to find that the programme has been hijacked by modern educationists particularly in the United States. It no longer means what creator Benjamin Bloom had intended.
 
He designed Mastery Learning in the context of traditional education through language, science, social science, mathematics and economics.
 
Behaviour change was meant to involve children growing to adulthood with a wide range of generalized skills and knowledge. Reading and writing were preeminent skills.
 
Today, behaviour change  involves destroying family values, opposing faith and promoting a gay and lesbian lifestyle among children.  Reading, writing and arithmetic are no longer seen as having educational value. This is not what Bloom envisaged.
 
Please read the report below. It deeply and unfairly criticizes Bloom. He was not setting up a system in which there were no values. There is no indication that Bloom was anti-family and anti-faith. Please click:

Who's Who in Outcome Based Education
integraonline.com/~bonville/Education/WhoIsWhoInOBE.html

Benjamin Bloom. Mastery Learning was the original name
for the process known lately as Outcome Based Education,
also known as Performance Based ...

Who's Who in Outcome Based Education

The Players:

WHO IS BEHIND OBE?

Describing the character, theories and objectives of Outcome Based Education provides a basic understanding of the system that the government and its schools are foisting upon our children and families, like it or not. To obtain a deeper insight into OBE, however, it is necessary to learn something about the agents of change who are bringing OBE to you and your children. For that, we begin at the beginning with:

B. F. Skinner, a psychologist and learning theorist who gained prominence at mid-century. He developed the techniques of learning (operant conditioning) based on conditioning phenomena first analyzed scientifically by Pavlov. Skinner called his technique his "teaching machine." Like any machine, it can be used for good or bad, for meeting the goals of traditional education or for the goals espoused by OBE. Skinner thus developed the principles on which "Mastery Learning" was developed by:

Benjamin Bloom. Mastery Learning was the original name for the process known lately as Outcome Based Education, also known as Performance Based Education, or Restructuring. Educational theories used in OBE are based on Benjamin Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. A curriculum, according to Bloom, "...may be thought of as a plan for changing student behavior." (p 14 of Ron Sunseri's book OBE: Understanding the Truth about Education Reform, Questar Publishers, P.O. Box 1720, Sisters, OR 97759) Bloom called it "Mastery Learning." Techniques for his new style of education are based on Skinnerian behavioral psychology. It focuses on stimulus-response conditioning, which lends itself neatly to indoctrination. It is an approach which comes out of Pavlov's experiments with a dog, which he conditioned to salivate when he rang a bell.

AIDS Holistics: This is not true. Bloom's Taxonomy provided a framework for knowledge, understanding and expressing in own words, analysing, extrapolating on ideas, putting ideas together and evaluating plans and theories.

There was no intention to indoctrinate and condition children like dogs. Thinking teachers will use Mastery Learning to produce thinking students.

He said the mission of education is to change the thoughts, actions and feelings of students. Bloom held that the desired outcome is "...formulating subjective judgment as the end product resulting in personal values/opinions with no real right or wrong answer." Bloom's theory thus denies that there are absolute truths and it makes everything relative. One idea is as good as another. With no absolutes, then the goal of good teaching is to modify the "thoughts, feelings and actions" of the student to some replacement system supplied by the educational system. Since that system is controlled by the government, the change is specified by the government.

AIDS Holistics: The explanation above perverts what Bloom intended. It is intended to show that Bloom was in league with the gay and lesbian agenda that says there are no rules and no sin. It is all what people make it. Bloom did not promote an anti-faith and anti-family agenda. That came later.

William Spady. Based in Colorado, Spady is Director of the High Success Network and Director of the International Center on Outcome-Based Restructuring. He is the "father" of OBE. He works with the federal government, foundations, states and school districts helping them implement OBE. He is a sociologist with theories of "socialization" on global terms. OBE is designed to prove his theories. When asked by an interviewer if the system would promote patriotism or teach loyalty and allegiance to one's own country, he replied, "I don't know what Patriotic means."

According to Spady, we are faced with "a fragile and vulnerable global environment that requires altering economic consumption patterns and quality of life standards, and taking collective responsibility for promoting health and wellness." The goal of education, Spady says, has to be to prepare students for that future.

Learning results are what is important, and his premise is that all students can learn, and it is not important how long it takes, as long as the desired learning takes place. Since all will learn, grades are irrelevant in the new system. All get an "A". Competition in schools in his estimation is a negative influence impairing learning. He also believes that textbooks will be obsolete.

Spady's definition of an "outcome," found in the in-service training program for OBE teachers, is "The acceptable culminating demonstration of a significant learning behavior." Subject knowledge and concepts are not valid outcomes. In 1982 he observed that one of the four main goals of Mastery Learning is a "system of supervision and control which restrains behavior of kids. The outcome of the hidden agenda should be the fostering of social responsibility and compliance." These goals "transcend academics," and deal with attitudes and feelings.

However, Spady rejected the term "Mastery Learning" because of its monumental failures, renaming it so that the system of OBE would not be rejected out of hand. He found that the elite in the educational establishment supported his ideas because they, like Spady, want education not to teach, but to revamp society.

John Goodlad of the University of Washington and head of the Institute for Educational Renewal, doing research on strategies for reaching OBE goals. He is a one-worlder and globalist, who wrote, "Parents and the general public must be reached... Otherwise, children and youth enrolled in globally-oriented programs may find themselves in conflict with values assumed in the home. And then the educational institution...comes under scrutiny..." p 17-18 Elsewhere Goodlad advises, ..."Most youth still hold the same values as their parents and if we don't resocialize, our system will decay." p18

Sharon Robinson, appointed Asst. Secretary of Education for the Office of Educational Research and Improvement in the Clinton administration. A long-time staffer of The National Education Association, who sat with Hillary at the NEA convention and helped facilitate OBE.

National Center on Education and the Economy. Its original mission was to develop policies on education and human resources. It developed out of the Carnegie organization. Its Board of Trustees in the early 1990s included Michael Tucker (president), Mario Cuomo, Ira Magaziner, David Rockefeller, Hillary Clinton and Very Katz. In 1990 this non-profit group published America's Choice: High skills or low wages.

It described the workplace as one "managed by a small group of educated planners and supervisors (utilizing) ....administrative procedures (that) allow managers to keep control of a large number of workers. Most employees under this model need not be educated. It is far more important that they be reliable, steady and willing to follow directions." p 29-30 Why? Because, the report states, "More than 70 percent of the jobs in America will not require a college education by the year 2000." p 30 What is needed is "Workers who do what they are told, with a good attitude," says Ron Sunseri. How do you get them, Sunseri asks: "Start now teaching students, from the earliest grades, the attitudes and social behaviors that will please business and avoid a broad-based, high-quality, academic education."

Professor Anthony Oerringer of Harvard University contends: "Do we really want to teach people to do a lot of sums or write...when they have a five-dollar hand-held calculator or a word processor? ...Do we really have to have everybody literate---writing and reading in the traditional sense?" p28

So what are these changes to be? As implemented by education, based on research conducted by the National Training Laboratory associated with the National Education Association, the technique is to supplant skill training with "sensitivity training."

The goal, according to David Jenkins of the NTL, is "...to manipulate; (the teacher's) job is to plan and produce behavior in order to create changes in other people." Relative to your children, they may "appear to behave appropriately...(but) this appearance is deceptive... (They are) 'pseudo-healthy' persons who can benefit from sensitivity training." p 17 The NTL warned, however, not to be too up front about what is being done. Massel Smith of NTL advised educators: "Couch the language of change in the language of the status quo." p 17

Bill Clinton in 1979 initiated the "restructuring" reform of Arkansas schools and chose the bureaucracy to run it. After fifteen years of the system, the schools are presently 45th in literacy and 44th in standard achievement tests. He also started the "Governor's School" as a model for statewide school reform.

The school takes the best and brightest students in the state and send them to a special Summer school, six weeks long, with 350 to 400 students attending each year. Mark Lowry, former director of publicity for the school, says the goal is to identify the four or five exceptional students suited to future political careers.

Lowery reports that the school does not deal in traditional academic excellence, but political correctness. It uses thoroughly scripted "brainwashing" techniques, including isolation from the outside world, to instill moral relativity and disintegration of family values.

Students reported that they were fed a curriculum that focused on gays and gay rights, radical homosexuality, "all the things my parents said were wrong." Others reported, "We were encouraged to do what we felt like doing, to be hostile to Western Civilization and culture."

Lowery stated, "The greatest influence of the Governor's School is to promote the thought with these students that to be considered an intellectual by your peers...you have to be a liberal thinker." The school, he said, "invokes not only philosophy, but political thought, and that is the underlying message that permeates the whole six weeks. This is not teaching or learning, but indoctrination."

A student reported that the main course at the school, two hours every day, was "Views of Man." It dealt with radical feminist, leftist ideology, and other radical thinking. The student said it was "warped," presenting one viewpoint only. Its goal was to "Convince students that they are the intellectual and cultural elite." It taught that it is OK to challenge authority because "you are part of the elite, and your parents wouldn't understand all this. As the elite, it doesn't matter what ordinary people believe or want. You know what is good for them."

Parents reported that their children came back from the school "terribly changed." One parent reported that it took two years of psychological deprogramming to restore their child to normal. Another said that her son committed suicide, and probably would not have but for the school. Another student reported his repeated fantasies of committing suicide, even to the point of writing a suicide note, because he loved the school so much he didn't want to be back in the real world.

Unfortunately, the "real world" of tomorrow is the world of OBE, courtesy of the Clintons and Katz, the Bushes and Bells, Paulus and Roberts, and most recently John Kitzhaber and Brady Adams, all loyal Democrats and Republicans, who cozied up to the elitists who understand better than you what you ought do with your life and how to raise your children.

For your children it will be a life of lowered expectations and diminished returns.

Data periodically gathered through invasive testing within the affective domain has then, through the illegal demand for students' social security numbers...been compiled on computer systems storing vast amounts of intimate and private information on our children and youth, in violation of their constitutional rights...

"The traditional interests and rights of parents have been trampled upon, as educators have proceeded on the proposition that professionals know better than parents how to raise children.... The results create a further attack upon the already weakened family units in our sachet. Both the assessment tests and the related curriculum increasingly reinforce the message that conformity to government-established values and attitudes is the key to future success in life...

"The public does not understand that the government is establishing criteria to assess attitudes, values and opinions, nor do they understand that a 'planned course' will be introduced to 'remediate' attitudes, values and opinions not meeting government standards." p258-9

This is our future, compliments of the elite class of government bureaucrats and multi-national corporate managers and bankers who have given us OBE for the sake of the "Brave New World" they have in mind.



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