- SCHOOL CHOICE
- CHARTERS
- COMMUNITY RE-EDUCATION
The 1985 U.S.-USSR Education Exchange Agreement signed between Presidents Reagan and USSR President Gorbachev, and the extensive Carnegie Corporation-Soviet Academy of Science Agreements which dealt with joint development of computer courseware, etc., related to Marxist Critical Thinking. For background information, read Soviets in the Classroom... America’s Latest Education Fad at www.deliberatedumbingdown.com (a free download HERE).
This agenda has continued. Of enormous significance is fact that Tony Wagner, the founder in the early 1980s of the far left Educators for Social Responsibility (ESR), is very prominent in the present Marxist U.S. education restructuring. Wagner recommends “The Finnish Model” for American schools.
Wagner has very close ties to Donald Davies, editor of Communities and Their Schools (1981), one of four published books resulting from The Goodlad Study. The other three books are: Schooling for a Global Age (Becker), Arts and the Schools (Hausman) and A Place Called School (Goodlad). All are still available at Amazon.com
Donald Davies is the nation’s foremost leader of the womb-to tomb Community Education movement. This is being implemented across the country under label of community schools, community centers, life long education, workforce training, ALL social services, including taking grandma to see the leaves in the autumn, having an abortion, etc. These government-funded and controlled services are to be provided under the community school district, also known as community schools, community centers, hubs, etc.
This is all important background information because Tony Wagner has recently assumed the Presidency of Donald Davies leftist group, the Institute for Responsive Education (IRE).
And, lo and behold! IRE’s website letterhead has the late Theodore Sizer’s Coalition of Essential Schools (CES) listed at the bottom of its letterhead! (Quite a nest of red birds out of Cambridge, Massachusetts!)
Sizer’s Coalition of Essential Schools, after being approved for charter school corporate developmental funding by the New American School Development Corporation in the mid-nineties, received additional funding from Annenberg.
Annenberg is connected to Chicago’s Bill Ayers (Weathermen building bomber) and brother of John Ayers, former VP of the Carnegie Foundation for the advancement of Teaching. John Ayers now heads up the School Choice/Charter School and Community Education agenda out of Tulane University, New Orleans. (This agenda is being touted as the national/international model!) John Ayers was deeply involved in President Obama’s early Chicago education restructuring agenda and in the setting up of charter schools in Chicago. (See earlier blog articles HERE and HERE and HERE.)
One excerpt from Soviets in the Classroom... America’s Latest Education Fad, relates to the USA implementation of Marxist curriculum follows:
A Few Examples
A complete listing of the many shocking exchange activities taking place as a result of the 1985 and 1988–1991 agreements would require volumes. A few concrete examples should suffice to convince the reader that all proposals called for in the agreements are being faithfully and fastidiously carried out.
1. Cambridge-based Educators for Social Responsibility (ESR) project, “Educating for New Ways of Thinking: An American-Soviet Institute.” Two such institute sessions have been held (one in Leningrad the summer of 1989) at which “Soviet and American educators examined classroom theory and practice in critical thinking about social and political issues and worked on recommendations and resources for improving the ways we teach about each other’s country, and on A Source-Book for New Ways of Thinking in Education: A U.S.-Soviet Guide for use by teachers and students in both countries.”
“Critical thinking” is the latest fad to hit our children’s classrooms. N. Landa’s Lenin: On Educating Youth, published by the Soviet state-controlled Novosti Press, quotes Lenin on “thinking” as follows:
To pose a real question means to define a problem which demands a new approach and new research.... Sometimes accepted truth no longer answers as a solution for a serious and pressing problem. The school should cultivate in pupils the ability to perceive scientifically evolved truths as stages along the endless road of cognition—not as something stationary and set.
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| Vladimir Lenin |
