The deliberate dumbing down of America
by Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt · first published 1999
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5HN commenters
2009–2025first – last mentioned
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…cheap and easily disposable labor. Here are some books to read: John Taylor Gatto: Dumbing Us Down, Weapons of Mass Instruction and The Underground History of American Education. Charlotte Iserbyt: the deliberate dumbing down of america. Ivan Illich: Deschooling Society. John Holt: Anything at all, but particularly How Children Fail and How Children Learn. ---------- Besides Sudsbury schools, there's several other alternative school…
on “How Does This Not Blow Your Mind?” ↗For those of you looking for a possible explanation as to why our education system is such a failure, I suggest Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt's book, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America http://www.deliberatedumbingdown.com/MomsPDFs/DDDoA.sml.pdf
on “'Reading Rainbow' Reaches Its Final Chapter” ↗…deliberately defective education again, but I think I might have an interesting tidbit to share on this, which paints a rather ugly picture of the whole situation. An excerpt from Charlotte Iserbyt's the deliberate dumbing down of america (Revised and Abridged Edition [2011], Ch 2: The Turning of the Tides, p. 31, c. 1928): ------------------- "1928: A deliberate math "dumb down" was seriously discussed in 1928. A teacher named O.A.…
on “Who Says Math Has to Be Boring?” ↗…apparently the Trivium had been removed from a classical liberal education some time ago. I learned about the Trivium in an online school long after I left college... Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt's "The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America" may be a case in point. https://deliberatedumbingdown.com/ddd/ Conspiracy surrounds us, "conspiracy theory" seems to be a tactic first used by an "intelligence" agency to discourage those who question…
on “Kids Should Be Taught to Think Logically” ↗…of daily life. A clear sentence now sounds inhuman; a careless one, sincere. Truth begins to look artificial, and confusion passes for honesty. I recall the warning of Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt in The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America. She foresaw a culture that would teach obedience in place of thought. That warning now feels less like prophecy and more like description. When people begin to distrust eloquence, when they scorn precision…
on “Artificial Writing and Automated Detection [pdf]” ↗…age-old principles on their own. Charlotte Iserbyt, former Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), U.S. Department of Education, wrote the free eBook (pdf) "The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America" http://www.deliberatedumbingdown.com/
on “Lawsuit against "Discovery Math" in Seattle Schools” ↗