Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt

Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt was once a senior policy advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement at the U.S. Department of Education. she was also a co-founder of Guardians of Education for Maine, an educational activism group. Today she promotes a conspiracist view of educational problems that attributes American anti-intellectualism to the the evil machinations of former Soviet KGB agents.[1] If you hear the sound of hoofbeats in Central Park, then surely it must be the sound of... former Soviet KGB agents dressed up as zebras.

Some dare call it
Conspiracy
What THEY don't want
you to know!
Sheeple wakers
v - t - e

Book

In 1999, Iserbyt published The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America.[2] The book outlines Iserbyt's criticism of the American education system, wherein, according to her, schools and universities are used to suppress creative thinking, and to encourage students to toe the line.

Some of her findings:

  • A child who can read, write and compute at a sufficient level should have no limitations on controlling his or her own destiny. Providing such basic education is not and should not be expensive, but the subsequent brainwashing is an expensive and long process.
  • In 1972, a survival problem was presented to a class where a lifeboat was overloaded and students needed to decide who to toss off the lifeboat to ensure that some survived. When the students found a method that allowed all people to survive, the professor rejected it and insisted the problem be done again.
  • After Iserbyt questioned the educational value of some pedagogical methods, she discovered that some critics were calling her a "kook" for maintaining what she believed was a principled position.
gollark: That's nice, but you still have to implement very complex sandboxing to *do* it.
gollark: The option #3 I suggested was to not have multiple users; just let the person using it edit everything and don't try some awful nonfunctional sandboxing implementation like you've made.
gollark: I mean, you could do that; that's option #1. It would be an awful solution. But you could.
gollark: Oh, actually there's option #3: just do single user mode and don't bother stopping editing of "OS" files.
gollark: Well, your current implementation lets them do stuff to OS files, so no.

References
  1. Charlotte Iserbyt. Former KGB Heads to Helps Spy on Americans. NewsWithViews.com. 2003 April 24.
  2. http://deliberatedumbingdown.com/
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