TODAY’S EDUCATION, THE JOURNAL OF THE NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION, CARRIED an article in the September–October 1976 edition entitled “The Seven Cardinal Principles Revisited.”

December 13, 2016 in News by RBN Staff

On page 1 this article stated that:
In 1972, the NEA established a Bicentennial Committee charged with developing a “living commemoration of the principles of the American Revolution.” This 200th anniversary celebration of the Declaration of Independence was to focus on the next 100 years of education in an interdependent global community. The initial work of the Committee culminated inthe NEA Bicentennial Idea Book. Among its ideas was that of developing a definitive volume to “contain a reframing of the Cardinal Principles of Education and recommendations for a global curriculum.”

After recognizing the importance of the original Cardinal Principles,
which were published in 1918, the Committee made the point that “today, those policy statements about education are obsolete, education taken as a whole is not adequate to the times and too seldom anticipates the future.” A report to be issued by the NEA, proposing cardinal premises for the twenty-first century is the direct and immediate outgrowth of the Bicentennial Committee’s belief that “educators around the world are in a unique position to bring about a harmoniously interdependent global community based on the principles of
peace and justice….” Early in September 1975, a 19-member Preplanning

Committee began the task of recasting the seven Cardinal Principles of Education by developing 25 guidelines
for the project.
[Ed. Note: Members of the Preplanning Committee read like a “Who’s Who of Leading Globalists.” It included: former Secretary of Education T.H. Bell, “Mr. Management-by-Objectives,” who was responsible for the grant to William Spady of the Far West Laboratory to pilot OBE in Utah, with plans to “put OBE in all schools of the nation”; Professor Luvern Cunningham, Ohio State University, who subsequently served as advisor to the Kentucky Department of
Education during its education restructuring in the 1990s; Willis Harman, Stanford Research Institute; Robert Havighurst, University of Chicago; Theodore Hesburgh, University of Notre Dame; Ralph Tyler, Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Science; Professor Theodore Sizer, Coalition for Essential Schools, which calls for a “less is more” curriculum and removal of graduation standards (the Carnegie Unit); David Rockefeller; Professor Benjamin Bloom, father of Mastery Learning (the international learning method); the late McGeorge Bundy of
the Ford Foundation; and others.]
3D, page 139-140

IN THE SEPTEMBER 1976 ISSUE OF PHI DELTA KAPPAN, “AMERICA’S NEXT TWENTY-FIVE Years: Some
Implications for Education,” Harold Shane described his version of the “new and additional
basic skills” as follows:
Certainly, cross-cultural understanding and empathy have become fundamental skills, as
have the skills of human relations and intercultural rapport… the arts of compromise and
The Serious Seventies : c. 1976
140 reconciliation, of consensus building, and of planning for interdependence become basic….
As young people mature we must help them develop… a service ethic which is geared toward
the real world… the global servant concept in which we will educate our young for planetary
service and eventually for some form of world citizenship…. Implicit within the “global
servant” concept are the moral insights that will help us live with the regulated freedom we
must eventually impose upon ourselves.

3D, A-49 (bulk of this “When Right Is Left” entry in 3D written by Cynthia Weatherly, editor, the deliberate dumbing down of america, 1999 out of print version which is a free download at deliberatedumbingdown.com)

When Right Is Left
It just happens that the October 1992 edition of Visions (Pac Telesis Foundation newsletter)
contained an article entitled “Why Technology?” It began
Alvin Toffler, the author of such influential books as Future Shock and The Third Wave,
has written that the spread of personal computers is the single most important change in the
field of knowledge since the invention of movable type in the 15th century. He goes on to state
that knowledge is the key to power in the 21st century—not mineral rights or military force.
This was the same publication that carried the definitive definition of assessment. And
wasn’t this the same Alvin Toffler who wrote Creating a New American Civilization, which
heralds the coming “Third Wave” of global culture, published by the Progress and Freedom
Foundation and introduced at their “Cyberspace and the New American Dream” conference
in Atlanta last year?
Newt Gingrich, the new Speaker of the House, introduced Toffler as his longtime friend
and then sat quietly by to hear Toffler say that national sovereignty was a thing of the past and
that he was an avowed secularist. These are the stripes of our new “conservative” future?
At the same Cyberspace conference, an array of professionals from many areas of cultural
life paraded their contributions to leadership toward the much-touted “Third Wave”. The spokesperson
for education in Progress and Freedom Foundation’s lineup was—and still is—Lewis J.
Perelman, author of School’s Out: A Radical New Formula for the Revitalization of America’s
Educational System. Perelman advocates what he calls just-in-time learning, privatized public
schools, Total Quality applications, hyperlearning, and many other catchy concepts which are
now, of course, getting much attention in the policy debates.
It should be noted that in the preface to his book Perelman cites Wassily Leontief and B.F.
Skinner among those from whom he particularly benefited during his years at Harvard in the
1970s. Most interesting, since Leontief is the acknowledged expert on management byobjectives
(MBO)—the forerunner and companion to PPBS. And Skinner was the American father of
behavioral psychology and mastery learning/operant conditioning—the foundation for OBE.
These relationships of Perelman’s are important because he supplied the connecting piece
to complete the puzzle picture of our children’s future. Perelman states on page 316 that
…Nostalgic mythology about “local control” should not mask the reality that the state
governments have the constitutional authority, call the shots, and pay most of the bill for
Appendix XI
A–50 education. But government, local or otherwise, no longer needs to own and operate school
systems or academic institutions.
Taxing Human Worth
Now to the heart of Perelman’s alternative proposal which forms the future of “conservative”
educational policy and expresses assessment’s future use:
…One possibility would be a human capital tax [emphasis added]. The human capital
tax might be simply the same as a personal income tax, or might be calculated or ear-marked
in a more limited way. Technicalities aside, it’s logical that if the government is going to help
fund investments in the development of the community’s human capital, taking back a share
of the resulting gains is a good way to pay for it. In effect, each generation of beneficiaries
of such investment pays back some of the benefits it received to the next generation [valueadded
tax, ed.]. (p. 317)
We should deal with parents who are starving their children’s minds with the same legal
remedies we use to deal with parents who are starving their children’s bodies. The media
through which a microchoice [voucher] system is provided will give public authorities more
accurate information on what individual families and kids are doing than is currently available,
making it easier to identify instances of negligence or misuse. [emphasis added] (p. 318)
…[T]here’s no good reason why the learner should not be able to purchase services or products
from any provider—whether public or private, in-state or out-of-state. (p. 319)
A Value-Added Tax For Human Worth
There is the framework. A value-added tax process that will deduct from a services/education
super-voucher a tax for every level of achievement/skill a student achieves—true assessment.
Standards will be rigid and penalties for non-achievement will be enforceable against the student,
his parents, and providers of educational services in order to achieve a trained workforce.
The implications for families being disrupted by accusations and prosecutions for Perelman’s
implied abuse and neglect over “parental starving of children’s minds” are startling in
their flagrancy.
An elaborate and accurate system will track families and students, leaving privacy and
confidentiality in the dust. The tax/voucher will follow the student across state and regional
boundaries, necessitating a reformulation of tax bases; this could even be extended to foreign
sources—facilitated by choice and charter school initiatives. (Remember Toffler asserts that
national sovereignty is, or will soon be, a thing of the past. And what about GATT’s education
provision?)
The World Bank has just announced (Associated Press, The Des Moines Register, 9/15/95)
its new formula for estimating a nation’s worth. Ismael Serageldin, World Bank Vice President
for Environmentally Sustainable Development, stated in Monitoring Environmental Progress:
A Report on Work in Progress that the system “for the first time folds a country’s people and its
natural resources into its overall balance sheet.” While the World Bank projects that its new
system of measuring wealth which “attempts to go beyond traditional gauges” and lists “Human
Resources: value represented by people’s productive capacity” (e.g. education, nutrition) will
take years to perfect, I submit that our process of assessment is a giant step in that direction.
I am reminded that in May of 1984 the Washington Post published an article entitled “Industrial
Policy Urged for GOP.” The Institute for Contemporary Studies, “founded by Edwin Meese,
A–51
Caspar Weinberger, and other Reagan supporters,” issued a report that advocated “Republicans
shed some of their deep-rooted antipathy to a planned economy.” All signals seem to point to
the fact that this has indeed happened.
Somewhere in all of this is lost the ability to communicate our culture in an organized way
and to teach basic skills that can be used whether cyberspace technology is available or not.
Didn’t we used to call this “education”? Didn’t we believe that our children had some choice
in their futures?
When is assessment really assessment? Ernest Boyer, former Director of the Office of Education
and Carnegie Foundation director, once said, “To be fully human one must serve.” In
the future to be fully assessed may mean our children’s worth as a servant of the state will be
“assigned a value for tax purposes”—assessment.
America, where are you?
Eph. 6:10-20