Charlotte Iserbyt’s comprehensive work, referenced in the first article of this issue of Education Reporter, is potentially the most thoroughly researched and documented work ever written on how American education has been subverted, undermined, and yes, “dumbed down” over the nation’s 250-year history.

The late, great author and educator, Samuel Blumenfeld, writing in the foreword of Iserbyt’s book, summed up its extensive content this way:

• Charlotte Iserbyt is to be greatly commended for having put together the most formidable and practical compilation of documentation describing the “deliberate dumbing down” of American children by their education system. Anyone interested in the truth will be shocked by the way American social engineers have systematically gone about destroying the intellect of millions of American children for the purpose of leading the American people into a socialist world government controlled by behavioral and social scientists.

In her review of the work when it was released, Phyllis Schlafly, herself an education expert and praiseworthy author, noted that, while the book appears daunting because of its size, “it was designed this way and is quite user-friendly.” Phyllis pointed out the value of how easily people could make use of Iserbyt’s extensive documentation by taking out or copying pages to present at school-board meetings or other public hearings, in order to prove points or justify positions on important education issues.

As Phyllis observed, “these are verbatim quotes from the ‘change agents’ themselves. This book documents what the education establishment has really been doing to our children, not what they’ve proclaimed they are doing.”

The information in Iserbyt’s book is presented chronologically, beginning with the “sowing of the seeds” of deliberate and detrimental change in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. She skillfully documents how a long line of change agents used a series of education “crises” to advance their agenda and introduced new programs and fads to “fix” the crises that of course never did.

Rather, decades of “solutions” by the educators have only increased the power of the teachers’ unions and, for the most part, erased the imparting of knowledge by developing children’s innate talents and abilities and building on them year over year.

The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America is not a pleasant read, but it is an important one.

It contains 30 years of research by the author, and is a factual history, description, and chronology of the undermining and subversion of American education culminating in the disastrous result we see playing out in the schools today. It describes the frightening shift in educational philosophy, beginning more than 100 years ago and fueled by experimental psychology such as practiced by B.F. Skinner, Ivan Pavlov, and others.

Iserbyt leaves no stone unturned in unmasking the names and educational machinations of numerous players over nearly 15 decades. She covers the socialist/Marxist angle, the globalist angle, the perverted sexual angle, the endless psychological manipulation, and the resultant moral relativism that has only become more extreme since she wrote the book in 1999.

If knowledge is power, readers would be wise to avail themselves of a resource such as The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America. While Charlotte Iserbyt passed away in 2022, she left a valuable legacy of facts with which every parent and concerned citizen should be armed.

To read the entire book, go to Amazon.com to order!

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