WASHINGTON, D.C. – Have US education reforms over the past century led to the dumbing down of America?

This 12 minute movie will take you on a brief journey through US education policy as seen through the eyes of a mother to a  little girl named Maya. In a society where we trust in professionals, it shows how parents, by failing to question school policies, have allowed the educational system to become laboratories of experimentation.

The journey of Maya is sort of a fast forward of several education programs collapsed into the life of one little girl. It begins when she goes to school and her mother notices that the teacher doesn’t correct her spelling. The teacher explains it is a new system of education called “Whole Language” where children use “invented spelling.” Whole language made its way into the school system in the mid-1980s.

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Then in the advanced math classes, Maya doesn’t have to learn the right answer to math problems. Under the new advanced method of math taught in the advanced classes, students don’t need to have the right answer. They only need to have an explain why their answer is correct. By the late 1990s, the use of manipulatives had made its way into math education. During those years, it became unpopular to teach children the multiplication tables by memory.

The next step of the journey involved death education and psychological surveys. The psychological surveys were used to determine which students were “at risk” and needed referrals to the school psychologist and medicated.  This practice entered into schools during the beginning of the No Child Left Behind era and have accelerated under common core.

The movie then goes into the history of education reforms since 1900, including the Sally, Dick, and Jane books of the late 1950s.

You may not think of a movie on education policy as riveting, but this one is. It will, without a doubt, grab your attention.

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Authored by Allison Martinez – The Free Patriot