Outcome Based Education: Another Name for Creeping Socialism

MYTH: The establishment of predetermined educational outcomes will improve test scores and more children will have access to academic success.

At the turn of the last century, Harvard professor George Santayana wrote: “Those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.”

In pre WW II Germany, Adolph Hitler made sweeping changes to the educational system for the purpose of restructuring German society. Inspired by Soviet revolutionaries, his goal was a National Socialist state in which its citizens complied with specific expectations. To accomplish this, he introduced a system of instruction that de-emphasized academic knowledge in favor of attitudinal outcomes. In his own words, Hitler said, “The People’s State must reconstruct our system of general instruction in such a way that it will embrace only what is essential” (Mein Kampf, Vol. II, Chap. 2). He succeeded in establishing a state curriculum through legal maneuvers, laws, and intimidation. Gradually, even private and parochial schools were pressured into compliance or faced the loss of government subsidies and tax concessions. Before the start of hostilities, every institution of learning in Germany was in compliance with the state curriculum creating a population of happily complacent and compliant worker drones.
Seven decades later, we are seeing history repeat itself. One of the more popular educational fads to darken the hallways of American schools in recent years is that known as outcome based education (OBE). The similarities between OBE and Hitler’s National Socialist curriculum are disturbing. Like Hitler’s curriculum, the ultimate goal of OBE is the total reconstruction of the educational system and eventually the reengineering of society.
OBE is another in a continuing series of experimental educational schemes that have been inaugurated without proven research data to back up their vague promises and outright lies. It is new age psychobabble and junk science. But unlike other flawed educational experiments, OBE has the weight of law to enforce its total implementation.
OBE is one of those knee-jerk responses intended to correct perceived problems with the schools: falling test scores, increasing violence, and prevailing apathy toward education in general. OBE was not developed by teachers. It was introduced by a radical group of liberal psychologists, sociologists, and politicians for the purpose, we were told, of saving our ailing educational system. This group included the father of OBE, ex-Harvard professor William Spady, management consultant Charles Schwahn, and psychiatrist Dr. William Glasser. With Workforce 2000, authored by Arnold Packer of Johns Hopkins University, and the National Education Association’s (NEA) Ten Cardinal Principals as a blueprint for the Federal Goals 2000, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Education, Richard Riley, pushed through legislation that set the stage for what is being called “a train wreck in slow motion.”
Outcome based education, as it is enthusiastically promoted by its liberal supporters, “is simply the establishment of expected goals or outcomes for different levels of elementary-secondary education, and a commitment to ensuring that every student achieves at least those minimum proficiencies before being allowed to graduate.” Now, if this sounds good, it’s supposed to. OBE is actually a broad based, legislatively mandated program designed to dumb down the curriculum in schools so that everyone achieves the same level of “mastery.”
Our traditional system of education has been academically oriented, with teacher directed instruction. Based on a curriculum rich in content, students acquire “core knowledge” then are tested to determine their ability to formulate conclusions or judgments based on that knowledge. On the other hand, OBE represents a shift away from the traditional educational system in which content and core knowledge are emphasized, to one which emphasizes attitudes and beliefs.
With OBE there is a tremendous potential to influence students with a politically correct set of doctrines. We are already seeing an increased emphasis on radical issues such as global citizenship, environmentalism, humanism, self-esteem, and human sexuality at the expense of core subjects such as math science, history, and writing. Hitler had a similar idea when he said, “The subject of our historical teaching must be curtailed.” When we see schools today refusing to teach about our founding fathers on the pretext that to do so will offend someone, are we witnessing a move to Hitlerian revisionist history?
In some school districts currently, an average of only 41% of the school day is devoted to core subjects. The other 59% is made up of a smorgasbord of values based course offerings. These new courses are designed to increase student awareness, teach tolerance, instill self-esteem, and resolve conflicts. They teach values clarification, moral reasoning, gender and lifestyle issues, and other high sounding new age mumbo jumbo topics.
OBE has a deceptive way of showing improvement over results of the traditional system: it simply lowers the standards and relies on ambiguous assessment methods. The outcomes are values based and require the student to demonstrate attitudes, behaviors, and feelings, but not knowledge or judgment. Competition is discouraged. Group participation and team building take precedence over intellectual development of the individual. Brighter students are held to the same level of mastery as their less academically blessed classmates. They wait while less scholarly students attempt mastery of the material forcing the brighter students to comply with the lowered standards.
Just as Hitler used legal tactics to impose his curriculum, OBE has legislation in place that will impose its insidiousness on our schools. The well known Federal Goals 2000 established a mandatory curriculum for schools and proposals for eliminating local control of schools. Public Law 103-382, passed in 1994, set aside $8 billion for schools to use to implement OBE. The federal Education Act H.R. 6 allows for the elimination of laws which may interfere with OBE implementation. Under this legislation, schools will be forced to implement OBE or face the loss of federal funding, or worse, takeover by the government.
And just as Hitler pressured private and parochial schools to comply, our government is bringing privates and parochials into the sinister web of OBE. The much touted government vouchers are cunning devices to reduce the efficacy of private and parochial schools. By promising high expectation/low income parents the opportunity to send their children to these options to public schools, the government is laying the ground work for the elimination of these alternatives as we have come to know them. Federal law requires that once an institution of learning accepts government funding it must comply with government educational standards. This means that once vouchers are issued, OBE will begin to infest private and parochial schools as well. Shortly after that, the last bastion of parental control, home schooling, will be outlawed.
It doesn’t take a social scientist to see the danger in outcome based education. The dumbing down of the curriculum, emphasis on attitudinal outcomes, self-esteem, alternative assessments, etc. will produce a nation of happily complacent and compliant worker drones. Creativity will disappear and individual initiative will become a foot note in the revisionist history books. Even a cursory examination of it will show that OBE has socialism written all over it.