Direct Instruction: Learning for Rats, Applied to Children

In a recent post of a post from Daily Kos that summarized a speech by Jim Cummins, the author noted the following:

Cummins challenged educational practices resulting from federal No Child Left Behind legislation, with its emphasis on standardized tests and consequent teaching "to the tests," saying instructional approaches now being imposed are something that most in the audience wouldn’t want their own children to suffer. These approaches have, he said, more to do with teaching rats than humans. He urged his audience to reclaim good instruction with attention to the lessons of social constructionism instead of treating students with a behaviorist approach in which, as B.F. Skinner proved, even pigeons can be taught to play ping-pong.

One prominent venue for training the trainers of poor children in the new mind control (not so new, really) is the Association for Direct Instruction, a spin-off of the U. of Oregon's Reading First mafia headed by Doug Carnine and Roland Good.

Here principals and teachers come to receive the gospel according to Siegfried Engelmann, whose Direct Instruction has become today's federally-sanctioned child abuse for poor children. DI is a steroidal scripted behaviorist methodology very popular with urban school policymakers and the Reading First thugs who make their curricular choices for them in Title I schools.

No middle class suburban parent would ever permit this kind of cognitive decapitation of their children.


As you have a look at these video clips here, count how many white children are in these groups. By the way, note the spelling in the title of the first clip below of "explanation" and "othography." Orthography is the study of the correct spelling and usage of words. You could not make this stuff up.