KINDER'S COMMENTARY: TEACHING `ATTITUDES' PART OF OBE

This column continues excerpting a paper written on Outcome Based Education and its core, Mastery Learning, written by Dr. Daniel Harden, professor of education at Washburn University in Topeka. Dr. Harden is speaking of Dr. William Spady, the father of OBE and a sociologist who never taught in a classroom:

"The proper emphasis, according to Dr. Spady, should no longer be proficiency in the traditional curriculum, but new attitudes and a social consciousness appropriate to the new world they will live in during the 21st century.

"... Spady states rather directly in his definition of an outcome, `An outcome is a result of learning and an actual, visible observable demonstration of three things: knowledge, combined with competence, combined with something ... I call orientations -- the attitudinal, affective, motivational and relational elements that also make up a performance.' (Emphasis added.)

Wow. Here we have the heart of the matter. OBE, according to one of its fathers, is specifically about instructing students in the correct "attitudes." Which ones, though? Whose attitudes are to be taught?

To ask these questions is to pierce the soft underbelly of the OBE reformers. More from Dr. Harden:

"The degree to which this should or should not be taken is unclear and therefore discomforting. If the development of these attitudes that are associated with `success,' in Spady's view, is the responsibility of the school, or, let's face it, the state, the implications are profound. If students are going to be successful in tomorrow's world, it now becomes the responsibility of the school to determine those conditions that may negatively affect the desired attitudinal or affective development of the student. Since we are dealing with a complex of interactions between the student, the family and the total network of social values that surround and nurture the child, the conclusion must be that within this particular OBE model there is the potential for a vastly increased state involvement in social engineering and utopian tampering with the political and philosophical world views of children. (Emphasis added.)

"It is not surprising that many parents have reacted with alarm at the thought that the values they wish to instill in their children, often deeply based in their religious or philosophical world view, are now subject to the conscious alteration and manipulation of those who have set themselves up as arbiters of what will and will not be acceptable in the future. The process of instilling personal values has traditionally been with the family in the context of our American culture. ...

"There is frequently a kind of utopian sentimentality that surrounds certain kinds of OBE. In Johnson City, N.Y., for example, one of the promotional sheets for an OBE workshop asks whether the reader could imagine a future where cooperation would replace competition, where respect and love would replace prejudice and bigotry. ... This, quite simply, is an approach that replaces, in a most profound way, the vision of the future held by a great many good, well-educated parents.

"One might suggest that there is a certain arrogance associated with what purports to be a school reform movement that associates itself with the angels in their cosmic struggle with darkness as represented by parents who do not support their efforts. One does not have to be religious rightist to conclude that there is a more profound paradigm shift afoot than even the reform leaders are admitting to. It is a shift from the family, especially those with clearly established moral values that do not meet today's criteria for political correctness, to the state." (Emphasis added.)

If this doesn't frighten you, it should. Dr. Harden goes on, describing why OBE is destined, as with so many other aspects of Big Government, to be tremendously intrusive. Once we accept the utopian world view of OBE, Harden says, "There are few aspects of life that do not lend themselves to the social engineer's manipulations. Social problems are seen (by them) fundamentally as behavioral problems that can be solved through the manipulation of controlled variables. It is no wonder that primary to the social webs spun by the many OBE visionaries are extensive sex education programs, more affective and attitudinal than biological and functional. The effort to emphasize the function of schools in providing so-called `wrap-around' services, and the redefinition of the public school as an institution designed to provide all the social services that the state may believe to be appropriate to youth, takes on considerably more meaning when seen in this context."

Do we want our schools in the business of teaching socially and politically correct "attitudes," understood in this context? I will continue my effort to awaken Missourians to the threats posed by educational reformers who are not content to instruct the three Rs, but who have signed onto a mission to remake society according to their own, half-baked view of the future.

~Peter Kinder is the associate publisher of the Southeast Missourian and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.