Aside from an occasional piece of jewelry, you cannot get many Americans interested in gold. Why does it appear that proportionally fewer citizens today realize the value of gold as real money than at any other time in our history? It seems that it has a lot to do with education, or more correctly the lack of quality cognitive education. I'm not talking about economic education specifically. That was never particularly good. I'm referring to general education. The kind of education that gives you the tools to think about the things in life that are not a part of the school curricula and then to act appropriately. Effectively thinking about these things can be viewed as a three-step process:

1. Obtaining measurement information from various sources.
   
2. Cognitively processing the information with varying degrees of competency.
   
3. Engaging in a variety of behavioral outcomes.
   

As we progress deeper and deeper into the sinkhole of the welfare state the educational system continually erodes. This erosion is produced by a combination of the natural outcome of bureaucratic bumbling and intentional mechanisms to support state control. It is in the interest of communist, socialist and welfare states to have "dumbed-down" populations. These state types are economically identical. All three are moving in the same direction of the state planning for its citizens and controlling the means of production. The plans of the state will take precedence over the plans of the individual.

Von Mises has indicated in his 1972 work, The Anti-Capitalist Mentality, that "the antagonism between present-day communist and socialist parties does not concern the ultimate goal of their policies. It refers mainly to the attitude of the Russian dictators (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) to subjugate as many countries as possible……. It refers, furthermore to the question of whether the realization of public control of the means of production should be achieved by constitutional methods or by a violent overthrow of the government in power."

There is no doubt that in the last 3 1/2 decades the U.S. has become largely a welfare state with its burgeoning taxes and behavior controlling regulations. More government by executive and bureaucratic edict, as opposed to legislative product, is evident everywhere. At the same time there is overwhelming evidence of a large decay in the educational process in this country. These negative effects are not due to a lack of funding, since real per pupil spending has more than tripled between 1960 and 1996 according to the U.S. Dept. of Education. With under-educated and misinformed citizens, it is easier to present them with a distorted view of reality via manipulated measurements. So how have they accomplished this "dumbing-down"? The first step deals with changes in the schools to reduce independent, competent, cognitive processing of information.

Attacks on two major fronts have led to the downfall of the schools:

The first prong of the attack revolves around the journey into psychological and brainwashing techniques used to change children's values to the appropriate ones (Inside American Education, Chapter 3, by Thomas Sowell). Teachers who are generally ill prepared to teach basic content, (e.g., in a recent Massachusetts certification test 60% of teachers failed and 1/3 of Virginia's aspiring teachers couldn't pass a basic skills test), are practicing psychological manipulation. This is a trend that has multiplied its influence since the appearance of morally relativistic "Values Clarification" techniques in the 1960's. I shall not pursue here the questionable morality of using Orwellian techniques to isolate and pressure students until they succumb, but, the attempt to fight the value reeducation of their children has lent great support to the home schooling movement. A major by-product of this value reeducation effort has been to greatly reduce the time spent on the basic cognitive skills so that the students show increasing deficiencies in those areas.

The second prong of the attack arises from adjusting the remaining curriculum content to suit contemporary politically correct values. This involves not only eliminating content that doesn't fit, (e.g., speeches, correspondence and letters depicting the founders great concern about a too powerful state), but actually fabricating history (Not Out of Africa by Mary Lefkowitz Basic Books).

These two mechanisms result in a population that is much less prepared to think about general concerns than those in their narrowly focused vocational/professional training.

The next step was to tamper with the measurements that citizens use to make decisions about economic or educational phenomena. The three most important criteria of the usefulness of a measurement are; its validity, its reliability, and its normative appropriateness.

1. The reliability of a measurement refers to how similar measurements are when made repeatedly with the same instrument under the same conditions.
   
2. The validity of a measuring instrument refers to the extent to which it measures what it says that it measures. That is, does the content reflect the theoretical construct that the name of the measurement implies and can it be used to predict future events?
   
3. For many purposes additional meaning is attached to a measurement when it is referenced to a particular group. In economics, raw measurements of the consumption of electronic goods take on more meaning when we compare people in different occupations or with varying levels of education. In education, an individual's test scores in mathematical problem solving take on more meaning when we compare those scores to those of people who have attended different schools; who have different amounts of formal education; or have shown varying degrees of success in a particular occupation. These comparisons must focus on appropriate references in order to get maximum meaning.
   

Problems in the two areas that I'm discussing, economics and education, usually arise out of measurement validity and normative appropriateness, not reliability.

The focus of bureaucratic concern turned towards what people will do with the results of a measurement to challenge the actions of the state. As a result inappropriate measurement instrument modifications were being made, which damaged the validity and reference appropriateness of the instrument. We saw this in economics where it was to the government's advantage to minimize the signs of monetary inflation, which was quite high during the late 1970's. First, items were removed from the CPI that produced large index increases, by declaring them no longer relevant. Secondly, a new geometric smoothing technique was created which tended to reduce the average influence of those items making the largest increases. In the third place, the government hid certain mandated product changes that resulted in higher prices (e.g., the cost of catalytic converters for automobiles) by not allowing the CPI to reflect those increases. Finally, components of productivity were offered that exaggerated the output of the computer industry and minimized the number of hours worked, arriving at a grossly inflated gain in productivity (Grant's Interest Rate Observer 3/31/2000). If they change the measurements to reflect a construct different than the name of the measurement implies, you cannot see the implied construct clearly.

This paralleled exactly the trends in education during the same time period. Measurements reflect inflation in education? Yes! Throughout the last three plus decades, it has become obvious to some that there has been great inflation in the grading of educational accomplishments. While on the one hand, virtually every standardized measure of basic cognitive skills was on the decline, grades earned in class had greatly increased. The proportion of A & B grades had mushroomed over those years. This conflict of measurements, the objective vs. the subjective, was very annoying to the educational establishment. It is one thing to have a study show that the vocabulary used in high school advanced placement tests is approximately equivalent to that of an 8th grader in the early 1940's and that a declining proportion of Americans are earning degrees at our own graduate schools. Very few people will ever see these studies in the major media. But when a testing organization's nationally reported standardized test had continually shown that the average Verbal Score for contemporary students was about equivalent to only the 25th percentile for students in the mid- 1960's, then we had trouble. So finally after years of political pressure that testing organization "re-normed" the test. Now you can no longer readily discover the comparison between contemporary students and those in the 1960's because the scores only reflect current student performances. No more historical context, for verbal aptitude scores, to agitate the citizenry.

Standardized tests at the elementary school level have also undergone "adjustments". These adjustments range from simplifying the vocabulary to eliminating any items on which we might discover ethnic or sex differences. Of course, this presents the danger of not truly measuring concepts upon which real group differences do exist, because they might be removed from the test altogether. But in an egalitarian society these differences could not possibly occur.

In both cases people use measurements to make decisions and alter their behavior. The predictive utility of those measurements to citizens depends upon their validity and the appropriateness of comparisons made. Government bureaucracies have changed the measurements so that they do not reflect the underlying construct implied by the name of the measurement, or have made inappropriate comparisons. Poorly educated citizens have greater difficulty dealing with these measurements. Citizen decisions will be incorrect, and their behaviors can thus be suppressed or altered. In the educational case, uneasy as they might be, most people will continue to accept the educational product instead of trying to dislodge the bureaucrats in charge. And in the economic case, people will continue to have faith in fiat currencies and not acquire much gold. So, valid measurements, like termites under the house, will only become apparent when the house finally collapses.

Harry J. Clawar Ph.D.
Hjc@angelfire.com

4 May 2000