This sort of tactic (a system of rewards to change behavior) is the subject of my 1985 booklet (30 pages) Back to Basics Reform or OBE Skinnerian International Curriculum?
Believe it or not, this little book was effectively boycotted — not just by the left — but more so by the right (neoconservatives).
Both left and right are involved in installing the corporate/fascist/socialist/communist partnership initiated under President Reagan in 1981. This partnership is effectively transforming the nation’s schools from academic learning to communist workforce training and behavior modification, and, believe it or not, this system will be lifelong, as stated on the letterhead of the National Alliance of Business in the late nineties.
Not so hard to believe (when you look at those involved) is fact the corporate (so-called private) sector is leading the destruction of our formerly capitalist economic system.
Read Conclusions and Recommendations, Carnegie Corporation, 1934. This book calls for the change we are looking at presently in ALL schools in the USA which receive any form of federal funding (including charters, vouchers, tuition tax credits).
(1) 1934 – CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS FOR THE SOCIAL STUDIES (CHAS. SCRIBNER’S SONS: NewYork, 1934) compiled by the American Historical Association was published. This book was the result of a project funded to the tune of $340,000 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York called “Investigation of the Social Studies in the Schools,” and was carried out by the American Historical Association. Professor Harold Laski, a philosopher of British socialism, said of this report: “At bottom, and stripped of its carefully neutral phrases, the report is an educational program for a Socialist America.” 4 Important excerpts from Conclusions follow:
[Preface]
The Commission is under special obligation to its sponsor, the American
Historical Association. Above all, it recognizes its indebtedness to the Trustees of the Carnegie Corporation, whose financial aid made possible the whole five-year investigation of social science instruction in the schools, eventuating in the following Conclusions and Recommendations.
The Commission could not limit itself to a survey of textbooks, curricula, methods of instruction, and schemes of examination, but was impelled to consider the condition and prospects of the American people as a part of Western Civilization merging into a world order. (p. 1)
The Commission was also driven to this broader conception of its task by the obvious fact that American civilization, in common with Western civilization, is passing through one of the great critical ages of history, is modifying its traditional faith in economic individualism, and is embarking upon vast experiments in social planning and control which call for large-scale cooperation on the part of the people…. (pp. 1–2)
Cumulative evidence supports the conclusion that in the United States as in other countries, the age of laissez faire in economy and government is closing and a new age of collectivism is emerging…. (p.16)
The implications for education are clear and imperative: (a) the efficient functioning of the emerging economy and the full utilization of its potentialities require profound changes in the attitudes and outlook of the American people, especially the rising generation—a complete and frank recognition that the old order is passing, that the new order is emerging…. (pp. 34–35)
Organized public education in the United States, much more than ever before, is now compelled, if it is to fulfill its social obligations, to adjust its objectives, its curriculum, its methods of instruction, and its administrative procedures to the requirements of the emerging integrated order.
If the school is to justify its maintenance and assume its responsibilities, it must
recognize the new order and proceed to equip the rising generation to cooperate effectively in the increasingly interdependent society and to live rationally and well within its limitations and possibilities….
Signed: A.C. Krey, Chairman; Charles A. Beard; Isaiah Bowman (signed with reservations printed as Appendix C); Ada Comstock; George S. Counts;Avery O. Craven; Guy Stanton Ford; Carlton J.H. Hayes; Henry Johnson; A.C. Krey; Leon C.Marshall; Jesse H. Newton; Jesse F. Steiner. (Frank A. Ballou, Edmund E. Day, Ernest Hom, and Charles E. Merriam declined to sign these Conclusions.) (p. 35)
(2) 3D, page 174: EARLY IN 1981 THE PRESIDENT’S TASK FORCE ON PRIVATE SECTOR INITIATIVES was installed at 734 Jackson Place, N.W., Washington, D.C. Membership listed on The White House letterhead read like a “Who’s Who” of individuals in government agencies, universities, tax-exempt foundations,non-governmental organizations, business, media, labor unions, and religion.
(3) The United States-USSR Education and Cultural Agreement signed by Reagan and USSR President Gorbachev in 1985. Read Soviets in the Classroom… America’s Latest Education Fad, 1989.