Governor Reagan's aide Roger Freeman, who later served as President
> Nixon's educational policy advisor, while he was working at the time for
> California Governor Ronald Reagan's reelection campaign, commented on
> Reagan's education policy: "We are in danger of producing an educated
> proletariat. That's dynamite! We have to be selective about who we
> allow to through higher education. If not, we will have a large number
> of highly trained and unemployed people."
CB: The rationale of grading on a curve is this. Why assume that some must fail or do poorly, and only a small minority are "A" students" ? The places in college prep curriculum are limited based on this arbitrary assumption, well not arbitrary , but class based. Also, I suspect that the whole anti-good student culture of many, many students is fomented or encouraged somehow: The conflict between being "popular" and "smart" in high schools, Nerds and all that.
A frequent theme on this list at one point was American anti-intellecutalism. Could it be rooted in ruling class ideas and brainwashing as the ruling ideas of the age -discourage the working class from thinking too much by promoting dumbing down, formenting envy of good students ? Don't want a bunch of thinking, reading, analyzing, deconstructing unemployed people, do we ?