According to an article printed Sept. 8, state education officials are blaming a flaw in Maine’s eighth-grade writing test for having to scrap the test after 78 percent of 15,000 students failed to meet state standards.

“Officials say that they were unable to pinpoint exactly why so many students failed to meet the mark,” the article stated. It seems that students wrote an emotional response, instead of a factual one to the test question.

As someone who testified against adopting standards (Maine’s cover-up title for outcome-based education) at a public meeting in Augusta in April 1997, I will explain why I believe the students reacted as they did.

These eighth-graders became the brainwashed subjects of a government-controlled experiment that failed. In outcome-based education, the contents of subjects (facts) are played down. Most learning is laundered through the emotional self in group discussions and cooperative learning activities.

Education officials cannot blame a test flaw, students, teachers or parents for that tragedy. They must blame themselves for passing statewide standards that set up 1,000 learning objectives, and budgeted $4 million for the first two years to set them up.

I suggest that education officials give those children who got angry at the question an A+ for responding exactly the way they have been emotionally trained.

Maine residents, parents and taxpayers should demand an audit to determine how many millions of dollars have been wasted on shortchanging students, and ask that Maine’s educational standards be scrapped.

Cecile J. Hecker, Lewiston