Evil, anti-Christian forces brainwashing children in our school system

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The following is from:

Thomas Sowell. Inside American Education. Chapter 3.

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Classroom Brainwashing

Many parents wonder why they lose their children to a whole new value system.

—DONNA MULDREW, parent and educator

A VARIETY of courses and programs, under an even wider variety of names, have been set up in schools across the country to change the values, behavior, and beliefs of American youngsters from what they have been taught by their families, their churches, or the social groups in which they have grown up. These ambitious attempts to re-shape the attitudes and consciousness of a generation are as pervasive as they are little known, partly because they have kept a low profile, but more often because they are called by other, high-sounding names—"values clarification," "decision-making," "affective education," "Quest," "drug prevention," "sex education," "gifted and talented" programs, and many other imaginative titles. The particular door through which such programs enter the school curriculum is far less important than what they do after they have gained entrance.

Drug prevention and sex education might seem to be very different activities, and a program for gifted and talented students still more different from both of these. But that is true only where these programs are legitimately confined to what they claim to be. Far too often, however, these words are mere flags of convenience under which schools set sail on an un-charted sea of social experimentation in the re-shaping of young people's emotions and attitudes. People who have looked beyond the labels to the concrete specifics have often discovered that the ostensible subject of special curriculum programs—drug education, sex education, etc.—occupies a minor part of the textbooks or class time, while psychology and values are a major preoccupation.

So-called "sex education" courses and textbooks, for example, seldom involve a mere conveying of biological or medical information. Far more often, the primary thrust is toward a reshaping of attitudes, not only toward sex but also toward parents, toward society, and toward life. The same pattern is found in many other programs claiming to be about drug prevention, smoking prevention, or many other worthy purposes. Typical of this pattern was a so-called "drug prevention" program in New Hampshire, which a parent found to be about one-fourth "informational" while "the other three-quarters deal with values, attitudes, etc." The same could be said of the widely used sex education textbook, Changing Bodies, Changing Lives. Similarly, in a widely distributed book used in school anti-smoking campaigns, smoking goes unmentioned except for inclusion in a list of "many new decisions" teenagers will face. A North Carolina teacher, testifying before the U.S. Department of Education, pointed out that a federally funded "drug education" curriculum" does not emphasize any information or facts about drugs, per se." Instead she found:

This curriculum is 152 pages long, and yet only four pages make any mention of drugs, either directly or indirectly. The program is divided into three phases. The first phase is self-awareness followed by a series of exercises that permit students to gain "a wider understanding and appreciation of their values as autonomous individuals."

If these programs are often not what they claim to be, then what are they?

They are attempts to re-shape values, attitudes, and beliefs to fit a very different vision of the world from what children have received from their parents and the social environment in which they are raised. Instead of educating the intellect, these special curriculum programs condition the emotions.

This is sometimes called "affective education," as distinguished from intellectual education. It can also be called brain-washing.

BRAINWASHING METHODS

A variety of programs used in classrooms across the country not only share the general goals of brainwashing—that is, changing fundamental attitudes, values, and belief by psychological-conditioning methods—but also use classic brainwashing techniques developed in totalitarian countries:

1. Emotional stress, shock, or de-sensitization, to break down both intellectual and emotional resistance

2. Isolation, whether physical or emotional, from familiar sources of emotional support in resistance

3. Cross-examining pre-existing values, often by manipulating peer pressure

4. Stripping the individual of normal defenses, such as reserve, dignity, a sense of privacy, or the ability to decline to participate

5. Rewarding acceptance of the new attitudes, values, and beliefs—a reward which can be simply release from the pressures inflicted on those who resist, or may take other symbolic or tangible form

Stress and De-sensitization

There are all too many examples illustrating the use of these methods in psychological-conditioning programs in the public schools. For example, viewers of the ABC network television program "20/20" on September 21, 1990, may have been surprised—or upset—when they saw school children being taken to a morgue and being encouraged to touch the corpses, as part of "death education." Some viewers may have thought this exercise pointless as well as tasteless, and an imposition on the children. That may all be true, when looking at this as an educational activity, in the sense of something intended to convey information and develop the student's ability to analyze logically and weigh evidence. But this exercise was by no means pointless as part of a psychological-conditioning program. On the contrary, it was an example of the first step in brainwashing — stress and de-sensitization.

Some children undoubtedly found the experience stressful, some perhaps shocking, and more generally it served to desensitize normal inhibitions. An historical study of brainwashing techniques in various countries and in various periods of history found "emotional disruption" to be "essential" to the process. The trip to the morgue was not a pointless exercise, from this perspective. Public schools do not have the degree of control maintained by totalitarian governments, but the targets of their brainwashing are younger and more vulnerable to milder versions of the same brainwashing techniques used under Stalin or Mao.

De-sensitizing experiences have been common in "death education" programs, as well as in many other kinds of psychological-conditioning programs. For example, assignments for students receiving "death education" have including writing their own epitaphs, writing a suicide note, discussing deaths which have occurred in their families and—for first graders—making a model of a coffin for themselves out of a shoe box.

Among the associated psycho-dramas in some schools are (1) having the children imagine that they are the children in the school bus that was buried underground in the infamous Chowchilla kidnapping case, and (2) discussing lifeboat dilemmas in which there are more people than the boat can hold, so that a decision must be made as to who is to be left to drown. Sometimes it is a fall-out shelter with limited capacity, so that some must be left outside to die of radiation poisoning after a nuclear attack. Sometimes these dilemmas as to whose life is more important to be saved are extended to the point of asking the child to decide which members of his own family should be sacrificed in life-and-death situations.

Because these are psychological experiences, stage-managing can be important. One handbook for teachers contained the instruction, "dim the lights," followed by: "Tell the students to pretend they are now dead." Later, the teacher is to arrange "a field trip to a local funeral home," "have each student briefly write what kind of funeral he wants for himself" and "write in ten words or less the epitaph he wishes to be remembered by." Another book which prescribes a funeral home visit has more specific instructions for the students, including the following:

Go through all the procedures to pre-arrange your own funeral.

Select a casket as well as vault that meets your particular desires as well as financial needs.

Among the questions to be asked the students are:

"How will you die?"

"When will you die?"

"Have you ever known anyone who died violently?"

"When was the last time you mourned? Was it expressed in tears or silent pain? Did you mourn alone or with someone else?"

"Do you believe in an after-life?"

Another book outlines a series of "death education" class sessions, including funeral music, a filmstrip of funeral customs around the world, and many personal questions about the student's own emotional responses to death. Outside assignments include visits to a funeral home and a cemetery, with a list of data to be collected from tombstones. This and other "death education" programs clearly envision many class sessions being devoted to the subject, for a period of weeks. This would be hard to explain or justify on purely educational grounds. But, if the purpose is to replace a whole set of attitudes with new attitudes preferred by those who design and administer such programs, then the time allotted is in keeping with the magnitude of what is being attempted.

Sex education of course is a very different subject—but the same pattern of de-sensitizing has been central. A parent who visited a fifth-grade classroom in Oregon testified at U.S. Department of Education hearings as to what she saw:

I was present when a plastic model of female genitalia with a tampon insert was passed around to the boys so they might understand how tampons fit.'⁷

From an educational standpoint, such information was obviously of limited practical use to eleven-year-old boys, but as a de-sensitizing experience it made sense—for purposes of brainwashing them into new attitudes. Similarly understandable for such purposes was a movie shown to a sixth-grade class in Kansas. A parent who was present testified:

The first three minutes of the footage was the actual birth of a baby.

It started out with a lady with her legs up and apart, and her feet in stirrups or something like that, with a doctor. It was very graphic and very detailed.

The children in the 6th grade witnessed three actual births. I sensed a state of shock in the little boys and girls that it was all new to see a man doing what a doctor does to deliver a baby."

In a North Carolina classroom, one of the children fainted when shown a childbirth movie. In the Kansas classroom, when the parent questioned the nurse who showed the movie in a "health" class, the nurse's reply was: "Well, someday they need to learn about these things." The more fundamental question was: What gave her the right to usurp the decision as to when that someday was, and to make it the same day for all the children, regardless of their individual emotional development? Clearly, she must have realized that it was a usurpation, for the movie was billed as a film on vitamins! Indeed, two-thirds of the movie was on vitamins, though the parent who watched it "did not see any correlation between the live births and the vitamins."

Other de-sensitizing movies have shown a man's genitals, a naked couple having sex "in living color" and "complete with sound effects," and masturbation. Less graphic but more personal de-sensitizing techniques have included asking students questions about their own sexual attitudes and behavior. A so-called "health" class in a junior high school in Washington state required all the boys to say "vagina" in class and all the girls to say "penis." When one embarrassed girl was barely able to say it, the teacher "made her get up in front of the class and very loudly say it ten times."

Another common classroom technique is pairing boys and girls, so that each couple jointly studies and discusses sex education material, such as the sexual organs and their parts and/or have conversations with each other using synonyms for penis, vagina, intercourse, and breast. Again, the educational value of such pairing is much less apparent than its value as a de-sensitizing experience. Death education and sex education are by no means the only special curriculum topics dealt with by brainwashing techniques. The difference between genuine education and psychological conditioning to change attitudes can also be illustrated by so-called "nuclear education," which deals with political-military issues involving nuclear weapons. Like any other controversial topic, nuclear weapons issues have generated numerous arguments on both sides in books, articles, speeches, and editorials. Moreover, there have long been two opposite schools of thought on the more general question as to whether peace is more likely to be preserved through military deterrence or through disarmament. Leading intellectual and political figures of the past two centuries have argued on either side of this issue.In short, there is an ample literature on both sides for comparing opposing arguments, analyzing their logic, scrutinizing their evidence, and otherwise treating this as an educational topic. Instead, psychological conditioning has been widely used to lead children toward the pre-selected choice of disarmament. For example, tenth-grade children were introduced to the subject by the showing of a movie called "Hiroshima/ Nagasaki":

In grisly detail these generally well-off upper middle-class kids were obliged to observe Japanese women and children being incinerated by the fire storm set in motion by the dropping of nuclear bombs. The youngsters sat riveted in their seats. Sobbing could be heard. By the conclusion the general mood of the class was well expressed by an emotional young lady who asked: "Why did we do it?" The teacher responded by saying, "We did it once; we can do it again. Whether these weapons of destruction are used depends on you." So began the unit on nuclear weapons.

Note that the girl's question was never answered, but instead was side-stepped and used to lead toward anti-nuclear activism. As a study of various nuclear education programs concluded

They encourage kids to "talk their hearts out." But they do not encourage an appreciation of the historical events leading to that tragic bombing in 1945.

In short, this subject—like others—is treated as an emotional rather than an educational experience. The consequences of emotionalizing nuclear education, sex education, and many other subjects are not simply that an incorrect conclusion may be reached, or even that general intellectual development may be neglected. There are psychosomatic effects as well.

A father in Oregon testified that his daughter required medical treatment as a result of tension created by such programs. One young woman recalled, years later, the nightmares she had after viewing a movie shown in a high school course. Many parents, doctors, and teachers have reported children bursting into tears in class during psychological-conditioning sessions or after coming home. Another parent reported that physicians had seen students with such symptoms as nightmares, stomach aches, vomiting, sleeplessness, and stuttering after they were subjected to a program with the high-sounding name "Exemplary Center for Reading Instruction."

A research assistant who viewed numerous school movies, as part of the preparation for this book, likewise reported that she had trouble sleeping afterwards—even though she is a mature, well-educated woman who has lived in three countries and speaks two languages. What she had been seeing were movies routinely shown to students in American elementary and secondary schools.

Isolation and Cross-Examination

The success of brainwashing depends not only on the stress brought to bear on the targeted individuals but also on the extent to which their resistance can be undermined. Isolation—disconnecting them from the psychological support of those who share their values, or who are tied to them personally—is one way of undermining their resistance. Totalitarian regimes often hold political prisoners in isolation , but even such regimes can find it excessively costly to do so when large numbers of people must be brainwashed simultaneously. An ingenious solution was found under Mao in China: The victim would be given a preliminary interrogation and then released with a "warning that it is a criminal offense to tell anybody—his friends, his relatives, or even his wife—that he is under examination by the police." Any individual who violated this warning was subject to a long prison sentence, even if he was never convicted of the offense for which he was being investigated. This situation produced the desired psychological isolation and emotional tension, without the government's incurring costs for incarceration.

Even an accompanying physical threat, such as imprisonment, is not always essential. Richard Wright, leading black writer of the 1940s, left a haunting sketch of an internal Communist Party "trial" he witnessed in Chicago, where a fellow Party member confessed to false charges after a long and skillful presentation of the Party's worldwide struggle left him psychologically isolated.

The emotional vulnerability of school children makes psychological isolation easier to achieve. A witness testifying at U.S. Department of Education hearings reported observing the treatment of a first-grade child who failed to have his values re-shaped to the teacher's liking:

The teacher then asked how many of the students agreed with him. By the tone of her voice, they knew no one should raise a hand, so no one did. The little boy was so humiliated by the peer pressure and class manipulation by the teacher that he began to cry.

A similar manipulation of peers against a recalcitrant was discovered by another parent in another school.

Mr. Davis, the teacher, would bring up a controversial moral issue, such as premarital sex or homosexuality, and call on members of the class to defend their positions on the issue. He would call upon those with opposite moral beliefs from Jon, thus exerting peer pressure on Jon to change his moral views. Jon was consistently called on up to 23 times per class session to defend his values before his friends with opposing views. When Jon mentioned to Mr. Davis that he was calling on him more than anyone else, Mr. Davis just said, "Oh", and continued calling on him.

In yet another school, a parent testified, a junior high school girl "was required to defend her religion and values under extreme ridicule from the group leader and from her peers."

Isolation from peers is only part of the process. In one way or another, students must also be emotionally isolated from the support of parents. Some psychological-conditioning programs have the children sit in a circle, called a "magic circle," where everything that is said there is confidentia1. Some programs explicitly tell the children that they are not to tell their parents what is said or done. Moreover, as will be seen later, the undermining and discrediting of parents is a recurring theme in the most disparate programs—whether called "sex education," "transactional analysis for tots," or called by many other labels. While it is parents who are undermined directly, it is the child who is thus isolated to face the brainwashing alone.

Stripping Away Defenses,

In Maoist China, where the term "brainwashing" originated, an important part of the process was "the writing of autobiographies and diaries," which were then discussed by the group to which the individual belonged. This was not a matter of acquiring facts, but of discovering psychological vulnerabilities and putting the individual on the defensive. As one individual who had been through this process described it:

A straight narrative of your past life was not enough. For every action you described, you had to give its motive in detail. Your awakened criticism had to be apparent in every sentence. You had to say why you smoked, why you drank, why you had social connections with certain people—why? why? why?

Many irrelevant details, once they became "public property" in the discussion group, could then be used by the director of the group to probe for "sore spots" at which the individual was emotionally vulnerable—and that was very relevant to the brainwashing process." George Orwell described a similar technique in his novel 1984. This same technique is widely used by psychological-conditioning programs in American public schools.

A seventh-grade "health" class in Corvallis, Oregon, for example, required "a private journal to be kept by the student on his feelings"—not events, but feelings. Nor was this to be a traditional journal for such traditional educational purposes as developing better use of the language. As the mother of one of these children testified: "No efforts were made to correct grammar, punctuation, sentence structure or continuity of thought." Neither the keeping of diaries nor the disregard of their academic quality was peculiar to this school. Such diaries, focusing on feelings, including feelings about confidential family matters, are common around the country. Utter disregard of the spelling, grammar, or punctuation in these diaries is likewise a pattern widely reported from around the country. In short, this is not an educational activity but psychological conditioning.

In fourth-grade and sixth-grade classes in Tucson, diaries were assigned with the specific instructions that the student "could write about her personal problems and family relationships even if they were bad because the teacher is her friend and would not tell." Similar assurances of confidentiality from parents were made in New Hampshire, though the sharing of these diaries in the group meant that family confidences were betrayed to strangers . There is no special program to which such practices are confined. While these diaries were assigned in "health" classes in Oregon and New Hampshire, in various other places they have also been assigned in history, English, and social studies classes.

In the Orwellian Newspeak widely found among advocates of psychological-conditioning programs, assignments creating pressure or compulsion to reveal personal and family matters are referred to as an opportunity—for example, "an opportunity to generate meaningful information about themselves which can be shared with others." Obviously, people always have an opportunity to reveal anything they choose, to anyone they choose, at any time they choose. Psychological conditioning programs do not provide opportunity but pressure or compulsion. A leading book on the so-called "values clarification" approach to attitude-changing likewise refers to giving the student “the opportunity to publically affirm and explain his stand on various values issues." During this "opportunity," the teacher "may ask the student any question about any aspect of his life and values ." All this is called "helping students get acquainted with each other on a more personal basis."

When the class is further broken down into small groups, this "provides students with an opportunity to share on a more intimate basis" than when addressing the whole class. Something called "privacy circles" is called strategy number 21, which "gives students the opportunity to find out whom they are willing to tell what." While students are not directly forced to talk in this particular approach, they are encouraged to talk—and to talk at length. The authors' instruction to the teacher is:

Quantity is encouraged. Quantity eventually breeds quality.

Among the questions which school children were given an "opportunity" to answer were the following:

What disturbs you most about your parents?

Would you bring up your children differently from the way you were brought up?

What would you change?

As a child, did you ever run away from home?

Did you ever want to?

Who is the "boss" in your family?

Do you believe in God?

How do you feel about homosexuality?

Do you have any brothers and sisters? How do you get along?

What is the saddest thing you can remember?

Is there something you once did that you are ashamed of?

In addition to questions, students have an "opportunity" to tell things, such as:

Describe a time of your greatest despair.

Tell where you stand on the topic of rnasturbation.

Reveal who in your family brings you the greatest sadness, and why.

Then share who brings you the greatest joy.

Tell some ways in which you will be a better parent than your own parents are now."

Tell something about a frightening sexual
experience."

This book is not unique in asking such questions. Another "values clarification" book has blanks to fill in, such as:

Someone in my family who really gets me angry is _______

I feel ashamed when ______

The U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1979 produced a questionnaire for "health education" which included these questions:

How often do you normally masturbate (play

with yourself sexually)?

How often to you normally engage in light

petting (playing with a girl's breast)?

How often to you normally engage in heavy

petting (playing with a girl's vagina

and the area around it)?

Critics have often been so outraged by such questions that they have not sought to discover why these kinds of questions are being asked in the first place—from the standpoint of those who are asking. Such questions strip away all defenses and leave the student vulnerable to the brainwashing process. As Richard Wright said of his Communist Party comrade who had confessed voluntarily to false charges:

His personality, his sense of himself, had been obliterated.

On a practical level, not only the child but the parents are left vulnerable as well. Family secrets revealed by children in school can be used to claim that objections to these programs are attributable to the parents' own psychological problems.

Another technique for stripping away defenses is to make the targeted individual a forced participant in emotionally indelible experiences—that is, to make the individual play a role chosen by others. An example of this role-playing technique in China's brainwashing program was given by an inmate who later described "a trip by the whole school to a nearby village to watch and participate in the beating to death of an old woman 'landlord' who was hung up by her wrists before a mob of over a thousand people."

While the powers of a totalitarian government vastly exceed those of a public school in the United States, very similar techniques have been used against more vulnerable subjects in the milder form of classroom role-playing. For example, a program on "Holocaust Studies" assigned to students the roles of concentration camp guards, Jewish inmates, and the like. A scholar who had studied the Holocaust found very little substantive information about the Holocaust contained in many school programs on the subject, some of which paid more attention to leading the students toward anti-nuclear activism. With "Holocaust Studies," as with "sex education," "drug prevention," or other psychological programs, the ostensible purpose often has little to do with what actually takes place. Role-playing is an integral part of many psychological-conditioning programs, whether in "sex education" classes where boys and girls are paired to have a conversation with each other about sex, or in "death education" classes where students are sent to funeral homes to arrange their own funerals, or in "values clarification" classes where they are assigned to play the role of political demonstrators .

Brainwashing Agendas

Attitude-changing programs involve so many thousands of schools, so many teachers, administrators, and "facilitators," and so many commercial, ideological, and other interests, that it is impossible to ascribe a single purpose to all involved. Yet such a pronounced pattern is found in these programs—whether their ostensible purpose is death education, sex education, drug prevention, or other concerns—that a broad consensus in approach and agenda can be discerned.

The most general—indeed pervasive—principle of these various programs is that decisions are not to be made by relying on traditional values passed on by parents or the surrounding society. Instead, those values are themselves to be questioned and compared with the values and behavior of other individuals

or other societies. This is to be done in a neutral or "non-judgmental" manner, which does not seek to determine a "right" or "wrong" way, but rather to find out what feels best to the particular individuals. This general approach has been called "values clarification." Its focus is on the feelings of the individual, rather than on the requirements of a functioning society or the requirements of intellectual analysis.

Psychologists have been prominent among the proponents and creators of these programs, including the late psychotherapist Carl Rogers and a whole school of disciples gathered around him. Critics have called this approach "cultural relativism," for a recurring theme in attitude-changing programs is that what "our society" believes is just one of many beliefs with equal validity—so that individuals have the option to choose for themselves what to believe and value.

Central to this questioning of authority is a questioning of the role of the central authority in the child's life—the parents. Alternative ways of constructing individual values, independently of parental values, are recurring themes of curriculum materials on the most disparate subjects, from sex to death. The risks involved in the process of jettisoning what has been passed on from the experience of generations who went before are depicted as risks worth taking, as an adventure, or as a matter of subjective feelings of "trust" in oneself, in one's peers, and in the values clarification approach.

Attitude-changing programs and their promoters will be examined in more detail after first seeing how their general agenda is carried out in their treatment of parents, peers, and risk.

Parents as Pariahs

The sex-education textbook Changing Bodies, Changing Lives illustrates patterns which reach far beyond sex education courses. "There isn't any rule book to let you know when, where, or how to make the moves," it says in its opening pages. "There's no 'right' way or 'right' age to have life experiences," it says on the next page. In short, standards are dispensed with early on, even though Changing Bodies, Changing Lives is primarily a book about social behavior, with only a fraction of it biological or medical. Although it takes a dismissive attitude toward "many people in our parents' generation" who had "negative attitudes toward bodies and sex" and also dismisses "old-fashioned stereotypes ", "society's moralistic attitudes" and "religious traditions," it implicitly sets up another reference group for purposes of guidance: "We spent three years meeting and talking with several hundred teenagers all across the United States." What those teenagers said is used again and again throughout the book to illustrate what is possible—and permissible.

The contrast could not be greater between the largely uncritical acceptance of selected statements from these teenagers and the repeatedly negative references to parents, who get "hung up" or who "have a hard time letting go," parents who "go overboard" or "have serious problems."

In short, in Changing Bodies, Changing Lives as in other textbooks, parents are not presented as guides to follow, or as sources of valuable experience, but as problems to contend with, or perhaps even as examples of what to avoid. These repeatedly negative pictures of parents were epitomized in a free-verse poem about a girl who was trying to get her father's attention after dinner, when he had his face buried in a newspaper. The poem ends:

Dad I gotta talk with you.

Silence.

Ya see dad I've got this problem.

Silence.

Dad I'm PREGNANT!!

Did you say something honey?

No dad go back to sleep.

Again it must be emphasized that this anti-parent pattern is not peculiar to this particular textbook or to sex education. In a "values clarification" curriculum in Oregon, for example, third-graders were asked: "How many of you ever wanted to beat up your parents?" In a so-called "talented and gifted" program, fourth graders were shown a movie in which children were in fact fighting with their parents. In a so-called "health" class in Tucson, a high school class was asked: "how many of you hate your parents?" Among the questions asked in a "values clarification" class in Colorado, was: "What is

the one thing your mom and dad do to you that is unfair?"

These were not isolated episodes. They were part of curriculum materials and approaches being used nationwide. As a parent in Tucson said, after surveying many such materials used in the local school, they "eroded the parent-child relationship by inserting a wedge of doubt, distrust and disrespect." In some schools, students in various psychological conditioning kinds of courses are explicitly told not to tell their parents about what is said in class. This pattern too is very widespread—and not just in avant-garde places like California or New York. Hearings before the U.S. Department of Education turned up examples from Georgia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Oregon.

The undermining of parents’ authority can begin quite early. An author in the "transactional analysis" school of psychology—often known as "T.A."—has produced a book designed for children from pre-school to third grade, entitled T.A. for Tots. One of the pictures has a caption: "Hey, this little girl is crying" and a butterfly on the side of the picture says: "Oh! oh! Looks like she got a spanking." The picture on the next page shows the same girl spanking her doll and saying "No No!" The caption reads: "Ah ha! Now she is being bossy and spanking her doll. Who taught her to do that?" The butterfly in the corner says: "Could it have been Daddy and Mommy?"

The recurring theme of the book is that little boys and girls are born as little princes and princesses. At first, in infancy, they are treated that way and feel that way. But parents end up turning these princes and princesses into frogs, in their own minds, by constantly criticizing and punishing them. One of the morals of the story is:

Sometimes things happen you don't like. You have the right to be angry without being afraid of being punished. You have a right to tell Mommy or Daddy what you don't like about what they are doing.

This book sold nearly a quarter of a million copies within four years, so apparently many pre-schoolers and early elementary school children have received this message about their parents.

That the undermining or discrediting of parents should be a common feature of a wide variety of programs with such ostensibly different aims is by no means inexplicable. Parents are the greatest obstacle to any brainwashing of children, and it is precisely the parents' values which are to be displaced. If parents cannot be gotten out of the picture, or at least moved to the periphery, the whole brainwashing operation is jeopardized. Not only will individual parents counter what the brainwashers say; parents as a group can bring pressure to bear against the various psychological conditioning programs, and in some places get them forced out of the schools.

Advocates of such programs have written about ways for teachers or administrators to deflect or counter objections by parents. For example, one "sex education" curriculum which uses explicit color slides of both homosexual and heterosexual acts, warns that students "should not be given extra copies of the form to show to their parents and friends." It is one of a number of programs which warn against letting parents know the specifics of the material being used. Where parents nevertheless learn of what is happening and object, there are standard procedures used by boards of education to dismiss their complaints:

Board members quickly learn to tell parents they are too inexperienced to speak on the subject of education, that all the experts oppose their point of view, that scientific evidence proves them wrong, that they are trying to impose their morals on others, and that they are the only people in the community who have raised such complaints."

Any or all of these assertions may be completely false, but most parents do not have the time or the resources to prove it—which makes such claims politically effective. However, the very fact that supporters of such programs have written tactical suggestions for dealing with parents and other critics hardly fits the claim that few people have objected.

In some cases, laws may require parental consent or notice for the use of these psychologically-oriented programs on their children, but this requirement can be rendered virtually meaningless in practice by concealing the specifics. An Oregon program labelled Talented and Gifted (TAG) was a typical anti-parent, anti-values program, but it was very difficult to discover this beforehand. One persistent parent, who endured insults and misdirection to find out what was happening, testified before the Department of Education:

Parents are notified before students participate in these programs, but it is not an informed permission. Most parents whose children are recommended for the TAG program think that they are going to be given advanced academic education. They don't know that, in these workshops, attempts will be made to alienate their children from them and from moral values, or that their children will be taught to substitute the judgment and will of the group for that of individual judgment and responsibility.

Such programs and such deception are not confined to the public schools. A private secondary school in Los Angeles, obtained parental permission for something called "senior seminar" by describing what was to be done in only the most vague and lofty words, while the actual specifics remained unknown until it was too late. (Yanking a student out of class in mid-semester of the senior year is especially difficult in a school whose students are usually going on to college.) Any suggestion of indoctrination or emotional manipulation was wholly absent from the materials supplied to parents before this program began. Much of what was said in this material would in fact suggest the very opposite, that it was some kind of advanced academic training. The "objectives" listed when the "senior seminar" was instituted began:

1) develop the ability to analyze and synthesize ideas and information among disciplines

2) recognize and practice effective listening and speaking skills as well as critical thinking and effective writing techniques

3) make better decisions and contribute to their own personal growth

The list went on and on, accompanied by pages of other material containing an inundation of words on the mechanics and aspirations of the course—and nothing on the specific content. The list of objectives concluded:

10) Improve research and library skills
11) write a Senior Thesis

Who could possibly object to such things? Yet, despite the intellectual emphasis of these statements, psychological manipulation began immediately. The first specific assignment involved betraying family confidences to strangers in an "autobiography" that included the student's relationship with a family member. The student was to describe "what gives you satisfaction and dissatisfaction in your family." Among later "units" in the course were "aging, death, and dying," featuring movies about the terminally ill, visits to local hospices serving terminally ill patients, arranged visits to funeral homes and to cemeteries, and a speaker on euthanasia. This went on for weeks, culminating in oral presentations in class. None of this was revealed until after permission had been obtained through glowing generalities.

Peers as Guides

While parents are finessed aside in one way or another, and the values they have instilled are made to seem arbitrary or outmoded, students are repeatedly told that it is they individually who must determine the values on which to make decisions—and the guidance repeatedly held out to them is the example of their peers.

"It's up to you alone" is the message repeated again and again. What you do "will have to be your decision." It is not merely that the child or adolescent must choose—but must also choose the underlying set of values on which the particular decision is made. Right and wrong are banished from the scene early on. "Remember, there are no 'right' or 'wrong' answers—just your answers," according to the textbook, Learning About Sex, which also says:

“I cannot judge the “rightness” or “wrongness of any of these behaviors.. Instead, I hope that you can find the sexual lifestyle which is best for your life ...”

Concepts of "normal" or "healthy" sex are dismissed because "each of us has his or her own legitimate set of sexual attitudes and feelings." Homosexuality is a matter of "preferences". "Sado-masochism may be very acceptable and safe" for some people. Although it is illegal and "exploitation" for adults to "take advantage" of children sexually, "there may be no permanent emotional harm."

In the same book, a chapter entitled "Different Strokes for Different Folks" begins:

You have noticed how the kinds of food you like and dislike are different from some of those other people like and dislike. . . . It is much the same with the sexual appetites of human beings.

Even parents' views may be all right—in their place. "If you are interested in their ideas," you may talk with your parents, but if "disagreement" occurs or "the discussion turns into an argument," then parent and child alike should see the other's point of view "as different, not wrong." In short, all views are equal, though it turns out that some are more equal than others, for the examples offered in the psychological-conditioning literature and classroom programs emphasize the feelings, attitudes, and behavior of peers. For example, the textbook Changing Bodies, Changing Lives begins many sentences:

"Most of the teenagers we interviewed:. . . "

"Lots of people.

"Some people. . "

"Many people.... "

"Most teens. . . . "

"Almost everyone.. . ."

Again and again, issues are posed in terms of what "many teenagers,'' "teenagers we've interviewed,''"many people" or "many teens" feel, believe, or do. By adopting the "non-judgmental" attitude which pervades such books, courses, and programs, the values and behavior of peers are left as the only guides. Nor is there any way for the reader to know whether the particular teenagers quoted are typical, or merely typical of what the brainwashers wish to promote.

Risk as Adventure

A recurring pattern in the attitude-changing, psychological-conditioning literature is the depiction of risk-taking in a wholly positive light. Numerous examples of the benefits of risk-taking are to be found in this literature—and virtually no examples of its disadvantages. Nothing bad ever seems to have happened to anyone as a result of taking risks, and certainly nothing catastrophic. The "objective" specified in one part of a so-called "gifted and talented" curriculum is: "To be a risk taker by having the courage to expose oneself to failure or criticisms, to take a guess, to function under conditions devoid of structure or to defend one's own ideas." The epigraph to this handbook is:

Better is one's own path though imperfect
than the path of another well made.

This motto is offered, not to seasoned and mature adults, but to children in grades 4 through 6.

Carl Rogers, one of the gurus of the attitude-changing movement, rhapsodized about teachers who were "risking themselves, being themselves, trusting their students, adventuring into the existential unknown, taking the subjective leap" by abandoning traditional methods for his kind of program. The often-cited book Values Clarification, by Sidney Simon and others, gives as the purpose of its strategy number 20, "learning to build trust so that we can risk being open." Much of what is done in trust-building exercises—having classmates lead a blindfolded student, for example—may seem to be innocuous, and perhaps pointless, when viewed in isolation. It is, however, one of a number of aptly named "strategies" designed to induce a certain state of mind, including a relaxation of inhibitions against the unknown and reliance on peers. In short, youngsters are encouraged to extrapolate from these exercises in a highly controlled environment to the unpredictable dangers of real life.

Sometimes the step-by-step increase of riskiness can at some point reach serious levels of danger, even within the context of the trust-building exercises themselves. For example, in the Values Clarification handbook's strategy number 45, children go riding in a police car, or go into a ghetto, among other risk-taking activities. This handbook's "note to the teacher" proclaims the philosophy behind such activities:

All new experiences are risk taking experiences, because we never know how they might turn out. Generally, the more the student has to do, the newer the experience for him, the greater the risk he has to take, the deeper will be the sensitivity which results from it.

In short, there is a coherent—though unproven—structure of beliefs behind these psychological exercises. Individual teachers are not usually the source of these beliefs, which typically originate with psychologists or psychological gurus who package programs for use in schools. Educators simply carry out such "innovations" and experiments on a captive audience of school children, while promoting the whole philosophy of life which attitude-changing programs represent. Particular trust-building exercises are just part of a larger pattern of inducing attitude changes by psychological means.

In attitude-changing programs, trust and risk are repeatedly depicted in a positive light, as if there were no dangers— psychological, physical, or financial—in ill-advised trust. Like so much in this approach, it simply assumes what is crucial, namely trustworthiness in this case. Carl Rogers was sanguine enough to make this assumption explicit, when he referred to "a profound trust in the human organism" as a prerequisite for the kind of education he advocated. More generally, such sweeping trust and corresponding willingness to risk are prerequisites for abandoning the values and inhibitions which have been distilled from the experience of previous generations. Unfortunately, the greatest risks are not taken by teachers or promoters of attitude-changing programs, but by vulnerable children and the parents who will be left to deal with the consequences.

SPONSORS AND PROMOTERS

Who is pushing psychological-conditioning or attitude-changing programs into the public schools? And why?

Some are doing so out of simple self-interest. When pharmaceutical companies provide material promoting birth-control products for sex education courses, the financial self-interest is obvious. Similarly when an automobile manufacturer provides material for driver education. Moreover, the selling of curriculum materials of a more general nature is a substantial business in itself. A captive audience of more than 40 million school children is attractive to all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons. The susceptibility of educators to such fashionable "innovations" is what opens the floodgates to permit the intrusion of such programs into the public schools. This susceptibility is only partly spontaneous. Organizations pushing curriculum programs engage in massive and sustained promotional activities all across the country, sponsoring conferences, retreats, and traveling exhibits, to reach an audience of education officials with the power to choose curriculum materials for vast numbers of children.

Some idea of the amount of promotional activity that goes on, on behalf of attitude-changing programs, may be suggested by a schedule covering just six weeks of promotional meetings in 1990 by just one organization, Quest International:

DATE CITY

November 5: Columbus

DATE

November 15:

CITY

Chicago Nashville Rochester (Minn.) San Francisco

November 7: November 8:

November 12:

November 13:

Omaha

Grand IslandNovember 16:

(Nebr.)

Green Bay (Wisc.) November 26: St. Cloud (Minn.)

AnaheimNovember 27:

Atlanta
Duluth
Milwaukee

Gary

Madison (Wisc.

Sacramento

Bloomington
Denver
Hartford

Indianapolis
New York City
Tulsa

November 14: Columbia (S.C.) November 28: Albany

Elgin (Ill.) Oklahoma City

Minneapolis Springfield (Ill.) Oxnard (Calif.)

November, 29: Davenport (Iowa) December 6: Richmond (Va.)

Portland (Oreg.) St. Louis

Syracuse December 7: Boston

Kansas City (Mo.)

November 30: Buffalo December 11: Albuquerque

Des Moines Charlotte

Seattle Houston

Toledo

December 3: Cincinnati December 12: Cleveland

Fort Lauderdale Dallas

(Fla.) Greensboro (N.C.)

Pittsburgh Phoenix

December 4: Louisville December 13: Akron

Orlando (Fla.) Corpus Christi

Washington, D.C. Las Vegas

Raleigh (N .C.)

December 5: Allentown December 14: Austin

Evansville (Ind.)

Roanoke

Note that this was only the schedule of promotional meetings during these two months. There was another busy schedule of three-day training sessions by the same organization in cities from coast to coast for teachers who were going to be using the "Quest" programs. "Minimum implementation fees" were $975 in 1990 for a program in a given institution, including the training of one person, with additional training fees of $375 each for additional participants. Quest International also offered for sale audio and video materials to be used with the program, as well as T-shirts and coffee mugs. Moreover, it offered information on how the money to pay for its programs could be raised from foundations and civic organizations.

According to the promotional material for Quest, its program for adolescents "has been adopted by over 12,000 schools in North America and 22 countries "reaching " more than 1.5 million young people each year throughout the world." Quest International is clearly a multimillion-dollar enterprise. While it characterizes itself as "a non-profit organization," whether the money coming in is called profit or something else does not affect its financial ability to expand the organization, or to reward those who operate it, or who are affiliated with it.

Ideology is another potent force behind the promotion of altitude-changing programs and shapes much of the content, the psychological-conditioning methods, and the circumvention and undermining of parents. Advocates of secular humanism, for example, have been quite clear and explicit as to the crucial importance of promoting their philosophy in the schools, to counter or undermine religious values among the next generation. As an article in Humanist magazine put it:

I am convinced that the battle for humankind's future must be waged and won in the public school classrooms by teachers who correctly perceive their role as the proselytizers of a new faith: a religion of humanity that recognizes and respects the spark of what theologians call divinity in every human being.

These teachers must embody the same selfless dedication as the most rabid fundamentalist preachers, for they will be ministers of another sort, utilizing a classroom instead of a pulpit to convey humanist values in whatever subject they teach, regardless of the educational level—preschool day care or large state universities.

While the organized secular humanist movement might seem to be a small fringe group, its impact on education is out of all proportion to its size. For example, Carl Rogers—the psychotherapist who was one of the leading figures in introducing psychotherapeutic techniques into schools—was proud of having been named Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Society, Rogers' dismissive attitude toward religion, and his contempt for American culture in genera1, are reflected in a vast literature, reaching well beyond his own considerable corps of disciples, and found in other schools of psychotherapeutic approaches to education.

Promoters of internationalism have likewise seen a need to undermine patriotism or other national cultural traditions through "global education." Gay rights advocates have also been active in promoting the use of school materials, including movies, promoting the homosexual lifestyle, and boosting the social image of homosexuals. One of the largest organizations, with one of the oldest and most thoroughly elaborated ideologies and most sophisticated promotional operations, is Planned Parenthood. The very name is deceiving, for the last thing they are planning is parenthood. Planned Parenthood is an organization with a population-repression ideology.

While the ideologies of these different groups have different emphases, they overlap to a considerable degree and reinforce one another. Moreover, they are all pushing ideas which cannot be openly and plainly labeled, so they all have an interest in maintaining lofty euphemisms and labels which obscure or misdirect. Their simultaneous emergence on a large scale in the public schools during the past two decades was neither a coincidence nor a conspiracy, but grew out of new opportunities provided by large infusions of federal money into public school systems long controlled and financed at the local level. Professor Jacqueline Kasun, who has studied the sex education aspect of this phenomenon extensively, concluded:

. . . Congress created the conditions for massive growth in the sex education and birth control movement. From a crank obsession subsidized by drug companies, it became a growth industry with big money prizes for those who qualify for the multimillion-dollar federal grants. It could now not only operate more programs, but it could undertake massive "research," publishing, and promotion; it could employ high-powered "experts," operating out of its own proliferating offices located in the very heart of the public bureaucracy. Parents who questioned the new programs for the schools soon found that they were up against an entrenched power structure with a virtually limitless financial base.

Although organizations such as Planned Parenthood present themselves as rationalistic and scientific, the hysteria they promote about alleged "over-population" in the world is contradicted by considerable empirical evidence to the contrary. The population control ideology is simply one branch of the general ideology of an elite controlling the lives of the masses, for their own good—a view once openly expressed. Although Planned Parenthood and others who have promoted sex education in the schools have used the argument that it would reduce teenage pregnancy, their bottom line has been population control, so that these programs have been a success from their perspective when abortions prevent population growth, even though more teenagers get pregnant.

The role of federal money is crucial, for it means that both commercial and ideological interests have a large market for their products. The fact that the money comes from Washington, rather than from locally controlled sources, means that local control or parental influence are less effective barriers to the intrusion of this material into the classroom.

Whatever influence parents might have is further diluted by education administrators' reluctance to let the public know about the introduction of any potentially controversial material. For example, an academic study of a controversial curriculum called Man: A Course of Study (MACOS) found that "school administrators were reluctant to acquaint parents and the general citizenry with their district's use of MACOS, either prior to or following its installation." Among the comments often heard from these administrators were: "Keep the lid on" and "do not want controversy," and expressions of fear of "flack from the community." Nor did those who introduced this program believe that students would be any more receptive. Among teachers trained to present the MACOS curriculum, only 4 percent gave as their reason for adopting it that they thought students would like it.

The sense of mission, of excitement, of being part of a vanguard promoting advances beyond the ken of ordinary people, should not be discounted as a factor behind the spread of attitude-changing programs. The notion that they are doing something scientific as opposed to merely "traditional," is part of this mystique. A doctoral dissertation on the MACOS program even referred to "scientific values," with no definition of what that might mean (inasmuch as values are not science and science is not values). Nevertheless, the dissertation depicted the controversy which erupted over MACOS as a clash between those with "scientific values" and those with "traditional values":

Proponents of MACOS and scientific values believe . . . that it is not only appropriate but important for value issues to be discussed within the context of classroom lessons. They assert that because the world is constantly changing, students must have an opportunity to deal as first-hand as possible with problems and realities of that world. Issues of the present and future, then to a large degree are paramount (though not to the total exclusion of issues of the past) to those in favor of scientific values, whereas those in favor of traditional values tend to focus on the past.

Just as Orwellian use of the word "opportunity" to describe compulsion is not uncommon among defenders of brainwashing programs, so is use of the word "scientific" in a wholly unscientific sense, as verbal garnish for a set of ideological fashions. Invocations of "science" as a characterization of educational fashions and dogmas go back for decades. Moreover, the same note of self-congratulation was apparent in Abraham Maslow, a disciple of Carl Rogers and himself one of the early gurus of psychological conditioning in schools, when he said, "traditional value systems have all failed, at least for thoughtful people," so that "we are now casting about in a new direction, namely the scientific one." Apparently school children are to be drafted for this "casting about" experiment.

The vague, lofty, and self-congratulatory note was also apparent in the titles, as well as the content, of books by Carl Rogers: The Right to be Human and Freedom to Learn—the latter another Orwellian phrase for public school children being compelled to be guinea pigs. Another writer on values clarification said: "I conceptualize man as a total, unified person." This kind of pretentious mush has provided the ideological rationale for displacing intellectual studies from the schools in favor of psychological conditioning.

............................................

With psychological conditioning programs, as with ideological indoctrination, the problem is not so much that the program will succeed in accomplishing what it sets out to do, but that it will do great damage in the attempt. With psychological conditioning programs, the damage can go much deeper than educational deficiencies.

"Values clarification" programs, for example, could more accurately be called values confusion, for its whole nonjudgmental approach is at odds with any set of values that includes right and wrong—and without any concept of right and wrong, it is hard to see what "values" mean. One parent testified before the U.S. Department of Education that her son "came home one day very confused as to the rightness or wrongness of stealing" after going through "values clarification" and other psychological-conditioning programs. Other parents report similar confusion among children after their parents taught them right and wrong and the schools said that there was no such thing. Things taught in the classroom "cause children to re-think values taught at home" and caused children "to wonder whom to believe."

The very phrase "values clarification" is fundamentally dishonest. When parents tell their children not to steal or not to have sex, there is no ambiguity as to what they mean. Clarification is neither required nor attempted. Instead, values are downgraded to subjective preferences of individuals or blind traditions of "our society" and contrasted with alternative values of other individuals and other societies — including, in some cases, the societies of various species of animals. The "nonjudgmental" approach which pervades such exercises provides no principle of logic or morality by which to choose among the many alternatives presented—except, implicitly, what peers or "experts" or "modern thinking" might prefer. "Clarification" is merely a word used to camouflage this process of undermining the child's existing values.

Programs which attempt to re-mold the values, beliefs, and attitudes of school children have often been criticized in terms of the particulars of the new values, beliefs, and attitudes. Thus there has been much discussion of the relative merits of secular humanism versus religious morality, or radical ideologies versus traditional values. While these are legitimate issues, the more fundamental question is: Who is to decide—and by what right—the values with which children are to be raised? More specifically, who authorized outsiders to intrude into family relationships, undermine parental authority, and use brainwashing techniques on children? The problems created by these programs are not confined to the particular subject matter of the programs or to those children who become convinced by the brainwashers.

The promoters of psychological-conditioning programs themselves inadvertently admit the illegitimacy of what they are doing by (1) the stealth with which such programs are introduced into schools, behind the parents' backs; (2) the many uninformative or misleading labels and descriptions of these programs, and the frequency with which these labels change, as more parents begin to understand what such terms as "values clarification" or "transactional analysis" really mean; (3) injunctions to secrecy upon students, teachers, administrators, and "facilitators" involved in these programs; and (4) the numerous tactics of delay, denial, adverse labeling, and plain hassles inflicted upon ‘parents who question or challenge’. Are these the tactics of people who are doing what they have every right to do—or of people who have to cover their tracks? Lofty assertions of "expertise" beyond the parents' understanding, and of unnamed "studies" which have supposedly "proved" the effectiveness of the various brainwashing programs, are likewise ways of not discussing the issues raised.

These programs are fundamentally irresponsible, not simply in an arbitrarily normative sense, but in the plain factual sense that those who promote and carry out such programs pay no costs if their notions turn out to be wrong, damaging, or even disastrous to some or all of those subjected to them. The smug and glib apostles of these programs do not support one baby born to a teenage girl, or one youngster who contracts AIDS from the risk-taking spirit of adventure promoted by such programs. It is the much disdained parents who are left to pick up the pieces—or to grieve and mourn when a child commits suicide, after getting in too deep to handle the problems.

It is precisely the pervasive pattern of undermining parents which makes brainwashing programs dangerous beyond their particular subject matter, whether that be sex, death, smoking, or drugs. Even youngsters who develop no problems in these particular areas may nevertheless have their ties with their parents weakened, confused, or otherwise made insecure—especially during the crucial and dangerous adolescent years. The constant conditioning to act independently of parents, and to use similarly inexperienced peers as guides, is an invitation to disaster in many ways, going far beyond those covered in a particular brainwashing program.

Parents are not simply a source of experience from their own lives; they are a conduit for the distilled experience of others in earlier generations, experience conveyed in traditions and moral codes responding to the many dangers that beset human life. Psychological-conditioning programs which enshrine current "feelings" fail to understand that it is precisely feelings of the moment which lead to many dangers, and that inhibitions toward some feelings have evolved for that very reason.

It is pseudo-rationalism to say that a child or adolescent should follow only such values as he or she can defend intellectually against the cross-examination of an adult trained specifically for such cross-examination—and for emotional manipulation. The values which have endured the test of time were not created by children, but evolved out of experiences distilled into a way of life by adults. Such values are often used precisely for the purpose of guiding people too young to have enough personal experience to grasp fully the implications of the rules they follow—or the dangers in not following them. In other words, many values would not be needed if youngsters fully understood why they existed.

A trained cross-examiner could no doubt also bring out a student's incomplete grasp of the underlying premises of mathematics and science, but no one would regard this as either a refutation of mathematics and science or as a reason why students should make up their own rules of arithmetic, or their own personal physics.

The superficial rationalism of telling school children that their parents are just "ordinary people with faults and weaknesses and insecurities and problems just like everyone else" misses the deeper and more relevant point that the relationship of a child to a parent is no ordinary relationship. It is the most extraordinary relationship anyone is likely to have with anyone else. Moreover, at the particular period of life when this statement is addressed to school children, the parents have vastly more experience than the child or the child's peers—and a far deeper and more enduring stake in the child's well being than any teacher, administrator, or "facilitator."

Another common piece of superficial rationalism is to offer examples of alternative values in differing cultures as a reason to make values in general seem like arbitrary choices. This too ignores a deeper and weightier reality: All societies which have survived have had some particular set of values, some canons of right and wrong. To banish right and wrong is to attempt something which no society has achieved—survival without shared values. Different societies also have different ideas of what kinds of food to eat, but that does not mean that food is something arbitrary that we can do without.

Despite the affectations of a detached, objective, or "scientific" attitude in many programs, reckless experiments are not science. Chemists do not take chemicals at random and pour them into a test tube to see what happens. Few chemists would survive if they did.

_________________________________________________________________________________

This is the America of today. What can one do? I can only think of one answer. See The Christian Brotherhood.

12 Mar 2024