| This essay, and the
links that follow, demonstrate some of the more unsettling aspects of government involvement in schooling.
"Change Agents" Change
American Education
by Chuck Morse
In the early 1970's, the "change- agents", as they call themselves, came to
dominate our public education system. After almost a century of planning,
they have "changed" our American school system into an increasingly
top-down, command oriented, Prussian style model. They have sought to create
"human resources" rather than free thinking and functioning individuals.
They have attempted to "mold", to borrow their word, young people into
better functionaries of the corporate state. While by conventional
terminology, the change-agents are considered to be left-wing, the term
right-wing would be more literally applicable as they peruse a type of
eugenic, National Socialist agenda.
Academic subjects such as math, science, and history have been deliberately
hollowed out of their content. These, and most other disciplines, have been
replaced with meaningless, mind-numbing psychobabble. Dumbed down methods
such as whole language, new math, guessing, and others, are meant to cripple
the minds of our young people. These methods create the mental dissonance
required to stanch the development of cognitive thinking. Family,
patriotism, and belief in God, has been undermined with sex education,
values clarification, "remediation", new age, and more psychobabble. A
moral, independent thinking person threatens the goal of the change- agent
which is the replacement of the moral authority of the family with that of
the State. From their twisted perspective, today's education system is a
smashing success!
One of the founding change-agent bibles, "Taxonomy of Educational
Objectives," by University of Chicago Professor Benjamin Bloom, lays out the
strategy for how the State, acting through the public schools, would,
eventually, control the minds and behavior of it's citizens. Bloom saw
education as "a tool to classify the ways individuals are to act, think, or
feel as the result of some unit of instruction". Improper attitudes, brought
in from home, would be "remediated". What Bloom meant by "improper
attitudes" should be obvious.
By 1971, according to "The Underground History of American Education" by New
York City Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto, the U.S. Office of
Education was deeply committed to Bloom's agenda of accessing and
manipulating the private lives and thoughts of children. That year, the
Office of Education contracted the RAND Corporation to produce
"change-agent" studies which would serve as training manuals for teachers.
Federal funding was granted under the "Education Professions Development
Act" and the volume "Change-Agents Guide to Innovation in Education" would
play a central role in this education "transformation". Soon after, teacher
training programs were established, and more RAND change-agent volumes were
produced. Our tax dollars were being spent to destroy the structure and
fabric of our society, not to mention our children's lives.
In 1973, Catherine Barrett, president of the National Education Association,
the monopolistic teachers union, said "Dramatic changes in the way we raise
our children are indicated, particularly in terms of schooling... we will be
agents of change". Parents still harbor the quaint idea that they, as
sovereign citizens of a free democracy, decide how to raise their own
children. What these "dramatic changes" would be is becoming increasingly
obvious. The NEA is the largest and most powerful union in the US.
In 1989, a senior director of the Mid-Continent Regional Educational
Laboratory, no doubt an incubator for change-agents, funded by the taxpayer,
addressed all 50 American Governors attending a conference on education. He
stated that "What we're into is total restructuring of society". Not a
single Governor, Democrat or Republican, raised his hand to ask what was
meant by "restructuring." There is no record of a single Governor
registering an objection. Since the establishment of the Department of
Education in 1977, States have surrendered, at breakneck speed, control over
public education, transferring that control to the Federal government.
Government school advocate Gerald Bracey, in a revealing essay, succinctly
summed up the change-agent agenda. He claimed that, realistically, "we must
continue to produce an uneducated social class." Government, by nature,
seeks power for it's own sake. This requires a docile, semi literate
populace focused on external stimulants such as entertainment and controlled
substances. This is why, clearly, government must be driven out of
education.
Published in the February 9, 2001 issue of Ether Zone.
Copyright © 2001 Ether Zone Online. (http://etherzone.com).
Reposting permitted with this message intact.
The Nazi
Model for Outcome-Based Education
"...our leading change agents don't know what their deceptive
strategies and dumbed-down curricula will do to our children. Maybe they
haven't noticed the similarities between their educational strategies and
former Nazi tactics for molding young minds and teaching group
conformity..."
Values
Clarification - Whose Values Are They?
"...Valuing is therefore considered a process of the student identifying
with and accepting the standards or norms of the important individuals and
institutions within his society. The student "incorporates" these values
into his or her own value system...Extreme advocates such as Talcott Parsons
(1951) believe that the needs and goals of society should transcend and even
define the needs and goals of the individuals..."
Side Effects of Standardized Testing
"...Years ago I administered standardized tests to the students in my public
school classrooms. As a homeschooling parent, I have agonized over whether
to test my own children. Now I regularly administer achievement tests to
homeschooled students. I continue to notice that standardized tests often
teach significant lessons..."
Political
Correctness: The Scourge of our Times
"...the citizens of this
nation are increasingly censoring themselves and losing their freedom of
speech out of fear of Political Correctness repression..."
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