Inside american educatio.., p.6
Inside American Education, page 6
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? 60
In addition to questions, students have an “opportunity” to tell things, such as:
Describe a time of your greatest despair. 61
Tell where you stand on the topic of masturbation. 62
Reveal who in your family brings you the greatest sadness, and why. Then share who brings you the greatest joy. 63
Tell some ways in which you will be a better parent than your own parents are now. 64
Tell something about a frightening sexual experience. 65
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 -----. 66
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)? 67
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. 68
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.” 69
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. 70 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, 71 or in “death education” classes where students are sent to funeral homes to arrange their own funerals, 72 or in “values clarification” classes where they are assigned to play the role of political demonstrators. 73
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. 74 “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 being biological or medical. Although it takes a dismissive attitude toward “many people in our parents’ generation” who had “negative attitudes toward bodies and sex” 75 and also dismisses “old-fashioned stereotypes,” 76 “society’s moralistic attitudes” and “religious traditions,” 77 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.” 78 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” 79 or who “have a hard time letting go,” 80 parents who “go overboard” 81 or “have serious problems.” 82
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. 83
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?” 84 In a so-called “talented and gifted” program, fourth graders were shown a movie in which children were in fact fighting with their parents. 85 In a so-called “health” class in Tucson, a high school class was asked: “how many of you hate your parents?” 86 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?” 87
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.” 88 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. 89
The undermining of parents’ moral 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?” 90
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. 91
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.” 92 It is one of a number of programs which warn against letting parents know the specifics of the material being used. 93 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. 94
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 antiparent, anti-values program, but it was very difficult to discover cover 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. 95
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 midsemester 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:
develop the ability to analyze and synthesize ideas and information among disciplines
recognize and practice effective listening and speaking skills as well as critical thinking and effective writing techniques
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” 96 is the message repeated again and again. What you do “will have to be your decision.” 97 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 own life … 98
Concepts of “normal” or “healthy” sex are dismissed because “each of us has his or her own legitimate set of sexual attitudes and feelings.” 99 Homosexuality is a matter of “preferences” 100 “Sado-masochism may be very acceptable and safe” for some people. 101 Although it is illegal and “exploitation” for adults to “take advantage” of children sexually, “there may be no permanent emotional harm.” 102
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. 103
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.” 104 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:
