Participatory Democracy Put To The Sword
Thirty-odd years later, between 1967 and 1974, teacher training in the United States was
covertly revamped through coordinated efforts of a small number of private foundations,
select universities, global corporations, think tanks, and government agencies, all
coordinated through the U.S. Office of Education and through key state education
departments like those in California, Texas, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and New York.
Important milestones of the transformation were: 1) an extensive government exercise in
futurology called Designing Education for the Future, 2) the Behavioral Science Teacher
Education Project, and 3) Benjamin Bloom's multivolume Taxonomy of Educational
Objectives, an enormous manual of over a thousand pages which, in time, impacted every
school in America. While other documents exist, these three are appropriate touchstones
of the whole, serving to make clear the nature of the project underway.
Take them one by one and savor each. Designing Education, produced by the Education
Department, redefined the term "education" after the Prussian fashion as "a means to
achieve important economic and social goals of a national character." State education
agencies would henceforth act as on-site federal enforcers, ensuring the compliance of
local schools with central directives. Each state education department was assigned the
task of becoming "an agent of change" and advised to "lose its independent identity as
well as its authority," in order to "form a partnership with the federal government."
The second document, the gigantic Behavioral Science Teacher Education Project,
outlined teaching reforms to be forced on the country after 1967. If you ever want to hunt
this thing down, it bears the U.S. Office of Education Contract Number OEC-0-9-
320424-4042 (BIO). The document sets out clearly the intentions of its creators — nothing
less than "impersonal manipulation" through schooling of a future America in which "few
will be able to maintain control over their opinions," an America in which "each
individual receives at birth a multi-purpose identification number" which enables
employers and other controllers to keep track of underlings and to expose them to direct
or subliminal influence when necessary. Readers learned that "chemical experimentation"
on minors would be normal procedure in this post- 1967 world, a pointed foreshadowing
of the massive Ritalin interventions which now accompany the practice of forced
schooling.
The Behavioral Science Teacher Education Project identified the future as one "in which
a small elite" will control all important matters, one where participatory democracy will
largely disappear. Children are made to see, through school experiences, that their
classmates are so cruel and irresponsible, so inadequate to the task of self-discipline, and
so ignorant they need to be controlled and regulated for society's good. Under such a
logical regime, school terror can only be regarded as good advertising. It is sobering to
think of mass schooling as a vast demonstration project of human inadequacy, but that is
at least one of its functions.
Post-modern schooling, we are told, is to focus on "pleasure cultivation" and on "other
attitudes and skills compatible with a non-work world." Thus the socialization classroom
of the century's beginning — itself a radical departure from schooling for mental and
character development — can be seen to have evolved by 1967 into a full-scale laboratory
for psychological experimentation.
School conversion was assisted powerfully by a curious phenomenon of the middle to
late 1960s, a tremendous rise in school violence and general school chaos which followed
a policy declaration (which seems to have occurred nationwide) that the disciplining of
children must henceforth mimic the "due process" practice of the court system. Teachers
and administrators were suddenly stripped of any effective ability to keep order in
schools since the due process apparatus, of necessity a slow, deliberate matter, is
completely inadequate to the continual outbreaks of childish mischief all schools
experience.
Now, without the time-honored ad hoc armory of disciplinary tactics to fall back on,
disorder spiraled out of control, passing from the realm of annoyance into more
dangerous terrain entirely as word surged through student bodies that teacher hands were
tied. And each outrageous event that reached the attention of the local press served as an
advertisement for expert prescriptions. Who had ever seen kids behave this way? Time to
surrender community involvement to the management of experts; time also for
emergency measures like special education and Ritalin. During this entire period, lasting
five to seven years, outside agencies like the Ford Foundation exercised the right to
supervise whether "children's rights" were being given due attention, fanning the flames
hotter even long after trouble had become virtually unmanageable.
The Behavioral Science Teacher Education Project, published at the peak of this
violence, informed teacher-training colleges that under such circumstances, teachers had
to be trained as therapists; they must translate prescriptions of social psychology into
"practical action" in the classroom. As curriculum had been redefined, so teaching
followed suit.
Third in the series of new gospel texts was Bloom's Taxonomy, in his own words, "a tool
to classify the ways individuals are to act, think, or feel as the result of some unit of
instruction." Using methods of behavioral psychology, children would learn proper
thoughts, feelings, and actions, and have their improper attitudes brought from home
"remediated."
In all stages of the school experiment, testing was essential to localize the child's mental
state on an official rating scale. Bloom's epic spawned important descendant forms:
Mastery Learning, Outcomes-Based Education, and School to Work government-
business collaborations. Each classified individuals for the convenience of social
managers and businesses, each offered data useful in controlling the mind and
movements of the young, mapping the next adult generation. But for what purpose? Why
was this being done?
Bad Character As A Management Tool
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