Parents and teachers in the State of Maine
should be especially interested in Empire High School's decision to "chuck the
textbooks" since Maine was the first state to move towards the computerization
of schools, thanks to the aggressive lobbying of the business community and
former Governor Angus King
REVOLUTION IN EDUCATION - SOVIET STYLE
PART 1 OF 2
By
Charlotte Iserbyt
August 29, 2005
Important note from
the author: The next time you attempt to discuss with a friend or
acquaintance a serious issue (such as illegal immigration, the Iraq War, our
loss of constitutional rights under the Patriot Act, or the latest Supreme Court
Decision doing away with private property rights) and you get that ?glazed,
blank, mindless, couldn?t care less _expression_,? refer back to this article
which attempts to explain the cause of that glazed _expression_:
Pavlovian/Skinnerian conditioning, be it through operant conditioning programs
in the schools, computers at school or at home, the television, radio, music,
video games, or plain print media. It is important for Americans to become aware
of the effects of conditioning, the brain and soul (conscience) killer, which is
silently at work in our society 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year.
If the reader of this
article wants to go to what author considers the crown jewel related to the
subject of conditioning, he should read ?The Leipzig Connection?, ISBN
0-89739-001-6, by Paolo Lionni, a slim 103- page paperback. (Contact: Delphian
Press, 20950 SW Rock Creek Road, Sheridan, Oregon 97378.) Lionni has explained
in clear language the difference between education and conditioning. The first
few pages of his book are helpful for the purposes of this article. Lionni?s
important information taken from Chapter 1, entitled ?A New Domain?, follows in
much abbreviated form:
Wilhelm Maximilian
Wundt, the founder of experimental psychology, was born in 1832 in Neckarau,
Germany, graduated as a medical doctor from Heidelberg University in 1856. He
worked at Heidelberg for the next seventeen years, ultimately becoming a
professor in the field of psychology. Psychology, at that time, meant simply the
study (ology) of the soul (psyche), or mind. In 1874, Wundt left Heidelberg to
take a position as professor of philosophy at Zurich, stayed there only one
year, and then accepted a chair in philosophy at the University of Leipzig where
he spent the rest of his academic career. He died in 1920. Wundt was the founder
of experimental psychology and the force behind its dissemination throughout the
western world. To Wundt, a thing made sense and was worth pursuing if it could
be measured, quantified, and scientifically demonstrated. Seeing no way to do
this with the human soul, he proposed that psychology concern itself solely with
experience. As Wundt put it:
??it truly appears to
be a waste of energy to keep returning to such aimless discussions about the
nature of the psyche, which were in vogue for a while, and practically still
are, instead, rather of applying one?s energies where they will produce real
results."
In his Philosophical
Studies, which became the official organ of both the new laboratory and the
newly redefined ?science? of psychology, he stated ?The work which I here
present to the public is an attempt to mark out a new domain of science.?..
Wundt asserted that man is devoid of spirit and self-determinism (free will, ed)
He set out to prove that man is the summation of his experiences, of the stimuli
which intrude upon his consciousness and unconsciousness.
From Wundt?s work, it
was only a short step to the later redefinition of the meaning of education.
Originally, education meant the drawing out of a person?s innate talents and
abilities by imparting the knowledge of languages, scientific reasoning,
history, literature, rhetoric, etc.?the channels through which those abilities
would flourish and serve. To the experimental psychologist, however, education
became the process of exposing the student to ?meaningful? experiences so as to
ensure desired reactions: ??the situation-response formula is adequate to cover
learning of any sort, and the really influential factors in learning are
readiness of the neurons, sequence in time,belongingness, and satisfying
consequences.? (Rudolph Pintner, et al, An Outline of Educational Psychology,
1934, page 79).
Wundt?s thesis laid
the philosophical basis for the principles of conditioning later developed by
Pavlov (who studied physiology in Leipzig, in 1884, five years after Wundt had
inaugurated his laboratory there) and American behavioral psychologists such as
Watson and Skinner??
Public Schools Adopt Soviet
Techniques, Part 1
An AP article ?Arizona
High School Trades Textbooks for Laptops", August 15, 2005, opens the door
for a long- overdue discussion of the dangers of the Pavlovian/Skinnerian method
of instruction also known as mastery learning,
outcomes/performance/results-based education, and direct instruction. This
programmed learning (stimulus/response/bells+whistles animal training method),
has been in use for over thirty years in the nation?s schools, primarily in
urban schools and special education classrooms. Now that it has been
incorporated into computer software programs, it will replace textbooks as the
primary instructional media. As the reader will see from many quotes in this
article this type of computer assisted instruction is essential for value and
attitude change and for work force training.
The AP article states in
part "Students at Empire High School here started class this year with no
textbooks--but it wasn't because of a funding crisis. Instead, the school issued
IBooks--laptop computers by Apple Computer Inc. -- to each of its 340 students,
becoming one of the first U.S. public schools to shun printed textbooks...Empire
High, which opened for the first time this year, was designed specifically to
have a textbook-free environment....Schools typically overlay computers onto
their instruction 'like frosting on the cake,' Baker said. 'We decided that the
real opportunity was to make the laptops the key ingredient of the cake...to
truly change the way that schools operated.?"
(Parents and teachers in
the State of Maine should be especially interested in Empire High School's
decision to "chuck the textbooks" since Maine was the first state to move
towards the computerization of schools, thanks to the aggressive lobbying of the
business community and former Governor Angus King. All middle school students in
Maine have been provided with Apple computers, over the strenuous objections of
many well-informed persons within the education community and in the Maine
Legislature. This innovation will soon have extended itself up into Maine's high
schools and down into its elementary schools, if parents and teachers do not
mount a major resistance to this radical change in education pedagogy.
Fortunately Maine has not yet ?chucked the textbooks!? )
The plan to get rid of
textbooks and to computerize instruction dates back to at least 1971. The
February 22, 1971 Individualized Learning Letter, An Administrator's Guide to
Improve Learning, stresses on its letterhead the need for "Individualized
Instruction Methods, Flexible Scheduling, Behavioral Objectives, Study Units,
Self-Directed Learning, and Accountability" and states under "Quotes You Can
Use":
"Down With Books.
Textbooks not only encourage learning at the wrong level (imparting facts rather
than telling how to gather facts, etc.), they also violate an important new
concern in American education--individualized instruction......A good start
would be to...declare a moratorium on textbook use in all courses." Dwight D.
Allen, Dean of Education, University of Massachusetts, writing on The Decline of
the Textbook, Change, Jan.-Feb., 1971."
The same newsletter
advertised "First National Educational Technology Conference, April 5-8, 1971,
Americana Hotel, New York City. Conference seminars and workshops will cover
curriculum design, use of computers, programmed instruction, simulation,
innovation theory, etc.?
Three years later, in
1974, Leon Lessinger, superintendent of schools in Beverly Hills, California and
former associate commissioner of education in the U.S. Office of Education,
called for the implementation of Skinnerian behavior modification and discussed
environmental influence when he said:
??Would that we had such
a system; a system of accountability.? Lessinger went on to recommend ?Use of
contingency rewards. May make you feel uncomfortable? Does me, but he who shirks
this responsibility does a disservice to the children of the United States.
Behavior Modification is here. Better for us to master and use wisely.
Powerful?powerful?powerful.?
Fast forward eight years
to the Annual Meeting of the Council of Chief State School Officers in 1982,
during which Dr. Elam Hertzler, Secretary of Education T. H. Bell?s top
assistant in the U.S. Department of Education, told the State Superintendents of
Instruction:
?One of the elements of
an effective school was to monitor, assess, and feed back?As little as 5 percent
of a school budget K-12 would be needed over a period of 12 years to enable each
student to have his own computer, and this is within our cost range.?
As indicated above, this
plan to get rid of textbooks and implement Pavlovian/Skinnerian computerized
instruction has been on the drawing board for many years just like everything
else in "the deliberate dumbing down" of our schools. This is the education
(training) system for "The Brave New World Order", the system which denies "free
will" and will assure that your child no longer receives a traditional academic
education, but that he be "trained" with rewards and punishments to be a docile,
accepting, non-thinking, atheistic "performer" (robot) in Lenin's International
Socialist System, euphemistically referred to by our controlled media as
?democratic socialism? which is being implemented, world region by world region,
as I write.
The admission by Empire
High School, one of the first schools to implement this textbook-free schooling,
allows education researchers who have focused on the dangers of the Skinnerian
behaviorist method to finally be listened to. The old saying applies here:
"You'll know it's true when it happens to you."
Now that parents will be
faced with their children learning exclusively from computers, which are operant
conditioning (attitude and value-changing machines), perhaps they will be
willing to listen to those teachers and education researchers who have been
issuing warnings ever since the early eighties when the Skinner method and the
proposed use of computer technology was carved in stone by the Reagan
Administration's Department of Education, commencing with The National
Commission on Excellence's Nation At Risk Report; continuing with its major
computer technology initiative, Project BEST: Basic Education Skills Through
Technology, The infamous 1984 Utah grant to Professor William Spady to pilot
outcomes-based education in Utah and then to ?put it in all schools of the
nation;? and ultimately with the Bush Administration's support for Skinnerian
Direct Instruction to teach reading.
The No Child Left Behind
Act virtually mandated the ?scientific research based? Skinner reading method be
used in the classrooms of our nation, to the exclusion of other non-behaviorist
methods of reading instruction which have successfully taught children to read
for over one hundred years.
Siegfried Engelman?s
federally-funded ?Teaching Your Children to Read in 100 Easy Lessons (SRA?s
DISTAR Mastery Reading program) is probably the most extensively used Direct
Instruction program in the nation, and is best known for its controversial
results in Houston, Texas. It has a teacher training video which instructs
teachers on the use of hand signals with children, the same hand signals one
uses when training dogs! The Exemplary Center for Reading Instruction (ECRI) a
federally-funded to the tune of $848,536 (1966 dollars!) mastery learning/direct
instruction program, is the fraternal twin of DISTAR. It has been used
extensively across the country since 1966 (its published reports listed its use
by 3,000 schools as of 1985!).
According to doctors,
teachers, and parents it causes sickness and stress for students and turns
teachers into robots. Its pre-training Manual lists the following teacher and
resource materials: Adaptation of Birds, Monitoring Forms Before and After
Instruction (observation data sheet records), How to Teach Animals by Skinner,
How to Teach Animals: A Rat, A Pigeon, A Dog, by Kathleen and Shauna Reid. The
late Dr. Jeanette Veatch, internationally known in the field of reading, called
the ECRI program ?a more modern version of breaking children to the heel of
thought control.? She added, ?it is so flagrantly dangerous, damaging and
destructive I am appalled at its existence.?
The following quotes
should help Americans understand the importance of the Pavlovian/Skinnerian
method and how the use of computers (Skinner's Box) has been planned for over
fifty years, and how it will affect the education and behavior of their children
and of utmost importance, how such education denies free will. Don't forget it
was Professor B.F. Skinner who said:
"I COULD MAKE A PIGEON A
HIGH ACHIEVER BY REINFORCING IT ON A PROPER SCHEDULE." and
?OPERANT CONDITIONING
SHAPES BEHAVIOUR AS A SCULPTOR SHAPES A LUMP OF CLAY.?
Also, most frightening
and significant, is the following 1984 quote from Dustin Heuston of Utah's World
Institute for Computer-Assisted Teaching (WICAT):
"We've been absolutely
staggered by realizing the computer has the capability to act as if it were ten
of the top psychologists working with one student...You've seen the tip of the
iceberg. Won't it be wonderful when the child in the smallest county in the most
distant area or in the most confused urban setting can have the equivalent of
the finest school in the world on that terminal and no one can get between that
child and that curriculum? We have great moments coming in the history of
education."
This comment should come
as a shocker to parents who have been battling openly and usually unsuccessfully
at school board meetings to have certain controversial textbooks and social
engineering programs removed from the schools. At least before, sometimes,
parents had access to what their children were learning in school. Dustin
Heuston explains that such a privilege will no longer be granted to parents.
And, in case parents
don't really believe that operant conditioning/behavior modification programs,
which now will primarily use the computer for reinforcement, are dangerous and
are designed to destroy your children's traditional values, read on:
The late Professor
Benjamin Bloom, internationally known behaviorist, father of
Pavlovian/Skinnerian mastery learning and outcomes based education, said in his
Taxonomy of Educational Objectives:
"The evidence points out
convincingly to the fact that age is a factor operating against attempts to
effect a complete or thorough-going reorganization of attitudes and values.
(Taxonomy, p. 85) The evidence collected thus far suggests that a single hour of
classroom activity under certain conditions may bring about a major
reorganization in cognitive as well as affective (attitudes, values and beliefs)
behaviors." (Taxonomy, page 88)
Bloom also said the
purpose of education was to "change the thoughts, actions and feelings of
students" (All Our Children Learning, 1982) and defined good teaching as
"challenging the students' fixed beliefs." (Taxonomy, page 55)
Additional proof of the
computer's ability to change attitudes is found in "The Role of the Computer in
Future Instructional Systems" which was published as the March/April, 1963
supplement of Audiovisual Communication Review [Monograph 2] of the
Technological Development Project of the National Education Association
[Contract #SAE9073], U..S. Office of Education, Dept. of Health, Education and
Welfare.) Excerpts from a chapter entitled "Effortless Learning, Attitude
Changing, and Training in Decision-Making" follow:
"Another area of
potential development in computer applications is the attitude changing machine.
Dr. Bertram Raven in the Psychology Department at the University of California
at Los Angeles is in the process of building a computer-based device for
changing attitudes. This device will work on the principle that students'
attitudes can be changed effectively by using the Socratic method of asking an
appropriate series of leading questions designed to right the balance between
appropriate attitudes, and those deemed less acceptable. For instance, after
first determining a student's constellation of attitudes through appropriate
testing procedures, the machine would calculate which attitudes are 'out of
phase' and which of these are amenable to change.
"If the student were
opposed to foreign trade, say, and a favorable disposition were sought for, the
machine would select an appropriate series of statements and questions organized
to right the imbalance in the student's attitudes. The machine, for instance,
would have detected that the student liked President Kennedy and was against the
spread of Communism; therefore, the student would be shown that JFK favored
foreign trade and that foreign trade to underdeveloped countries helped to
arrest the Communist infiltration of these governments. If the student's
attitudes toward Kennedy and against Communism were sufficiently strong, Dr.
Raven would hypothesize that a positive change in attitude toward foreign trade
would be effectively brought about by showing the student the inconsistency of
his views. There is considerable evidence that such techniques do effectively
change attitudes.
"Admittedly, training in
decision-making skills is a legitimate goal of education in this age of
automation, but the problem remains--does the educator know what values to
attach to the different outcomes of these decisions?...What about students whose
values are out of line with the acceptable values of democratic society? Should
they be taught to conform to someone else's accepted judgment of proper values?
Training in decision-making is ultimately compounded with training in value
judgment and, as such, becomes a controversial subject that needs to be resolved
by educators before the tools can be put to use."
The operant conditioning
method is an animal training method. Since the top behaviorist educators
consider man an animal, without a soul, mind, or conscience, it makes sense to
them that man be trained, not educated. One can train an animal but one cannot
educate an animal. Dogs sit upon command when they know there is a reward
(biscuit) for doing so. Since this type of stimulus/response computer education
does not transfer (dogs are unable to make connections between different
commands), your children will not be able to learn. They will simply respond, as
would an animal, to bells and whistles which are nothing but neurological
stimuli. Yes, "it works."
Yes, it is "effective",
since it allows for the precise measurement (behaviorist term) of all your
child?s thoughts and behaviors. Yes, it provides for "accountability" (through
computerized data collection of your child?s behaviors) to the federal and
international government and to UNESCO (the United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization). It is not, however, accountable in any
way to you, the parent, or to the teacher (now known as a "facilitator" of
learning, not a transmitter of knowledge). This method, in conjunction with
computers, can be counted on to train and brainwash your children and their
teachers to become members of the collective (group), to perform like robots/
animals, lifelong, in the social and career roles identified for them by the
multinational corporate and global elite, and to never, ever speak out in
opposition to the government for fear of punishment. Yes, it is an invasion of
privacy.
How easy it will be for
the government schools to maintain records on every aspect of your child's
personality and behavior: his individuality or willingness to conform to the
group; his tolerance or lack thereof of any and all lifestyles; his religious
beliefs or lack thereof, his global mindedness or lack thereof; his
intelligence, his mental health, his sexual proclivities, and to make such
information available upon request to any corporation, government or private
"snoop" agency without written, informed parental consent. The U.S. Department
of Education already collects such information through the mandated National
Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), but the collection of information
will be facilitated when the schools' administrative offices (central computer
data bases) are connected to the content of each individual student's computer
hard drive. (President Bush's Mental Health Screening Initiative can be easily
implemented simply through the computerization of the NAEP) Sixty percent of the
test items included in the mandated NAEP, upon which most state assessments are
based, are already attitudinal (politically correct)!
The General Agreement
between the United States of America and the United Soviet Socialist Republic on
Contacts, Exchanges and Cooperation in Scientific, Technical, Educational,
Cultural and Other Fields, signed by Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev in 1985,
which are still in effect, virtually merged the two countries' education systems
and called for cooperation in furthering this type of Pavlovian computerized
education. The agreement signed between the Carnegie Corporation and the Soviet
Academy of Science in 1985 was even more specific and resulted in "joint
research on the application of computers in early elementary education, focusing
especially on the teaching of higher level skills and complex subjects to
younger children." "Higher level skills" is often a euphemism for "critical
thinking skills".
N. Landa "Lenin: On
Educating Youth," published by the state-controlled Novosti Press, quotes Lenin
on "thinking" as follows: "To pose a real question means to define a problem
which demands a new approach and new research....sometimes accepted truth no
longer answers as a solution for a serious and pressing problem. The school
should cultivate in pupils the ability to perceive scientifically-evolved truths
as stages along the endless road of cognition -- not as something stationary and
set." But you, dear parent, will not know how your second grader's values are
being changed (?are evolving on Lenin?s endless road of cognition?) since, as
Heuston says above: "you will not be able to get between your child and that
[computer] curriculum."
Not only are your
children being conditioned in the Pavlovian/Skinnerian schools of America. Their
teachers, who, as stated before, are now known as ?facilitators of learning? not
as ?transmitters of knowledge?, have been even more victimized than your
children. The May, 1985 issue of The Effective School report entitled
?Principals Expectations as a Motivating Factor in Effective Schools? says the
following regarding the conditioning of teachers:
?The principal expects
specific behavior from particular teachers which should then translate into
achievement by the students of these teachers; because of these varied
expectations, the principal behaves differently toward different teachers, i.e.,
body language, verbal interactions and resource allocations. This treatment also
influences the attitudes of the teacher toward the principal and their
perception of the future utility of any increased effort toward student
achievement. If this treatment is consistent over time, and if the teachers do
not resist change, it will shape their behavior and through it the achievement
of their students?With time teachers? behavior, self-concepts of ability,
perceptions of future utility, attitude toward the principal, and students?
achievement will conform more and more closely to the behavior originally
expected of them.?
Do the above quotes
reflect your views and/or what you want for your children? Do the above quotes
reflect how good American teachers want to be trained to teach in the Orwellian
Classroom of the Future?
Additional most
legitimate concerns regarding the computerization of education are addressed in
an excellent article entitled "The Computer Delusion" by Todd Oppenheimer which
was published in the July 1997 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. Excerpts from that
article follow:
Oppenheimer: "Opinions
differ in part because research on the brain is still so sketchy, and computers
are so new, that the effect of computers on the brain remains a great
mystery."
