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The Reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 2002, No Child Left Behind, and other pieces of legislation have all resulted in the federal government's increasing control of education and the economy in ways that are intrusive, unconstitutional, and destructive to academic achievement, parental authority, and America's free enterprise system.
Many conservatives have yet to understand the worldview war that has been raging within the educational establishment for years and how liberals have patiently worked to pass one piece of legislation after another that allows the federal government to take more and more control over our lives. Some have ignorantly assisted in passing legislation that is now creating an educational and economic system that John Dewey, Benjamin Bloom, Aldous Huxley, Karl Marx and B.F. Skinner would be proud of.
In this segment we will learn about the devious concepts often found in eduction known as "Programmed Learning" and "Corrective Thought." These dangerous philosophies must be recognized and combated in our public schools today- our futures depend on it...
"Faith, Family & Freedom: Our American Values Under Fire"
B. F. Skinner
(1844-1918)
In 1972, Burrhus Frederic Skinner – behavior psychologist, author, and professor at Harvard University – was given the Humanist of the Year Award by the American Humanist Association. It was a well-deserved honor.
An avowed atheist, Skinner was one of the early promoters of using a machine for “remediation.” Its purpose was to aid in developing programmed learning or corrective thought control. A behavioral psychologist, Skinner believed man is controlled by stimuli from the environment and, therefore, can never make a decision in which he exercises free will. He explained why this belief is so central to his approach to psychology: “the hypothesis that man is not free is essential to the application of scientific method to the study of human behavior.” At least he made his assumption clear. He even predicted the results his presupposition would lead to:
We must expect to discover that what a man does is the result of specifiable conditions and that once these conditions have been discovered, we can anticipate and to some extent determine his actions.
In other words, once the right stimuli, or the right conditions, are discovered, the one in charge of the stimuli can control anyone. According to Skinner in Beyond Freedom and Dignity, his vision postulates a new sort of Have’s and Have-not’s:
Man plays two roles: one as a controller, as the designer of a controlling culture, and another as the controlled, as the products of a culture.
As long as environment is controlled, he proclaimed, behavior can be controlled. Skinner advanced the thesis that social concepts such as free will and human dignity (by which he meant belief in individual autonomy) were obsolete, and stood in the way of greater human happiness and productivity. Creating a utopia on a small scale, controlled community is difficult, so building it in reality on a national scale requires a quantum leap in methodology. Nowhere is the leap better prepared for by the influencers in this series than in our educational system.
As school curriculum has been re-engineered by the likes of Benjamin Bloom, the job of the teacher is being transformed by the work of B. F. Skinner – transformed to the degree that some believe the role of the teacher is disappearing from America’s classrooms. Bloom’s “higher order thinking skills” and the behavior psychology of Skinner have met in today’s computer programs. The result is classrooms that no longer require a teacher, merely a facilitator to indoctrinate children with the desired government worldview. One observer noted, “Our teachers will be reduced to computer disc DJs.” In a publication titled “Technology and Outcome-based Education in Minnesota,” the Minnesota Department of Education describes this changing role:
Machines are becoming the information givers of our society. Since professional information givers of the past may quickly be replaced by these machines, teachers need to define themselves, and act as diagnosers, perscribers, creative climate makers, instructional designers, coaches, and learning facilitators… Teachers must stop functioning as information givers, putting learners in rows, trying to transmit information through worksheets and lectures.
Sidestepping teachers is made easier with the OBE mindset in which excuses are built into the system to underachieve. In Whole-Language approach to reading, for instance, educators have decided some readers are “genetically indisposed toward learning phonics.” The teacher-as-facilitator model is merely an idea that has “come of age.” As early as 1968, the “education reform movement” laid the groundwork for its future policies. A report from an educational conference at the time reveals the agenda of the educational elite:
The teacher will have disappeared, and his place will be taken by a facilitator of learning, focusing attention on the prime period of learning… from infancy to age six or eight. …He (the student) will never be graduated.
Social engineers call this “life-long learning.” In a 1969 speech before the 22nd Annual Teachers Education Conference at the University of Georgia, Dean Corrigan predicted that Skinner’s “…teaching machines will pace a student’s progress, diagnose his weaknesses and make certain that he understands a fundamental concept before allowing him to advance to the next lesson.” While computers are a tremendous asset to our society and to education, technology has the potential to facilitate the “Big Brother” thinking of bureaucrats who see education and schools as a way to control society. Within the framework of B. F. Skinner’s worldview, computers can, in a hunter-becomes-hunted twist, be used to program people.
Skinner believed in Darwinian evolution and saw little difference between humans and animals. The following statement can be found at www.newworldencyclopedia.org:
Skinner argued that the so-called humanistic characteristics of species, which presumably set Homo-sapiens off from the rest of living evolutionary products, are in fact an illusion, created over history to give humans a sense of security. In fact, for Skinner, to be human meant to be in control, to understand and use environmental contingencies to self benefit.
Skinner and Karl Marx had the same mindset that dominates today’s social engineers, who believe a perfect world or utopia can be created by establishing the right environment through proper conditioning, programmed learning, corrective-thought control, coercion, brainwashing, and manipulation. Dr. Skinner was so skilled at behavioral programming that he trained pigeons during World War II to pilot and detonate bombs and torpedoes. In B. F. Skinner, The Man and His Ideas, author Richard Evans quotes Skinner: “I could make a pigeon a high achiever by reinforcing it on a proper schedule.” Skinner believed that by using the teaching machines he developed to reinforce desired behavior in animals, he could also program humans.
The New World Encyclopedia makes the education connection:
Skinner’s works has also been applied to the field of education. He formulated principles of programmed learning, in which reinforcement of small, incremental steps with immediate reinforcement, or reward, for the correct (desired) responses would presumably lead to learning not only of sensori-motor responses but also of verbal responses and conceptual knowledge. In fact, his ideas have been successfully incorporated in “teaching machines” as well as computer assisted instruction.
Professor Kenneth Goodman, former president of the International Reading Association, wrote President Jimmy Carter denouncing programs based on the philosophies of B. F. Skinner. Many were being funded by the U.S. Department of Education, and Goodman explained to the president exactly what B. F. Skinner’s programmed learning was all about:
In behavior management, outcomes are assumed or arbitrarily determined and the behavior of human learners is shaped, conditioned, reinforced, extinguished, rewarded or punished until the learners achieve the target behavior.
Under Mastery Learning and Outcome-Based Education, teachers are expected to track, record, and correct improper attitudes, values, feelings, and emotions of their students – an impossible task unless the teacher has help. Today, computers and specialized software can track and correct students who exhibit the politically incorrect responses, even without the aid of a teacher. Why do the agents of change want to track the beliefs of our children? One reason is to aid the diabolical quest to inculcate into our children the elite’s “higher minded” beliefs and values. And this must not be hindered by the beliefs of the child’s parents. When children exhibit wrong attitudes or beliefs – likely those instilled by their parents – remediation, corrective thought control, and pre-programming will be the order of business. The computer is the fastest and most efficient means by which to track both a student’s moral and character development to correct his or her developmental behavior.
In 1963, under contract with the U.S. Office of Health, Education and Welfare, the National Education Association managed the Technological Development Project. It published a statement of what it was working on:
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 in Los Angeles is in the process of building a computer-based device for changing attitude. 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 logically designed to right the balance between appropriate attitudes and those deemed less acceptable.
Eventually, every school child will be working on his or her own computer, on individualized projects and assignments. Why? Because every child will have different attitudes, values, feelings, and emotions that need remediation. What will really be happening, of course, is that every student will have varying shades and types of political incorrectness that must be changed. According to the educational elite, every child is sick and in need of help. Dr. Pierce, professor of education and psychology at Harvard University, explains the challenge each student presents:
Every child who enters school at the age of five or six is mentally ill because he enters school with an allegiance toward our elected officials, our founding fathers, our institutions, the preservation of this form of government that we have, patriotism, nationalism, and sovereignty. All this proves that the children are sick, because a truly well individual is one who has rejected all of those things, and is what I would call the true international child of the future.
Curriculum will be designed to correct this “mental sickness.” Of course the question that arises is: What makes every five or six-year-old in America sick? Could it be the five to six years of love and attention the child has received from his parents? Yes, in fact, that is exactly what “experts” think makes children sick. Dr. Pierce says they come to school with a set worldview – one with which he disagrees. This worldview that Dr. Pierce finds so sickening, of course, came from the child’s parents. What Pierce really objects to is parental authority and influence, Judeo-Christian values, the traditional American family, and the Biblical Worldview.
In a television documentary on America’s educational system, Geoffrey Botkin discovered that even in 1978 the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers warned about the unlawful political abuse of electronics technology, a warning that was ignored. In 1994, IEEE published a summary of the abuses that had occurred by them:
1. The collection of psychological, medical, and sociological data on students and their families without their knowledge or consent via the NAPE, the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
2. The “going on line” of the education supercomputer, the Elementary and Secondary Integrated Data System in 1989. This system linked the U.S. Department of Education with all 50 state education departments.
3. Promoting the above under the rubric of “educational restructuring” under names like Outcome-Based Education while withholding from the public the nature and extent of the data collection.
America’s social engineers will stop at nothing to achieve their goal of reprogramming our youth. “Withholding from the pubic” is a favorite strategy for concealing their methods of collecting data about our children. B. F. Skinner would probably approve heartily of the conditioning we’ve received to think that “what we don’t know won’t hurt us.”
Sources:
Carol Pomery, ”Education According to Corporate Fascism,” unpublished speech delivered March 3rd, 1994 at Northwestern College
Richard Evans, B. F. Skinner, The Man and His Ideas
Geoffrey Botkin,”Certain Failure”
George Grant, The Family Under Siege (Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House Publishers, 1994)
Brannon Howse, Grave Influence (Worldview Publishing, 2009)Ask and you shall receive, seek and you shall find, knock and it shall be open for you - Matthew 7:7
Blessings on your success!Shane <><
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