THE PERFECT CRIME:

HOW PSYCHOLOGY AND HIGH-TECH MARKETING HAVE "DEFORMED" EDUCATION

by

© 2001 Beverly K. Eakman

Author, Educator and Executive Director
National Education Consortium
First delivered at St. Andrew the Apostle Catholic Church
Clifton, Virginia (suburban Washington, DC)

January 27, 2001

FIRST PUBLISHED IN VITAL SPEECHES OF THE DAY, MARCH 1, 2001


Vital Speeches of the Day

Thank you for that gracious introduction. It’s an honor to address you on the critical topic of education, which has taken on new urgency since the President started pitching his Education Plan to Congress.

During the campaign, of course, everyone was awash in sound bites on education. Pundits and policymakers—not to mention the presidential hopefuls—repeated all the expected mantras about "school choice," "education standards," "safe schools," and "accountability." But little was said about what’s being taught and tested, or to whom educators are supposed to be accountable.

Over the course of four years of teacher training and nine years teaching, I found public schools to be places where bad ideas are legitimized. My role wasn’t to transmit "basics," or literacy, or proficiency at anything, but rather to promote "mental health." Accountability meant satisfying government mandates and bureaucrats, not answering to parents.

Between 1968-1975, standardized tests started looking more like opinion surveys than cognitive measures. Teachers like me were told essentially not to teach—not to put red marks on pupils’ papers, not to say anything that could even be construed as a negative comment about a youngster’s work, clothing, or speech.

Today, few prospective teachers even pursue an academic major. They major in education which means, quite simply: psychology—or social work. Even those few who do specialize in an academic subject, likely will find it isn’t what they wind up "facilitating" once they hit the classroom.

Facilitate: That’s what teaching is called now in the field. It entails a whole new curricular experience: "survival and coping skills," "anger management," "conflict resolution," "self-esteem," "sexual diversity," and so on. Little in the curriculum provides insight into our cultural or constitutional underpinnings. Courses like logic, philosophy, and civics, that once helped kids get a handle on modern issues, are gone. Nothing incorporates the values of self-reliance, property rights, limited government (especially in the context of regulatory power), or the role of religion in our society. Physics, chemistry, calculus, and physiology are reserved for the few with very high IQ scores.

Now, four consequences necessarily follow from this shift of emphasis:

So, in effect, children are being "warehoused," not educated.

If you think back, you’ll find that this approach to education mirrors the childrearing advice that started being disseminated in books and magazines beginning in the mid-1950s. Parents who continued to transmit even innocuous virtues like propriety, tact, and modesty had the rug pulled out from under them.

As a young teacher, I listened to behavioral experts like William Glasser explain how children needed to be told their every accomplishment was wonderful, even when it wasn’t. I was there when child experts told parents and teachers to "take the screws off," let toddlers express themselves. I was there when psychologists admonished adults to stop "snooping" in kids’ belongings and give them some "space." I was there when schools started sponsoring dances and dating for pre-pubescent youngsters—which crushed tender egos worse than a parent’s scoldings ever did.

I was there when educational psychologists helped us scrap the dress codes, and when the message became "don’t lecture and moralize; kids won’t listen." The self-anointed "experts" claimed the traditional approach to raising children was (and I quote) "creating a thousand neurotics for every one that psychiatrists can hope to help with psychotherapy."

By the mid-90s, it was "children have rights"—rights to sexual information and paraphernalia, rights to access porn on the Internet, rights to sue their parents for disciplining them. In fact, children had more rights than you! But when the fire hits the fan at Columbine, or Santana High, it’s parents who get blamed for not doing all those things the "experts" lobbied against.

Increasingly, parents were treated as "amateurs"—well-intentioned dummies without degrees in the social or behavioral sciences—unfit to make judgments concerning their children’s welfare, right down to everyday decisions about health. Then they launched the notion that kids would be better off in day care so they’d be socialized and "ready to learn."

Now, common sense told the parents of the 1930s and 40s that it wasn’t in the best interests of the child to spend all day with other kids—because they torment each other, and because youngsters learn appropriate conduct, manners, and so forth, by being around adults. Everyone knew that you "socialize" puppies, not people! That you civilize children, not socialize them!

Today, most education-related legislation is rooted in the presumption of parental incompetence. School staff is given license to circumvent parents. Legislative language allows children to refer themselves for "mental health services," for example, which can mean anything from psychotherapy to abortion counseling. Did you see the recent surgeon general’s report demanding universal mental health services for schoolchildren? Well, three states have just initiated legislation to that effect.

As some of you know, in 1986 I stumbled on what appeared to be a testing scam in Pennsylvania. I had long since escaped the teaching profession, but this discovery led to a 15-year-long investigation of the Mental Health Movement which, it turns out, gave us today’s psychologized K-12 education. I located archived speeches and papers by eminent behavioral theorists—Drs. Brock Chisholm, John Rawlings Rees, A.S. Neill, Albert Segal, Ewen Cameron, Chester Pierce—all detailing a campaign to re-orient education’s purpose. In particular, they urged eradicating traditional concepts about right and wrong. Suddenly something called "high religiosity," which means "firm religious belief," became a risk factor for mental illness—equated with dogmatism, inflexibility, resistance to change, paranoia, irrationality.

The logic went like this: Guilt over supposed "sins" produces neurosis. Therefore, redefining "morality" will produce happier, guilt-free, and mentally healthy people who are less inclined to engage in conflict, right down to international hostilities. Experts had decided that guilt forced people to take responsibility for things beyond their control.

Eventually, all behaviors were defined as outside of one’s control. Spiritual awareness was viewed as delusional; self-discipline as unattainable. This marked the turning point of free societies around the world, overturning 2000 years of Judeo-Christian philosophy which affirmed, essentially, that guilt is a civilizing influence because it implies personal responsibility and individual accountability.

Beginning in the 1940s, the Mental Hygiene Movement, as it was called then, stepped up its efforts to first "re-interpret," then "eradicate," traditional concepts about right and wrong. For example, Dr. Brock Chisholm, the same guy who said parents were creating thousands of neurotics, referred to religion as "the world’s oldest and most parasitical growth." He told colleagues in an address to the World Federation of Mental Health:

"The only psychological force capable of producing ... perversions is morality, the concept of right and wrong.... [T]his artificially imposed inferiority, guilt, and fear, commonly known as ‘sin’… [he said] produces so much of the social maladjustment and unhappiness in the world.... If the race is to be freed of its crippling burden of good and evil, it must be psychiatrists who take the original responsibility." When I first read this, I thought this guy Chisholm was a fluke. I didn’t believe he could possibly be representative of the field. Then I ran into Dr. Ewen Cameron. In a broadcast aired by the Canadian Broadcasting Company at about the same time, 1947, he announced that the family, conscience, and nationalism were the chief culprits leading to international hostilities! He insisted that, quote, "what we call morals are simply the customs, prohibitions and rules which a society maintains at any given time...." I’m sure you’ve heard that line, but you may not have known who said it. Cameron claimed that schools were "passing on outworn, harmful and perilously ... misleading information about human beings" at a time when Americans were vulnerable, at the close of World War II and all the atrocities reported in its wake. He claimed that there were now "important [new] tools" that would do a better job of curbing conflict and atrocities: "the social sciences—psychology, sociology, psychiatry," he said.

Then there was Dr. Albert Segal, who admonished his colleagues in the profession that they had just 20 years to do the job of "rooting out and destroying religion." In another major address, this one to the National Council for Mental Hygiene, Dr. John Rawlings Rees, who was also a Brigadier General heading Britain’s infamous Tavistock Institute, issued this challenge to his audience: "We must aim to make [psychology] permeate every educational activity in our national life...."

And on and on it went. Through a succession of like-minded theorists and mental hygiene gurus, education and parenting became saturated with unworkable philosophies of child management. British and American psychologists built on the experiments of German theorists (of all things), like Kurt Lewin and Theodor Adorno, to determine whether people could be made to behave erratically—as Dr. Rees put it—to find out if individuals could be induced to willingly let go of firmly held, cherished beliefs and adopt, through controlled peer pressure, a predetermined set of alternative beliefs.

These experiments centered on what was called "thought disruption" (that is, carefully applied distraction), first field-tested by Dr. Rees on British and American soldiers late in World War II, ostensibly as part of a program dealing with psychological resistance in prisoner-of-war camps. Rees once boasted he could "turn an adult population into the emotional equivalent of neurotic children." He coined the term "psychologically controlled environment," to describe a setting in which people can neither tune out nor circumvent a continuous barrage of selected distractions and messages. The psychologically controlled environment became key to "freezing" new beliefs—getting people to "internalize" them. Adorno went on to pursue the same techniques in the American media via a joint project of the Rockefeller Foundation and Moscow’s Institute for Social Research, which had by then affiliated with Columbia University. That’s where the premier teacher education facility, Teacher’s College, was headquartered.

The term "internalize" started being applied to education during my teaching years in the late 1960s. It means "to induce an automatic response," which sounds somewhat Skinnerian, but with a twist. Today, the psychologically controlled environment is evident in everything from billboards, to film, to teen magazines, to school curriculum. No one can totally escape the messages.

The studies in thought disruption spawned the first peace-time high-stress, encounter-style behavioral modification techniques via a facility called the National Training Laboratory, which America’s National Education Association eventually took over. I found a waiver teachers had to sign absolving the NTL from any adverse psychological reactions. By the 1970s, this kind of "counseling," once confined to adults who had agreed, for one reason or another, to undergo such abuse had moved into the classroom and now is used with unsuspecting children who believe they are taking a test or playing a game. For example, the Michigan School Code, established in 1976, states that personality tests may be administered as part of a school program or project [R340.102]. Parents are supposed to be notified by mail, but you know they aren’t. The reason is because there are no penalties for failing to do so. Big loophole. But the larger issue is that the use of personality tests are considered a legitimate activity for the school to undertake.

The psychologizing of the educating process was improved upon by modern educators with higher name recognition, individuals who, with the help of large public and foundation grants, brought in today’s curriculum, testing, and classroom management strategies—John Dewey, Edward Thorndike, Ralph Tyler, Benjamin Bloom, Ted Sizer, John Goodlad, Marc Tucker, William Spady. They’re the leaders of what I call The Illiteracy Cartel because of their political and monetary stake in assuring a poorly educated, consensus-driven population.

So…what do we have today? For openers, we have educators and legislators who can’t tell a substantive, cognitive test question from a "loaded," subjective one. I embarrassed a state board member recently when I posed to him two math questions I found on an 8th-grade test given in 1895 in Salina, Kansas:

The fellow, who had a bachelor’s degree, couldn’t figure the answer. So I tried a geography question: Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific at the same latitude?

Again, no response. I tried a spelling question: Give two rules for spelling words with a final 'e'. Nada. Okay, I said, how about naming an event associated with any one of the following dates: 1607, 1620, 1800, 1849, and 1865. Zilch.

Finally, I canned the 1895 test and tried something more recent—two 1995 8th grade test questions: "Name 3 things we can do to save the earth"; and "List 5 strategies for eliminating contests, competitive games, and other win/lose activities."

Bingo…

I notice he didn’t suggest banning the Superbowl. Now that would have gotten the attention of our couch-potatoes. Can’t you see it? Thousands of angry male liberals converging on their local schools accusing the principal of being a Commie. But I digress.

But seriously, with this shift has come officials who are unable to differentiate between a pupil carrying aspirin and cocaine, between an innocent peck on the cheek by a 6-year-old and the gang rape of an 11-year-old; between a kid saying "bang-bang" as he aims a half-eaten chicken bone wing at a classmate in the lunch room, and one putting a 6-inch switchblade to somebody’s throat!

We have debutantes giving birth to babies in toilets on prom night, then sashaying back out on the dance floor; young couples throwing newborns in a motel dumpster; and 8-year olds playing sex instead of jump-rope. We have college professors reporting entire classes of university students who suddenly no longer view the atrocities committed in the Holocaust as "wrong"; rather, their pupils say these actions "must have fulfilled some basic need."

Excuse me?

What we’re seeing here is the success of a now 50-year-old campaign to obliterate the lines between right and wrong. By advising kids to develop their own value systems, elementary and secondary schools have become subject to a host of disciplinary problems never previously experienced.

Eventually, my research took an unexpected turn—into the world of electronic transfer systems, data-trafficking (and laundering), and something called by advertisers "psychographics."

Schools today inundate pupils with psychological and demographic questions—a combination long known in the world of advertising as "psychographic data-gathering." Psychographics determines, among other things, the content of your junk mail. In education, personal information is collected and dumped into one of several recently consolidated electronic transfer systems—the most popular one being the SPEEDE/ExPRESS, linked to WORKLINK—where it’s analyzed by behavioral psychologists and picked up by curriculum and test developers, nearly all of whom hold degrees in—guess what?—behavioral psychology. School codes like Michigan’s specify that only those who have "earned doctorates in psychology, educational psychology, and related behavioral sciences" are qualified to "interpret" tests [R340.1105]. If the tests weren’t largely psychological, such caveats wouldn’t be necessary.

What education policy-makers have done is to take their cue from market research, which relies heavily on computer programmers and behavioral science analysts. To sell you something, advertisers have to find out what makes you tick—then see if you can be made to "tick" differently. First, they go after demographic, socio-economic, religious, and political blocs. By cross-matching magazine subscriptions; favorite movies, cars, and vacation spots; income sources; profession; hobbies; family structure, and so on, they can then fine-tune down to the individual.

Thanks to tremendous advances in computer technology, programmers inadvertently handed behaviorist educators the Holy Grail of Social Engineering. It’s called "predictive technology." When you cross-match enough psychographic data using both public and private records, it’s possible, using a mathematical model, to predict how a group, or even an individual, is likely to react to specific "stimuli," not just today, but 10 years or so down the road. That’s the Skinnerian "twist" I was talking about earlier. The "stimuli" are advertising messages, both subtle and overt. If the controlling elite doesn’t like the predicted reaction, it sets about changing the future, by altering or "restructuring" the message. In the media, that translates to news, sitcoms, and movies. In education, it means curriculum. So, what I’m saying is that today’s curriculums function like advertising packages. Get it?

How does this work? Well, experts look for something called "psychological threshold." You can find the term in any psychology dictionary, but the first time I saw it was in a teacher's guide to Pennsylvania's "citizenship" curriculum. It defined threshold as "the severity of stimulus tolerated before a change of behavior occurs." When you test for threshold, stated the manual, "it is possible to assess not only the students’ predisposition [toward certain reactions] . . . but also to provide some measure of the intensity of that predisposition across a wide spectrum of situations." Now, that’s pretty sophisticated.

How does this play out in the classroom? First, there’s "projective and nonprojective personality tests." The first type is easily predictive—"unstructured stimuli such as pictures, inkblots, ‘complete-the-sentence’ exercises."

The second type, nonprojective, involves asking for written responses, as in essays which, according to several school codes, "provides helpful inferences about personality and behavior." Remember, in this context, behavior does not mean conduct. All passed off as "achievement testing."

Inasmuch as any school program or project can incorporate these "tests", what happens is you get things like seventh-graders watching films of cuddly animals being burned alive—to garner support for saving the environment. That’s a threshold-level film. Or you get graphic AIDS education for kindergarten children. Or you get a sex ed board game played with "sperm cards." Or you get trips to the morgue to see dead people. Or you get third-graders watching a movie that shows a disabled high-school boy trying to hang himself with a rope.

A third-grade boy saw this movie, Nobody Useless, put out by the trusted Encyclopedia Britannica. Impressed, he went home that afternoon and tried the rope trick. He succeeded. The teacher never previewed the film before showing it, because it was listed in the National Diffusion Network, or similar, regionally linked federal database of so-called "validated" programs—for teaching compassion. What teacher is going to screen something that’s already been screened? But the government-appointed board that is supposed to do that doesn’t bother with programs that have a trusted name attached to them, like Encyclopedia Britannica.

Still other questionable learning programs are downloaded via satellite systems like the National Community and Learning Information Network, directly into a pupil’s computer in our nation’s newly "wired" classrooms, bringing new meaning to the term "p.c."

Moreover, curriculum and test development are a far cry from what it was when you went to school and your teacher gave a pop quiz on yesterday’s lesson. What we have today are social "scientists," either in tax-exempt foundations or partnering with government agencies via grants and contracts, producing educational materials and programs aimed at molding future public opinion. That’s the bottom line. Tests and surveys determine the degree to which children accept positions that, quite frankly, are now considerably at variance with the US Constitution and religiously based moral and ethical codes.

No longer are the values that undergirded the Declaration of Independence "givens" in our society. In fact, memorizing the Declaration is no longer considered appropriate—in part because it mentions a Creator, and because of slavery, which purportedly makes the document itself racist. Some legislators in New Jersey are trying to ban this founding document from the classroom. Moreover, under the cover of nonjudgmentalism, tolerance, flexibility, diversity, and Separation of Church and State, the State itself is now in a position to be able to dictate beliefs.

The emphasis on psychological proclivities and personality in schools has led not only to a turnabout in the nation’s principles, which we have seen played out on the nightly news the past 8 years, it is fueling a morbid preoccupation with the peer group. The peer group has become the "controlling legal authority" in matters of conduct. When things go wrong, of course, all is reduced to a "mental disorder" instead of a moral disorder.

So, now that everyone’s resigned to kids blowing away their classmates, psychologists are calling for "mandatory, universal behavioral screening." With license to inspect every 5-year-old, they claim they can identify those "at risk" of becoming unstable, anti-social and even violent. And if they just intervene soon enough, without interference, they say they can turn these youngsters around.

Most parents take this to mean that out-of-control kids will be separated from their own children. Policymakers and the media like the prevention message.

In fact, nobody will be separated from anything…but a lot of good kids having a bad day will be stereotyped and labeled for life. Like everything else, mental health referrals go into an electronic portfolio, which follows the pupil wherever he goes. Even if there’s no substance to a referral, anyone who reads that file will always wonder.

As with the behavioral screening instruments, kids are inundated with clinical questionnaires, increasingly given to classroom teachers to disseminate to students. Where do you think pollsters get statistics concerning the percentage of 12-year-olds who are depressed, or who’ve tried marijuana, or whose parents drink wine? Well, they come from supposedly restricted fare like the Personality Assessment Inventory, the State-Straight Depression Adjective Checklist, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, the Emotional Problems Scales, the Reynolds Child Depression Scale, the Defense Mechanisms Inventory, and so on. Questions run the gamut from "What does your urine smell like?" to "What do you hate most about your mother?"

Obviously, mandatory tests would eliminate the necessity for parental consent. With the spate of copycat shootings, today’s dominating faction of the education establishment—behavioral psychologists—feel confident they can convince legislators to do away with pesky parental consent requirements and mandate their larger agenda: universal testing, treatment, and tracking.

Most states, of course, see the scribbling on the wall. All that money the feds supposedly will turn over to each state to do its own thing will carry a caveat. Grant solicitations, which come packaged in booklets from dozens of agencies, make it very clear what will be rewarded. So, regardless of whom is at the helm of the Administration, states will comply with the incentives and directives of their immediate benefactors to keep getting money. For example, every new program will incorporate a mental health approach. State and local computer systems will be made increasingly compatible with federal ones for ease of data sharing. This, in turn, will help federal agencies keep tabs on grantees and even their subgrantees.

So the push is on for an alliance between schools and mental health agencies in every state and school district as a "solution" to violence, Attention Deficit Disorder, depression, teen pregnancy, and anything else you can slap a label on. President Bush’s just-passed education reform package includes a large grant to train teachers in psychological testing and screening techniques to prevent violence. Remember, "prevention" is the new buzz-term.

How much bang do these guys get for the buck? Well, let’s take the Institute on Violence and Destructive Behavior at the University of Oregon’s College of Education. Its leaders, Drs. Hill Walker and Herbert Severson, are just two among a large cottage industry of child experts pitching universal screening instruments to local school districts.

Teachers are taught by the Institute’s educational psychologists to match the classroom and playground conduct of pupils against a list of behavior patterns. This means that "recess" is no longer about play time. Certain "markers" (or "red flags") signal a child’s need for professional help. These youngsters are referred to a school psychologist, counselor or other "behavioral specialist," who makes determinations about each kid’s problems. The child is taught alternative, "adaptive" behaviors to use as "coping mechanisms." Parents are enlisted to reinforce these alternatives, while experts continue to monitor (or track) each child’s progress, by means of observation and additional psychological testing.

So a teacher checks off a red-flag term like "loner" to describe a child who’s merely "reserved." The ensuing psychological snooping reveals that the parents are rather "private people," not given to showy, public displays of emotion. In other words, no Al-and-Tipper Gore-style smooches for the cameras in this family. But psychologists interpret such modesty as "coldness," even "inhibition," so the counselor teaches the child adaptive behaviors that result in bizarre ideas about openness and tolerance.

Very young schoolchildren are easy to manipulate. The way they respond to any contrived situation or question (called a "prompt") will depend a lot on what happened that morning. If Johnny got into trouble for missing the school bus, he may insist his parents hate him. If he got a birthday cake, his parents love him. Youngsters also misinterpret events. Yet, psychologists use such unreliable data to make predictions about how students will react to future events (or "stimuli"), and they transfer this information to a permanent file, an "electronic portfolio."

The "confidential" label is invariably taken by the layperson for anonymity. But confidential means "need-to-know." Most school codes make it clear that "specific responses and interpretation summaries may become part of published research findings and reports, with the identities of the individuals tested properly safeguarded." "Properly safeguarded" is a very loose term, because it’s up to anybody’s imagination what is "proper."

In a 1992 letter from Emerson Elliott, former head of the National Center for Education Statistics, 29 entities, including the Department of Defense, were listed as automatic recipients for "confidential" test results. Questionnaires already were routinely "tagged," or "slugged," for identification. I detail in my book various types of "embedded identifiers," some of which—for example, sticky-labeling—require complicated procedures to ensure kids won’t know somebody has their names.

The quantum leap in computer capability, coupled to an increasing demand for state-federal comparability and access, means opinion-oriented information is slowly making its way into the child’s future financial, credit, medical and other records. Loopholes in privacy laws make it difficult to stop your child’s file from eventually landing on the desktops of executives, security officers, credit bureaus, or anybody with an ax to grind.

Counseling also triggers what’s called an IEP (individual education plan), implying a "tailored" (individualized) curriculum. Parents believe their child’s education will be personalized, so they sign on the dotted line. What they’ve signed, however, is a permission slip giving the school authority to supersede parents. It also allows officials to track students on into adulthood.

Why do we see statistics like how many sexually active 15-year-olds go on to, say, abuse drugs at age 25? They come from surveys that track kids into adulthood—called longitudinal studies.

So-called social maladjustment, substance abuse and dysfunctional families are not all that researchers are looking for. Former eugenicists like Max Kallmann and Linda Erlenmeyer-Kimling, having reinvented themselves as "social biologists" and "evolutionary psychologists" in the 1970s, are now screening for "markers" of more controversial nature.

Did you know that the label Attention-Deficit Disorder (ADD) is being used as a genetic "marker" for adult schizophrenia? Even though there exists no organic anomaly identified as present in ADD-labeled individuals, this inability to focus and concentrate for protracted periods—which is what ADD is supposed to mean—was seized upon by Dr. Erlenmeyer-Kimling as an indicator of a far worse malady having an equally loosey-goosey definition. ADD is used as a justification, then, for increasing school-based psychological therapies passed off as real curriculum. These therapies are disseminated through Title X (Medical Assistance), which the US Departments of Education, Labor, and Health and Human Services jointly and aggressively pursue in the name of school-based health services nationwide.

Unsurprisingly, medical "markers" are being "pitched" successfully to business and industry. In 1999, for example, legislation was approved in the House that would make it even easier to cross-match records, including medical data. Keep in mind that medical records increasingly include mental and genetic information. A provision was embedded in a massive bill to overhaul the financial services industry to allow release of medical information by insurance companies—not only to determine charges for premiums, but to facilitate research projects, medical and nonmedical. So, for all the hoopla about medical records privacy (even if the bill fails this time around), a credit agency may one day find a diagnosis which says, in effect, "By the way, Joan Smith had a brain tumor; don't lend her any money."

  If you think that’s scary, imagine a diagnosis alleging that schoolgirl Joan Smith has an ADD "marker" and is thus at risk of schizophrenia.

Today, nearly all grant programs, public or private, including delinquency-prevention proposals, are grounded in the behavioral sciences. Virtually nothing, however, is mentioned about the extent to which intimate and personal data already is shared via computer; or about the technological inability to prove when or if computerized data is "purged" (destroyed); or about the long-term nature of psychological tracking; the planned level of family intervention; the poor track record of existing assessments and therapies; and the ulterior purposes to which computerized information is being put. Moreover, psychologized education is serving as a stealth method of transmitting whatever passes for politically correct propaganda—which is another way of saying "molding public opinion."

Meanwhile, the loss of subject matter that generations before ours were expected to learn, practice, and commit to memory, is resulting in an ever-shrinking common body of cultural and cognitive knowledge. Subjects like logic and philosophy are now completely unknown in secondary schools, thereby greatly compromising our young people’s capability to see recent events in any historical, cultural or logical context.

Just what values are kids supposed to learn in our knowledge-challenged institutions? Let me enlighten you.

Here’s a seven-point list, faxed to me from an educator in North Carolina. She got it during an inservice training workshop at her school, and it turns out to be representative of the new value system being transmitted in most schools today:

The first phony-baloney test I saw was the State of Pennsylvania’s Educational Quality Assessment, or EQA. The EQA was given every two years and, for those of you who may not be familiar with today’s state tests, the questions on the EQA are fairly representative, such as: This last question is a "fishing probe": It assumes that the child will join the club under some circumstance, including the desire to provoke parents. Now think about this. What are psychologists really asking here? Aren’t they asking: "What do we have to do get this kid to commit vandalism?"

The EQA had 375 questions covering attitudes, worldviews and opinions. Most involved hypothetical situations and self-reports. There were also 30 questions on math and another 30 covering verbal analogies. Just enough academic questions to appear credible.

The next shocker was the scoring mechanism. It revealed points given for what was called a "minimum positive attitude." For example, on the "Midnight Artists" question, the preferred response was "b—Most of the popular students in school were in the club." Why "b"?

The Interpretive Literature, which is off limits to the layperson, tells us why. The EQA’s creators were testing for: the child’s "locus of control"; his "willingness to receive stimuli"; his "amenability to change"; and his inclination to "conform to group goals." In English this means: Where’s the child coming from? Is he easily influenced? Are his views firm or easy to change? Will he submit to group-think and "go along to get along"? Answer "b" to the Midnight Artists question is preferred because it reflects a willingness to conform to group goals. Got it?

At the time of the uproar over EQA in Pennsylvania in 1986, both the test’s developers and the government agencies that paid for its dissemination lied about the nature and purpose. It took alert parents four years and the intervention of congressional representatives to get an admission that the test’s chief purpose was psychological and that it violated seven protected areas.

Today psychological testing under the cover of academics has become more sophisticated and blatant. Most state assessments of the past 5 years are filled with political- and opinion-oriented fare, under the cover of "relevancy," which pupils sometimes expand upon in an essay section following each set of questions. But the timeless principles underlying our Constitution or Judeo-Christian thought are not included as "relevant."

Take 5 so-called science questions for 5th-graders on universal child fingerprinting—a transparent probe to see how much resistance there might be to the idea. Terms like "mandatory," of course, are never used, because of the negative connotations. But there’s no mistaking the intent. The multiple choice answers, even the "incorrect" ones, actually drum up support: "fingerprinting doesn’t hurt," "lost children can be identified," etc. Not a single "down side" is offered. The student is carefully led to select the politically expedient choice, as the alternatives are so patently ridiculous that no child who can read would ever pick them.

But this is a science test, not a reading test. Question: "Fingerprinting is MOST useful in which of the following jobs: [a] police work, to help in crime fighting; [b] window washing, to help clean windows; [c] auto mechanics, to help cars run better; [d] teaching, to help kids learn to multiply. Even if you ignore the political overtones here, so much information is contained in each "choice" that the student doesn’t have to know what window washing or auto mechanics mean.

In a preparatory activity for this set of questions, called "Your Fingerprint Investigation Journal," students used tape, #2 pencils, wet paper towels and other fun stuff to take their fingerprints; then handed them into the teacher, who was instructed to say they would "keep it for you and return it when you take your [state] science test." But not a single question involved any science. How’s that for teaching to the test!

In his State of the Union message, President George W. Bush made the observation that if teachers are "teaching to the test," then that means they’re teaching things kids need to know—reading, math, science. Right?

Has he seen "history" questions like the one leading to an essay on women in combat. Task I was "Interpreting the Information." While the Data Section from which the children are supposed to draw for their responses mentions—and only in passing—that the data are "hypothetical," the age group being tested will probably not even know what that means. Here’s how every section of the test is prefaced:

"Directions: Read the following hypothetical information about a public policy issue. Use it with what you already know to complete the tasks that follow [i.e., answer the questions]."

The only interpretation one can make from the data given is that women should be in combat. Despite the implication in the instructions to the essay section that a student’s views per se don’t matter, it’s clear that any view not supported by those imaginary "facts" in the Data Section will be judged insufficient to warrant a top grade. In fact, in the sample the testers start the paragraph for the child: "I think that women members of the military should definitely be allowed to participate ...."

The most fascinating thing about these tests is that regardless of whether the section in question is called science, geography, or reading, all the questions are social studies. There’s no topography in the geography sections (the Michigan assessment covered only "global issues" like overpopulation, colonial victimization, and redistribution of resources to Third World countries). Even the writing sample was about "coping with change."

I recently saw a comprehension section (thinly disguised as literature) that was a soppy, poorly written story about two friends, one poor and the other who had saved her money and wound up taking care of her friend when they reached old age. While none of the questions on the selection was "profound," the last one listed not a single correct response. It asked whether the story was: realistic, adventure, biography, or mystery. Since the piece wasn’t based on an actual person, contained nothing adventurous, and no who-done-its, the politically correct answer was "realistic." In fact, the piece was a "commentary"—not listed as a choice.

There are thousands of examples of phony "testing." I could wallpaper the Dept. of Ed with them. Where’s challenge, the transmission of hard knowledge?

Little wonder we have a more troubling issue facing us: psychiatric drugging—schools that tell parents to put their kids on psychiatric drugs, or else. Since psychologists have convinced gullible policymakers, and many medical doctors as well, that personal behavior is largely a matter of chemistry, psychotropic drugs are increasingly being prescribed for naughty, shy, daydreaming, and bored schoolchildren, doing untold damage to their developing brain structure, while the psychologized education I’ve been describing systematically undermines what children really need—intellectual stimulation, spiritual belief and family.

Researchers around the country are now reporting horrifying side-effects. For example, kids on antidepressants frequently don’t enter deep, Stage 4 sleep. Severe sleep deprivation results in—guess what?—heightened irritability, impaired judgment, uncontrollable rage and, if it goes on long enough, psychotic breaks. As for Ritalin, X-rays are showing what appears to be atrophy of brain tissue after extended use.

Another tobacco settlement anyone?

The fact is, there are reforms that could turn our schools around. Instead of having educators look for signs of psychological distress, they should be instructed in how to recognize bona fide impediments to learning—problems with spatial orientation, visual identification, visual and auditory memory, perceptual speed, mental stamina, hand-eye coordination and thought-expression synchronization. These are the make-or-break learning factors, the infrastructure of learning.

A prospective teacher should be majoring in a preferred academic subject and minoring in one of these critical components, like spatial reasoning. The teacher should be hired for these dual specialties. Pupils should then be paired with teachers on the basis of weaknesses found in their learning infrastructure.

Do legislators want non-discriminatory tracking? Well, here it is. Who’s to say that visual identification is superior to auditory memory or spatial reasoning? Indeed, how would a pupil know why he is assigned to Mrs. Jones’ class instead of Mr. Smith’s under such a criterion?

Take the child whose spatial reasoning is poor: A student who believes that one-fourth is larger than one-half because 4 is bigger than 2 is not going to be able to solve a problem involving fractions no matter how many formulas he memorizes. He’ll continue to multiply fractions when he should divide them, and vice versa. This pupil will require visual aids, scale models—anything to improve his ability to conceptualize.

On the other hand, a student who has an intuitive grasp of one-fourth versus one-half will become bored under that approach. He may need to work on his recall skills.

So, what about vouchers, tuition tax credits, charter schools, and home schooling? All these will provide some stop-gap relief for individual children. But they won’t stop institutionalized child violence or the nation’s declining knowledge base because the worst flaws lie within teacher preparation and Education Establishment thinking. Only a mass refusal to put up with the policies of the past 40 years will result in a noticeable correction.

To turn things around, we must set about removing the red tape that discourages launching and franchising private schools and implementing home schools. Our legislators should wash their hands of the long line of familiar faces who’ve had their chance. There are brave men and women around the country penning legislation and resolutions to start putting parents and serious teachers back in the driver’s seat.

The President should use his bully pulpit to encourage Congress to ban psychographic surveying in a compulsory setting, to stop funding teacher training institutions that push courses in psychology instead of in the key learning infrastructure areas, and then wean state and local governments off federal education dollars. This is critical, because non-public schools are increasingly targets for personality and psychiatric testing—always worded as an "offer" or "voluntary." But that quickly "morphs" into a mandate.

The private sector has a role to play here. Suppose, for example, the Catholic Church were to support only university education departments that schooled prospective educators in those eight critical infrastructure areas. Suppose Catholic schools contracted only with testing companies that performed real learning diagnostics, and hired only teachers who knew how to incorporate them into their lesson plans. What a message that would send to the rest of the profession!

Teachers must start insisting on real professional associations. Instead of lobbying for goofy stuff like gay rights, they should be pushing for expulsion of students who continually disrupt their classes, for training techniques that work, and for backup by administrators. A mother in Cleveland recently wrote how teachers there lived in fear of their students; how one teacher had her arm broken by the same thugs who were harassing this mother’s daughter. She said teachers were faced with hard-core delinquents day after day and told not to send anybody to the principal’s office because there was nothing they could do. These loud, roaming pupils sapped teachers’ energies and left no time for instruction.

Of course, these situations are non-issues in Cleveland’s private institutions (primarily because they don’t accept federal and state dollars and therefore don’t have to follow their mandates). A truly professional teachers association could tackle such threats to teachers if it wasn’t so preoccupied with counterculture causes.

In the meantime, you as parents will have to learn, then teach your children, how to avoid getting roped into group-think. How are kids supposed to recognize when they’re being indoctrinated? Well, there are basically seven giveaways.

You’ll have to learn things you would have learned in school 50 years ago—but not in the last 35 years—like how to shut down manipulative consensus strategies like Delphi and Tavistock techniques; how to influence others without giving away the store; how to recognize and rebuff professional manipulators in a task force, curriculum committee, or advisory board; and how to get the real scoop on who is funding or promoting controversial programs.

In other words, we’re all going to have to learn how to be psychological resistance fighters, and we’re going to have to stop trying to win wars armed only with the rules of etiquette.

The perfect crime, Ladies and Gentlemen, isn’t getting away with something after you’re caught red-handed. The perfect crime is the one nobody knows was committed. Whether you realized it or not when you walked in, the reason you’re here today is because you didn’t follow a predictable, psychographic consumer behavior pattern. In other words, you didn’t "buy." You didn’t buy the illusion that guilt is mentally unhealthy; you didn’t buy the insult that you’re amateurs—unfit to make decisions about your youngsters’ welfare. And you didn’t buy the idea that Separation of Church and State means America is a religion-free zone.

Well, time’s up, and you’re probably feeling overwhelmed. So I’ll leave you with a wonderful definition of success by none other than Gen. George S. Patton. "Success," he said "is how high we bounce when we hit bottom." Isn’t that great?

Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. You’re saying to yourself: "This is like walking uphill through glue! How am I supposed to find the will to bounce at all when the whole society seems to have gone mad?" Well, Amelia Earhart had the answer. I found it one day on the bottom of a jar of makeup. No kidding. She said: "Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace." And I thought, "Wow!" What a way to start my day! And, you know, if enough of us find that courage and sustain it over the next four years, we just might bounce very high indeed.

Thank you.

7,645 words

Exactly 60 minutes

B.K. Eakman is executive director of the National Education Consortium and the author of the book, Cloning of the American Mind: Eradicating Morality Through Education.