Inside American Education (11 page)

ASSESSMENT

Attitude-changing curriculum programs can be assessed in a number of ways, including (1) how effective they are in the specific area in which they claim to be effective (drug prevention, for example), (2) the academic and emotional costs they entail, and (3) their wider social consequences.

Remarkably little attention has been paid to the actual consequences of programs which have claimed to reduce drug usage, teenage pregnancy, fear of death, and so on. Glowing words and confident claims have often been considered a sufficient basis for subjecting millions of American youngsters to psychological conditioning. Often the promoters of such programs
have been content to quote statements by those children who liked the programs, or by teachers who liked running the programs. But selected testimonials about how some people feel are hardly evidence as to whether these activities accomplish their declared aims. Moreover, some children and some teachers also like the traditional academic subjects, which psychological programs displace.

The most openly promoted and most widely introduced non-academic program has been so-called “sex education.” The public has been told that these programs are ways of reducing teenage pregnancy and venereal diseases, including in recent years AIDS. The 1970s have been called “the heyday of the growth of sex education.”
¹³⁸
What was the situation before massive, federally-funded “sex education” programs began and how has it changed since?

Teenage pregnancy was
declining
, over a period of more than a dozen years, before so-called “sex education” programs spread rapidly through American schools in the 1970s. Teenage pregnancies then
rose
sharply, along with federal expenditures on “sex education” programs and “family-planning” clinics, many located in schools. The pregnancy rate among 15 to 19 year old females was approximately 68 per thousand in 1970 and 96 per thousand in 1980.
¹³⁹

Sex education advocates cite different statistics—on fertility or live births—to claim success. There was, as they claim, some decline in adolescent birth rates during the 1970s, when abortions among pregnant teenagers more than doubled, so that the dramatic increase in pregnancies was statistically offset by abortions and miscarriages.
¹⁴⁰
However, even the modest decline in live births could not be attributed to sex education or to so-called family-planning clinics. Fertility rates among teenage girls had been declining since 1957,
¹⁴¹
long before the massive, federally funded programs of the 1970s and before
Roe v. Wade
made abortion legal in 1973.

Although sex education advocates have seized upon fertility declines to claim success, what they themselves predicted beforehand was a decline in both pregnancies and abortions—both of which increased.
¹⁴²
Moreover, the sex education “experts” were wrong in other fundamental ways: (1) in their insistence that abstinence was not a viable option among today’s teenagers because “everybody” was having sex and (2) their
depiction of the role of parents and traditional values as ineffective or counterproductive.

There was no evidence that a majority of teenagers were engaging in sex before the sex education programs spread. As late as 1976, a majority of high school students were still virgins, and as late as 1987 only half of all 18-year-olds had had pre-marital sexual relations. Even among the so-called “sexually active,” 14 percent had been “active” only once in their lives, and half had not engaged in sex in the month preceding their interview.
¹⁴³
In short, “everybody” was not doing it, and only a minority were promiscuous. Although abstinence is often dismissed as impossible, it remains a way of life for many teenagers—however inconvenient that fact may be for those peddling an ideology or seeking money to support their programs.

Empirical evidence also shows that parents with traditional values have had much more positive impact than the “experts” have assumed. More than 80 percent of adolescent girls whose parents did not permit dating in their early teens were virgins, compared to only about half among those who began dating at age thirteen.
¹⁴⁴
When Utah passed a law requiring parental consent for minors to be given contraceptives, not only did teenagers’ use of family-planning clinics and teenage abortions decline; so did pregnancy and birth rates.
¹⁴⁵
In short, parental influence proved to be a more effective force against teenage pregnancy than so-called “sex education” or even contraceptive clinics. But, over the past generation, traditions that worked have been replaced by “innovations” that sounded good.

Much more research has been done on sex education than on other attitude-changing programs, but the results in other areas have been similar. A study of death education in two secondary schools found that fear of death
increased
among those students taking this program, well beyond the level among those students not taking death education, even though the students in the death education program initially had less fear of death.
¹⁴⁶
Parents whose children have talked about suicide, or committed suicide, after taking death education courses have been understandably bitter, though cause and effect are obviously difficult to establish in such cases. Still, one mother of a boy who committed suicide accused the school
of “playing Russian roulette” by offering such courses to a mixture of students, some of whom may not be able to handle it.
¹⁴⁷

There has likewise been controversy over the effects of so-called “drug prevention” programs—for example, over whether the program “Quest” is responsible for an increase in drug usage among students in its program.
¹⁴⁸
Causation and correlation are not the same, but it is worth noting that controversies seem to be over how to apportion blame for bad results, rather than discussions of the good results so confidently promised or assumed when these programs were inaugurated.

With psychological conditioning programs, as with ideological indoctrination, the problem is not so much that the program will succeed in accomplishing what it sets out to do, but that it will do great damage in the attempt. With psychological conditioning programs, the damage can go much deeper than educational deficiencies.

“Values clarification” programs, for example, could more accurately be called values
confusion
, for its whole nonjudgmental approach is at odds with any set of values that includes right and wrong—and without any concept of right and wrong, it is hard to see what “values” mean. One parent testified before the U.S. Department of Education that her son “came home one day very confused as to the Tightness or wrongness of stealing” after going through “values clarification” and other psychological-conditioning programs.
¹⁴⁹
Other parents report similar confusion among children after their parents taught them right and wrong and the schools said that there was no such thing. Things taught in the classroom “cause children to re-think values taught at home”
¹⁵⁰
and caused children “to wonder whom to believe.”
¹⁵¹

The very phrase “values clarification” is fundamentally dishonest. When parents tell their children not to steal or not to have sex, there is no ambiguity as to what they mean.
Clarification is neither required nor attempted
. Instead, values are downgraded to subjective preferences of individuals or blind traditions of “our society,” and contrasted with alternative values of other individuals and other societies—including, in some cases, the societies of various species of animals.
¹⁵²
The “nonjudgmental” approach which pervades such exercises provides
no principle of logic or morality by which to choose among the many alternatives presented—except, implicitly, what peers or “experts” or “modern thinking” might prefer. “Clarification” is merely a word used to camouflage this process of undermining the child’s existing values.

Programs which attempt to re-mold the values, beliefs, and attitudes of school children have often been criticized in terms of the particulars of the new values, beliefs, and attitudes. Thus there has been much discussion of the relative merits of secular humanism versus religious morality, or radical ideologies versus traditional values. While these are legitimate issues, the more fundamental question is:
Who is to decide
—and by what right—the values with which children are to be raised? More specifically, who authorized outsiders to intrude into family relationships, undermine parental authority, and use brainwashing techniques on children? The problems created by these programs are not confined to the particular subject matter of the programs or to those children who become convinced by the brainwashers.

The promoters of psychological-conditioning programs themselves inadvertently admit the illegitimacy of what they are doing by (1) the stealth with which such programs are introduced into schools, behind the parents’ backs; (2) the many uninformative or misleading labels and descriptions of these programs, and the frequency with which these labels change, as more parents begin to understand what such terms as “values clarification” or “transactional analysis” really mean; (3) injunctions to secrecy upon students, teachers, administrators, and “facilitators” involved in these programs; and (4) the numerous tactics of delay, denial, adverse labeling, and plain hassles inflicted upon parents who question or challenge. Are these the tactics of people who are doing what they have every right to do—or of people who have to cover their tracks? Lofty assertions of “expertise” beyond the parents’ understanding, and of unnamed “studies” which have supposedly “proved” the effectiveness of the various brainwashing programs, are likewise ways of
not
discussing the issues raised.

These programs are fundamentally irresponsible, not simply in an arbitrarily normative sense, but in the plain factual sense that those who promote and carry out such programs
pay no costs
if their notions turn out to be wrong, damaging,
or even disastrous to some or all of those subjected to them. The smug and glib apostles of these programs do not support one baby born to a teenage girl, or one youngster who contracts AIDS from the risk-taking spirit of adventure promoted by such programs. It is the much disdained parents who are left to pick up the pieces—or to grieve and mourn when a child commits suicide, after getting in too deep to handle the problems.

It is precisely the pervasive pattern of undermining parents which makes brainwashing programs dangerous beyond their particular subject matter, whether that be sex, death, smoking, or drugs. Even youngsters who develop no problems in these particular areas may nevertheless have their ties with their parents weakened, confused, or otherwise made insecure—especially during the crucial and dangerous adolescent years. The constant conditioning to act independently of parents, and to use similarly inexperienced peers as guides, is an invitation to disaster in many ways, going far beyond those covered in a particular brainwashing program.

Parents are not simply a source of experience from their own lives; they are a conduit for the distilled experience of others in earlier generations, experience conveyed in traditions and moral codes responding to the many dangers that beset human life. Psychological-conditioning programs which enshrine current “feelings” fail to understand that it is precisely feelings of the moment which lead to many dangers, and that inhibitions toward some feelings have evolved for that very reason.

It is pseudo-rationalism to say that a child or adolescent should follow only such values as he or she can defend intellectually against the cross-examination of an adult trained specifically for such cross-examination—and for emotional manipulation. The values which have endured the test of time were not created by children, but evolved out of experiences distilled into a way of life by adults. Such values are often used precisely for the purpose of guiding people too young to have enough personal experience to grasp fully the implications of the rules they follow—or the dangers in not following them. In other words, many values would not be needed if youngsters fully understood why they existed.

A trained cross-examiner could no doubt also bring out a student’s incomplete grasp of the underlying premises of mathemathics
and science, but no one would regard this as either a refutation of mathematics and science or as a reason why students should make up their own rules of arithmetic, or their own personal physics.

The superficial rationalism of telling school children that their parents are just “ordinary people with faults and weaknesses and insecurities and problems just like everyone else”
¹⁵³
misses the deeper and more relevant point that the relationship of a child to a parent is no ordinary relationship. It is the most extraordinary relationship anyone is likely to have with anyone else. Moreover, at the particular period of life when this statement is addressed to school children, the parents have vastly more experience than the child or the child’s peers—and a far deeper and more enduring stake in the child’s well being than any teacher, administrator, or “facilitator.”

Another common piece of superficial rationalism is to offer examples of alternative values in differing cultures as a reason to make values in general seem like arbitrary choices. This too ignores a deeper and weightier reality: All societies which have survived have had some particular set of values, some canons of right and wrong. To banish right and wrong is to attempt something which no society has achieved—survival without shared values. Different societies also have different ideas of what kinds of food to eat, but that does not mean that food is something arbitrary that we can do without.