Inside American Education (6 page)

Non-Academic Orientations

The academic deficiencies of American teachers and administrators, and the institutional insulation of incompetence, are only part of the story. Such factors might go far toward explaining the academic shortcomings of American schools, but there is an equally pervasive phenomenon in American education—an ever-growing intrusion of
non-academic
materials, courses, and programs into schools across the country. These
non-academic intrusions include everything from political ideologies to psychological-conditioning programs, and their sponsors range from ordinary commercial interests (such as automobile manufacturers pushing driver education) to zealots for a vast array of “causes.”

That outside interests should see 40 million school children as a captive audience to be exploited is not so difficult to comprehend as the fact that educators themselves are not merely acquiescent, but are often enthusiastic apostles of these innumerable non-academic courses and programs. Throughout most of the twentieth century, public school educators have pressed—usually successfully—for the inclusion of ever more non-academic materials in the curriculum, while the counterpressure for more academic rigor, “back to basics,” and the like, has come primarily from laymen.
³⁸
As laymen have urged more emphasis on teaching mathematics, science, languages, and other traditional academic subjects, educators have promoted such personal concerns as nutrition, hygiene, and “life adjustment” in an earlier period, or sex education and death education more recently, along with such social crusades as environmentalism and the anti-nuclear movement, or such exotic topics as the occult. While the particular subjects that are fashionable change over time, what has been enduring is the non-academic thrust of the professional educators. As far back as 1928, John Dewey lamented the anti-intellectual tendencies of so-called “progressive education,”
³⁹
though many educators had used his theories as a justification for abandoning or deemphasizing traditional disciplines.

Strange as it may seem that people hired to teach academic subjects should be straining to do something else instead—for decades and even generations—this is far less strange in light of the academic backgrounds of the people who constitute the teaching and administrative staffs of the American educational system. It is not simply that they are academically deficient. They are not
academically oriented
. Nor is it reasonable to expect them to have a dedication to academic work, which brought them so little success when they were students in high school or college.

In addition to particular outside interest groups pushing to get their own interests and views represented in the school curriculum, there have been general theorists providing rationales
for abandoning traditional academic education in favor of a wide variety of psycho-therapeutic activities known collectively as “affective education,” designed to re-mold the emotions and values of students. Whether called by general names like “values clarification” or by more specific titles like “death education,” “sex education,” or “drug prevention,” these psycho-therapeutic activities have flourished in the public schools—without any evidence of their effectiveness for their avowed purposes, and even despite accumulating evidence of their counterproductive effects (as will be seen in subsequent chapters). The theorists or gurus behind these ideas and movements have been very influential with educators highly susceptible to non-academic fashions and dogmas. The net result has been a deflection of public schools’ efforts, interests, time, and resources from academic objectives toward what can only be called classroom brainwashing.

CHAPTER 3
Classroom Brainwashing

Manyparents wonder why they lose their children to a whole new value system.

—DONNA MULDREW, parent and educator
¹

A
VARIETY
of courses and programs, under an even wider variety of names, have been set up in schools across the country to change the values, behavior, and beliefs of American youngsters from what they have been taught by their families, their churches, or the social groups in which they have grown up. These ambitious attempts to re-shape the attitudes and consciousness of a generation are as pervasive as they are little known, partly because they have kept a low profile, but more often because they are called by other, high-sounding names—“values clarification,” “decision-making,” “affective education,” “Quest,” “drug prevention,” “sex education,” “gifted and talented” programs, and many other imaginative titles. The particular door through which such programs enter the school curriculum is far less important than what they do after they have gained entrance.

Drug prevention and sex education might seem to be very different activities, and a program for gifted and talented students still more different from both of these. But that is true only where these programs are legitimately confined to what they claim to be. Far too often, however, these words are mere
flags of convenience under which schools set sail on an uncharted sea of social experimentation in the re-shaping of young people’s emotions and attitudes. People who have looked beyond the labels to the concrete specifics have often discovered that the ostensible subject of special curriculum programs—drug education, sex education, etc.—occupies a minor part of the textbooks or class time, while psychology and values are a major preoccupation.

So-called “sex education” courses and textbooks, for example, seldom involve a mere conveying of biological or medical information. Far more often, the primary thrust is toward a
re-shaping of attitudes
, not only toward sex but also toward parents, toward society, and toward life. The same pattern is found in many other programs claiming to be about drug prevention, smoking prevention, or many other worthy purposes. Typical of this pattern was a so-called “drug prevention” program in New Hampshire, which a parent found to be about one-fourth “informational” while “the other three-quarters deal with values, attitudes, etc.”
²
The same could be said of the widely used sex education textbook,
Changing Bodies, Changing Lives
. Similarly, in a widely distributed book used in school anti-smoking campaigns, “smoking goes unmentioned” except for inclusion in a list of “many new decisions” teenagers will face.
³
A North Carolina teacher, testifying before the U.S. Department of Education, pointed out that a federally funded “drug education” curriculum “does not emphasize any information or facts about drugs, per se.” Instead she found:

This curriculum is 152 pages long, and yet only four pages make any mention of drugs, either directly or indirectly. The program is divided into three phases. The first phase is selfawareness followed by a series of exercises that permit students to gain “a wider understanding and appreciation of their values as autonomous individuals.”
⁴

If these programs are often not what they claim to be, then what are they?

They are attempts to re-shape values, attitudes, and beliefs to fit a very different vision of the world from what children have received from their parents and the social environment in which they are raised. Instead of educating the intellect, these special curriculum programs condition the emotions.
This is sometimes called “affective education,” as distinguished from intellectual education. It can also be called brainwashing.

BRAINWASHING METHODS

A variety of programs used in classrooms across the country not only share the general goals of brainwashing—that is, changing fundamental attitudes, values, and belief by psychological-conditioning methods—but also use classic brainwashing techniques developed in totalitarian countries:

1. Emotional stress, shock, or de-sensitization
   , to break down both intellectual and emotional resistance
   
2. Isolation
   , whether physical or emotional, from familiar sources of emotional support in resistance
   
3. Cross-examining pre-existing values
   , often by manipulating peer pressure
   
4. Stripping the individual of normal defenses
   , such as reserve, dignity, a sense of privacy, or the ability to decline to participate
   
5. Rewarding
   acceptance of the new attitudes, values, and beliefs—a reward which can be simply release from the pressures inflicted on those who resist, or may take other symbolic or tangible form
   

Stress and De-sensitization

There are all too many examples illustrating the use of these methods in psychological-conditioning programs in the public schools. For example, viewers of the ABC network television program “20/20” on September 21, 1990, may have been surprised—or upset—when they saw school children being taken to a morgue and being encouraged to touch the corpses, as part of “death education.” Some viewers may have thought this exercise pointless as well as tasteless, and an imposition on the children. That may all be true, when looking at this as an
educational
activity, in the sense of something intended to convey information and develop the student’s ability to analyze
logically and weigh evidence. But this exercise was by no means pointless as part of a psychological-conditioning program. On the contrary, it was an example of the first step in brainwashing—stress and de-sensitization.

Some children undoubtedly found the experience stressful, some perhaps shocking, and more generally it served to desensitize normal inhibitions. An historical study of brainwashing techniques in various countries and in various periods of history found “emotional disruption” to be “essential” to the process.
⁵
The trip to the morgue was not a pointless exercise, from this perspective. Public schools do not have the degree of control maintained by totalitarian governments, but the targets of their brainwashing are younger and more vulnerable to milder versions of the same brainwashing techniques used under Stalin or Mao.

De-sensitizing experiences have been common in “death education” programs, as well as in many other kinds of psychological-conditioning programs. For example, assignments for students receiving “death education” have including writing their own epitaphs,
⁶
writing a suicide note,
⁷
discussing deaths which have occurred in their families
⁸
and—for first graders—making a model of a coffin for themselves out of a shoe box.
⁹

Among the associated psycho-dramas in some schools are (1) having the children imagine that they are the children in the school bus that was buried underground in the infamous Chowchilla kidnapping case,
¹⁰
and (2) discussing lifeboat dilemmas in which there are more people than the boat can hold, so that a decision must be made as to who is to be left to drown.
¹¹
Sometimes it is a fall-out shelter with limited capacity, so that some must be left outside to die of radiation poisoning after a nuclear attack.
¹²
Sometimes these dilemmas as to whose life is more important to be saved are extended to the point of asking the child to decide which members of his own family should be sacrificed in life-and-death situations.
¹³

Because these are psychological experiences, stage-managing can be important. One handbook for teachers contained the instruction, “dim the lights,” followed by: “Tell the students to pretend they are now dead.” Later, the teacher is to arrange “a field trip to a local funeral home,” “have each student briefly write what kind of funeral he wants for himself”
and “write in ten words or less the epitaph he wishes to be remembered by.”
¹⁴
Another book which prescribes a funeral home visit has more specific instructions for the students, including the following:

Gothrough all the procedures to pre-arrange your own funeral.

Select a casket as well as vault that meets your particular desires as well as financial needs.

Among the questions to be asked the students are:

“How will you die?”

“When will you die?”

“Have you ever known anyone who died violently?”

“When was the last time you mourned? Was it expressed in tears or silent pain? Did you mourn alone or with someone else?”

“Do you believe in an after-life?”
¹⁵

Another book outlines a series of “death education” class sessions, including funeral music, a filmstrip of funeral customs around the world, and many personal questions about the student’s own emotional responses to death. Outside assignments include visits to a funeral home and a cemetery, with a list of data to be collected from tombstones.
¹⁶
This and other “death education” programs clearly envision many class sessions being devoted to the subject, for a period of weeks. This would be hard to explain or justify on purely educational grounds. But, if the purpose is to replace a whole set of attitudes with new attitudes preferred by those who design and administer such programs, then the time allotted is in keeping with the magnitude of what is being attempted.

Sex education of course is a very different subject—but the same pattern of de-sensitizing has been central. A parent who visited a fifth-grade classroom in Oregon testified at U.S. Department of Education hearings as to what she saw:

I was present when a plastic model of female genitalia with a tampon insert was passed around to the boys so they might understand how tampons fit.
¹⁷