AFT, NEA China Connection?

In the ongoing culture wars between the secular human-progressive-mommy state totalitarians and the economically and socially laissez-faire libertarians, totalitarians currently have the upper hand.

They control education; therefore, they control how language is taught to children.  In doing so, they determine what they think and believe.  This sets limits as to what they are able to think, say, and believe.  These emotional and cognitive blinders are useful tools that help them condition children to become self-censoring and subservient.  The only alternative that they find acceptable is to drug them into submission.

Free speech is an indispensable means of combating, confronting and challenging the totalitarian education collective's indoctrination machine.  We use words to express ideas or concepts.  Without the words, we cannot express our ideas; unable to articulate those concepts, we lose the ideas themselves.  Bowdlerizing speech sanitizes thought.  Words only mean what they mean when it is expedient to totalitarians.  Diane Ravitch refers to this as "cultural amnesia."   

At the heart of the conflict is their plan to eliminate all words and ideas that facilitate accurate comparison.  Part of the scheme to eliminate accurate comparison is to eliminate standards. Without a standard, or single, fixed point of reference, such comparison is impossible.  This helps their efforts to reward or discourage students based upon the extent to which those students are willing to embrace totalitarian groupthink.

Eliminating accurate comparison also prevents universal evaluation of conduct and performance.  Doing so helps to promote totalitarians' ethical and cultural relativism agenda.  If ethics can be understood as the science--emphasis on scientific method--of making moral choices, the purpose of the relativist agenda becomes clear.

Some tenets of ethical relativism are that all moral choices are equally valid, that they are purely subjective, that morals are only relevant when it is convenient, that situations, rather than principles, determine whether actions are moral, and that each individual choice is as valid as any other. 

Cultural relativism's dominant precepts are that all cultures' values, beliefs, and practices are equally valid and worthwhile, that all cultures have contributed equally to the human condition, and that behavior can only be evaluated from within the context of its cultural setting.  Totalitarians emulsified ethical and cultural relativism and devalued objectionable cultures and ethical systems to hide their intentions.  

Totalitarians' agenda has been effected through various means and by many different sources.  Outcome Based Education is one method of behavioral conditioning that they have used.  Under it, schoolchildren who object to particulars of the agenda or point out its flaws are ostracized and bullied with peer pressure until their voices are silenced.  In adolescent and young adult settings, the result of refusing to conform is that they are branded by their peers, teachers, instructors, and professors as people who have personal problems.

They are most often accused of exhibiting from some form of ism, ageism, racism, sexism, who-knows-what ism; nonetheless, the message is clear.  There is something wrong personally with non-conformers; these tactics resemble those used in Chairman Mao's reeducation camps.  An enlightening and informative reading list on these matters can be found here.

Author Ann Wilson points out that Outcome Based Education has been "packaged under other names, including Mastery Learning, Performance Based Education, Glasser's Reality Therapy, Management by Objectives, Planning Programming, Budgeting Systems (PPBS), Total Quality Management (TQM), Accelerated Schools, Effective Schools, Corner Schools, Johnson City Schools, Schools for the 21st Century, Sizers Coalition of Essential Schools, Professional Development Schools, Outcomes Driven Development Model (ODDM)," and many other euphemistic titles that obscure that they are only slight variants of OBE.

These agents of the state are hiding their intentions and actions; when government agents hide what they are doing, something is seriously amiss.

May your gods be with you.