Hypnenated Education

Borg is the finished product of American education.  Borg is the collective consciousness crowd of people who have unquestioningly adopted the prepackaged collection of values and beliefs given to them in progressive/postmodern government schools.  Only through free minds engaged in critical thinking can this oppressive, diversity-intolerant ideology be replaced with a more laissez faire, live-and-let-live approach to acquiring knowledge.

The extent to which we can free our minds from the political and philosophical influences conditioned into our subconscious selves by agents of the state in government-run schools is the approximate extent to which we can become critical thinkers.  Educational poseurs pay lip service to teaching critical thinking; however, this red herring merely directs attention away from their indoctrination of children through affective education. 

There is only one Education, and it has only one goal:  the freedom of the mind.  Anything that needs an adjective, be it civics education, or socialist education, or Christian education, or whatever-you-like education, is not education, and it has some different goal.  The very existence of modified "educations" is testimony to the fact that their proponents cannot bring about what they want in a mind that is free.  An "education" that cannot do its work in a free mind, and so must "teach" by homily and precept in the service of these feelings and attitudes and beliefs rather than those, is pure and unmistakable tyranny.  ~Richard Mitchell, The Underground Grammarian. 

Affective, or emotional, education is the antithesis of critical thinking because it forces its subjects to ratify beliefs emotionally rather than to evaluate them rationally.  To think critically is to require justification as a condition of accepting as valid any proclamation, value, belief, assertion, opinion, or policy issued from agents of the state, especially in schools.  The state exists to serve itself, and critical thinking allows one to recognize that people in government service serve those who govern, not the governed.  The state uses schools to indoctrinate, or socialize, people into accepting normative expectations devised by those in power. 

Beginning in grade K, the state assails children with Skinnerian Behavior Modification techniques, or operant conditioning.  This manipulates them into actively participating in their own indoctrination.  Educator/indoctrinators praise and reward children for embracing group thought and punish, reject, and ostracize those who think independently.  The status quo can only remain in power if the public lacks the cognitive resources needed to question the authority of the federal Education Department and its local agents to force children to accept state-mandated values and beliefs. 

To retain this power, education/indoctrination must be mandatory for everyone and begin while children are too young to think for themselves.  Benjamin Bloom, the grandfather of Outcome Based Education, a form of indoctrination through affective education, said that the purpose of education is to change the thoughts, feelings, and actions of students.  It is also the purpose of brainwashing.  Home schooling and independent schools are mortal enemies of thought and speech police run government schools.

Today, far too many parents are unable to think critically or to choose rationally; therefore, they blindly send their children into education’s self-perpetrating loop of ignorance and obedience.  To them, grades K-6 represent cost-free daycare; grades 7-12 warehouse the teenage children of uninvolved and uninterested parents.  This serves the needs of the state because a critical thinker will establish an arms-length adversarial relationship with the state, one in which the state must continually prove itself worthy to govern.  

This is the postmodern/progressive education state’s version of the road to serfdom.  We are poorly educated and rationally challenged wage slaves incapable of extricating ourselves from the mess that we have created because we are too ignorant to recognize our plight.  After all, B. F. Skinner observed that education is learning to express your ignorance in scientific terms.

May your gods be with you.

Brave New Nation

One hallmark of totalitarian government is that its proponents prefer totems—enforced demands that we engage in and perpetrate certain practices—to control populations while they relegate taboos to the role of mere boundary markers that define acceptable behavior.  Representatives from education and media, including the Internet, condition the governed to embrace Doublethink and to conform to Newspeak requirements until they are unable to object to government oppression, or even to recognize it.

Media esteem thoroughly indoctrinated people in high profile industries such as sports, government, movies, and television to help accomplish this sort of brainwashing, or social engineering.  Sociologists and psychologists recognize that, consciously or not, when searching for their mates, most women seek some sort of alpha male who will insure that future generations carry their genes.  This means that the people who control media and education get to choose and promote current and future leaders whose very lives further progressive propaganda.   

Mainstream media primarily cover events and release information that benefits themselves and the state, promotes the elite, and rewards them all financially.  This is how progressive supremacists use media and education to practice eugenics, or selective breeding.  Forced birth control is the ultimate way to eliminate competitors.  Adversaries whose equally viable philosophies and practices threaten the status quo are simply bred out of existence.

Progressive academics--the only sort allowed on campus--deny tenure to professors who have the temerity to oppose totalitarianism’s official party line.  High schools and colleges—player development facilities for the NBA and NFL—graduate semi-literate, overly exercised behemoths whose primary job skills are meeting goals through violence and intimidation.  Movies glorify the seamiest members of society and marginalize self-reliance, fairness, and accountability.  All of this contributes to totalitarians' affective education efforts.

To control education and media is to control and determine thought and speech.  Complicit sports and entertainment industries complement the totalitarian package and insure its future.  For years, progressives’ plans for education included compulsory yearlong school beginning at age three for all children.  The plan was to reduce parents to breeders and feeders and to let the state raise children.  They have moved on to controlling breeding as well.

May your gods be with you.

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.         

Education in America

It has not been just the laziness and ineptitude of far too many teachers that has caused education to fail in this country.  Greedy trial lawyers' use of frivolous lawsuits to establish demographic quotas for school suspensions has left educators with virtually no means to discipline unruly students. 

This is but one reason that we should support education vouchers for private schools.  It might be justified to respect, or at least take seriously, someone who shoves a gun into your face and robs you.  A person who pencil whips you deserves absolutely no respect.

On the topic of furtive and devious behavior, American universities are factories of progressive propaganda that champion the socialist, totalitarian, and fascist form of government that they have put into place.  These institutions foster the education colleges that produce classroom teachers who inculcate into unsuspecting children values, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors that are consistent with progressives' ideals.  They are responsible for giving students diplomas that they cannot read.

These videos are two good examples of the products of American education.

It is a dreadful mistake to allow these people to bargain collectively.  Government unions are antithetical to public interest.  The reason for collective bargaining is to gain leverage against employers.  First, they are not employees; they are overhead.  Second, the leverage is against us, the taxpayers.  Now in Florida, we have the recently outed Communist Charlie Christ who, in an act of political groveling, vetoed proposed legislation that would have eliminated tenure and established merit pay for teachers.

This article and its video version offer 10 suggestions that will greatly improve academic achievement in the US.  These recommendations, along with removing political indoctrination from the curriculum, would go a long way toward improving education.  By the way, we should also end the practice of paying tenured professors to conduct ersatz research in Provence for three months each summer while graduate teaching assistants substitute for them in their classrooms.

May your gods be with you.