Who Controls the Children (Schools Deliberately Dumb Down Children)

This is an old video that synchronuosly crossed my path right after a discussion about the dumbing down of American education. I went to high school in Pennsylvania, and this videotaped meeting from 1992 may explain some of the reasons that I feel so grateful to have benefited from an elementary, middle school and high school education that emphasized individuality, critical thinking, soul-based decisions about right or wrong, intuitive and intellectual gifts, and actual instruction about how propaganda works and how to see through it. I’ve always realized that I had an unusual education, and I did watch my siblings’ curricula gradually get watered down as the years went by. Still, when I look at some of the (now retired) teachers that my siblings and I had, in contrast to the standardized test happy current education system I hear about from clients, I feel a mixture of gratitude and, “Wow! What are we going to do about it?”

I had heard that decades ago, the CIA hijacked the US education system with specific goals to dumb down the population and create workers smart enough to perform basic tasks but too dumb to question authority. It sounds like conspiracy, and yet, when I talk with teachers, retired teachers, parents and students and then look at course topics and required reading, it’s clear that something drastic has happened to our education system. Critical thinking certainly seems to get a lot of children into trouble these days! Until watching this video, I had been contrasting this with my own education, thinking things really ramped up after I graduated high school in 1991. The controls and standardized tests are in place now, for sure; however, this video made me aware of how long this battle had already raged before I became aware of it. I thank all the concerned parents in Pennsylvania who did what they could to stand up to the State. Perhaps their vigilance accounts for why so many of my teachers managed to buck the system for as long as they did.

According to this videotaped informational meeting, based on actual documentation, here’s what American schools were really testing, even as far back as the 60’s:

“Locus of control: are you internally or externally motivated? Will you go with the crowd or think for yourself?” “The correct answer is go with the flow.” In Citizenship, the EQA admits that it did not test anything in the factual domain [such as what is the UN, or what’s the history of your country]. Citizenship tested ‘threshold of behavior. How do I vary reward and punishment in order to get you to do what I want you to do?’ … [The State-desired response was], “Avoid punishment, but go with the group. … The goal was Collectivism.” “The State-desired response was ‘rapid adjustment to change without protest.’ That was the State desired response.” The EQA, which I remember taking as a student, measured attitudes and then rewarded or punished school systems based on how compliant their students were to the State-desired responses. “The tests didn’t just discover the students’ attitudes, but scored the responses. There is a right answer and a wrong answer and I say what it is.”

Education funding favored those school systems who created the most compliant students and deprived and ostracized those school systems in which students failed to demonstrate a “minimum positive attitude” — i.e. evaluating situations and choosing behaviors based on more than peer pressure or authority’s ability to intimidate and punish. Curricula needed to be changed in order to enhance “positive attitude.”

This video is about children’s education, but it asks important questions about how we each make our own decisions, and under what circumstances we might be willing to stand strong in the face of tyranny or abuse. As products of some sort of educational/propaganda program, we each have varying degrees of “automatic filters” imparted not for our own benefit, but rather for the State’s survival. In a world of Patriot and Ex-Patriot Acts, corporate fascism, anonymous drone murders, kill lists and dehumanization, these questions have become uncomfortably less theoretical.

I found this video fascinating, so I’m sharing it here. Perhaps it will start some parent-child or parent-teacher discussions. I know in Seattle, many teachers have already banded together to boycott administrating the MAPS standardized test. I see signs of life in the rising interest in homeschooling as well as Waldorf and Montessori schools. I do hope something shifts in public education, since that’s what most people get. For now, we have a free(ish) internet, but people still need to know what to search. This video shares how parents have stood up in the past. Perhaps we will see a return of self-respect and the recognition that the government rules by the consent of the governed. This woman’s got a lot of good ideas, energy, information and questions. As the YouTube channel says:

“PLEASE forgive the quality… THIS IS WORTH WATCHING.

“Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt was Former Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) in the US Department of Education under President Reagan. Due to her unique perspective she was able to observe firsthand the methods the Federal Government used to deliberately dumb down the American public education system with Soviet style “brainwashing”.

“Disgusted with the American Government’s policy to use a behavior modification system designed to churn out unthinking, uncritical “citizens of the world” trained to accept socialism, Charlotte set out to wake up her fellow Americans.

“This documentary is a MUST WATCH for any home-schooler, teacher, parent or anyone interested in methods of education or anyone wondering why we as a people seem to grow less intelligent and less able with each passing generation.”

From what I can tell at the end credits, the speaker is Mrs. Peg Liksick:

Wife and Mother
Panelist in White House briefings 1984-85
Gubernatorial candidate
Founder and CEO of Mom’s House International