by Jim Marrs
According to Beverly Eakman, a former educator, government speech-writer, and author of Walking Targets: How Our Psychologized Classrooms Are Producing a Nation of Sitting Ducks, foundation-subsidized educators like G. Stanley Hall, Abraham Flexner, John Gardiner, Theodore Sizer, Ronald Havelock, John Goodlad, Benjamin Bloom, and Ralph Tyler brought to the classroom the psychology principles of the World Federation of Mental Health: “For openers, they worked to ensure that school curriculum and testing ditched the traditional focus on excellence and academics to concentrate on a subjective socialization (i.e., socialist) agenda that targeted the child’s ‘belief system.’ To illustrate the radical nature of this step, one need only quote from the ‘father of modern education,’ John Dewey. In his acclaimed book School and Society he wrote: ‘There is no obvious social motive for the acquiring of learning [and]…no clear social gain at success thereat.’ Fast-forward to 1981 and to the ‘father of outcome-based education,’ Benjamin Bloom. In All Our Children Learning, Bloom averred that ‘the purpose of education is to change the thoughts, feelings and actions of students…by [challenging] the student’s fixed beliefs.’”
Eakman pointed to one example of how perceptions can be changed. “…[R]ugged individualism is an expression nobody hears much anymore, but folks used to hear with regularity,” she noted. “Rugged individualism encompassed a range of characteristics—independence, self-sufficiency, thinking for oneself. In the 1970s, the axe was laid to all three. Negative terminologies like ‘loner’ and ‘misfit’ redefined the individualist. ‘Independence’ was scrapped for interdependency, self-sufficiency for redistribution, and ‘thinking for oneself’ was equated with intolerance. Today, any close reading of the newspaper reminds us daily that the ‘loner’ requires psychiatric intervention, and maybe drugs as well….
“By 1989, the much-ballyhooed ‘paradigm shift,’ as it was dubbed by behaviorist educrats, occurred in American schools, and the free world was hurled into ‘free fall’: clandestine censorship counselors in university dorms, encounter-style techniques masquerading as ‘class discussions’ in high schools, massive invasions of privacy under the cover of ‘academic testing,’ ‘value-neutral’ courses in ethics, and world history that bestowed upon even the most heinous regimes the moral equivalence of Jeffersonian democracy. Little wonder that by the 1990s battalions of psychiatrists were being dispatched to every school district to help contain the new brand of war games: a tsunami of school shootings and mass murders perpetrated by kids raised on a diet of behavior modification and psychiatric drugs.”
The changing of a student’s beliefs, or “behavior modification,” is a technique long studied by the CIA and other agencies seeking methods of mind control. It should be obvious that to modify anyone’s behavior, first one must find out what people—preferably children—are thinking and then set about changing any “offending” attitudes.
It has been well documented in a number of books and articles that the U.S. intelligence community has heavily influenced the American education system to propagate its views and philosophies. David N. Gibbs, an associate professor of political science at the University of Arizona, believes that influence is always supported by the distribution of money. He wrote, “While pundits never tire of the cliché that American universities are dominated by leftist faculty, who are hostile toward the objectives of established foreign policies, the reality is altogether different: The CIA has become ‘a growing force on campus,’ according to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal. The ‘Agency finds it needs experts from academia, and colleges pressed for cash like the revenue.’ Longstanding academic inhibitions about being publicly associated with the CIA have largely disappeared: In 2002, former CIA Director Robert Gates became president of Texas A & M University, while the new president of Arizona State University, Michael Crow, was vice-chairman of the Agency’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel Inc…. The CIA has created a special scholarship program, for graduate students able and willing to obtain security clearances. According to the London Guardian, ‘the primary purpose of the program is to promote disciplines that would be of use to intelligence agencies.’ And throughout the country, academics in several disciplines are undertaking research (often secret) for the CIA.”
The Constitution never states that the federal government should control education. Education should never be the responsibility of the federal government but that of parents and local educators. Many people see government as a means to control education by selecting what to teach and what alternative theories to suppress. Many parents fear brainwashing in public or private schools. They look to schools to teach their children to be open-minded, to be able to read and write, and to fully understand the Constitution.
Yet schools have often fallen short of what parents want and, rather, have seemed to embrace what John D. Rockefeller Sr. wanted; he is often quoted as saying, “I don’t want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers.” A 2006 report by the Federation of American Scientists seemed to echo Rockefeller’s request for workers over thinkers by arguing for increased use of video games in the classroom. The report stated, “Workforce globalization is rapidly expanding…. The United States cannot compete in this highly-connected system of global commerce on the basis of low wages, commodity products and standardized services. It must compete by taking the lead in the next generation of knowledge creation, technologies, products and services, business models, and dynamic management systems…. When individuals play modern video and computer games, they experience environments in which they often must master the kinds of higher-order thinking and decision-making skills employers seek today.” Others, such as author Beverly Eakman, contest the idea that such games can truly prepare young persons for the workplace.
Given the men behind America’s education history and the mind-numbing curriculum they produced that is now used by teachers, it becomes understandable why our entire educational system merely churns out young people prepared for either wage slavery or to become teachers.
The late author and media critic Neil Postman wrote, “In order to understand what kind of behaviors classrooms promote, one must become accustomed to observing what, in fact, students actually do in them. What students do in a classroom is what they learn (as [John] Dewey would say), and what they learn to do is the classroom’s message (as [media commentator Marshall] McLuhan would say). Now, what is it that students do in the classroom? Well, mostly they sit and listen to the teacher. Mostly, they are required to believe in authorities, or at least pretend to such belief when they take tests. Mostly they are required to remember [original emphasis]. They are almost never required to make observations, formulate definitions, or perform any intellectual operations that go beyond repeating what someone else says is true. They are rarely encouraged to ask substantive questions, although they are permitted to ask about administrative and technical details. (How long should the paper be? Does spelling count? When is the assignment due?) It is practically unheard of for students to play any role in determining what problems are worth studying or what procedures of inquiry ought to be used. Examine the types of questions teachers ask in classrooms, and you will find that most of them are what might technically be called ‘convergent questions,’ but what might more simply be called ‘Guess what I am thinking’ questions.”
Postman and his coauthor Charles Weingartner concluded in their book Teaching as a Subversive Activity that contemporary curriculums are designed as a distraction to prevent students from knowing themselves and the world about them.
And the deficiencies of a weakened education system are passed along to future teachers. “It starts almost immediately,” noted the two authors, “because the [teachers] have been victims—in this case for almost 16 years—of the kind of schooling we have described…as producing intellectual paraplegics. The college students [future teachers] we are now talking about are the ones who were most ‘successful’ in conventional school terms. That is, they are the ones who learn
ed best what they were required to do: to sit quietly, to accept without question whatever nonsense was inflicted on them, to ventriloquize on demand with a high degree of fidelity, to go down only on the down staircase, to speak only on signal from the teacher and so on. All during these 16 years, they learned not to think, not to ask questions, not to figure things out for themselves. They learned to become totally dependent on teacher authority, and they learned it with dedication.”
TWIXTERS
BUT IS TIME CONSUMED with DVD movies and video games or merely regurgitating facts back to a teacher truly preparing youth for gainful employment? Not if you pay attention to those who are called “Twixters,” a new word for single, middle-class twenty-to-thirty-plus somethings who work in low-paying jobs (usually service), engage in serial dating, maintain old school friendships, and generally live with their parents or room with other Twixters.
Bob Schoeni, a professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan, has reported that the percentage of twenty-six-year-olds living with their parents has nearly doubled from 11 percent to 20 percent since 1970. According to Schoeni, youngsters between the ages twenty-five and twenty-six garner an average of $2,323 a year in financial support from their parents.
Laziness and a lack of initiative cannot be totally blamed for this phenomenon. Around 1980, most financial aid for college came in the form of grants. Today, lending is the common way to gain money for education. According to a study reported in 2005 by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, college graduates in 2005 owed 85 percent more in student loans than in the 1990s. A Time magazine poll showed 66 percent of student respondents owed more than $10,000 upon graduation and 5 percent owed a crippling $100,000 or more.
Such numbers fail to reflect burgeoning debt for students who abuse the credit cards often sent unsolicited by the giant credit companies. According to the public policy group Demos, credit-card debt for Americans aged eighteen to twenty-four more than doubled from 1992 to 2001. With such a debt load hanging over them, it is small wonder that young people, including the Twixters, can’t seem to gain the financial independence to move out of their parents’ house. Given the rise of Twixterization of the nation’s young adults, the widespread use of video games, computer networking sites (Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, etc.), and the popular mass media, there seems to be too much competing for the attention of today’s student. Add this to an overburdened and inadequate educational system and you have a recipe for intellectual disaster.
The consensus of thoughtful experts is that a dumbed-down education system produces dumbed-down teachers who produce dumbed-down students. The result is a dumbed-down population, the exact situation desired by old man Rockefeller and the elite globalists. The correlation is uncanny. It begs the question: Is this sheer happenstance or a conscious agenda?
PART III
HOW TO CONTROL ZOMBIES
The only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over the government.
—FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT
ONCE A NATION of zombies has been created, the population must be kept docile and under control. This can be done through legislation and regulations, increasing police powers, and drugging the food and water supplies. But many commentators have written about how so many Americans become zombielike while sitting mesmerized before their TVs for more than eight hours a day. Between September 2007 and September 2008, the average household watched TV for more than 8 hours a day, a record high since the 1950s when TV viewer polls first began. In the third quarter of 2008, Americans watched more than 142 hours of TV a month, up 5 hours from the same period in 2007.
What is most essential to control is that the zombies are unaware they are being controlled. This, of course, would require controlling the mass media. Could this be happening in the United States, home of the First Amendment, and with a proud heritage of a free press?
MEDIA CONTROL AND FEARMONGERING
THE INTERNET HAS DONE a marvelous job of bringing alternative news and information to the people, but it has only done that for those who own and can use a computer. Everyone else is at the mercy of the corporate-controlled mass media, whether it be broadcast, cable, or satellite. America’s mass media is currently in the hands of only five major multinational corporations: AOL-Time Warner, the Walt Disney Company, Viacom, Vivendi Universal, and News Corporation.
Media mogul Ted Turner once observed, “The media is too concentrated, too few people own too much. There’s really five companies that control 90 percent of what we read, see and hear. It’s not healthy.” Not to mention Bertlesmann AG, which has become the largest English-language print publisher in the world and has roots in Nazi Germany.
The face of the media has changed considerably since 1975, when cable TV served less than 15 percent of the viewing population and satellite TV and the Internet did not even exist as we know them today. More than thirty years later, less than 15 percent of American homes don’t have either satellite or cable TV, and one-third of the population receives its news through the Internet.
GOVERNMENT-DICTATED NEWS
FAR TOO OFTEN THE relationship between the government and the media corporations shapes what the news covers. “As technology blurs the distinction between print and electronics, the success of media businesses depends increasingly on the decisions of government, embodied in regulations, legislation, and judicial rulings,” explained Leo Bogart (who died in 2005), a former Media Studies Fellow and general manager of the Newspaper Advertising Bureau. “This must make the people who run them more sensitive to the political effects of their news coverage. As political advertising has become a considerable component of television revenues, politicians have found it increasingly necessary and expedient to court the media, creating a new source of pressure on journalists.”
Media reformist Robert McChesney agreed with Bogart, writing, “Professional journalism is now about currying close relations to the powerful so you have access to their news. When the powerful are entirely in agreement on an issue, for example, whether or not the U.S. has the right to invade another country (taken as a given by many people in power), the journalists don’t ask questions. They reproduce the elite consensus, take it as a given. In fact, if a journalist were to question the right of the U.S. to invade a country, they would be regarded by the professional news community as un-professional. They would be seen as someone who was bringing their ideological agenda or axe to grind to the discussion. When a journalist dares to question the motives of those in power, they are framed as bringing their own personal political bias into news reporting. But when a journalist just reports and repeats what people in power say and doesn’t try to weigh in with critical observations, they are regarded as professional, ‘fair and balanced.’”
Editors, particularly those in publicly held corporations whose executives are cautious about reactions on Wall Street, do not have to be ordered to kill stories or slant the coverage. They intuitively understand the views and interests of their bosses and act accordingly. This capacity to anticipate the owners’ desires is why they are made editors.
FEARMONGERING
WITH THEIR MASTERS CRACKING the whip, the “watchdog” media have turned into lapdogs for their corporate (and political) owners, which in turn has allowed the government to manipulate the public through national fearmongering.
One of the best examples of fearmongering came in early 2006, when President Bush—under fire for the unresolved wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the torture of terrorist suspects, and unconstitutional spying on Americans—declared: “We cannot let the fact that America hasn’t been attacked in four and a half years since September 11 lull us into the illusion that the threats to our nation have disappeared.”
Bush then went on to describe a thwarted terrorist attack on Los Angeles in 2002, revealing that the attack in California was plann
ed by a man named Hambali, reportedly a key lieutenant of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Both Hambali and Mohammed were reportedly captured in 2003.
According to Bush, al Qaeda leaders Hambali and Mohammed recruited Asian men who were supposed to use shoe bombs to blow open the cockpit door of a commercial airliner and then crash the plane into the U.S. Bank Tower in Los Angeles. Bush mistakenly referred to this building as “Liberty Tower,” but was quickly corrected that its original name had been “Library Tower.” Bush said the plot was foiled when a key Asian al Qaeda member was arrested. Bush declined to name the suspect or his nationality.