Part I covered the center point of Iserbyt’s book (Skinnerian, Behaviorist education- education which is actually intended to program people, producing reactions rather than inculcating decision-making). Part II covered several of the subsidiary points of the work,¹ including US entanglement with Communist regimes, the use of technology, and two methods by which America’s school system was brought to heel. Today, we’ll start with the double-pointed final prong of that advance: Measurement  and R&D.

Note, of course, that a fundamental problem here is the connection between government and education. But more on that later….

Measurement/ R&D

“Work on this paper was supported by the National Institute of Education, Department of Education, under Contract No. 400–83–003. The contents do not necessarily reflect the view or policies of the Department of Education or the National Institute of Education” (Iserbyt A-159² quoting Brian Rowan). Such is the comforting context for a paper on how ‘shamanism’ and ‘premodern magic’ could be incorporated into Effective Schools,³ a paper which presents the following intriguing admonition to us: “Thus, the art of measurement can be used as an aid to shamanism…. Student variability in performance can be reduced, and relative performance increased, not by changing instructional objectives or practices, but simply by changing tests and testing procedures” (201, A-165).

Dr. Roche, quoted on page 363, provides another introduction: “’SAT Scores Rise Strongly after Test Is Overhauled’ read [sic] a Wall Street Journal headline. The continuation of the article carried the title ‘SAT Scores Post Strong Increase.’ Good news?” To answer his question as he did: no. Not good news. See, the reason test scores rose lay entirely in that overhaul: the test was dumbed down.

The use of changing a test is simple: by changing the test, I change the metric. So long as I present the test as equivalent to its past iterations, therefore, I can decide what the apparent results of the program will be simply by giving a much easier test to the new system. My Effective School, equipped with Mastery Learning and OBE, will turn out to have drastically higher test scores than its predecessor. I won’t mention that the two tests we’re comparing are very different; the first test was much harder than the second, and I specifically trained students to the second, neglecting the rest of their education, as is the modus operandi of ML (G-13⁴). In at least one instance, actually, a test was revised from year-to-year in order to raise the success rate from abysmal to tolerable, though I cannot find the note I made of its citation.

Tangential to this, the Federal Department of Education proposed in 1992 to establish a system whereby the government schools graded children on “Responsibility…. Self-Esteem…. Sociability…. Self-Management…. [and] Integrity” (Iserbyt 267). Lest you think this some benign effort, the purpose of this SCANS report was to be an assessment following and determining the life of the student: (quoting from the proposal) “Because this information would be extremely useful to employers in making hiring decisions and to colleges in evaluating applications, students would have a strong motivation to learn the SCANS foundation skills and workplace competencies, and employers and colleges would have a strong incentive to require them” (267). Ohio would in the next decade implement something of the sort (267). Whether the government should be reporting on your children’s character or yours in order to define how your (potential) employer sees you, I’ll let you consider.

Another fact is crucial to maintaining a stranglehold on the testing and thus on the metrics by which the wider populace determines how well their schools are doing (albeit only until they begin to feel the effects of said schools, several years later and possibly only after decades or in looking back). What is it? The fact of who funds and does the research. The R&D of education produces the ‘science’ of education and the ‘experts,’ granting it the ostensible authority to shape how tests are made, as well as the apparent ability to best determine what will produce good results in the first place.

Who funds R&D? The federal government, to the tune of 90% of the total (169, 205).

Who does the R&D? NGOs, liberals, and Behaviorists (just look at the NCEE or read the book. It’s littered with examples- try skimming Shirley McCune’s contributions). Part of this flows from the fact that making education a ‘science’ is a liberal, scientistic idea, one naturally Behaviorist (because Behaviorism reduces people to mechanism, science’s subject of study) and naturally elitist (because you have to have an Education in the liberal-aligned college system to be a scientist, and you need to align with the elite orthodoxy in at least your basic outlook in order to be funded and promoted).

This section could be much longer, if I had the space or the time, if my notes were a little better optimized for the topic. As it is, know that I’ve only scratched the surface; I’ve left out at least one remarkably shocking quote simply because I can’t find it at the moment. Read the book, if you have any interest or stake in American education.

The Competition

Public school has one competitor that really matters. It’s not private school. Private schools have proven remarkably weak to funding, and their claim on the kid is tenuous at best, being non-original. Moreover, private schools just don’t have the coercive claim that government schools have. They can’t wield the sword to decide where kids will end up. The public schools (and the private schools which have the same character) have therefore one arch-enemy, one competitor, one foe towards whom their enmity must naturally be inveterate: the kids’ parents.

Iserbyt records several facets of this enmity. Among the most shocking is the several efforts made by schools to establish their own dominance over the parents directly, to teach the parents. Missouri, starting in 1981, ran a “Parents as Teachers” program (301), a prime example of how program names rarely mean what they seem to mean. See, the PAT program was labeled as parents teaching, and they did that. The program’s name omits to mention that parents were being trained to teach according to the school’s standards; the parents were not allowed to control what ‘they’ taught their children. Parents, in this program, were to be the puppets, the conduits, the instruments of the school.

The program became mandatory for Missouri schools in 1985. The center point of the program is “assigning to all parents and children a ‘certified parent educator’” (301). The role of this ‘certified parent educator’ was, in sum, to control the parent-child relationship as an agent of the state. Each child was given a government file, labeled as being more-or-less at risk. No child, of course, was entirely outside of risk (301); government never passes up the chance for an emergency, for “Necessity, the tyrant’s plea, excus’d his dev’lish deeds” (Milton⁵). The rest of the program I’ll leave to Iserbyt’s quote:

“The state agent conducts periodic home and school visits to check on the child and the family, dispensing gratis such things as nutritional counseling, mental health services, and even food. Schools under the PAT program provide free day and overnight care. The “certified parent” might forbid the biological parents to spank their child, and might prescribe, if the child is deemed “unhappy,” psychological counseling or a drug such as Ritalin. If the parents refuse the recommended services or drugs, the state may remove the child from the home, place him in a residential treatment center, and force the parents to enroll in family counseling for an indefinite period” (301).

A few years later, in Santa Ana, CA, 1999, federal funding was injected into the school system with a remarkable mandate: a “parent education program” (433). According to a local supterintendent, “300–400 parents at a time are going through these…. All parents are required to sign a Parent Compact, agreeing to do certain things at home, “provide a study space, put the kids to bed on time, read with them,” etc. So, parents are trained, then have to sign an agreement” (433). The schools aren’t content with having control over the parents, though; they are sure to reinforce the parent’s lack of control over their own kids by making the parents accountable to their own children via a “parent report card,” albeit that was renamed after some objections (433). The kids would by these methods be made aware of their parent’s school-administered grades- grades measuring how thoroughly the parents aided the school (433). This, for 1.1M dollars of federal money.

And don’t worry: the schools kept the parents accountable, made sure the parents were properly aligned to the schools’ mandate to raise the nation’s kids: “So, if a parent was deemed to be neglectful (failed on their report card, was what I figured), they would have to go through the SARB (Student Attendance Review Board) and have a meeting at the police department with someone from the District Attorney, Child Protection Service, Social Services, School Counselors, etc. Here they would be given their court-ordered program to improve their parenting” (433).

Modern society is quite advanced indeed. We kidnap kids without bothering to remove the parents; we have the government run kids’ lives as thoroughly as any slaveowner ever ran the lives of his slaves’ children, all under the cover of law. Sometimes it gets more blatant, as recommended in certain prominent Total Quality resources: “Consider too the “parent as vendor” of a precious resource, the child. In the internal customer concept, the parent is serving the teacher. Teachers could identify reasonable specifications for parents relative to the home learning environment and certify parents who will cooperate” (305). Parents, do you feel like selling your kid to the schools, advertising how good you are at producing the raw material for the school to shape? Kids, do you want your parents to ‘sell’ you?

Well, don’t worry. As one assistant principal opined at a conference on model schools, “One way to make sure that parents attend conferences at school and support the educational process for their children would be to dock a certain part of their tax deduction for their children” (305-6). You really oughtn’t to have a choice.

The essence of this credo has already been put in place openly: in China. In 1994, at a model school conference in the US, the “founder and chairwoman of China International Intellectual Resources Development Center for Children,” an organization with “branches in the United States, Germany, and other countries to facilitate the immersion of its Chinese students into the culture [and] language of other countries” (334), Su Lin by name, presented the Chinese vision of the parent-school relationship, premising that “Sincere love of children is the principle upon which CICC is constructed…” (335).

Su Lin stated in part: “I am strongly against parents or teachers who impose their own views and demands on the children. Education is a noble job that calls for devotion and dedication with no reservation. Chances and conditions for education should be equal for every child…” (335). These three sentences seem remarkably disjointed, at first glance. The first is clear; the Chinese government’s view of education is that the government, not the parents or even the individual teachers, should decide what the parents learn.⁶ The condemnation of parents who pass on values to their children is a corollary of that perversion. The second and third sentences seem a complete tangent, at least until we view them as an explanation. If we understand them as explaining the government’s position, they allege two reasons for preferring the school’s prescribed orthodoxy to the parents or even individual teachers:⁷ first, that the parents cannot be truly wholehearted in pursuing the education’s goal, while the state can; second, that different parents are differently equipped or motivated to be teachers, preventing perfect equality of outcome in the children.

The sharp eye may pick out and question to what end the “devotion and dedication” Su Lin extols is meant to be directed. Is it to be directed towards the child’s good? In light of the Chinese government’s tendencies and those of liberal governments⁸ in general, the questioner may be justified in suspecting that this “devotion and dedication” is to be directed to the state who funds the whole affair and prescribes the desired outcome.⁹

Su Lin says also, in grim echo of the American PAT program described above, that “We have established a school for the parents, where people can learn how to educate their own children” (335).

Replacing the parents, of course, requires not just subordinating the parents formally but actually taking over the parental role. In part, this usurpation is baked into the school system; education is a parental responsibility, and since the parents are no longer quite in charge of who educates their kid (compulsory education laws), the school has usurped that role, not received it by parental delegation. The schools, however, must take this a step farther; they must complete the usurpation. While the ways in which this is done are too many to list here (and Iserbyt honestly hardly touches on the topic), the effort to take over the psychological-spiritual health and moral worldview of children deserves a moment’s spot-light, as foretaste and proof of the general.

In this, the Clinton administration has you covered. “Mr. Clinton has directed Mr. Riley and Attorney General Janet Reno to work with the National Association of School Psychologists,” an article quoted on pages 409-410 states, a cooperation ostensibly aimed at catching school shooters early. (Anybody who follows the news closely will notice that schools are remarkably bad at doing this, to this day; the shooting up in Michigan a few years ago is a glaring example of this. Probably it has something to do with the historic refusal to consider whether the schools are responsible for any part of the tragedy; we prefer to go after controversial reporters (Alex Jones, for Sandy Hook¹⁰) or the parents (in Michigan).) As the article points out (410), though, once the school’s job includes assessing every student’s psychological status and providing the “troubled” ones counselling…. Well, the schools get to define what ‘troubled’ means and get to stick the kid in with their own psychologist. For poorer parents, the option of choosing another psychologist certainly won’t be available, if it is available at all.

Moreover, counselling, whatever the liberal consensus may say, is no perfect solution. Indeed, on at least one occasion, child counselling proved to be correlated with bad results: “In the original study (first report in 1948) an experimental group of 253 high-risk problem boys were given extensive counseling. A control group matched as to behavior, history, and family background received no counseling. In 1975 Professor McCord contacted the original participants and compared the circumstances of the experimental and control subjects. The experimental subjects were, among other things, found more likely to commit criminal acts, be alcoholics, suffer from mental illness, die younger, and have less prestigious jobs than the control group” (202). Modern psychology, while presenting some information worth considering, is structured around hating God (Ps. 53:1), and so we should hardly be champing at the bit to impose it on the nation’s children.

To quote that article (written by a Kathleen Parker) one last time: “When they come knocking to say they want to help my children, I reflect wistfully on moats” (409).

Then, besides this psychological mumbo-jumbo, we have those excellent curricular elements: character education and sex education. According to the ASCD, a prominent educator organization, character education was all the rage back in 1993: “Society is now turning back to schools to transmit positive moral values…” (311-312). It’s still in vogue nowadays, though, as the Tennessee state government will attest. What is character education? Well, as that quote implied, it’s the school being entrusted with the job of teaching kids good character and good morals- religion, in other words. Thus the worries the ASCD article mentions on page 312: “But even with broadening public support, some schools may be reluctant to adopt explicit values curriculum partly because of… the fear of creating conflict with religious and ethnic groups over whose values to teach.”

So, the schools are teaching religion to the kids, albeit at a little remove- morals and how to live, not the explicit doctrines, the James 2:14-17 fulfillment of faith rather than faith itself (what a relief). The current understanding of the First Amendment, of course, would countervail, but that was always a fig leaf anyway.

Way back (for young ‘uns like me) in 1977, one educator’s magazine broached the topic of ‘death’, making it the headline of its May issue (145). In that issue, the following ominous statement was offered: “The last goal is to help students clarify their values on social and ethical issues. An underlying, but seldom spoken, assumption of much of the death education movement is that Americans handle death and dying poorly and that we ought to be doing better at it. As in the case of many other problems, many Americans believe that education can initiate change. Change is evident, and death education will play as important a part in changing attitudes toward death as sex education played in changing attitudes toward sex information and wider acceptance of various sexual practices” (145). The question, as pointed out by Iserbyt, is whether we regard that “wider acceptance of various sexual practices,” here attributed to the school system, as a good thing- and whether we want that goodness to be reproduced in our perspective on death. Perhaps, as Iserbyt intimates, a part of the explanation for the rise in school violence is connected to this ‘death education’ which promotes a more governmentally-approved opinion of death.¹¹

The method of ‘helping’ students should also be scrutinized. One method of character education is “sensitivity training,” “defined as group meetings, large or small, to discuss publicly intimate and personal matters, and opinions, values or beliefs; and/or to act out emotions and feelings toward one another in the group, using the techniques of self-confession and mutual criticism” (132). If you’ve ever heard of ‘struggle sessions,’ a part of Marxism and particularly Maoism, this procedure should sound familiar. It’s essential idea is to require self-humiliation; it rewards finding even nonexistent faults. It encourages people to break themselves down and let the educator re-build them, an encouragement particularly cruel to direct towards kids and particularly sinister to direct towards them too, given that the only part which can be broken down is what the parents gave them (and their own basic character). Other brainwashing-adjacent psychological techniques, including “Operant Conditioning,” “Self-Hypnosis, Role Playing,” and “Situation Ethics” are mentioned in the same article (132) as methods of character education (to which sex education is naturally connected).

Not to worry, though: the federal government is funding this. Indeed, “In his 1997 State of the Union Address, President Clinton called for schools to teach character and mold children into good citizens. Most recently, Vice President Al Gore announced $2.7 million in grants for 10 states under the Partnerships in Character Education Pilot Projects Program. The grants should allow states to work with school districts in developing curriculum and providing teacher training for character education programs” (420).

Vouchers

If you follow my work on TruthWire News, writing on Tennessee politics, you’ll know I have opinions about education vouchers. They are, in short, subsidies offered by the government in an effort to simultaneously bribe votes, avoid responsibility for the terrible government schools, and extend government power into private schools, into homeschooling. Not all the legislators voting for them recognize this purpose, but the purpose remains nonetheless.

(See: [article], [article], and [article]. Also, by somebody else: article)

Vouchers are not a major point for Iserbyt. She does, however, include multiple mentions of them, mentions which put them in a bad light indeed, as part of the extension of malicious power into areas of schooling which sought to divorce themselves from the government’s vice-pushing. Due to the length of this article, I’ll content myself with a list of relevant mentions, citing page numbers not PDF numbers as always: 111, 137, 179, 241, 253, 286, 289, 299, 306.

Conclusion

Schools have a primary competitor, the parents, and the school system therefore works hard to minimize the parent’s role, even to the point of attacking those who partake of that role in the smallest way (the good teachers within the system). Parents are made to learn from the school, are graded by the school, and are made subordinate to their children. Children are taught to abandon what their parents taught them and learn new values from the school. The federal government funds it all, and whispers pass of the government enforce this whole affair.

Is this a promising state of affairs?

Part One – Part Two – Part Four

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Footnotes

1. Navigating the PDF to find a particular page can be tricky, due to page-number mismatch. The mainline book’s numbers are 23 behind the PDF’s page ticker. If you want to find a page-number, though, particularly in the glossary or appendices, the best method is to cntrl+f (cmd+f) search the page number- ‘201’, ‘A-165,’ etc. Admittedly the lower numbers will return a lot of chaff, but those are easily found by the first method. ↩︎
2. Appendices. Note that the printed version does not include the appendices; you’ll need the PDF for that. ↩︎
3. “Miracle (1982) suggested that shamans and applied social scientists perform a number of similar functions in society. Shamans, the powerful medicine men of premodern societies, worked mainly to cure ills, divine the unknown, and control uncertain events, and they performed these functions by using a specialized craft obtained after a long period of formal initiation and training. Similarly, applied social scientists acquire a specialized craft after initiation and training, and they too are called upon to alleviate the vague ills of corporate groups, divine the unknown for organizational strategists, or bring order to the uncertain events that plague institutional affairs” (Iserbyt A-159 quoting Rowan) ↩︎
4. Glossary. Also present only in the PDF available here on her website. ↩︎
5. I come to this quote from Paradise Lost by a circuitous route: P. Hamburger’s so-far-excellent Is Administrative Law Unlawful? quotes a statue in page 72’s footnote, and the statue quotes Milton. ↩︎
6. They recognize the danger of good teachers, which exist in the public school system even now; such are inimical to the government’s agenda overall. ↩︎
7. Though I’ve not devoted a particular section to it, unless you count discussing ‘change agents,’ Iserbyt spends significant time discussing how teachers are coerced or brainwashed into compliance with the changes. ↩︎
8. Liberalism’s modern incarnation, the descendant of old-time liberalism, is the third great totalitarian ideology of the 1900s and by far the most successful. ↩︎
9. To those aware of Tennessee’s recent interest in government-run year-round boarding schools for ‘at-risk’ youths, the CICC defense of their boarding model may be interesting, particularly its proposal of the school as an alternate comfort/loyalty center to the family (335). ↩︎
10. Those legal cases were and are a horrendous travesty of justice, smears America should be ashamed of. ↩︎
11. This doesn’t require the government to consciously promote murder or mass killings, the way the media does (mass media knows that mass publicity on spree killers triggers copy-cats, and they manifestly don’t care). All it requires is for the children to be taught a false understanding of death, resulting in a disjointing of such a fundamental aspect of their worldview that, in some predisposed or circumstantially vulnerable instances, the whole affair falls over in the Wicked Young Man direction. ↩︎