Inside American Education (10 page)

Note that this was only the schedule of
promotional
meetings during these two months. There was another busy schedule of three-day training sessions by the same organization in cities from coast to coast for teachers who were going to be using the “Quest” programs. “Minimum implementation fees” were $975 in 1990 for a program in a given institution, including the training of one person, with additional training fees of $375 each for additional participants.
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Quest International also offered for sale audio and video materials to be used with the program, as well as T-shirts and coffee mugs. Moreover, it offered information on how the money to pay for its programs could be raised from foundations and civic organizations.
¹²¹

According to the promotional material for Quest, its program for adolescents “has been adopted by over 12,000 schools in North America and 22 countries”
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reaching “more than 1.5 million young people each year throughout the world.”
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Quest International is clearly a multimillion-dollar enterprise. While it characterizes itself as “a non-profit organization,” whether the money coming in is called profit or something else does not affect its financial ability to expand the organization, or to reward those who operate it, or who are affiliated with it.

Ideology is another potent force behind the promotion of attitude-changing programs and shapes much of the content, the psychological-conditioning methods, and the circumvention and undermining of parents. Advocates of secular humanism, for example, have been quite clear and explicit as to the crucial importance of promoting their philosophy in the schools, to counter or undermine religious values among the next generation. As an article in
Humanist
magazine put it:

I am convinced that the battle for humankind’s future must be waged and won in the public school classrooms by teachers who correctly perceive their role as the proselytizers of a new faith: a religion of humanity that recognizes and respects the spark of what theologians call divinity in every human being.

These teachers must embody the same selfless dedication as the most rabid fundamentalist preachers, for they will be ministers of another sort, utilizing a classroom instead of a pulpit to convey humanist values in whatever subject they teach, regardless of the educational level—preschool day care or large state universities.
¹²⁴

While the organized secular humanist movement might seem to be a small fringe group, its impact on education is out of all proportion to its size. For example, Carl Rogers—the psychotherapist who was one of the leading figures in introducing psychotherapeutic techniques into schools—was proud of having been named Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Society,
¹²⁵
Rogers’ dismissive attitude toward religion, and his contempt for American culture in general,
¹²⁶
are reflected in a vast literature, reaching well beyond his own considerable corps of disciples, and found in other schools of psychotherapeutic approaches to education.

Promoters of internationalism have likewise seen a need to undermine patriotism or other national cultural traditions through “global education.” Gay rights advocates have also been active in promoting the use of school materials, including movies, promoting the homosexual lifestyle, and boosting the social image of homosexuals.
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One of the largest organizations, with one of the oldest and most thoroughly elaborated ideologies and most sophisticated promotional operations, is
Planned Parenthood. The very name is deceiving, for the last thing they are planning is parenthood. Planned Parenthood is an organization with a population-repression ideology.

While the ideologies of these different groups have different emphases, they overlap to a considerable degree and reinforce one another. Moreover, they are all pushing ideas which cannot be openly and plainly labeled, so they all have an interest in maintaining lofty euphemisms and labels which obscure or misdirect. Their simultaneous emergence on a large scale in the public schools during the past two decades was neither a coincidence nor a conspiracy, but grew out of new opportunities provided by large infusions of federal money into public school systems long controlled and financed at the local level. Professor Jacqueline Kasun, who has studied the sex education aspect of this phenomenon extensively, concluded:

…Congress created the conditions for massive growth in the sex education and birth control movement. From a crank obsession subsidized by drug companies, it became a growth industry with big money prizes for those who qualify for the multimillion-dollar federal grants. It could now not only operate more programs, but it could undertake massive “research,” publishing, and promotion; it could employ high-powered “experts,” operating out of its own proliferating offices located in the very heart of the public bureaucracy. Parents who questioned the new programs for the schools soon found that they were up against an entrenched power structure with a virtually limitless financial base.
¹²⁸

Although organizations such as Planned Parenthood present themselves as rationalistic and scientific, the hysteria they promote about alleged “over-population” in the world is contradicted by considerable empirical evidence to the contrary.
¹²⁹
The population control ideology is simply one branch of the general ideology of an elite controlling the lives of the masses, for their own good—a view once openly expressed.
¹³⁰
Although Planned Parenthood and others who have promoted sex education in the schools have used the argument that it would reduce teenage pregnancy, their bottom line has been population control, so that these programs have been a success from their perspective when abortions prevent population growth, even though more teenagers get pregnant.

The role of federal money is crucial, for it means that both commercial and ideological interests have a large market for their products. The fact that the money comes from Washington, rather than from locally controlled sources, means that local control or parental influence are less effective barriers to the intrusion of this material into the classroom.

Whatever influence parents might have is further diluted by education administrators’ reluctance to let the public know about the introduction of any potentially controversial material. For example, an academic study of a controversial curriculum called
Man: A Course of Study
(
MACOS
) found that “school administrators were reluctant to acquaint parents and the general citizenry with their district’s use of
MACOS
, either prior to or following its installation.” Among the comments often heard from these administrators were: “Keep the lid on” and “do not want controversy,” and expressions of fear of “flack from the community.”
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Nor did those who introduced this program believe that students would be any more receptive. Among teachers trained to present the
MACOS
curriculum, only 4 percent gave as their reason for adopting it that they thought students would like it.
¹³²

The sense of mission, of excitement, of being part of a vanguard promoting advances beyond the ken of ordinary people, should not be discounted as a factor behind the spread of attitude-changing programs. The notion that they are doing something “scientific,” as opposed to merely “traditional,” is part of this mystique. A doctoral dissertation on the
MACOS
program even referred to “scientific values,” with no definition of what that might mean (inasmuch as values are not science and science is not values). Nevertheless, the dissertation depicted the controversy which erupted over
MACOS
as a clash between those with “scientific values” and those with “traditional values”:

Proponents of
MACOS
and scientific values believe … that it is not only appropriate but important for value issues to be discussed within the context of classroom lessons. They assert that because the world is constantly changing, students must have an opportunity to deal as first-hand as possible with problems and realities of that world. Issues of the present and future, then, to a large degree are paramount (though not to
the total exclusion of issues of the past) to those in favor of scientific values, whereas those in favor of traditional values tend to focus on the past.
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Just as Orwellian use of the word “opportunity” to describe compulsion is not uncommon among defenders of brainwashing programs,
¹³⁴
so is use of the word “scientific” in a wholly unscientific sense, as verbal garnish for a set of idological fashions. Invocations of “science” as a characterization of educational fashions and dogmas go back for decades.
¹³⁵
Moreover, the same note of self-congratulation was apparent in Abraham Maslow, a disciple of Carl Rogers and himself one of the early gurus of psychological conditioning in schools, when he said, “traditional value systems have all failed, at least for thoughtful people,” so that “we are now casting about in a new direction, namely the scientific one.”
¹³⁶
Apparently school children are to be drafted for this “casting about” experiment.

The vague, lofty, and self-congratulatory note was also apparent in the titles, as well as the content, of books by Carl Rogers:
The Right to be Human
and
Freedom to Learn
—the latter another Orwellian phrase for public school children being compelled to be guinea pigs. Another writer on values clarification said: “I conceptualize man as a total, unified person.”
¹³⁷
This kind of pretentious mush has provided the ideological rationale for displacing intellectual studies from the schools in favor of psychological conditioning.