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THE RUMBLE
OF GOOSE STEPS
SEEDS ARE PLANTED FOR SCHOOL SHOOTINGS - 1965
By: Chuck Morse
1965 was a watershed year for the change-agents in their quest to turn American education from one oriented toward the development of the intellect and character to a centrally controlled laboratory of social and psychological experimentation. New York City teacher of the year John Taylor Gatto remembers teaching high school in 1965. In his book The Underground History of American Education, he remembers discipline being replaced by a "due process" system. He states that "I watched fascinated as over a period of 100 days, the entire edifice of public schooling was turned upside down."
Previously, the teacher, backed by the school administration, was responsible for maintaining discipline. Students were graded for conduct and a check next to the "conduct" box on the report card was seen as more serious and humiliating than a failing grade. Students could be suspended and even expelled from school. All of this was suddenly and simultaneously replaced, virtually overnight, by a due process system which transferred the disciplinary responsibility from the teacher to a formalized schedule of hearings, referees, advocates, and appeals, modeled after the judicial system.
This system was too slow to contain the immediate outbreaks of mischief that occur from time to time in any school. Students prone to trouble understood immediately that the teacher was no longer in charge and that he was not likely to be disciplined, let alone suspended or expelled. All hell broke loose as school violence and general chaos began to rise to the point that it stands today.
1965 also was the year the "Behavioral Science Teacher Education Program (BSTEP)" was launched. Charlotte Iserbyt, in her book "The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America," points out that this program, funded by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, was set up to "change the teacher from a transmitter of knowledge/content to a social change agent/facilitator/clinician." Teachers who refused to conform were purged, over the next several years, in a bloodless re-enactment of a Stalinist cleansing of reactionaries.
Objectives of the BSTEP were the "development of a new kind of elementary school teacher who...engages in teaching as clinical practice...and functions as a responsible agent of social change." Iserbyt states that B.F.Skinner's behaviorism is the basis of BSTEP. The program states: "Calculations of the future and how to modify it are no longer considered obscure academic pursuits. Instead, they are the business of many who are concerned about and responsible for devising various modes of social change...We are getting closer to developing effective methods of shaping the future and advancing in fundamental social and individual evolution." Reading this jargon, one can't help hearing the faint but ever increasing rumble of goose steps. |
