This is disturbing. After reading this, I think all elementary education should be handled by the private sector. Government supported (Public Schools) should be abolished. This is Part I
Zero Tolerance For Non-Compliance: Clinton's Ten Steps Toward Lifelong Behavior Modification
Kjos Ministries
6/10/99 Berit Kjos
Should Twana Dawson, a Pensacola, Florida high school sophomore, be expelled for bringing a nail clipper to school? Her principal, Norm Ross, seems to think so, even though Twana intended no wrong. Nor did she realize that the small knife attached to the clipper - which she used to clean her nails - would violate the school's Zero Tolerance policy. (WND, 6-7-99)
But the lack of "intent" doesn't stop today's self-proclaimed social engineers from pursuing their goals. Remember, the nationwide Zero Tolerance policy began long before Mr. Ross used the violence in Littleton as his excuse for the harsh penalty. Our government has been using each new eruption of violence to win public consent for its unjust policies, just as it uses compassion for the mentally ill as a rationale for its massive system for monitoring and managing the "mental health of the population."1
Both programs, mental health and zero tolerance, are vital parts of a far more insidious program of intimidation, control, and cultural transformation. While the process began decades ago, the pieces are finally fitting into place. And, as Raymond Houghton, Professor of Secondary Education at Rhode Island College, predicted almost three decades ago, few Americans know what is happening.
"...absolute behavior control is imminent," he wrote in a 1970 NEA book. "The critical point of behavior control, in effect, is sneaking up on mankind without his self-conscious realization that a crisis is at hand. Man will... never self-consciously know that it has happened."2
PREPOSTEROUS PENALTIES FOR GOOD KIDS
John Turner couldn't understand what had happened to him. The twelve-year-old honor student was arrested during a school recess, handcuffed, taken to juvenile hall, fingerprinted, and forbidden to call his mother. He had to sign a $250 bond and may face steeper punishment along with a lifelong police blot on his personal computerized data file "if found guilty".
What could a good sixth grader do to deserve such bad treatment?
"He hit back," says his mother, Alyne Turner.
In 1997, during a January cold spell in Louisiana, the students at his elementary school were kept inside during recess. "Another student began picking on John, calling him names," says Mrs. Turner. John responded to the intimidation by telling his adversary that he must be stupid if he thought those insulting words were true.
The other boy hit him in the face. It hurt-especially since John was wearing braces. John reacted and hit back. The other students agreed that John had been provoked.
But that didn't matter. There was "a fight" and John had participated. He had failed to follow the prescribed steps toward "conflict resolution". By suggesting that the other boy was "stupid", he failed to "respect" his tormentor. He had broken the ground rules for the politically correct peace-making process which demands a standard of self-restraint that would disqualify most adults.
John's school had adopted a policy called "zero tolerance", a strategy touted by President Clinton and leading educators across the country. In Ohio, the "Zero Tolerance for violence" policy brings swift punishment on innocent victims as well as aggressors-both are summarily suspended. So when a young girl in Ohio was beaten by two other girls on her way to the schoolbus, all three girls were sentenced to equal punishment: a ten day suspension.
Intent to do wrong, a key element in criminal justice, is irrelevant. "If you are hit, you are suspended, no matter what," explained a concerned mother who asked to remain anonymous. "If somebody wants to get another person, they just hit them. Some kids don't mind getting suspended, but the students who want to succeed do. Middle school kids are getting hit by high-school kids and they are punished as if they hit back. The daughter of a school board member was hit in the hallway. She was suspended, even though other students said she didn't provoke it."
It's happening from coast to coast. Like Twana, a straight-A student in San Jose, California was expelled for bringing a finger-nail clipper to school. Amber Nash, a high school honor student in Gobles, Michigan, brought a knife to school to cut a friend's brithday brownies. She was suspended for ten days.
In Alexandria, Louisiana, eight-year old honor student Kameryan Lueng brought a family heirloom to her second-grade class. She didn't realize that the little knife attached to the chain of her grandfather's gold-plated old pocket watch would violate the "zero tolerance" policy. Her punishment was suspension from school and remediation at Redirection Academy.
"They were studying Colonial times, and Kameryan thought her teacher would be interested in seeing something old," said her mother, Cheryl Lueng. "Kameryan cried when I told her she couldn't go back to her school on Monday. She feels like a criminal."3
How can schools justify their harsh punishment when their victims intend no wrong? And why do most of the victims seem to be honor students and high achievers?
Some educators "say the benefits of zero tolerance policies in raising a school's overall standard of conduct outweighs the harm done to any child who inadvertently breaks a rule,"4 wrote Tamar Lewin in a New York Times article titled "School Codes Without Mercy Snare Pupils Without Malice."
"We don't want to be making exceptions, having a principal say this is a good child from a prominent family so we'll overlook it, or this is a problem child from a poor family so we'll enforce it," added Sylvia Pearson, president of the Rapides Parish School Board, referring to little Kameryan. "We adopted zero tolerance to make a safe environment for children."5
What about their emotional safety? Was the emphasis on self-esteem and self-expression merely a passing fad, a bridge between the old and the new paradigms? Did our permissive humanist stage prepare America to welcome a new suppressive global stage?
CLINTON'S TEN-POINT PLAN
For most of this century, humanist educators have sought ways to use education to transform both the world and its people. "All of us, including the owners, must be subjected to a large degree of social control," wrote NEA leader Willard Givens in 1934. "The major function of the school is the social orientation of the individual. It must seek to give him an understanding of the transition to a new social order."
Today, self-proclaimed "change agents" see the fruit of their work. Around the world, nations are conforming their education systems to international standards, just as our states are conforming to national standards. President Clinton outlined the U.S. version of this global system in his 1997 State of the Union address to Congress:
1. "Adopt high national standards."
2. "Establish nationally accepted credentials for excellence in teaching."
3. "Help all our children read."
4. "Start teaching children before they start school."
5. "Give parents the power to choose the right public school for their children."
6. "Teach our children to be good citizens."
7. "Help communities finance $20 billion in school construction."
8. "Open the doors of college to all."
9. "Expand the frontiers of learning across a lifetime."
10. "Bring the power of the information age into all our schools."
These goals sound good, don't they? They should. Their purpose is to win public support, not to communicate facts. As New York Times editor Alison Mitchell wrote on February 12, "Clinton... is still using his campaign polling firm of Penn & Schoen to gauge public opinion and help him test and craft language for his speeches."6
Clinton's marketing strategy matches the tactics of educational change agents who say one thing but mean another. North Carolina school superintendent Dr. Jim Causby summarized it well at a 1994 international model school conference in Atlanta:
"We have actually been given a course in how not to tell the truth. How many of you are administrators? You've had that course in public relations where you learn to put the best spin on things."
Today's reformers shun clear definitions. Ambiguous promises do far more to persuade the public, subdue the opposition, and create consensus. So truth-telling must wait until polls indicate public readiness. Clinton has learned his lessons well!
He challenges us to learn as well-to be ready always to test what we hear in the light of truth and facts. Unless we decode his noble visions in the light of new regulations and the stated goals of education leaders, we will be deceived.
By changing the sequence of Clinton's ten goals we see a different picture -- one that shows how the nice-sounding pieces fit into a monstrous system that would manipulate, manage and monitor "human resources" for the envisioned global village. But keep in mind, the outline below is merely a summary. For factual details explore Internet's education sites, check your state's "workforce development" program, and read Brave New Schools.
* "TEACH OUR CHILDREN TO BE GOOD CITIZENS," said Clinton. "Promote order and discipline.... Impose curfews, enforce truancy laws, remove disruptive students from the classroom and have zero tolerance for guns and drugs."
Like "zero tolerance" for guns, the policies for drugs and truancy have been stretched far beyond the realm of danger and reason. Brooke Olson, a 13-year-old from Texas, was suspended for carrying a bottle of Advil in her backpack. A thirteen-year-old Ohio honor student was suspended and faced possible expulsion for receiving the mild pain-reliever Midol from her friend for cramps. And the new truancy laws often seem more effective in intimidating home schoolers on the way to libraries than in stopping genuine truancy. What is happening?
A good citizen is a global citizen in the minds of leading educators. These global citizens must be trained to put planetary needs above their own. As governor in 1987, Clinton, together with professor John Goodlad, Carnegie president Ernest Boyer, and other visionary members of the Study Commission on Global Education, wrote a report titled "The United States Prepares for Its Future: Global Perspectives in Education." Its foreword states,
"A dozen years ago... teaching and learning "in global perspective" was still exotic doctrine, threatening... those who still thought of American citizenship as an amalgam of American history, American geography, American lifestyles and American ideas... It now seems almost conventional to speak of American citizenship in the same breath with international interdependence and the planetary environment."7
It isn't easy to persuade Americans to trade national pride for planetary loyalties. But our new education system is designed to instill a utopian vision of global interdependence in people everywhere. Contrasted to the exaggerated evils of Western culture, this vision looks enticing enough to motivate many to accept unthinkable environmental and social restraints.
Using "zero tolerance" policies to shock, embarrass, and intimidate dutiful students into compliance with irrational rules fits the plan. Most students caught in the confusing web of federal regulations must endure long sessions in "conflict resolution" and "anger management"-two related psycho-social strategies used to instill a submissive, collectivist mentality. They have already become standard procedure in our nation's classrooms. Thomas Sowell, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, summarized the process:
"The techniques of brainwashing developed in totalitarian countries are routinely used in psychological conditioning programs imposed on American school children. These include emotional shock and desensitization, psychological isolation from sources of support, stripping away defenses, manipulative cross-examination of... moral values, and inducing acceptance of alternative values by psychological rather than rational means."8
These unAmerican strategies may shock most parents, but they fit the plan for transformation. While the Carnegie Foundation was importing Soviet psychosocial strategies long before the US-Soviet General Education Agreement9 was signed by Ronald Reagan and Michail Gorbachev, the 1985 treaty made it official. Social studies, science, arts... all facets of education were included in the exchange.
"Cooperation would cover all computer-based instruction, instructional hardware and curriculum design for all grades of primary and secondary education, as well as college and university studies," wrote Malachi Martin in The Keys of this Blood. "The obvious goal was a total homogenization not only of the methods of teaching and learning, but what was to be taught and learned. "10 He continued,
"Cooperation.... in the 'social sciences' turned a blind eye to the official prostitution of psychiatry and psychology by the Soviet Union as clinical tools for inflicting mental and physical torture as political punishment and for disposing of dissidents. The USSR had been banned from the World Psychiatric Association in 1983 for such practices....
"Or take cooperation in the humanities. As taught in the Soviet Union, all humanities are marinated in Leninist Marxism as a matter of course. And history is distorted by... the systematic suppression of facts, and by downright lies. One might wonder what common curricula might be drawn up between the USSR and the US...."
The aim of the General Agreement was "to transform the shape of the world" and to restructure "institutions so that they are not confined merely to the nations-states."11 It would take a new kind of teacher to instill this message in the hearts of students across our nation.
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