A WEEKLY COMMENTARY
Year Twenty... Number Thirty-Six ... September 7, 1973
AND THEY STILL CALL IT EDUCATION
GETTING CHILDREN TO LEARN HOW THEY TICK
"Children at school are invited to repeat to
the class 'the lie you often tell about yourself'
... to write their own obituary notice
... to talk about their loneliness ... to drop
counters into a cup after predicting how
many they will get 'on target' ... to express
anger through noise and action.
"What are they doing? They are playing games, certainly, but they are also learning -- and taking part in a Unesco experiment in international understanding which has been tried out over the past 18 months in 16 schools in Austria, Cyprus, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, the Federal Republic of Germany, Hungary, the United Kingdom and the United States."
These are the opening paragraphs of a news release issued as one of a group of "Unesco Features, a fortnightly bulletin for press, radio and television" by United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 7 place de Fontenoy, 75700 Paris.
Unesco's Institute for Education in Hamburg which is running this particular project, explains that "while not neglecting the purely cognitive aspect, it tries to integrate social and affective learning more fully into the school curriculum. In other words, the attempt is to move from the transmission of facts towards getting the children to learn 'how they tick' ... Emphasis is on getting children to learn by themselves, not teaching them. Each of the games suggested creates a 'learning experience' from which the pupils draw their own instruction, so the project is right in the mainstream of modern attempts to reform education. "
" ...One British teacher trying the 'self-exploration game,' which aims at increasing self-understanding, tried Situation No. 4 -- 'Do Something Uncontrolled' -- and found his shoes removed and thrown out of the window. (... this illustrates the kind of crisis that teachers on the project must be prepared for.) "
Another Unesco "educational" experiment involves children in schools in Colombia. We are told that:
"There are 3,120 children in Colombia today who have a chance of growing up to be enlightened adults in the full sense of the word -- free of prejudices and taboos, able to bring up the number of children they desire and aware of their role in shaping their own lives and those of generations to come as they take an active part in their country's development ... Before too long this new form of schooling, which combines sex education and study of population and environmental problems with the usual subjects ... may be extended to the Colombian educational system as a whole."
Yvonne Tabbush, who is Unesco Regional Information Officer for Latin America, with office in Santiago de Chile, explains what she witnessed in some of the schools:
"The boys at Bolo primary school showed us neat exercise books in which they had drawn and written what they had learned about genetics throughout the term. The fourth grade girls at Nuestra Senora del Rosario trooped onto the stage one by one to explain, by means of photos and charts, the process of conception, gestation and birth .... The children spoke of changing traditional patterns, of their parents' attitudes to what they were learning and sometimes to their resistance to progress: 'They need classes too, but we try to teach them.' ... the curriculum is constantly re-evaluated and adapted to needs and concerns. As time is the great problem, suggestions are made for cutting down on details and descriptions of places and events -- the old standbys of geography, history and biology -- and emphasizing instead the concept of environment, demography and the ecosystem, giving more time for reflexion and analysis rather than rote of learning and memorizing ....
"And so the experiment proceeds with checks and balances, pre-tests and post-tests in the 24 schools where the project is being carried out, and a parallel selection of 21 control schools where classes have not been changed, the results being compared at each stage to calculate the impact of the new teaching and evaluate changes in attitude. When all the tests have been checked, codified and analyzed, discussed with educational leaders and the teachers who took part in the experiment and with representatives of the Ministry of Education, the National Population Council, the Council of (Catholic) Bishops and the Parents' Association, the guidelines should be ready for the preparation of a national programme of population education." (End of quotation from Unesco Features).
A few words of explanation are in order:
The United Nations Organization is set up like a World Government (which its creators intended it to become after a few structural changes had been made). The UN has its legislative branch, composed of two bodies: the General Assembly and the Security Council. The General Assembly, or lower house, bears some similarity to our own House of Representatives, in that it is made up of representatives from each of the member States. But there is this important difference to be pointed out: Our House members are elected according to the population of the States they represent, so that the large but sparsely populated Alaska has but one Representative, while the smaller but heavily populated New York State has 39 Representatives. In contrast, in the UN General Assembly, each State, regardless of size or density of population, has but one representative (save for the USSR which has three), thus belying the fiction that the UN is a "democratic" organization.
The UN's "upper house" or Security Council differs from most legislative bodies in that ten of its fifteen member nation representatives are elected every two years, while the Big Five (USA, USSR, UK, France and China) hold their seats permanently, and their representatives (called Ambassadors) also have the power of veto; this fact again belying the fiction of "democracy."
The United Nations Organization also has its judicial Branch, the World Court, or the International Court of Justice; fifteen judges elected for 9-year terms by the General Assembly and the Security Council.
These two branches, the legislative and the judicial, could be w ritten off as little more than expensive nuisances. Now and then the UN "legislature" will issue a sanction against some State, perhaps Rhodesia or Israel; the sanction will either be veoted by one of the Big Five, or it will be ignored by the indicted State. Only the United States ever seems to pay much attention to any United Nations decree. The same can be said of the World Court; nobody ever gives much thought to its decisions.
But the "Executive" or "Administrative"' branch of the United Nations is an entirely different matter. Not that Secretary General Kurt Waldheim and his staff are of great importance, they do little more than keep the records straight and manage the UN Headquarters in New York City. However --
Somewhat similar to our President's Cabinet and the various bureaus, agencies, authorities and administrations which make up our Executive Branch of federal government; the UN also has its special councils and agencies; bureaucracies wherein resides the real power of the United Nations. These are regulatory agencies which derive their power not from UN Headquarters, but from treaties which are signed by the various National Governments and administered by these UN agencies. For example: the so-called World Bank (International Bank for Reconstruction and Development) and the International Monetary Fund do not derive their power from their relation to the United Nations as such, but from the fact that multilateral treaties are signed by the member Nations, naming these organizations as official custodians and managers of international financial matters involving Nations.
UNESCO is such an international bureaucracy, deriving its powers from the fact that the nations have signed an international agreement giving Unesco diplomatic immunity and powers which actually supersede the powers granted by the United States Constitution.
To put it more simply: If the United Nations ceased to exist as an organization, we'd still have to deal with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the International Labor Organization (ILO), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Bank, the International Development Association (IDA), the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the IMF, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), the Universal Postal Union (UPU), the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the Intergovernmental Maritime Consultative Organization (IMCO), the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
Many of these international organizations are important, beneficial, and offer no threat to the integrity or security of any nation. Unesco, however, is not one of these. Its activities in the educational field have become little more than attempts to build a World Community. As Unesco itself says:
"Creating world understanding, of course, has always been the aim of Unesco, whose Constitution lays down that 'since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed.' For the past 20 years, attempts to build these defences have been made in Unesco 'Associated Schools', now numbering more than 900 in 62 countries ... "
These "Unesco Associated Schools" are better classified as laboratories, where the many schemes promoted by behavioral scientists, social scientists and educationists are tried out, using the children of various races, religions and nations as guinea pigs for their experimentations. Two such experiments were discussed at the start of this letter. When these Unesco experiments are proved successful in mind control efforts they are then recommended to National and State Boards of Education, and introduced into school systems in the United States and throughout the world.
It should be noted that the management and control method known as the Planning, Programming, Budgeting System, was tried out and adopted in Unesco Associated Schools before it was forced upon American school systems. It should also be borne in mind that this movement which aims at "programming the product (the future citizen) for existence in the newly programmed society," is not an American phenomenon. It is a world-wide movement which aims at mind control for the masses of the world, with only the children of the Elite to be spared. This concept was perhaps best explained by the late humanist and one world advocate, Bertrand Russell. In his book, The Impact of Science on Society, pages 29 and 30, he wrote:
I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is mass psychology .... This study is immensely useful to practical men, whether they wish to become rich or to acquire the government .... Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Of these, the most influential is what is called "education" .... What is essential in mass psychology is the art of persuasion .... It may be hoped that in time anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch the patient young and is provided by the State with money and equipment .... This subject will make great strides when it is taken up by scientists under a scientific dictatorship .... The social psychologists of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. Various results will be arrived at. First, that the influence of home is obstructive. Second, that not much can be done unless indoctrination begins before the age of ten. Third, that verses set to music and repeatedly intoned (as in hard rock-Ed .) are very effective. Fourth, that the opinion that snow is white must be held to show a morbid taste for eccentricity ....
Although this science will be dilligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for a generation will be able to control its subjects without the need of armies or policemen. As yet there is only one country which has succeeded in creating this politician's paradise.
Along the lines suggested by Russell, after the "scientists" and their computers were given control over "what is called 'education'," the term education was itself redefined. It now has become the objective of education to "measure and diagnose the child in order to prescribe a program that will develop his feelings and emotions, his values and loyalties toward predetermined objectives." Traditionally, the purpose of education was to impart knowledge and to develop skills, while at the same time instilling Christian character. But today, the way a pupil feels and reacts is said to be more important than how much he knows, or how much skill he has. As one of our correspondents said: "Conditioning people to behave according to predetermined behavior patterns becomes the objective of educational institutions. Drawing it right down to basics, we are talking about conditioned responses in human terms. Pavlov experimented on dogs!"
The same kind of experimentation is going on right now, with children instead of dogs, in schools throughout the Nation; indeed, in schools throughout the world. Two such experiments have been cited in this letter. We wrote, in our Don Bell Reports of August 3, of other experiments, of one in which the experimentation begins when the child is but two weeks old! It seems that time has proved Bertrand Russell to be wrong in one respect: He thought that indoctrination would have to begin before the "patient" was ten. It seems that "scientific experimentation" has shown that the indoctrination must begin before the child is, not ten years old, but only ten weeks old!
Although this mind conditioning was started seriously by Unesco more than twenty years ago, and although we have had our share of educationists such as John Dewey, William Heard Kirkpatrick, Harold O. Rugg, George S. Counts, Theodore Brameld, and others of like persuasion, the real perversion of our entire publis school system did not begin until after the Federal Government began taking over control of the schools.
Prior to 1965 there were local, elected, school boards and State heads of education that could make direct decisions regarding educational programs, textbooks and curriculums, because they were funded at the State and local levels.
But it was in 1965 that the means for the actual restructuring of education in the United States was provided by the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which gave the federal government its actual control over school systems. President Johnson once remarked that he considered the passage of this Act the most significant single piece of legislation of his entire administration.
1965 was an ominous year in other respects. That was the year when President Johnson issued the order which introduced the Planning, Programming, Budgeting System (PPBS) throughout the Executive Branch of the Federal Government. 1965 was also the year which unleashed the actual restructuring of governmental processes and formally included education as a legitimate Federal Government function.
Since then we have seen the national administration establish Federal Offices of Human Resources, the Office of Child Development, Head Start Programs, a National Institute of Education, a National Committee of School Finance, a National Office of Child Development, special tuition programs, day care centers, etc., etc. All of these, and other national offices are tools for the total control of all future generations by the State.
PPBS is the systems management tool made possible through computer technology, to affect the planned changes desired by the Elite of which Bertrand Russell spoke. As one California Assemblyman, Robert Burke, expressed it: "If you know what you have to start with, and know what you want to end up with, it's possible to design a system that will make the precise changes required."
The management system is perfected, in PPBS. But the "formula for change" is not yet worked out to the satisfaction of the Elite's behavioral scientists, educationists, and change agents (their own designation for the operators who are trained to affect the changes in the attitudes and behavior of the masses; the students of mass psychology spoken of by Bertrand Russell.) That is why there are so many different experiments still being conducted in schools and communities: the perfect formula to make PPBS perfectly effective in education, is still being sought. And your child may be their guinea pig without your ever knowing it before it is too late, if that child is going to a public school.
Some time ago Mrs. Mary Thompson of Santa Clara, California, who has been opposing PPBS and the new education for a number of years, was asked what could be done to stop this planned take-over of the Nation's future generations. Her answer still seems valid:
1. Stop thinking of these various education innovations as separate, isolated, individual programs. All of education today is part of the total concept of programming the product, the student ....
2. Stop participating in citizens committees and goals committees, and answering questionnaires for data purposes. Your answers are analyzed with a view to identifying the nature and scope of resistance to programs, and how to circumvent such resistance. If you do choose to be on a committee, do so for the purpose of obtaining information and issuing your own statements publicly as long as you are allowed to, from within the committee, in order to educate the general public as to the nature of the process.
3. Instruct your children not to supply personal information or answer personal questionnaires in school, or discuss any subjective or introspective matters in school. Teach them how to recognize data collecting techniques.
4. We believe the time has come to establish private schools to keep our children from falling victim to the behaviorists while there is still opportunity to do so. Be aware of the fact that there is a plan (the Voucher system) lurking in the wings to bring the private schools into the national control, alongside the public schools which are already under federal control.
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