No church in the wild...

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ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN 1933 IN THE NEW HUMANIST (VOL. VI, #3, 1933: Yellow Springs, Ohio), the main publication of the American Humanist Association. Co-author John Dewey, the noted philosopher and educator, called for a synthesizing of all religions and a “socialized and cooperative economic order.” The following are excerpts taken from Secular Humanism and the Schools: The Issue Whose Time Has Come by Onalee McGraw, Ph.D. (Critical Issues, Series 2, The Heritage Foundation: Washington, D.C., 1976): The basis of humanist belief is that there is no Almighty God, the Creator and Sustainer of life. Humanists believe that man is his own god. They believe that moral values are relative, devised according to the needs of particular people, and that ethics are likewise situational. Humanists reject Judeo-Christian moral and ethical laws, such as those contained in the Ten Commandments, calling them “dogmatic,” “outmoded,” “authoritarian,” and a hindrance to human progress. In humanism, self-fulfillment, happiness, love, and The Troubling Thirties : c. 1933  22 23 justice are found by each man individually, without reference to any divine source. In the Judeo-Christian ethic, there is and can be no real self-fulfillment, happiness, love, or justice on earth that can be found which does not ultimately issue from Almighty God, the Creator and Sustainer. Several main differences between the humanist ethic and the Judeo-Christian ethic become clear upon reading the Humanist Manifestos I and II (1933 and 1973) and comparing them to the tenets of the Judeo-Christian ethic contained in the Old and New Testaments.... At issue is the basic concept concerning the nature of man and the “rules” by which men govern themselves individually, in society, and in government. In the Judeo-Christian ethic, man’s ultimate deliverance and salvation—his finding a means of living together on this planet, in peace, harmony, justice, and love—is through God’s given “rules.” For the humanist, man’s greatness, his coming of age, his total fulfillment is found when he no longer needs the idea of God. Man gets rid of God, not just to do what he wills but to regain possession of human greatness. Is Humanistic Education unconstitutional? Inasmuch as humanistic curriculum programs and “values clarification” and “moral education” teaching strategies are based upon materialistic values found only in man’s nature itself, they reject the spiritual and moral tradition of theistic faith and religion. Thus, many parents who subscribe to Judeo-Christian belief oppose humanistic education in the tax-supported schools on grounds that such programs promote and advocate the religion of secular humanism in violation of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. The U.S. Supreme Court cited Secular Humanism as a religion in the 1961 case of Torcaso v. Watkins (367 U.S. 488). Roy Torcaso, the appellant, a practicing Humanist in Maryland, had refused to declare his belief in Almighty God, as then required by State law in order for him to be commissioned as a notary public. The Court held that the requirement for such an oath “invades appellant’s freedom of belief and religion.” The Court declared in Torcaso that the “no establishment” clause of the First Amendment reached far more than churches of theistic faiths, that it is not the business of government or its agents to probe beliefs, and that therefore its inquiry is concluded by the fact of the profession of belief. The Court stated: “We repeat and again reaffirm that neither a State nor the Federal Government can constitutionally force a person to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion. Neither can constitutionally pass laws or impose requirements which aid all religions as against non-believers, and neither can aid those religions based on a belief in the existence of God as against those religions founded on different beliefs.” The Court has also stated “Among religions in this country which do not teach what would generally be considered a belief in the existence of God are Buddhism, Taoism, Ethical Culture, Secular Humanism and others.” The Torcaso and Abington cases defined secular humanism as a religion and prohibited the government from establishing a religion of secularism by affirmatively opposing hostility to theistic religion, values, and beliefs.3 

 Americans forget that the present government education system started as a Prussian import in the 1840’s–’50’s. It was a system built on Hegel’s belief that the state was “God” walking on earth.

Coexistence on this tightly knit earth should be viewed as an existence not only without wars… but also without [the government] telling us how to live, what to say, what to think, what to know, and what not to know. —Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, from a speech given September 11, 1973

Educated men are as much superior to uneducated men as the living are to the dead. —Aristotle, 384–322 B.C.2 

For over a twenty-five-year period the research used in this chronology has been collected from many sources: the United States Department of Education; international agencies; state agencies; the media; concerned educators; parents; legislators, and talented researchers with whom I have worked. In the process of gathering this information two beliefs that most Americans hold in common became clear: 1)If a child can read, write and compute at a reasonably proficient level, he will be able to do just about anything he wishes, enabling him to control his destiny to the extent that God allows (remain free); 2) Providing such basic educational proficiencies is not and should not be an expensive proposition. Since most Americans believe the second premise—that providing basic educational proficiencies is not and should not be an expensive proposition—it becomes obvious that it is only a radical agenda, the purpose of which is to change values and attitudes (brainwash), that is the costly agenda. In other words, brainwashing by our schools and universities is what is bankrupting our nation and our children’s minds. In 1997 there were 46.4 million public school students. During 1993–1994 (the latest years the statistics were available) the average per pupil expenditure was $6,330.00 in  xiv xv 1996 constant dollars. Multiply the number of students by the per pupil expenditure (using old-fashioned mathematical procedures) for a total K–12 budget per year of $293.7 billion dollars. If one adds the cost of higher education to this figure, one arrives at a total budget per year of over half a trillion dollars.3  The sorry result of such an incredibly large expenditure—the performance of American students—is discussed in Pursuing Excellence—A Study of U.S. Twelfth Grade Mathematics and Science Achievement in International Context: Initial Findings from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMMS), a report from the U.S. Department of Education (NCES 98–049). Pursuing Excellence reads: Achievement of Students, Key Points: U.S. twelfth graders scored below the international average and among the lowest of the 21 TIMSS nations in both mathematics and science general knowledge in the final year of secondary school. (p. 24) Obviously, something is terribly wrong when a $6,330 per pupil expenditure produces such pathetic results. This writer has visited private schools which charge $1,000 per year in tuition which enjoy superior academic results. Parents of home-schooled children spend a maximum of $1,000 per year and usually have similar excellent results. 

  The reason Americans do not understand this war is because it has been fought in secret—in the schools of our nation, targeting our children who are captive in classrooms. The wagers of this war are using very sophisticated and effective tools: • Hegelian Dialectic (common ground, consensus and compromise) • Gradualism (two steps forward; one step backward) • Semantic deception (redefining terms to get agreement without understanding). The Hegelian Dialectic5  is a process formulated by the German philosopher Georg Preface  Synthesis  (consensus)  Thesis Antithesis xviii xix Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) and used by Karl Marx in codifying revolutionary Communism as dialectical materialism. This process can be illustrated as: The “Thesis” represents either an established practice or point of view which is pitted against the “Antithesis”—usually a crisis of opposition fabricated or created by change agents—causing the “Thesis” to compromise itself, incorporating some part of the “Antithesis” to produce the “Synthesis”—sometimes called consensus. This is the primary tool in the bag of tricks used by change agents who are trained to direct this process all over the country; much like the in-service training I received. A good example of this concept was voiced by T.H. Bell when he was U.S. Secretary of Education: “[We] need to create a crisis to get consensus in order to bring about change.” (The reader might be reminded that it was under T.H. Bell’s direction that the U.S. Department of Education implemented the changes “suggested” by A Nation at Risk—the alarm that was sounded in the early 1980s to announce the “crisis” in education.) Since we have been, as a nation, so relentlessly exposed to this Hegelian dialectical process (which is essential to the smooth operation of the “system”) under the guise of “reaching consensus” in our involvement in parent-teacher organizations, on school boards, in legislatures, and even in goal setting in community service organizations and groups—including our churches—I want to explain clearly how it works in a practical application. A good example with which most of us can identify involves property taxes for local schools. Let us consider an example from Michigan— The internationalist change agents must abolish local control (the “Thesis”) in order to restructure our schools from academics to global workforce training (the “Synthesis”). Funding of education with the property tax allows local control, but it also enables the change agents and teachers’ unions to create higher and higher school budgets paid for with higher taxes, thus infuriating homeowners. Eventually, property owners accept the change agents’ radical proposal (the “Anti- thesis”) to reduce their property taxes by transferring education funding from the local property tax to the state income tax. Thus, the change agents accomplish their ultimate goal; the transfer of funding of education from the local level to the state level. When this transfer occurs it increases state/federal control and funding, leading to the federal/internationalist goal of implementing global workforce training through the schools (the “Synthesis”).6 Regarding the power of “gradualism,” remember the story of the frog and how he didn’t save himself because he didn’t realize what was happening to him? He was thrown into cold water which, in turn, was gradually heated up until finally it reached the boiling point and he was dead. This is how “gradualism” works through a series of “created crises” which utilize Hegel’s dialectical process, leading us to more radical change than we would ever otherwise accept. In the instance of “semantic deception”—do you remember your kindly principal telling you that the new decision-making program would help your child make better decisions? What good parent wouldn’t want his or her child to learn how to make “good” decisions? Did you know that the decision-making program is the same controversial values clarification program recently rejected by your school board and against which you may have given repeated testimony? As I’ve said before, the wagers of this intellectual social war have employed very effective weapons to implement their changes. This war has, in fact, become the war to end all wars. If citizens on this planet can be brainwashed or robotized, using dumbed-down Pavlovian/Skinnerian education, to accept Preface xviii xix what those in control want, there will be no more wars. 

  “Human capital,” a term coined by reformers to describe our children, implies that humans are expendable. This explains why the lifeboat exercise has been used so rampantly, and why it was so critical to the education reformers’ plans. Is it any wonder, then, that we witnessed the horror of the Littleton, Colorado shootings, and that other violence in schools across the country is increasing? Death education in the classroom may be linked to deaths in the classroom. The dumbing down of a nation inevitably leads to the death of a culture. 

 For too many years the late Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner has been virtually ignored by conservative leaders, who focused their criticism exclusively on pervasive cultural influences of the humanistic psychologists (Rogers, Maslow, et al.). Skinner was written off as a utopian psychologist who represented no threat. Iserbyt’s premise, proven well, is that B.F. Skinner is comfortably alive and well—embedded within modern education methods. Direct Instruction, Mastery Learning and Outcome-Based Education are irrefutably the current incarnation of Skinner’s 1960s Programmed Instruction—a method of instruction which linked children to the computer and turned learning into a flow chart of managed behaviors. Interwoven throughout the book is the important theme of operant conditioning in education. Surprisingly, Iserbyt never debates the effectiveness of the method. Entry after entry in the book substantiates Iserbyt’s premise that the method is purposefully used to create a robotic child—one who cannot make connections, repeat an act, nor recall a fact unless provided with the necessary stimuli and environment (like a dog who learns to sit after the immediate receipt of a dog biscuit). Iserbyt reaches the inescapable conclusion that the method perfectly complements the reformers’ agenda for a dumbed-down global workforce. Iserbyt so effectively nails down her case that the debate noticeably shifts to the ethics of implementing such a method on children. The late Christian apologist and theologian, Dr. Francis Schaeffer, when discussing the evils of B.F. Skinner in his little booklet Back to Freedom and Dignity (1972), warned: “Within the Skinnerian system there are no ethical controls; there is no boundary limit to what can be done by the elite in whose hands control resides.” There is intriguing evidence in Iserbyt’s book that the “democratic” society of the Introduction xxvi xxvii near future will be managed via systematized operant conditioning—a startling proposition with ramifications which reach far beyond the scope of simple education reform. Inevitably, questions and controversy will arise after publication of this book. How many popular computer games, programs, and curricula for children are heavily dependent upon this method—a method which requires immediate rewards? To what extent have home school and Christian school leaders, authors, and curriculum companies endorsed and utilized this method? How many child rearing (training) programs, workbooks and seminars are based upon these Skinnerian methods? After reading this book parents will no longer be duped into accepting behaviorist methods—in whatever guise, or by whatever name they come.  

  The drawing out of a person’s innate talents and abilities by imparting the knowledge of languages, scientific reasoning, history, literature, rhetoric, etc.—the channels through which those abilities would flourish and serve. 

 A quantum leap was taken from the above definition to the new, dehumanizing definition used by the experimental psychologists found in An Outline of Educational Psychology (Barnes & Noble: New York, 1934, rev. ed.) by Rudolph Pintner et al. That truly revolutionary definition claims that: learning is the result of modifiability in the paths of neural conduction. Explanations of even such forms of learning as abstraction and generalization demand of the neurones only growth, excitability, conductivity, and modifiability. The mind is the connection-system of man; and learning is the process of connecting. The situation-response formula is adequate to cover learning of any sort, and the really influential factors in learning are readiness of the neurones, sequence in time, belongingness, and satisfying consequences.

 An in-depth understanding of the deplorable situation found in our nation’s schools today is impossible without an understanding of the redefinition in the above statements. Education in the 1 2 3 twenty-first century will, for the majority of youth, be workforce training. Thus, the need for Pavlovian/ Skinnerian methodology based on operant conditioning which, in essence, is at the heart of the above dehumanizing definition of education. This “sowing of the seeds” through redefinition will reap the death of traditional, liberal arts education through the advent of mastery learning, outcome-based education, and direct instruction—all of which will be performance-based and behaviorist.   

 EMILE BY JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU (CHEZ JEAN NEAULME DUCHESNE: A. AMSTERDAM [Paris], 1762) was published. Rousseau’s “Social Contract” presented in Emile influenced the French Revolution. In this book Rousseau promoted child-centered “permissive education” in which a teacher “should avoid strict discipline and tiresome lessons.” Both Rousseau (1712–1788) and Swiss educator Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827) believed that the “whole child” should be educated by “doing,” and that religion should not be a guiding principle in education, a theme we shall see repeated over the next 238 years.  

 WILHELM WUNDT, FOUNDER OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY AND THE FORCE BEHIND ITS dissemination throughout the Western world, was born in 1832 in Neckarau, southern Germany. The following excerpts concerning Wundt’s contribution to modern education are taken from The Leipzig Connection: The Systematic Destruction of American Education by Paolo Lionni and Lance J. Klass3  (Heron Books: Portland, Ore., 1980): To Wundt, a thing made sense and was worth pursuing if it could be measured, quantified, and scientifically demonstrated. Seeing no way to do this with the human soul, he proposed that psychology concern itself solely with experience. As Wundt put it... Karl Marx injected Hegel’s theories with economics and sociology, developing a “philosophy of dialectical materialism.”… (p. 8) From Wundt’s work it was only a short step to the later redefinition of education. Originally, education meant drawing out of a person’s innate talents and abilities by imparting the knowledge of languages, scientific reasoning, history, literature, rhetoric, etc.—the channels through which those abilities would flourish and serve. To the experimental psychologist, however, education became the process of exposing the student to “meaningful” experiences so as to ensure desired reactions: [L]earning is the result of modifiability in the paths of neural conduction. Explanations of even such forms of learning as abstraction and generalization demand of the neurones only growth, excitability, conductivity, and modifiability. The mind is the connection-system of man; and learning is the process of connecting. The situation-response formula is adequate to cover learning of any sort, and the really influential factors in learning are readiness of the neurones, sequence in time, belongingness, and satisfying consequences.4 If one assumes (as did Wundt) that there is nothing there to begin with but a body, a brain, a nervous system, then one must try to educate by inducing sensations in that ner- 2 3 vous system. Through these experiences, the individual will learn to respond to any given stimulus, with the “correct” response. The child is not, for example, thought capable of volitional control over his actions, or of deciding whether he will act or not act in a certain way; his actions are thought to be preconditioned and beyond his control, he is a stimulus response mechanism. According to this thinking, he is his reactions. Wundt’s thesis laid the philosophical basis for the principles of conditioning later developed by Pavlov (who studied physiology in Leipzig in 1884, five years after Wundt had inaugurated his laboratory there) and American behavioral psychologists such as Watson and Skinner; for laboratories and electroconvulsive therapy; for schools oriented more toward socialization of the child than toward the development of intellect; and for the emergence of a society more and more blatantly devoted to the gratification of sensory desire at the expense of responsibility and achievement. (pp. 14–15) 

 EDWARD LEE THORNDIKE WAS BORN AUGUST 31, 1874 IN WILLIAMSBURG, MASSACHUsetts. Thorndike was trained in the new psychology by the first generation of Wilhelm Wundt’s protegés. He graduated from Wesleyan University in 1895 after having studied with Wundtians Andrew C. Armstrong and Charles Judd. He went to graduate school at Harvard and studied under psychologist William James. While at Harvard, Thorndike surprised James by doing research with chickens, testing their behavior, and pioneering what later became known as “animal psychology.” As briefly stated by Thorndike himself, psychology was the “science of the intellect, character, and behavior of animals, including man.”