Pages
xvi-xvii: Another
milestone on my journey was an in-service training session entitled
“Innovations in Education.” A retired teacher, who understood what was
happening in education, paid for me to attend. This training program
developed by Professor Ronald Havelock of the University of Michigan and
funded by the United States Office of Education taught teachers and
administrators how to “sneak in” controversial methods of teaching and
“innovative” programs.
These
“innovative” programs
included health education, sex education, drug and alcohol
education, death education, critical thinking education, etc. Since then I have always
found it interesting that these controversial school programs are the only
ones that have the word “education” attached to them! I don’t
recall—until recently—”math ed.,” “reading ed .,“ history
ed.,” or “science ed.” A good rule of thumb for teachers, parents and
school board members interested in academics and traditional values is to
question any subject that has the word “education” attached to it.
This
in-service training literally “blew my mind.” I have never recovered
from it. The presenter (change agent) taught us how to “manipulate” the
taxpayers/parents into accepting controversial programs. He explained how to
identify the “resisters” in the community and how to get around their
resistance. He instructed us in how to go to the highly respected members of
the community—those with the Chamber of Commerce, Rotary, Junior League,
Little League, YMCA, Historical Society, etc.—to manipulate them into
supporting the controversial/non-academic programs and into bad-mouthing
the resisters. Advice was also given as to how to get the media to support
these programs.
I
left this training—with my very valuable textbook,
The
Change Agent’s Guide to
Innovations
in Education,
under
my arm—feeling very
sick
to my stomach and in complete denial over that in which I had been involved.
This was not the nation in which I grew up; something seriously disturbing
had happened between 1953 when I left the United States and 1971 when I
returned.
Orchestrated
Consensus
In
retrospect, I had just found out that the United States was engaged in war.
People write important books about war: books documenting the battles
fought, the names of the generals involved, the names of those who fired the
first shot. This book is simply a history book about another kind of war:
-
one fought using psychological methods;
-
a one-hundred-year war;
-
a different, more deadly war than any in which our country has ever
been involved;
-
a war about which the average American hasn’t the foggiest idea.
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).
Page
120:
RONALD
G. HAVELOCK’S THE CHANGE AGENT’S
GUIDE TO INNOVATION IN EDUCATION
was published by Educational
Technology Publishing: Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1973. This
Guide,
which contains authentic
case studies on how to sneak in controversial curricula and teaching
strategies, or get them adopted by naive school boards, is the educator’s
bible for bringing about change in our children’s values. Havelock’s
Guide
was
funded by the U.S. Office of Education and the Department of Health,
Education and Welfare, and has continued to receive funding well into the
1980s. It has been republished in a second edition in 1995 by the same
publishers.
[Ed.
Note: Why is it that the change agents’ plans and their tools to
“transform” our educational system
never
change, while parents
and teachers are told, repeatedly, that they must be ready and willing
to
change?]
Page
296: NCES
maintains a series of
Educational
Records Series handbooks
containing the computer coding numbers, categories, and specific pieces of
information gathered and recorded about anything connected with
schools—including
Handbook
VIII: The Community. This
handbook, while having its contents merged into later versions of others
in the series, originally contained the coding for all community “quality
of life” information, including factors producing socio-economic status
data and a chapter entitled “Attitudes, Values and Beliefs.” This
handbook provided the vehicle for profiling a “community”—defined as a
“school district” by the Census Mapping Project—for planning of
programs by Community Education practitioners.
(Community
Education’s Effect on Quality of Life
by
W. James Giddis, Diana Page, and George L. Mailberger [Center for Community
Education at the University of West Florida: Pensacola,
Fla., 1981], p. 8.)
Profiling
a community for “Attitudes, Values and Beliefs” is useful for those
education change agents steeped in the methods taught in Ronald J.
Havelock’s
The
Change Agents Guide to Innovation in Education,
regularly
taught at the National Training Laboratory’s programs and other
leadership training seminars for teachers, administrators, board members,
elected or appointed officials, and other “first-level adopters” of new
education reform/restructuring proposals. The data gathered through the
Census Mapping Project, among other things, assists in identifying those in
a local community defined as “resisters” to controversial programs.
Efforts
to require “accountability” based on “measurements of teacher
quality” have much broader consequences than most policy makers have
imagined. Defining terms can lead to understanding that some recent reform
efforts are based on faulty premises, to say the least.]