Inside American Education (7 page)

From an educational standpoint, such information was obviously of limited practical use to eleven-year-old boys, but as
a de-sensitizing experience it made sense—for purposes of brainwashing them into new attitudes. Similarly understandable for such purposes was a movie shown to a sixth-grade class in Kansas. A parent who was present testified:

The first three minutes of the footage was the actual birth of a baby.

It started out with a lady with her legs up and apart, and her feet in stirrups or something like that, with a doctor. It was very graphic and very detailed.

The children in the 6th grade witnessed three actual births. I sensed a state of shock in the little boys and girls that it was all new to see a man doing what a doctor does to deliver a baby.
¹⁸

In a North Carolina classroom, one of the children fainted when shown a childbirth movie.
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In the Kansas classroom, when the parent questioned the nurse who showed the movie in a “health” class, the nurse’s reply was: “Well, someday they need to learn about these things.”
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The more fundamental question was: What gave her the right to usurp the decision as to when that someday was, and to make it the same day for all the children, regardless of their individual emotional development? Clearly, she must have realized that it was a usurpation, for the movie was billed as a film on
vitamins!
Indeed, two-thirds of the movie was on vitamins, though the parent who watched it “did not see any correlation between the live births and the vitamins.”
²¹

Other de-sensitizing movies have shown a man’s genitals,
²²
a naked couple having sex “in living color” and “complete with sound effects,”
²³
and masturbation.
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Less graphic but more personal de-sensitizing techniques have included asking students questions about their own sexual attitudes and behavior.
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A so-called “health” class in a junior high school in Washington state required all the boys to say “vagina” in class and all the girls to say “penis.” When one embarrassed girl was barely able to say it, the teacher “made her get up in front of the class and very loudly say it ten times.”
²⁶

Another common classroom technique is pairing boys and girls, so that each couple jointly studies and discusses sex education material, such as the sexual organs and their parts
²⁷
and/or have conversations with each other using synonyms for
penis, vagina, intercourse, and breast.
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Again, the educational value of such pairing is much less apparent than its value as a de-sensitizing experience.

Death education and sex education are by no means the only special curriculum topics dealt with by brainwashing techniques. The difference between genuine education and psychological conditioning to change attitudes can also be illustrated by so-called “nuclear education,” which deals with political-military issues involving nuclear weapons. Like any other controversial topic, nuclear weapons issues have generated numerous arguments on both sides in books, articles, speeches, and editorials. Moreover, there have long been two opposite schools of thought on the more general question as to whether peace is more likely to be preserved through military deterrence or through disarmament.
²⁹
Leading intellectual and political figures of the past two centuries have argued on either side of this issue.
³⁰

In short, there is an ample literature on both sides for comparing opposing arguments, analyzing their logic, scrutinizing their evidence, and otherwise treating this as an
educational
topic. Instead, psychological conditioning has been widely used to lead children toward the pre-selected choice of disarmament. For example, tenth-grade children were introduced to the subject by the showing of a movie called “Hiroshima/ Nagasaki”:

In grisly detail these generally well-off upper middle-class kids were obliged to observe Japanese women and children being incinerated by the fire storm set in motion by the dropping of nuclear bombs. The youngsters sat riveted in their seats. Sobbing could be heard. By the conclusion the general mood of the class was well expressed by an emotional young lady who asked: “Why did we do it?” The teacher responded by saying, “We did it once; we can do it again. Whether these weapons of destruction are used depends on you.” So began the unit on nuclear weapons.
³¹

Note that the girl’s question was never answered, but instead was side-stepped and used to lead toward anti-nuclear activism. As a study of various nuclear education programs concluded:

They encourage kids to “talk their hearts out.” But they do not encourage an appreciation of the historical events leading to that tragic bombing in 1945.
³²

In short, this subject—like others—is treated as an emotional rather than an educational experience. The consequences of emotionalizing nuclear education, sex education, and many other subjects are not simply that an incorrect conclusion may be reached, or even that general intellectual development may be neglected. There are psycho-somatic effects as well.

A father in Oregon testified that his daughter required medical treatment as a result of tension created by such programs.
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One young woman recalled, years later, the nightmares she had after viewing a movie shown in a high school course.
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Many parents, doctors, and teachers have reported children bursting into tears in class during psychological-conditioning sessions
³⁵
or after coming home.
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Another parent reported that physicians had seen students with such symptoms as nightmares, stomach aches, vomiting, sleeplessness, and stuttering after they were subjected to a program with the high-sounding name “Exemplary Center for Reading Instruction.”
³⁷

A research assistant who viewed numerous school movies, as part of the preparation for this book, likewise reported that she had trouble sleeping afterwards—even though she is a mature, well-educated woman who has lived in three countries and speaks two languages. What she had been seeing were movies routinely shown to students in American elementary and secondary schools.

Isolation and Cross-Examination

The success of brainwashing depends not only on the stress brought to bear on the targeted individuals but also on the extent to which their resistance can be undermined. Isolation—disconnecting them from the psychological support of those who share their values, or who are tied to them personally—is one way of undermining their resistance.

Totalitarian regimes often hold political prisoners in isolation, but even such regimes can find it excessively costly to do so when large numbers of people must be brainwashed simultaneously.
An ingenious solution was found under Mao in China: The victim would be given a preliminary interrogation and then released with a “warning that it is a criminal offense to tell anybody—his friends, his relatives, or even his wife—that he is under examination by the police.” Any individual who violated this warning was subject to a long prison sentence, even if he was never convicted of the offense for which he was being investigated.
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This situation produced the desired psychological isolation and emotional tension, without the government’s incurring costs for incarceration.

Even an accompanying physical threat, such as imprisonment, is not always essential. Richard Wright, leading black writer of the 1940s, left a haunting sketch of an internal Communist Party “trial” he witnessed in Chicago, where a fellow Party member confessed to false charges after a long and skillful presentation of the Party’s worldwide struggle left him psychologically isolated.
³⁹

The emotional vulnerability of school children makes psychological isolation easier to achieve. A witness testifying at U.S. Department of Education hearings reported observing the treatment of a first-grade child who failed to have his values re-shaped to the teacher’s liking:

The teacher then asked how many of the students agreed with him. By the tone of her voice, they knew no one should raise a hand, so no one did. The little boy was so humiliated by the peer pressure and class manipulation by the teacher that he began to cry.
⁴⁰

A similar manipulation of peers against a recalcitrant was discovered by another parent in another school.

Mr. Davis, the teacher, would bring up a controversial moral issue, such as premarital sex or homosexuality, and call on members of the class to defend their positions on the issue. He would call upon those with opposite moral beliefs from Jon, thus exerting peer pressure on Jon to change his moral views. Jon was consistently called on up to 23 times per class session to defend his values before his friends with opposing views. When Jon mentioned to Mr. Davis that he was calling
on him more than anyone else, Mr. Davis just said, “Oh”, and continued calling on him.
⁴¹

In yet another school, a parent testified, a junior high school girl “was required to defend her religion and values under extreme ridicule from the group leader and from her peers.”
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Isolation from peers is only part of the process. In one way or another, students must also be emotionally isolated from the support of parents. Some psychological-conditioning programs have the children sit in a circle, called a “magic circle,” where everything that is said there is confidential.
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Some programs explicitly tell the children that they are not to tell their parents what is said or done.
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Moreover, as will be seen later, the undermining and discrediting of parents is a recurring theme in the most disparate programs—whether called “sex education,” “transactional analysis for tots,” or called by many other labels. While it is parents who are undermined directly, it is the child who is thus isolated to face the brainwashing alone.

Stripping Away Defenses

In Maoist China, where the term “brainwashing” originated, an important part of the process was “the writing of autobiographies and diaries,” which were then discussed by the group to which the individual belonged. This was not a matter of acquiring facts, but of discovering psychological vulnerabilities and putting the individual on the defensive. As one individual who had been through this process described it:

A straight narrative of your past life was not enough. For every action you described, you had to give its motive in detail. Your awakened criticism had to be apparent in every sentence. You had to say why you smoked, why you drank, why you had social connections with certain people—why? why? why?
⁴⁵

Many irrelevant details, once they became “public property” in the discussion group, could then be used by the director of the group to probe for “sore spots” at which the individual was emotionally vulnerable—and that was very relevant to the brainwashing process.
⁴⁶
George Orwell described a similar technique in his novel
1984
.
⁴⁷
This same technique is widely
used by psychological-conditioning programs in American public schools.

A seventh-grade “health” class in Corvallis, Oregon, for example, required “a private journal to be kept by the student on his feelings”—not events, but feelings. Nor was this to be a traditional journal for such traditional educational purposes as developing better use of the language. As the mother of one of these children testified: “No efforts were made to correct grammar, punctuation, sentence structure or continuity of thought.”
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Neither the keeping of diaries nor the disregard of their academic quality was peculiar to this school. Such diaries, focussing on feelings, including feelings about confidential family matters, are common around the country.
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Utter disregard of the spelling, grammar, or punctuation in these diaries is likewise a pattern widely reported from around the country.
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In short, this is not an educational activity but psychological conditioning.

In fourth-grade and sixth-grade classes in Tucson, diaries were assigned with the specific instructions that the student “could write about her personal problems and family relationships even if they were bad because the teacher is her friend and would not tell.”
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Similar assurances of confidentiality
from parents
were made in New Hampshire, though the sharing of these diaries in the group meant that family confidences were betrayed to strangers.
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There is no special program to which such practices are confined. While these diaries were assigned in “health” classes in Oregon and New Hampshire, in various other places they have also been assigned in history, English, and social studies classes.
⁵³

In the Orwellian Newspeak widely found among advocates of psychological-conditioning programs, assignments creating pressure or compulsion to reveal personal and family matters are referred to as an
opportunity
—for example, “an opportunity to generate meaningful information about themselves which can be shared with others.”
⁵⁴
Obviously, people always have an opportunity to reveal anything they choose, to anyone they choose, at any time they choose. Psychological conditioning programs do not provide opportunity but pressure or compulsion. A leading book on the so-called “values clarification” approach to attitude-changing likewise refers to giving the student “the opportunity to publicly affirm and explain his
stand on various values issues.” During this “opportunity,” the teacher “may ask the student any question about any aspect of his life and values.”
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All this is called “helping students get acquainted with each other on a more personal basis.”
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