- Matt - This article is dynamite, and I
really appreciate your sending it to me. I will print it out, and will
forward it. I read every single word and wept. Such tragedy; really brings
tears to one's eyes. The people inflicting this emotional and mental
torture on little children are pure evil. And to think that the federal
government provides them with our money to inflict the torture under the
guise of scientific research based reading instruction!
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- And, so few good parents have the
faintest idea...
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- Thank you, Matt, so much...
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- Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt
- http://www.deliberatedumbingdowbn.com
- http://www.americandeception.com
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Little Manchurian Candidates
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By Matt James
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"One ring to rule them all, one
ring to find them,
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One ring to bring them all, and in
the darkness bind them."
--Tolkien
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- Our six-year-old daughter was so
excited to start school. At our first parent-teacher conference, Barb and
I expected to hear the usual compliments and heartwarming anecdotes about
our bright little angel. From our experiences with activities like T-ball
and soccer, or dance and music recitals, we had learned that parents
always say nice things about the children of others. If the compliments
are sometimes unrealistic or excessive, well, parenting is tough work. We
can all use the encouragement.
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- I guess we had been spoiled.
Jenny's teacher got right to the point. She had some negatives to
address. For one thing, Jenny was struggling with her reading. The
teacher confessed that one of the most difficult parts of her job was
deflating parents with the news that their children were simply not
exceptional. Jenny was, at best, an average reader. She was not an
Eagle; she was a Pony. Our job was to learn to enjoy her as a 40-watt
bulb rather than a bright light. Was it my imagination, or did this
middle-aged matron's sweet smile contain a trace of malice as she related
these tidings?
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- I was confused by this assessment
of Jenny's reading abilities because it simply didn't fit in with her
prior history. She had a love affair with books for her entire
childhood. We have a photograph of her at 11 months of age staring
earnestly at the contents of an open book. I remember reading to her when
she was three. I stopped for some reason, but she continued the
narration. She knew her stories by heart. Like many other children,
Jenny had learned to read at home. She was a bookworm, and she was an
experienced and passionate reader before she ever started first grade.
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- The teacher went on to explain
that Jenny cried too much at school and that we needed to correct this
problem with the appropriate discipline. Barb and I exchanged glances but
didn't argue. We were in shock.
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- I was curious about the crying.
Jenny was such a happy child. I asked her that night what made her sad at
school. Expecting to hear about something on the playground, I was
surprised by her answer. The listening-hour stories made her sad:
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- Once upon a time there was a
daddy duck with seven ducklings. They ranged in age down to the youngest
(who reminded Jenny of a first grader). The daddy was mean. One day he
demanded that all his children learn three tasks, such as running,
swimming, and diving. If a duckling was unable to master all of the
tasks, he would be banished from the family to live with the chickens.
The youngsters struggled under the cruel eye of their father. When it
came to diving, the first grader floundered and was sent away to live with
the chickens.
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- This was the story Jenny related,
in her own words, as an example. I heard it told a second time several
years later, by my cousin Nancy, as a sample of objectionable curriculum.
We were impressed with the coincidence, since our families resided in
different states.
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- Jenny told me she also cried over
stories in her readers. They made her sad and frustrated in some way.
What a mess! In one evening we had found out that Jenny was unhappy at
school, that her teacher thought she was a poor reader and a dim bulb, and
that she heard mean tales during listening-hour that I wouldn't repeat to
hardened convicts. What in the name of heaven was going on at this
school?
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- I was determined to get to the
bottom of things. Since they didn't send books home with students in the
younger grades, I went to the school the following day and spent a couple
of hours reviewing the elementary readers. As I read, my eyes opened
wider and wider. I had assumed the purpose of the reading curriculum was
to stimulate the juvenile imagination and teach reading skills. Instead,
I saw material saturated with, to borrow another parent's language, "an
unadvertised agenda promoting parental alienation, loss of identity and
self-confidence, group-dependence, passivity, and anti-intellectualism."
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- I once daydreamed through a
basic psychology class in medical school which described the work of
Pavlov and B.F Skinner in the twentieth century. Their conclusions were
that animal (and human) behaviors can be encouraged or discouraged by
associating them with pleasure or pain. This is such an obvious fact of
nature. It is amazing that anyone would bother to prove it with
experimentation, as if the carrot and the stick haven't been used since
time began.
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- In behaviorist experiments
various stimuli, such as food or electrical shocks, were used as rewards
or deterrents. Over time, due to animal memory, a pattern of behavior
could be established without food or shocks coming into play. This
educational or training process is called "conditioning." With enough
conditioning, the dog will stop chasing cars.
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- As I read the stories and poems
in Jenny's readers, I was astonished to discover that they were alive, in
their own way, with the theories and practices of these dead scientists.
But the animals to be trained weren't dogs or rats. They were our young
students. Pleasure and pain signals were embedded into the reading
material in a consistent way. Given the vicarious nature of the reading
experience, and by identifying with the protagonists in the stories, it
was our first graders who were "learning" certain attitudes and behaviors.
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- When a child-figure in the
stories split away from his group, for example, he would get rained on,
his toes would get cold in the snow, or he would experience some other
form of discomfort or torment. Similar material was repeated ad
infinitum. Through their reading, our students would feel the stinging
rain and the pain of freezing toes. They would learn the lesson like one
of Pavlov's dogs: avoid the pain, stay with the group.
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- The stories in the readers
consistently associated individual initiative with emotional or physical
pain. Consider the example of the little squirrel whose wheel falls off
his wagon. When he tries to replace it, the wagon rides with an awkward
and embarrassing bump, noticeable to his friends, who then tease him about
it. Another attempt to repair the wheel results in an accident, with
bruising and bleeding and more humiliation. The cumulative effect of this
and similar story lines, given the vicarious nature of the reading
experience, would be to discourage initiative and reduce self-confidence
in the first grader.
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- Animal dads, moms, and
grandparents were portrayed over and over in various combinations as mean,
stupid, unreliable, bungling, impotent or incompetent. Relationships with
their children were almost always dysfunctional; communication and
reciprocal trust were non-existent. A toxic mom or dad, for instance,
might have stepped in to help our youthful squirrel repair his wagon, only
to make matters worse and wreak emotional havoc in the process. Jenny's
heart would be lacerated by stories which constantly portrayed
parent/child relationships as strained, cruel, or distant. I could see
her crying with hurt or frustration.
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- It occurred to me that over the
long run, at some level of consciousness, our daughter would have to hold
us accountable for permitting her to be tortured in school. Logically,
Barb and I had to be stupid, unreliable, uncaring, or impotent, just like
the parents in the books. By sending her to school, we were validating
the message in her readers, contributing significantly to the parental
alienation curriculum. Continuing in her school-based reading series,
Jenny's relationship with us would have become tarnished or eroded, and an
element of bitterness or cynicism might have crept into her personality.
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- I borrow the term
"anti-intellectualism" to describe another dominant theme in the readers.
Many of the compositions were, essentially, word salad. They lacked
intrinsic interest, coherence, or continuity, and they often demonstrated
a sort of anti-rationality. The stories and the corresponding questions
seemed to require the student to suspend the natural operations of his
intellect, such as the desire to make sense out of things or the impulse
to be curious. Under this yoke, a student could learn to hate reading or
even thought itself.
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- The following "story" and
"comprehension" questions are representative of the anti-intellectualism
that I found in the readers:
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- Once upon a time there was a
little green mouse who hopped after a tiger onto a yellow airplane. The
plane turned into a big red bird in flight, and the mouse turned into a
blue pumpkin. The pumpkin fell to the ground and its seeds grew into
pots and pans. Blah, blah, blah
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- 1) "What color was the mouse?"
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- 2) "Why do mice turn into
pumpkins?"
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- 3) "How do seeds grow?"
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- I can see children getting
frustrated over material like this. It is debatable as to which facet of
the exercise is more onerous, the reading or the "comprehension." I
almost incline to the latter. Among other concerns, I wonder if it is a
good thing to pressure children to respond to stupid or unanswerable
questions. Such a process would lead to passivity and a loss of
confidence, to a little engine that couldn't.
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- According to Pavlov and B.F.
Skinner, repetition of unpleasant reading experiences would turn a student
off to the reading activity. Predictable consequences would be a child
who hates reading and loses out on vast intellectual benefits and
development. In addition, his reading failure would tax his
self-confidence, and he could be branded with one of society's popular
labels such as dyslexia.
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- I considered Jenny's reading
struggles in the context of performance expectations as well as grading
and comparisons with other children. It seemed as if she faced a nasty
dilemma: force herself to read alienating material, or disengage and then
disappoint parents, teachers and self. What an impossible predicament for
a young child. Once sunny and blue, the skies had turned dark and stormy
for our happy little girl whose only offense had been to attend her
friendly neighborhood school at the innocent age of six.
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- It has occurred to me that the
cause of America's illiteracy crisis has been discovered. It is the
reading curriculum in our schools. Unfortunately, the damage to children
appears to extend way beyond reading failure. One wonders if the hidden
agenda in the readers has created our victim culture, a generation of
withdrawn and resentful children, alienated from themselves, their
parents, society, books and ideas.
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- I was reminded of the plight of
our neighbors. The father and mother were loving, dedicated parents. He
was an accountant and she was a homemaker and community leader. They were
nice people, and so were their children. The two teenagers were bright
but got poor grades and hated school. They hung out with the crowd and
participated in the kind of self-destructive behaviors that are
commonplace today. I asked these young people why they would behave in
ways which would cause pain for themselves or their loved ones. They
smiled quizzically and professed not to know. Maybe the ideas that moved
them truly were subconscious.
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- We are all familiar with kids
like this (Our own kids are kids like this, or they come too close for
comfort). They spend a lot of time "doing nothing" with like-minded
friends. Passive-aggressive with suppressed individuality, they all seem
cut from the same mold. Self mutilation with tattoos and body armor is
almost universal. Some of their groups are virtually masochistic cults.
Sadism is the other side of the masochism coin.
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- That so many of these
dysfunctional teenagers come from loving homes and neat families is
inexplicable and shocking, until you realize that they have all been
tortured together in school since the first grade. They are a batch of
little Manchurian Candidates with attitude, victims of the obscure
behaviorism that I found, and that others have found before and since, in
school readers.
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- Barb and I had seen some
perplexing changes in Jenny's reading since she started in first grade.
For one thing, she had stopped reading her favorite books and stories at
home. Before starting school, she had feasted on Grimm's Fairy Tales.
Although she still begged us to read these to her, she now explained that
she was not supposed to read them herself, according to her understanding
from her teacher, because they contained big words and content in advance
of her abilities. Barb and I, holding our tongues, exchanged tortured
grimaces and cross-eyed glances.
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- When reviewing the school
readers, I had noticed an impoverished vocabulary, composed mostly of
three and four letter words. I brought this up with the teacher. She
explained that the readers were integrated into a district policy that no
more than five hundred new words be introduced to students during any
grade level. The idea was to protect children from the dizzying and
confusing effects of an overabundance of words and ideas. I nodded as if
I understood, but I didn't really get it.
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- Barb and I had clearly used the
wrong approach with Jenny. We had allowed her to read anything she wanted
and had provided her with a flourishing home library. Furthermore, we had
encouraged her to run around in the grassy meadows and on the sandy
beaches. She must have collided with great numbers of unfamiliar words
and ideas, as well as a perilous diversity of flowers and sea shells. It's
a wonder she survived at all.
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- We considered the various
elements of Jenny's brief experience in first grade. She had a clueless
teacher. She was regressing in her reading skills, vocabulary, and
enthusiasm. She was being indoctrinated with character destroying
qualities like passivity and group dependence. Her intellectual
development was being stunted and she was being bombarded with a
curriculum of parental alienation.
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- Judging by her crying in the
classroom, she was part of a captive audience being repeatedly exposed to
painful stimuli. To put it plainly, she was the victim of ongoing torture
and cruelty. Along with her classmates, she was becoming, as one of her
school poems pointed out, "Small, small, small, just a tiny, tiny, tiny
piece of it all."
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- _____
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- In our state at that time,
compulsory education began at the age of eight. Jenny was not obliged by
law to attend school. With our various concerns, we pulled her out of
school while we tried to figure out what to do.
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