The following is a chapter from the new book I have been working on. Let me know what you think please.
As
briefly mentioned in the last chapter, B.F. Skinner wrote on the
post-scientific view of man that if the environment could be changed human
behavior would change with it. This came to be known as operant conditioning.
This was based on Ivan Pavlov’s discovery on learning which was classical
conditioning. This is the idea that behavior could be trained through stimulus
response mechanisms. What Pavlov discovered was that a dog would begin to
associate food with the sound of the bell and repeat the same behavior when
simply presented with the sound of the bell. Unfortunately, it has been discovered, that if
thoroughly broken-down, man responds to stimulus response mechanisms in much
the same way. Much of our education system has been based on techniques of
negative and positive reinforcement.
In
her book “The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America” Charlotte Iserbyt explains
that our education system, in the 1960’s, began the work of modifying the
behavior of our children as opposed to educating them[1]. The purpose was to create
compliant citizens that generally agreed with government policy and global
governance. Competition of free thought and ideas, and the expression of
freewill were not on the agenda. Instead, the standardization of human behavior
and the elimination of belief systems which opposed government goals were. With
classical conditioning techniques, or stimulus response mechanisms, social
science and educators alike saw the potential for developing the type of human
they saw useful as opposed to free thinkers schooled in the ways of rugged
individualism. Professor John Goodlad, author of the book “The Public Purpose
of Education and Schooling,” is quoted in Iserbyt’s book as saying the
following.
“The most controversial issues
of the twenty-first century will pertain to the ends and means of modifying
human behavior and who shall determine them. The first educational question
will not be what knowledge is of the most worth? but what kinds of human beings
do we wish to produce? The possibilities virtually defy our imagination.”
Clearly
there has been enormous success in accomplishing this agenda. The American male
has been virtually wiped out and replaced with the hipster generation. Kids in
public school are graduating believing that there are more than two genders. In
fact, seventy-seven percent of Democrats with a higher education degree believe
that gender is not determined at birth.[2] Furthermore, forty-four
percent of America’s largest generation, the millennials, claim that they would
prefer socialism over capitalism.[3] Imagine that, just what
the social engineers had hoped for!
This
transformation of public education began in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. John Dewey[4], known today as the father
of modern education, was one of the most influential figures in transforming
America’s education system. Dewey was a Fabian Socialist [5]who believed there was a need
to move away from a traditional education where reading, arithmetic and writing
were the focus[6]
as society progressed into the industrial age. He saw the old systems and
institutions that revolved around the family and the church as crumbling and
outdated, not able to fulfill the needs of the new developing society. Science,
the arts, and nature learning would take precedence. Education should focus on
socializing the student as opposed to educating them to be free thinkers. Dewey
foresaw that a public education system, where education was free, and children
were guided by trained teachers, had the potential to create a system where the
children themselves would be aiding in the creation of an equalitarian society.
Again,
here we are in the early twenty first century and American students from
elementary education in free public schools to top tier universities are
advocating for socialism. They are being educated to believe it is their job to
create a world based on the principles of equality, not liberty. Professor
Goodlad’s question of what kind of student should be produced is being
answered. They are creating a generation of social activists ready to take to
the streets to make the final push towards a collective society. Referring back to the list of forty-five
communist goals it is readily apparent that using our children and the school
systems to push their agenda has been the plan.
17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
18. Gain control of all student newspapers.
19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack[7].
In 1932,
William Foster, national chairman of the Communist Party of the United States
wrote the book “Toward Soviet America”[8], where he described his vision of American
education, which is frightening as it is apparent that eliminating all forms of
American patriotism is on the agenda.
"A U.S. Department of Education; implementation of a scientific materialist philosophy; studies revolutionized, being cleansed of religious, patriotic and other features of the bourgeois ideology; students taught on the basis of Marxian dialectical materialism, internationalism and general ethics of a new socialist society; present obsolete methods of teaching will be superseded by a scientific pedagogy. The whole basis and organization of capitalist science will be revolutionized. Science will become materialistic, hence truly scientific. God will be banished from the laboratories as well as from the schools[9]."
We
have seen this come to fruition on many levels as students have been
professionally organized across the country to protest what they perceive as
inequality when it comes to the issue of race, gender, and wealth. Protest
movements such as Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter are made up
primarily of college aged leftists who have had a constant barrage of Marxist
propaganda pumped into their soft heads since first entering the public
education system. At the time of this writing, February 2018, high school
students were being organized to protest for gun control in much the same way.
This
is the result of stimulus response, or operant conditioning. The education
system has been transformed into one where compliance with social norms has
been rewarded with positive reinforcement and undesirable traits have been
rooted out. Positive reinforcement simply means rewarding desirable behavior
immediately after the behavior is performed. This can be done socially with
verbal praise or with candy and stickers for elementary school children. In
1969 the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare released a booklet
entitled Reducing Behavior Problems: An Operant Conditioning Guide for Children[10] where operant
conditioning is defined as the following-
“In its simplest form, operant conditioning involves
the systematic use of consequences to strengthen and weaken behaviors under
specified stimulus conditions. Operant behavior is strengthened by some
consequences called reinforcers and weakened by other consequences called
punishers. Withdrawal of reinforcing consequences will also weaken behavior.
This procedure is called extinction[11].”
Going
along with Dewey’s vision, children in America are being trained, not educated,
to be good, obedient socialists. The effectiveness of this type of behavior
modification, if started at an early age, can be very effective as demonstrated
by the mindset and lack of any patriotism in college students today. The same
report cited above also stated that the most effective stimulus is the social
praising of students for exhibiting appropriate behavior. Imagine students
being socially praised for demonstrating attitudes that favor the socialist
controlled education systems teachings. That is exactly what has occurred. In
fact, a student’s attitudes can be just as easily changed through negative
reinforcers as they can through positive reinforcers.
Looking again to B.F
Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity[12] we can see that people
can be easily controlled through stimulus response mechanisms. In other words,
people’s attitudes can be changed and brought into alignment with the
collective using ridicule, peer pressure and the demonization of their belief
systems.
“People who get along together well under the mild
contingencies of approval and disapproval are controlled as effectively as (and
in many ways more effectively than) the citizens of a police state. Orthodoxy
controls through the establishment of rules, but the mystic is no freer because
the contingencies which have shaped his behavior are more personal or
idiosyncratic. Those who work productively because of the reinforcing value of
what they produce are under the sensitive and powerful control of the products.
Those who learn in the natural environment are under a form of control as
powerful as any control exerted by a teacher[13].
What Skinner
is saying here is that there is a social desire to fit in with peers and a fear
of not being able to is a great motivator for behavioral change. Our public
schools have become bastions for anti-American attitudes and in many cases
pro-American attitudes are viciously frowned upon and attacked as America is
often presented as a selfish, white supremacist nation. Students from patriotic
families may feel forced to keep their opinions quiet as they are sure to be
ridiculed and put on the spot by students who are rewarded for expressing
socialistic views.
The Manual on
Psychopolitics addresses this issue by describing how ridicule and pressure can
change a person’s loyalties to that of his enemy.
“The changing of loyalties consists, in its primary
step, with the eradication of existing loyalties. This can be done in one of
two ways. First, by demonstrating that previously existing loyalties have
brought perilous physical circumstances such as imprisonment, lack of
recognition, duress, privation and secondly, by eradicating the personality
itself. The first is accomplished by a steady and continuous indoctrination of
the individual that his previous loyalties have been granted to an unworthy
source[14].”
As part of this there is the creation of a state of
mind in the individual, by actually placing him under duress, and then
furbishing him with false evidence to demonstrate that the target of his
previous loyalties is itself, the source of the duress[15].
What Beria is
saying is that demonization and public shaming of a person’s beliefs is a
powerful tool of behavioral change. Constant exposure to this type of negative
reinforcer, especially at a young age can have lasting effects on the psyche of
an individual. This conclusion, given the state of American youth today, must
be taken seriously as this type of behavioral modification is still occurring in
our public schools.
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