The International Bullshit Brigade: On Tour!
I recently attended an educational conference here in North
Africa and was intrigued by one of the presentations offered by a
gentleman working for the US Department of state from the local US Embassy
which was entitled 'Critical Thinking in the Classroom'.
My interest was initially quite innocent as I had taught
English lessons to students and had always thought critical thinking was almost
a seditious act in today’s world of political lies and media programming. I
chatted with the fellow shortly before the start of the presentation and
explained how, in a recent lesson using a student book which suggested various
ways to change things about the local environment such as using social media or
writing letters to local officials, my wish to encourage ‘critical thinking’ in
students, could lead to increased citizen activism and a general improvement in
the democratic process.
He smiled and nodded as if he agreed, and little more was
said and no kindling of dark suspicion of his motives occurred to me at this stage.
The presentation began with a pretty standard ‘discuss with
your partner’ moment, where we had to talk about instances of using
‘critical thinking’ in our own classrooms.
I turned to a chap sat next to me and mentioned my recent
adventures using a certain student text book, and I jokingly mentioned that
despite eliciting various local issues in the city such as a lack of
green-spaces and water pollution and ways we could attempt to involve ourselves
as citizens such as protests and social media campaigns, we stopped short of
flying the red-flag starting the revolution.
And the thought occurred to me, if ‘critical thinking’ as I
understood it, was necessarily, to understand injustice and the corruption of
society, then how would a gentleman from the US Embassy handle such a topic?
Changing minds....Why?
Soon enough, the deception became apparent, and I settled
myself down to the realisation that I was about to witness a session of
indoctrination into a particularly pernicious form of mind control which is
prevalent in High Schools all over the United States, particularly the KIPP
(Knowledge is Power Program) High schools throughout the United states, which
the speaker trumpeted as a ‘critical thinking’ school and also a website
was alluded to: changingminds.org.
Some weeks following the presentation I investigated the
website recommendation. Changingminds.org, whose tag line
is, at the time of writing ‘How we change what others think, feel, believe and
do.’ among other things offers psychological advice on how to change
people’s thinking. This seemed to be the crux of the speaker's thesis, that we
must ‘change’ what people think so they think what we tell them to think. There
are many techniques suggested by the changing minds website, among which are
the following particularly duplicitous and unethical suggestions:
Persuasion principles
Much of persuasion and other forms of changing minds is based on a relatively small number of principles. If you can understand the principles, then you can invent your own techniques. It thus makes sense to spend time to understand these principles (persuaded yet?).
- Assumption: Acting as if something is true often makes it true.
- Authority: Use your authority and others will obey.
- Closure: Close the door of thinking and the deal is done.
- Confusion: A drowning person will clutch at a straw. So will a confused one.
- Contrast: We notice and decide by difference between two things, not absolute measures
- Deception: Convincing by trickery.
- Dependence: If you are dependent on me, I can use this as a lever to persuade you.
- Distraction: If I distract your attention, I can then slip around your guard.
- Framing: Meaning depends on context. So control the context.
- Hurt and Rescue: Make them uncomfortable then throw them a rope.
- Obligation: Creating a duty that must be discharged.
- Perception: Perception is reality. So manage it.
- Pull: Create attraction that pulls people in.
- Push: I give you no option but to obey.
- Repetition: If something happens often enough, I will eventually be persuaded.
- Trust: If I trust you, I will accept your truth and expose my vulnerabilities.
- Unthinking: Go by the subconscious route.
So we can see what kind of vision has been created for
education policy both domestically and abroad. One which advocates changing
students thinking, by fair means or foul. But what kind of ‘thoughts’ do they
want students to have?
I also took a look into the KIPP charter programme being
rolled out across America and seen as a model of good practice by the speaker.
The organisation was set up in 1994 by Yale graduate and possible Bonesman,
David Levin along with Michael Feinberg. As of writing they have 144
schools in 20 states with a total or around 50,000 students, from largely poor
and disenfranchised urban areas and a result of this has charitable status.
Weaponised charity
I looked into this ‘charitable’ educational foundation and
discovered that is was financed by several large social engineering foundations
including the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation (3rd world eugenics programme), National
Geographic Education foundation (pushing the global warming scam) Goldman
Sachs (international financial fraud).
Online educational journal ‘Schools Matter’ recently
reported in its December 2013 issue, how one hundred grade 8-9 year old year 5
students, were forced to sit on the floor a single classroom for one week until
they had ‘earned’ their desks. According to a teacher, students were forced to
sit on the floor the whole length of the day, from Monday until Friday, until
they were split into groups and sent to their respective classes. The length of
the class day at KIPP schools is usually from 7:30 am until 5 pm, but in this
instance the new students attended half days initially, this is still the best
part of four hours in a state of discomfort for a period four days. This
exercise somewhat makes me think of some of the images which were leaked into
the media of Guantanamo bay prison in Cuba, where part of the prisoners’ brutal
psychological conditioning involved being placed in positions of extreme
discomfort for many hours of the day. This clearly is a favoured method to
effect a subtle transformation. ‘Changing minds’ indeed.
Apparently these students were forced to sit on the
floor until they could follow instructions. A teacher present reports how the
students seem to become frustrated and other staff had instilled fear in the
students that they might not pass. Thus promoting a sense of uncertainty and
fear which is the key base ingredient in any mind control process. The teacher
present even describes it as a ‘mind game’. The method of course is completely
illegal and is a highly unethical shortcut to ensure good classroom discipline.
But at what cost? Some educational commentators describe KIPP schools as
‘military style boot camps, with drill sergeants’. What is more alarming is
that the majority of students at these schools are children of colour, which
has led some to describe this educational system as a new kind of apartheid.
The KIPP schools seem to have generated rumours and tales of brutality, tension and victimisation. Mike Feinberg, the co-creator of the KIPP programme, was reported to have thrown a chair threw a plate glass window in rage at an unsatisfactory apology from a student (Mathews 2009, 235-239). One wonders why the man was allowed to remain in a position of care with young children with such an explosive and uncontrollable temperament. One suspects the reason is he was a place man rolling out a government agenda, and as such, these people are beyond reproach and accountability.
The schools have a ‘no excuses’ policy, and any infractions are treat with in a summary manner, with offenders ritually ostracised from other students and forced to wear a label with the word ‘miscreant’ on it. Other students are punished if they are caught talking or communicating in any way with these students, either in school or out of school, and other students have a duty to inform or report on any students breaking these injunctions. So a culture of mutual espionage, surveillance and insecurity exists within the student body, which is only assuaged by total obedience to the rules.
Commentators have claimed that psychological this system creates ‘learned helplessness’ the same behaviour exhibited by beaten or tortured animals. The teachers similarly exist at the school under what one might term a state of duress with a 65 hour week including 2 hours a night of telephone homework assistance and the staff attrition rate is reportedly extremely high. Much of the information relating to KIPP I have cited has been gleaned from the Schools Matter website, and I will quote the following directly which relates specific examples of abuse carried out at KIPP schools. This remember, is apparently the model for education for the children of the economically disenfranchised section of the community.
In the KIPP schools and the charter school knockoffs that continue to be inspired by KIPP, this forced separation between culture and socioeconomic class is required in order to draw attention away from the effects of poverty, which, in turn, exacerbates the kinds of callous cruelty by KIPP personnel acting with little oversight, while under unrelenting pressure to achieve the unsustainable. The “no excuses” ideology, then, not only ignores the documented and substantive effects of poverty on the poor, but it becomes the all-pervasive, blinding excuse for justifying dangerous, damaging, and morally-repugnant acts that, otherwise, would not be entertained in a society grounded by humane values and ethical rules of conduct. This pervasive “no excuses” mentality results in an authoritarian organizational model that spawns a dark moral nihilism (Hedges, 2009a) that gets played out against the most vulnerable children in schools that operate from public funds but without the benefit of any credible public oversight:
This moral nihilism would have terrified Adorno. He knew that radical evil was possible only with the collaboration of a timid, cowed and confused population.
More recently, other disturbing events have been reported by parents at the Fulton County KIPP (Vogell 2009), and still other more serious allegations involve excessive punishment, child endangerment, and violations of state and federal laws (Grannan 2009) by school officials at KIPP Fresno, a school that was shut down within a few months after Fresno Unified School District filed a detailed report (Fresno Unified School District 2008) with the State of California. Fresno Unified’s 63-page “Notice to Cure” alleged legal and ethical lapses at the school by the principal and staff that involved abusive treatment, risks to student safety, breaches in test security, copyright infringement, teacher credentialing irregularities, and mishandling of school funds. Among the long list of allegations in the “Notice to Cure” are these published by Grannan (2009):
. . . Student (name deleted) said that in December of 2007, Mr. Tschang [the school principal] told him to get on his hands and knees and bark like a dog. (Name deleted) said it was a metaphor to get him to stop joking around in class.
. . . It was reported by Kim Kutzner that students who were late to school would not be allowed to eat their meals provided by the state. Student (name deleted) stated that Mr. Tschang told her, “People who are late don’t get to eat.”
......Parent (name deleted) reported that Mr. Tschang took student (name deleted) glasses away from him because (name deleted) was constantly adjusting his glasses. (Name deleted) is totally dependent on his glasses and cannot see without them. Mr. Tschang admitted to taking (name deleted) glasses away.
At the time none of the above information was available to
me at the time of the presentation, but with hindsight, within the context of
what the speaker went on to say, a chilling vision for the future of global
education was revealed.
Initially the talk seemed amiable enough with comforting
and easily digestible platitudes such as ‘the art of analyzing evaluating
thinking’ and exhorting teachers to ‘elicit ideas and provoke a response’.
All the while, during these early innocent minutes of the
talk, I was busy taking notes and chomping at the bit to respond to any request
for contributions with the examples of my evening class and their wish to end
corruption in this country and the various ways they thought up to tackle this
fundamental problem. Corruption was something I know quite a bit about
from my encounters and research
into Freemasonry, though I wasn’t quite ready to stand up and denounce the
Illuminati to someone who works for the US Dept of State. I would probably find
myself on some ominous sort of ‘teacher non gratia’ list.
So when the speaker fielded a hypothetical situation for us
to think about, where a student is asking a teacher if he can buy an A grade
and the teacher agrees to sell one, and asking us as the audience who would be
the corrupt agent in this transaction. Clearly to logic and common sense, it
would be the teacher who would be corrupt since he is in the position to
exercise his authority to undertake a duplicitous transaction, however this
answer did not satisfy our friend from the US government, and instead he wanted
us to realise that the student could equally be the ‘corrupt’ one.
It was at this point I started to see where this was
heading, and like Worzel Gummidge, I changed my naive and receptive, and put on
my conspiracy sleuth head and started taking notes in earnest, and trying to
find the angle.
It was at this point, after the vaunting of Mr Jason Singer
and his work at the King’s Collegiate high school in San Antonio, that he
quoted the gentleman’s pronouncement on critical thinking activities, that they
are ‘perpetually arguable’ and that there is ‘no right or wrong answer’.
Nothing is true, everything is permissible
Moral relativism anyone? How about child abuse.... should
one engage their brand of so called ‘critical thinking’ on this one and declare
that the rights and wrongs of child abuse are ‘perpetually arguable’ and that
there is no ‘right or wrong answer’? In fact why not just boil down what these
people are trying to do by removing the superfluous word ‘answer’ and declare
that there is no such thing as ‘right and wrong’.
This my friends, is what is being taught in many American
High Schools and this is what they would like us ex-pat teachers to teach in
the schools we find in whatever country we travel to. The speaker himself is a
very busy little bee, offering training and guidance to high-school teachers in
this country, no doubt to whittle away their so called ‘prejudices’ about such
quibbling trifles such as right and wrong, the existence of God, the moral
implications of euthanasia, homosexuality, the importance of the family and our
own immortal souls, and whatever else they can manage to destabilise and
corrupt.
This however is not limited to the United States education
system, which as we may or may not know, has its origins in the German theories
of education which all came from the various Illuminati infested universities
of Germany and were shipped over lock stock and barrel to the US, where at the
same time incidentally, Yale University and its attendant ‘Skull and Bones’
German Illuminati society was created.
With my eyes opened I awaited with anticipation what he
would come out with next. We were asked to discuss in groups of three, where one
person would be the teacher and the other two would be students discussing for
and against the proposition about war and whether it is necessary for a nation
to use war to create peace or not.
Now there are two things I immediately noticed about this
situation. First of all a representative from the US State Department working
at the US Embassy was asking the audience, who were mostly Arab Muslims
teaching English, and were attending a well mannered and largely enjoyable conference
at a comfortable 5 star hotel, whether now was the time and place to bring
attention to the obvious elephant in the living room. It must be a trap, best
to put it out of mind for fear of offending the American, we do teach at
American schools after all.
The second thing of course was the question was clearly
loaded to the acceptance of a false proposition, namely the 1984 lie that ‘War
is Peace’. So I started to realise, that this rather cleverly
disguised ‘critical thinking’ concept, is nothing of the sort but in fact some
kind of semantic game used in order to provoke the desired thinking in any
students unfortunate enough to end up with a teacher who either knowingly or
unknowingly, is trying to corrupt their thinking processes.
The question was answered from within the audience from
what I believe was a plant. I had spoken previously with a colleague who was
also doing a presentation and he regretted not having had the time to organise
his own plants in the group in order to better demonstrate his aims. Another
speaker I saw later that day also used plants to provide wrong answers to
basic questions, so he could demonstrate his particular teaching method.
The gentlemen however who raised his hand and was selected
to answer for our esteemed colleague from the US State Dept however was planted
in the audience to give the ‘right answer’ or at least, the kind of answer
which we as teachers, were supposed to accept to defuse these potentially
troublesome and contentious moral issues. He said the following: “The absence of
tolerance in the world is the root cause of war.” Phew, glad that one was
safely sorted out, because I always laboured under the distinct impression that
American foreign policy was the cause of most war in the world. Still, having a
member of the US government asking us about war is like having a cannibal
asking us what we fancy for dinner.
We soon got to the meat of the issue. With the audience
suitably dazed and acquiescent over the war question and our own critical
thinking faculties shut down by our refusal to admit the presence of the
elephant in the room, the esteemed speaker got to work pumping us with
pernicious and sometimes, risible nonsense.
The method involved: probing assumptions, which one can
pretty much accept, then probing reasoning, well ok, I guess, but mostly people
have a pretty good reason for their reasoning. It is reason after all. Probing reason really means, questioning someone's truth and personal reality. Questioning viewpoints,
surely one is entitled to a point of view? Probing implications, now this is
where the dirt really starts because any idea has an almost infinite set of
possible implications. But an implication is not the idea itself and the
attempt to challenge someone ideas and beliefs based on drawing out limitless
implications is psychological manipulation pure and simple.
Questioning questions
Finally, the road to hell and the final initiation into
madness was complete with the last sentence: Questioning questions,
namely: why are you asking that question? We were encouraged to
challenge the very motivation for someone asking a question. So you see, what
they call ‘critical thinking’ has very little to do with thinking at all, but
more to do with acquiescence to moral relativism, the acceptance that we do not
know the right answer and that therefore, it’s probably a good thing that the
US bombs women, children and wedding celebrations, and also that asking
questions itself, can compromise our own position of authority on any subject.
There are no right answers except OURS
Clever, fiendishly clever, also suitably ridiculous, but
people tend not to notice once they have agreed to a concept, but they didn’t
pull the wool over this old dog’s eyes. And so it went on, and it seemed to me to be only a matter
of time before that old chestnut ‘global warming’ entered the room. But there
was already more than enough hot air in the room! Ha, see what I did there? Anyway, and so it did, but this time however, the rules of critical thinking
and ‘no right or wrong answers’ no longer seemed to apply. If one were of a
cynical persuasion one might begin to imagine that when US Government policy is
concerned, then the Government answers are the right ones, whereas say, if there are some views and perceptions the US Government wants to change, then those views and perceptions will no doubt be considered targets subject to 'change' using the 'tool' of criticism under the guise of 'critical-thinking'.
And so the US Government representative carried out an
imaginary dialogue.
This is it verbatim.
“Student A said: ‘I think global warming is carried out by
humans’ Great! That’s awesome. Can you explain why? Student B said: 'Another
ice-age is going to happen anyway so who cares'. Can you show me evidence of
this.’
So clearly those who toe the party line get the softball
questions and need not provide evidence, for which there is none anyway which
has not been fraudulently concocted by the University of East Anglia following
the exposure of the Climate-Gate emails. However, the wacky, off-the wall,
dissenters, should be badgered to provide evidence.
An just to cement our understanding that certain topics be
given ‘special treatment’ within the framework of this so called ‘critical
thinking’, he added a hypothetical situation with a student declaiming that
‘sea levels were rising all over the world’. Now the next question a normal
person would ask should be, are you sure, where is the evidence? But here of
course, investigation and critical thinking is suspended, and the example critical
searching question which he provided as an example ‘How does this affect our
daily lives?’ was designed to strengthen the statement not to question it.
So I wrote this joker off as another shill for war and
carbon credits and the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation charitable genocide of
the world and decided to publish what they are up to out there, at large in the
world.
Students were to be encouraged in what are termed ‘good
habits of thought’, does this not sound dangerously close to ‘thinking the
right thoughts’ ie, what the government want them to think? I think it does. We
as teachers were encouraged to ‘change the students that we teach’. Really? Is
it really our job to change people? Shouldn’t they figure things out for
themselves and evolve at their own rate? And finally we were told baldly, that
‘their thinking is wrong’.
I wonder if this is an attempt to counteract the pernicious
internet and the wealth of truthful information out there which anyone with a
bit of time to spare can access and discover the truth (yes, there is such a thing) about the international conspiracy,
the rights and wrongs of our politicians and perhaps the question of Israel and
Palestine.
Is this an attempt to inoculate students so they cannot be
infected by the truth? To tell them that there is no truth and their ideas that
they hold are wrong and the teacher, a teacher trained and paid for by the
government, will guide you to discover what is real and what is not.
This attempt to export thought control abroad under the
cosy misnomer ‘critical-thinking’, along with reference to unscrupulous methods
as exhibited on the ‘changing-minds’ website, coupled with the
institutionalised intimidation, bullying and mind control methods reportedly in
use at the lauded KIPP schools, then we see a worrying picture of what might
happen if this system of education is allowed to infiltrate within the indigenous
systems of the various nations of the world, but for the moment, let us hope
that it is merely contained within the bottle-neck of the international
teaching conference circuit, and sensibly ignored by wise teachers.
Black, Edwin. 2003. War against the weak: Eugenics and America’s campaign to create a master race. New York: Dialog Press.
Burrell,Clay. 2009. Framing teachers: Bill Gates’ Disturbing TED rhetoric.
http://education.change.org/blog/view/framing_teachers_bill_gates_disturbing_ted_rhetoric (accessed June 1, 2009).
Grannan, Caroline. 2009. Excerpts from report on Fresno KIPP school: Abuse, cheating alleged. Examiner.com, February 21. n
Kozol, Jonathan. 2005. The shame of the nation: The restoration of apartheid schooling in America. New York: Crown Publishers.
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