Have you ever wondered why the educrats today are calling for computers in every classroom for every student? To give kids access to better education. Right? But who will determine the material and methods by which the student is “educated” using the computer?

What if the actual purpose is to use computers to reinforce and correct thoughts and attitudes on a proper and timely schedule?

Dustin Heuston of Utah’s World Institute for Computer-Assisted Teaching has said:

We’ve been absolutely staggered by realizing that the computer has the capability to act as if it were ten of the top psychologists working with one student. . . . You’ve seen the tip of the iceberg. Won’t it be wonderful when the child in the smallest county in the most distant area or in the most confused urban setting can have the equivalent of the finest school in the world on that terminal and no one can get between that child and that curriculum? We have great moments coming in the history of education. ¹

“No one can get between the child and that curriculum.” The question arises, then, Who will determine the content of the curriculum?

Charlotte Iserbyt, who served as a Special Assistant in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement in the U.S. Department of Education in the 1980s, has said that until recently, “parents could examine their children’s textbooks; now, thanks to technology, nothing or nobody will be able to get between the child and his computer. Except, of course, the agents of change.”

Computer Disc DJs

Along with radical changes in the school curriculum brought on by Outcome-Based Education, the job of the teacher is being transformed. In fact, some believe that the role of the teacher is disappearing from America’s classroom.

Under OBE, mandated by Goals 2000 and H.R. 6, the computer will be the new “teacher.” Someone has noted, “Our teachers will be reduced to computer disc DJs.”²

The Minnesota Department of Education in a publication titled, “Technology and Outcome-Based Education in Minnesota,” described this changing role of teachers:

Machines are becoming the information givers of our society. Since professional information givers of the past may quickly be replaced by these machines, teachers need to define themselves, and act as diagnosers, prescribers, creative climate makers, instructional designers, coaches, and learning facilitators. . . . Teachers must stop functioning as information givers, putting learners in rows, trying to transmit information through worksheets and lectures.

This idea is not new. In fact, as early as 1968, the “education reform movement” was laying the groundwork for its future policies at a U.S.A. Goals 2000 conference. Their own reports reveal the agenda of the educational elite:

The teachers will have disappeared, and his place will be taken by a facilitator of learning, focusing attention on the prime period of learning . . . from infancy to age six or eight . . . He [the student] will never be graduated.

This is what the social engineers call “life-long learning.”

When George Bush introduced America 2000, which later came to be called Goals 2000, the President said we would become “a nation of students.” There is nothing wrong with that as long as the student — or his parents — can determine what he will learn.

Forcing Students Into Line

In the future, every child will be working on his own computer, with his own projects and assignments. Why? Because every child will have different attitudes, values, feelings, and emotions that need re-mediating. In other words, every student will have varying shades and types of political incorrectness that must be changed.

According to the educational elite, every child is sick and in need of help.

Dr. Pierce, professor of Education and Psychology at Harvard University, has said,

Every child who enters school at the age of five is mentally ill because he enters school with an allegiance toward our elected officials, our founding fathers, our institutions, the preservation of this form of government that we have, patriotism, nationalism, sovereignty. All this proves that the children are sick, because a truly well individual is one who has rejected all of those things, and is what I would call the true international child of the future.³

Outcome-Based Education is designed to correct the mental sickness of every child. Of course the question that arises is: What makes every five-year old in America sick? Could it be the five years of love and attention the child has received from his parents?

Yes, that is what the “experts” think makes the child sick.

Dr. Pierce said that the child comes to school with a set worldview, a worldview with which he disagrees. Where did that worldview come from? Who instilled into the five-year old this worldview that Dr. Pierce finds so sickening? The child’s parents.

What Dr. Pierce really objects to the child’s parental authority, parental influence, traditional values, the traditional American family, and the Christian worldview.

Research journalist Geoffrey Botkin notes that it is at this point that the computer comes into play:

In coming stages of OBE, the government can determine how to re-mediate, or fix, the way the child thinks with custom software for every child . . . [the software] can create custom individualized computer drills that can force every student into line.⁴

Does this seem unlikely to you or maybe even extreme? I wish that were the case. However, the facts prove this is exactly what the educrats in Washington have in mind.

Collecting Data About Your Child

The Washington Star, April 15, 1970, printed in an article titled, “Set up Data Banks, Allen Urges Schools” by John Matthews. In this article, U.S. Commissioner of Education James Allen is quoted as encouraging local school systems to have a central diagnostic center and explains its purpose:

. . . to find out everything possible about the child and his background. . . . (The Center) would know just about everything there is to know about the child — his home and family background, his cultural and language deficiencies, his health and nutrition needs and his general potential as an individual.

Allen then implied that professionals would write a “prescription” for the child “and if necessary, for his home and family as well.”⁵ How would they determine which children need a professional “prescription”? According to Allen’s Plan, each child would “be evaluated before 6 years of age, then again at 11 and 15.”⁶

Research journalist Geoffrey Botkin, in a television documentary on America’s educational system, discovered that in 1978, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers warned about the unlawful political abuse of electronics technology.

The warning was not heeded, and in 1994 they published a summary of the abuses, which included:

1. The collecting of psychological, medical, sociological data on students and their families without their knowledge or consent via the NAEP, the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

2. The “going on line” of the education supercomputer, the Elementary and Secondary Integrated Data System in 1989. This system linked the U.S. Department of Education with all 50 state education departments.

3. Promoting the above under the rubric of “educational restructuring” under names like Outcome-Based Education while withholding from the public the nature and extent of the data collection.

America’s social engineers will stop at nothing to achieve their goal of reprogramming our youth — even if it means “withholding from the public” their secret methods of collecting data about our children — and us!

Programming Humans

Certainly computers are a tremendous asset to our society and to education, but such technology has the potential to perpetuate and facilitate the “Big Brother” thinking of bureaucrats who see education and schools as a means of controlling society.

B.F. Skinner, an atheist, humanist psychologist who taught at Harvard University, was one of the first to promote the use of a machine for remediation. Its purpose was to aid in developing programmed learning or corrective thought control. As a behavioral psychologist, B.F. Skinner believed that man is controlled by stimuli from the environment and, therefore, can never make a decision in which he exercises free will.

B.F. Skinner believed “the hypothesis that man is not free is essential to the application of scientific method to the study of human behavior.”⁷

Skinner went on to write, “We must expect to discover that what a man does is the result of specifiable conditions and that once these conditions have been discovered, we can anticipate and to some extent determine his actions.”⁸

In other words, once an individual discovers the right stimuli, or the right conditions, he can control anyone. According to Skinner, there will be those who are controlled and those who are the controllees.

In his book, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, Skinner wrote that man “plays two roles: one as a controller, as the designer of a controlling culture, and another as the controlled, as the products of a culture.”⁹

B. F. Skinner and Karl Marx had the same mindset that dominates today’s social engineers. They believe that a perfect world or utopia can be created by establishing the right conditions through proper conditioning, programmed learning, corrective thought control, coercive thought control, brainwashing, and manipulation.

Dr. Skinner was so skilled at behavioral programming that he trained pigeons during World War II to pilot and detonate bombs and torpedoes. In the book, B.F. Skinner, The Man and His Ideas, by Richard Evans, Skinner is quoted as saying, “I could make a pigeon a high achiever by reinforcing it on a proper schedule.”

Skinner believed, by using the teaching machines he developed to reinforce desired behavior in animals, he could program humans.

Alienating Children From Parents

Professor Kenneth Goodman, former president of the International Reading Association, wrote a letter to President Jimmy Carter denouncing programs that were based on the philosophies of B.F. Skinner and were being funded by the U.S. Department of Education. In his letter, Professor Goodman did an excellent job explaining exactly what B.F. Skinner’s programmed learning was all about.

Professor Goodman wrote:

In behavior management, outcomes are assumed or arbitrarily determined and the behavior of human learners is shaped, conditioned, reinforced, extinguished, rewarded or punished until the learners achieve the target behavior.¹⁰

Under Mastery Learning and Outcome-Based Education, teachers are expected to track, record, and correct the improper attitudes, values, feelings and emotions of students. That is an impossible task — unless the teacher has help. Today computers and specialized software can track and correct students who exhibit the politically incorrect responses — without the aid of a teacher.

Dean Corrigan, in a 1969 speech before the 22nd Annual Teachers Education Conference held at the University of Georgia, predicted that Skinner’s “teaching machines will pace a student’s progress, diagnose his weaknesses and make certain that he understands a fundamental concept before allowing him to advance to the next lesson.”

Why do the agents of change want to track the beliefs of our children? For one reason: to aid them in their diabolical quest to inculcate into our children their beliefs and values. First, however, they must make sure that this inculcation is not hindered by the beliefs of the child’s parents.

When children exhibit the wrong attitudes and beliefs, which were instilled into them by parents, then remediation, corrective thought control, and re-programming will be the order of business. The computer is the fastest and most effective manner by which to track a student’s moral and character development. The computer is also the fastest, most accurate and consistent way to correct wrong developmental behavior.

Using Eskimos to Mold Beliefs

In 1963, under contract with the U.S. Office of Education of Health Education and Welfare, the National Education Association oversaw the Technological Development Project, which published a supplement stating:

Another area of potential development in computer applications is the attitude changing machine. Dr. Bertram Raven in the Psychology Department at the University of California in Los Angeles is in the process of building a computer-based device for changing attitude. This device will work on the principle that students’ attitudes can be changed effectively by using the Socratic method of asking an appropriate series of leading questions logically designed to right the balance between appropriate attitudes and those deemed less acceptable.¹¹

In the 1970s, a controversial Social Studies program called, Man: A Course of Study was introduced into America’s schools. This course can still be found in schools today.

What was the purpose of this program ? “To help children by exploring in depth the lifestyle of an obscure Eskimo tribe.”¹²

Who designed the course and how was it supposed to help children?

The course was designed by a team of experimental psychologists under Jerome S. Burner and B.F. Skinner to mold children’s social attitudes and beliefs along lines that set them apart and alienate them from beliefs and moral values of their parents and local community.¹³

That assessment was made by Congressman John Conlan of Arizona on April 9, 1975 on the House floor.

John Conlan hit the nail on the head. Skinner’s programmed learning focuses on setting children apart and “alienating them from the beliefs and moral values of their parents” — particularly if those parents are instilling into their children traditional values.

The Secret Test

Are computers being used to track more than students’ test scores? Some people think so.

Many involved parents fear that personal and private information — which many tests and assignments draw out of their children — will be filed on a data base developed by their state or the U.S. Department of Education.

During the 1993-1994 school year, more than 7,000 schools in California had to give up the old academic achievement test and pass out a new one called the CLAS Test, (the California Learning Assessment System test). The test was so secret that the California Department of Education officials were threatening to sue those who leaked its content. Some California legislators were considering Senate Bill 1273, that would have made it a felony for a student or parent to disclose the content of the test.

The Press-Enterprise in Beaumont, California reported that, “Sherry Loofbourrow, a member of the Newport-Mesa Unified School District board in Orange County, has said she believes some of the questions violated state law.”

A parent from Menifee, California by the name of Debra Hills said, “Look at the eighth-grade test; it is so invasive.”

The Press-Enterprise in Riverside, California reported on April 14, 1994, that critics of the test object to it because they believe that the test, ‘violates students’ rights by asking about religious and family beliefs.”

Gary Kreep, director of the U.S. Justice Foundation, which sued one school district in California over the CLAS test said, “Questions ask for specific experiences from students’ own lives, not general experiences drawn just from the reading selections.”

Susan Kettner of Beaumont, California wrote in a letter to the editor of the Press-Enterprise, which was published in the paper on April 23, 1994, that her superintendent had not even seen the CLAS test. “John Wood is not comfortable with the test as it is. He should not be put in a position to administer a mandated test he is not even allowed to see.”

Susan Kettner also wrote in her letter to the editor about a school board meeting she attended. “The meeting, I found, was very frustrating. The State Department of Education representatives from the County of Riverside, who have never seen the test, refused to answer our questions. I left the meeting wondering, ‘Who has seen this test?’“

It was reported in the Press-Enterprise, April 16, 1994, that Don Lauder, a school board member in Beaumont, California, “defended the state’s refusal to let parents examine the CLAS test because doing so would compromise it.”

Concerning many of the test questions, which numerous parents felt invaded their families privacy, the Press-Enterprise, reported,

The purpose of such questions, Lauder said, is to measure the students’ ability to use higher-thinking skills. . . . “The state is trying to go beyond having students memorize lists of facts. They want students to organize facts and evaluate them and produce something called ‘authentic achievement,’” Lauder said. “That means students are able to adapt or use the basic knowledge they’ve learned.”¹⁴

As a school board member, Lauder, either out of ignorance or honesty, knowingly or unknowingly, spilled the beans when he said the purpose of the test is to see if students have or are “able to adapt.”

Adapt to what? Change?

That is exactly the purpose of these types of tests. With their intrusive questions, such tests are used to determine in what areas a student needs remediation. After a battery of drills and assignments, the student is tested once again. The test will disclose whether or not the student has adapted to the change as requested, without protest.

In certain states such as Oregon, students who do not demonstrate that they have adapted to the desired and requested change, thus possessing the correct worldview, are not permitted to go on in their education or receive a diploma.

The $55 Million “Desired” Response

The April 16, 1994 Press-Enterprise issue went on to report:

Lauder acknowledged that some of the questions could constitute invasion of privacy, but students are not graded on the “rightness or wrongness” of their answers, but on how well they state their case.

The reason students are not, as school board member Lauder said, “graded on the rightness or wrongness” of their answers is because the questions are open ended. Even the math portion of the CLAS test called for easy answers. To the casual observer there is no real right or wrong answer. As with most such tests, however, there is a “desired” answer or response.

I have read the CLAS test for all three grades, and it has absolutely nothing to do with cognitive, academic knowledge. The test is nothing less than an evaluation of the child’s attitudes, values, feelings, and emotions.

Governor Pete Wilson has, for the time, repelled the law that required that every fourth, eighth, and tenth grader take the CLAS test.

The question remains, however, what was done with the information we know was collected on thousands of children?

Many newspapers in California, including the Los Angeles Times, reported that only about 25 percent of the fourth, eighth, and tenth graders who took the state mandated CLAS test actually had their test graded.

If the state was grading only 25 percent of the tests, what was the purpose of having students take the test?

Once the fact that only 25 percent or less of the tests were being graded, parents became even more suspicious. Because the state did not grade all the tests or have any such intentions, many believe this proves the state was never really interested in gaining statistically data on the condition of education in California but to gain personal data on their children and families.

Many parents still have a lot of unanswered questions. What was the real goal and purpose of the CLAS test? Why would the state of California plan on spending $55 million a year to administer the CLAS test only to correct 25 percent of the test?

The CLAS test in California was an attempt by the cultural elite and educrats to implement a part of their “school reform” agenda. Thanks to passionate, involved, courageous, and committed parents and citizens, the attempt was foiled.

The battle is not won, however. In fact, it is just beginning. I have first-hand reports from one involved mother, whose husband is also a police officer, that the CLAS test, which was supposedly done away with, is back. Apparently, teachers are giving the test in small segments during regular class time so as not to arouse student or parental suspicions.

The CLAS test is just one example of how the “agents of change” hope to assimilate personal information about students for their computer database, which will later be used to channel them into the “right” career track after they have received their certificates.

The IRS: Getting to Know You

Students, however, are not the only Americans the government has targeted for data collection.

In January 1995, it was reported that the Internal Revenue Service has plans of expanding the secret computer database of information that it keeps on virtually all Americans. Developed in the 1970s, this database will be expanded to include “credit reports, news stories, tips from informants, and real estate, motor vehicle and child support records, as well as conventional government financial data.”¹⁵

According to an IRS notice filed in December 1994, “any individual who has business and/or financial activities” can expect upgraded agency computers to put such information before IRS auditors promptly.

What if the information they collect is wrong?

“Although agency officials concede that some of the data collected will be inaccurate, taxpayers will not be allowed to review or correct it.”¹⁶

Phyllis DePiazza, chief of the agency’s Privacy and Education Branch has said, “Only when undergoing audits — which the system is designed to target and assist — will taxpayers be able to rebut the system’s inaccuracies.”¹⁷ Ms. DePiazza acknowledged that even then taxpayers will not be permitted to see actual raw data about them that the IRS has collected.

Coleta Brueck, the agency’s top document processing official has said:

If I know what you’ve made during the year . . . if I know what your withholding is, if I know what your spending pattern is, I should be able to generate for you a return so that I only come to you and tell you, “This is what I think you should file for the next year, and if you agree to that, then don’t bother sending me a piece of paper.”

Does that mean the IRS is collecting enough data on you so that they could file your income tax return without your help?

Evan Hendricks, editor and publisher of Privacy Times, a bi-weekly Washington newsletter, has said the IRS wants to “wipe out the line between the private sector and government.”

After America’s radio talk show hosts got hold of this information and reported it to the American people, the IRS issued a statement saying it was going to reconsider plans to collect personal data.

Only time will tell.

Gary Bauer, former Under Secretary of Education and policy adviser in the Reagan Administration and now President of the Family Research Council, reported in his daily update, February 16, 1995:

The IRS has quietly implemented a new program called Compliance 2000. Under the program, any information that is linked to your Social Security number will be accessible to federal tax agents. That includes, believe it or not, orders from catalogs, whether your family has cable T.V., what videos you rent, what magazines you read, etc. All of this information will be warehoused by the IRS on computers that its agents can use for investigations. What’s more, the IRS is exempt from most privacy act requirements. This needs attention from the Congress right away.

For more information on the IRS, read chapter eight, “Your Family and Freedoms At Stake.”

Risking Your Privacy On-Line

If you use your personal computer to log onto a computer on-line service such as Prodigy, Compuserve or American Online, you may risk being monitored without knowing it.

In a speech given June of 1995, Rich Frank, president of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences told a group of TV and radio executives,

You will have instant access to an enormous database, which will provide you with a consumer’s age, number of children, color of hair, height, weight, credit card number, Social Security number and favorite soft drink. . . . As marketing executives, this is an incredibly exciting prospect. You will know intimate details about millions of consumers. At least it’s exciting until you realize that you’re also one of those consumers, and your intimate details will also be accessible to others.¹⁸

How will marketers get this information without talking to you? An Article by Robert S. Boyd, published in the St. Paul Pioneer Press, explains how the system works:

Every time you click the mouse, hit the “enter” key on your PC or press a button on your interactive-television remote, the signal can be captured by a computer, stored and analyzed. . . . Electronic marketers call it the “click-stream,” and they’re using it more and more. It gives merchants and advertisers a new way to gather personal information about potential customers who use the Internet, the World Wide Web or commercial on-line services such as Prodigy and Compuserve. . . . Combined with information from other sources, the click-stream can reveal who you are, where you live, what interests you, what you are willing to pay for and sometimes much more.

The selling of this information is becoming a big business in itself. You can bet if marketers have this information, the government will have access to it, too.

The next time you are browsing the Internet and are offered a free catalog or you pick a category for a free sample of sports, books, cars, music entertainment, or whatever else, remember it may cost you dearly. It may cost you your privacy.

I Smell a Rat!

The potential for misuse of computer collection of personal consumer and student information abounds.

Suppose our government puts a vaccination tracking system in place — as we discussed earlier. Not only are they tracking vaccinations, but under OBE they are tracking attitudes, values, feelings, and emotions. Add the IRS into that component, and I smell a rat!

I would like to think that these tracking systems were established by our current government for moral and practical reasons. Their motives are probably sincere and, hopefully, in the best interests of children and adult citizens. Under a moral and honest government, we have nothing to fear from the gathering and compiling of information about us.

What happens, however, if our leaders are not moral and not honest? What if those in control of these tracking systems decide that certain individuals and groups of people hold “politically incorrect” values and beliefs and need to be “retrained”? Could such a vaccination and attitude-tracking system be used to persecute or eliminate those who do not accept the government’s way of thinking?

Consider what happened in Waco, Texas to the Branch Davidian cult.

What about pro-life groups who have peacefully and prayerfully protested against abortion in America? Many pro-life Americans have been repeatedly jailed — some for long periods — because they dared to confront the establishment with the murder of innocent children.

Injustices occur everyday in America against God-fearing, freedom-loving people. You won’t always read about such incidents in your newspaper or see them reported on the network news.

Conservative and Christian media — television, radio, newsletters, etc. — however, abound with reports of persecution of Christian students, IRS intimidation of churches and pastors, and aggressive attempts to silence anyone who confronts and exposes the liberals with their socialistic agenda. Just ask me and others who consistently broadcast the truth.

Computer tracking systems, in and of themselves are not evil. But I for one will not sit idly by and passively let government thugs develop a centralized bureaucracy that could some day be used against me and my family.

How about you?

Notes

1 Dustin Heuston, “Discussion-Developing the Potential of An Amazing Tool,” Schooling and Technology, Vol 3. Southeastern Regional Council for Educational Improvement.

² Carol Pomeroy, “Education According to Corporate Fascism,” (unpublished speech delivered March 3, 1994, at Northwestern College).

³ From a keynote address to the Association for Childhood Education International, Denver, Colorado, April 1972, quoted by John Steinbacher and Dr. Dennis Cuddy.

⁴ “Certain Failure”, a documentary on H.R. 6 by Geoffrey Botkin.

⁵ Dr. Dennis Cuddy, Chronology of Education with Quotable Quotes, (Highland City, FL: Pro Family Forum, Inc., 1993), p. 47.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ B.F. Skinner, Science and Human Behavior (New York: Macmillan, 1953), p. 447.

⁸ Ibid, p. 6.

⁹ B.F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, (New York: Macmillan, 1953), p. 197.

¹⁰ Kenneth Goodman, “The President’s Education Program: A Response,” Support for Learning and Teaching of English Newsletter, March 1978, Vol. 3 No. 2.

¹¹ March/April: A special supplement of AV Communication Review is published as “Monograph No. 2 of the Technological Development Project of the NEA.” The project is under contract #SAE-9073 with the U.S. Office of Education of HEW, as authorized under title VII, Part B, of the National Defense Education Act of 1958. The contractor is the NEA. I was made aware of this fact by Dr. Dennis Cuddy.

¹² Charlotte T. Iserbyt, “Back to Basics Reform or...OBE Skinnerian International Curriculum?” 1995, p. 6.

¹³ Congressional Record, April 9, 1975, p. H. 2585

¹⁴ The Press Enterprise, April 16, 1994, p. B-7.

15 “IRS Plans to Collect More Data on Individuals to Nab Tax Cheats,” St. Paul Pioneer Press, January 20, 1995.

¹⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷ Ibid.

¹⁸ Robert S. Boyd, “Click. Be Monitored. Click. Fight Government Agents,” St. Paul Pioneer Press, June 13, 1995.