School - Programmed Retardation
(Learning Disorder, Discipline Problems and Dyslexia)

"This is no longer an educational system. Its character has been completely transformed and it now clearly reveals itself to be what for many decades it has been in the process of becoming: namely, an agency working for the barbarisation of youth."
George Reisman, professor of economics
Pepperdine University, Malibu, CA
'The Intellectual Activist'

Many children experience problems at school. From drugs, bullying and truancy through to challenges in learning and retaining new information. Some fall behind their classmates in reading and maths and cannot adjust to the learning environment. Others have problems with naughtiness or merely fitting in and socialising with other children.

We have examined physical problems that invariably lead to a sick and unhappy child. Food allergies and blood sugar imbalances, as well as toxins in the diet and environment, impair cognitive ability. The lack of consistent and effective nutrition is also one of the chief causes of childhood developmental and behavioural problems.

But many parents remain unaware of the tremendous toll psychiatric influences have wrought on the way our children are taught and raised at school. The baleful influences of Dewey, Russell and Thorndike, radiating out of the all-powerful Teacher's College at Columbia University, have indeed infected our societies with a rot that is proving very challenging to extirpate.

PERSONAL INITIATIVE
Prior to the 1920's, direct emphasis was placed on achieving academic brilliance. At the heart of this were the three 'R's - reading, 'riting and 'rithmatic. But children went to school to learn, not only academic subjects, but also the social skills they would need to survive and prosper in the adult world that beckoned within a few short years. They learned courage on the sports fields, and politeness and respect for their elders in the classrooms. They learned about law and the mistakes man had made in history and economics. The child was thus fashioned, becoming learned in the knowledge that if he did not learn the lessons of history, he would be doomed to repeat them.

Perhaps more importantly, children under the old system discovered, or were taught how to hone 'personal initiative'. They learned the skills they needed to solve problems, rely on themselves, lead others, triumph against superior odds. They were taught how to conceive an idea, plan its operational phase and then carry it through to a successful conclusion. Children were given projects to do which would last the whole summer. Their work was critically examined when turned in. Lots of red ink was used. Schools taught that failure was not an option. Excellence was the goal. Lack of discipline or bad behaviour were not tolerated. Oikishness and yobbery were given short shrift. Bullying met with a swift and summary justice. British broadcaster Jeremy Paxman, in his very readable polemic, The English, gives us a feel for how it was at one of these leading schools 'back then':

"Once away from home, a good thrashing was accepted as an essential part of the process of turning out a gentleman. The champion flogger was the Reverend Dr John Keate, appointed headmaster of Eton in 1809, who beat an average of ten boys each day (excluding his day of rest on Sundays). On 30th June 1832 came his greatest achievement, the thrashing of over eighty of his pupils. At the end of this marathon, the boys stood and cheered him. It says something about the spirit of these places that he was later able to tell some of the school's old boys of his regret that he hadn't flogged them more often."

Neither was it profitable for a boy to whinge to his parents about the disciplinarian, spartan regime of his school. After all, that was what his parents were paying for. This was the price, Paxman reminds us, of turning him into one of the Breed.

THE WHOLE ENCHILADA
I was schooled at Charterhouse in the UK between 1973 and 1977 along with my elder brother, James. My younger brother, Ian, was sent to Sutton Valence, a private school in Kent. Charterhouse's avowed aim was to take a snivelling thirteen-year-old (me) and machine him into an adult. For this to work, I had to have a complete understanding of the outside world and how its complicated parts interrelated one with another. I had to be able to express ideas, argue my principles, learn to discharge stress, keep myself fed and maintain a high degree of physical fitness. I had to exhibit unflinching courage in the face of adversity. I had to learn how to suffer with stoic determination that my failures would not be repeated.

The breadth of the curriculum was awesome. My subjects included English, English Literature, Physics, Biochemistry, Biology, Economics, Latin, German, German Literature, French, French Literature, Mathematics, Advanced Mathematics, Geography, History and Ancient History. These were merely the preliminary subjects I had to take for 'O' Level grades. A 'D' in any exam was a disgrace and would rightly have earned a thrashing in Keate's day. 'C's would have had the Housemaster's lip curling in a withering contempt. 'B's were second best and simply unacceptable. The 'A' was the only game in town. The teachers in the main had colossal brains. You failed them at your peril.

I flogged myself to exhaustion and distinction, earning 11 'A's and 2 'B's. I later earned 'A' levels before leaving the majestic old institution. During my studies, I represented the school in cricket, rugby and soccer. I became an accomplished sportsman. I learned how to speak in public and argue with the best of my teachers in the scheduled library debates. I learned how to be proud of, and love my country. I was taught how to blast the ace out of a playing card at thirty paces with a rifle, earning my marksman's certificate in the process.

The point is, I had worked hard for my accomplishments and they were my own. I had not been humoured, patronised or over-praised. It had not been easy. It was sink or swim and you learned the pecking order and your place in it. I once had A Concise History of 18th Century Europe slammed over my head by my Housemaster for failing to pay attention to what he was saying about the Industrial Revolution. There was nothing concise about that book. The headache stayed with me for days. No thoughts of litigation ever entered my throbbing brain. Yet, sore head or not, my achievements at school had bred an indefatigable confidence, discipline, respect and a self-reliance that has stayed with me to this day. My mission at school was thus accomplished. I was now an independently functioning, educated adult that knew the difference between right and wrong. I could now go out and serve others.

Britain built the most formidable empire the world has ever seen on the bedrock laid down by this no-nonsense system of education. The stoicism and courage infused by its methods have been evident in its laws, its literature, its art and in a thousand desperate actions, from Rourke's Drift to El Alamein, from the Spitfire skies of Kent to the churned-up poppy fields of Flanders. Even those who hated Britain took the best parts she had to offer and made them their own. Still today, many see it as their emigration destination of choice. Yes, there were flaws and abuses and victims and heartaches in the British system, but nothing foreign there to the plight of the human condition. For decades, the sun had never set on the British Empire. But the final twilight eventually came when the candle of her national and creative initiative was dampened and then extinguished at the wellspring of her educational font. To destroy a dream empire, you must first destroy her children's ability to imagine it, to want it. To inherit it.

LIGHTING THE FUSE
It was psychiatry which provided the canker that rotted the school system, not just in Britain, but overseas as well. America was particularly hardest hit. Ralph Truitt, head of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene, declared in 1927: "If we are going to prevent dependency, delinquency, insanity, and general inadequacy, the school should be the focus of our attack."

Psychiatrists, mental hygienists and reformers believed stress was the main cause of a child's mental woes. They targeted the three main areas they saw as the instigators of this stress: school failure, a curriculum centred on academics, and disciplinary procedures. Eliminate the emphasis on achievement and academics, and you would rid the child of the stress of school failure.

But, in targeting academics, the Teacher's College doyens were destroying personal initiative and, as crucially, the context in which a child finds himself in the world. For instance, in avoiding proper history, the child is not taught that his acts affect not just himself, but others too, and sometimes long after the doer of the deed has gone. Bruce Wiseman gives us other examples:

"With no awareness of, say, the Great Fire of London in 1666, and other such disasters, the building contractor of today thinks modern fire codes are 'stupid'. So he cuts corners to avoid what he thinks are pointless regulations. Catastrophe results. Shoddy workmanship. Racial hatred. Economic chaos. All can and do result from a society that has no understanding of all that has gone before…. And so we spend our own last breaths - and our children's - to learn the same lessons again.

Science is another academic subject. It covers the field of electronics, biology, medicine, chemistry, physics and a host of others. Without an elementary grounding in the sciences, we are creating people who are becoming more and more dependent on technological advances, while becoming less and less aware of the basic information upon which these advances are based. We end up with a population that does not understand the mechanics of disease, building structures, electricity, bodily functions, nutrition, plant growth - the list is endless. Yet these are things that touch all our lives and our knowledge or ignorance of them can mean the difference, literally, between life and death. "

Here we see the Protocols coming into their own; a dullard, ill-educated people spending 12 years in an educational system being taught a fraction of what their forebears learned. They are not even, as we shall discover, taught to read properly. Gradually the technological knowledge of society aggregates into the hands of the few, which is of course the whole point of social control. The people may not like the controllers. They may smash up a few city blocks in the annual May Day, anti-New-World-Order riots to express their frustration at 'being controlled' by the 'multi-nationals'. But in the end, 'bread and circuses' always win out for the dullards. These days, no-one grows their own food anymore. We have to rely on Ford and Toyota for our cars, on Monsanto, WalMart and Safeways for our food, on Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch for our news and entertainment, and on our medical peers to heal us when we're sick. The newspapers may patronisingly express our concerns in the most indignant and satisfying vitriol. But things stay just the same. And the whole game of control moves to Sega Level 4.

THE ARTS
And when mankind's most valuable emotional expressions - the arts - become a laughable parody of their former brilliance, what indeed becomes of us? Art gives us visual and auditory perceptions of the very heights to which mankind may aspire. A society weaned on comic books, MTV, Andy Warhol, gangsta rap and Jerry Springer loses the wonderful breadth of language and expression of art in every available field to evaluate and give meaning to the kaleidoscopic strata of achievements, places, technologies, customs, ideas and all that is godly, human, of this earth and beyond. If knowledge promotes understanding and tolerance, what does ignorance promote? Maybe the kind of behaviour we increasingly see on our streets and in our schools?

WHERE HAS ALL THE TALENT GONE?
All of which leads up to the question of educational standards. During the course of my research into this subject, I have spoken to a great number of teachers over the years. I would estimate that a full 80% of them themselves have learning disabilities or lack of social control skills based on how they were taught. Today in Britain, we suffer from a shortage of old-school teachers - even those from abroad are now balking at entering the pig-pen that is 21st century schoolyard Britain and America. Talent has been migrating out of the school systems across the world for years. What little remains finds itself bewildered, under siege, underpaid - which of course, once again, is the whole idea. Little wonder that homeschooling has become so popular in America - a system that has developed off the back of the frustration and anger many parents feel towards the declining standards and corruption of moral ideals in the classroom. Parents have decided to act. And they have used their personal initiative.

DYSLEXIA AND READING PROBLEMS
Eight percent of America's children are said to suffer from a reading and spelling disorder, known as dyslexia, an alleged defect in the language centre of the brain which prevents literacy. Other nations are reporting similar figures. What is not being reported however is how dyslexia has only struck in the past seventy years when, prior to this, illiteracy was solidly on the wane. In 1930, the illiteracy rates in America were as follows:

· 1.5% among native-born whites
· 9.9 % among foreign-born blacks
· 9.2% among urban blacks
· 16.3% among blacks in general

The only reason many were illiterate was that they simply had not gone to school. Today, the illiteracy rate among blacks in the US is around 40%. For whites, the figure varies from 7-30%, the exact figure being unknown. In 1990, 700,000 US high school graduates could not even read their own diplomas. Of the 190 million Americans (of all races) over 16 with an average school attendance of 12.4 years, almost 25% cannot read grade school lessons. Around 28 of 29 students would not be able to earn college credits in any other nation but America. This is a nation that has spent billions supposedly to ensure reading success among its 'socially disadvantaged populations' via its Special Educations programs.

PHONICS
Destroy a child's ability to read and write, and you effectively mutilate the chain of educational links that lead to the development of that child's intellect. The tried and tested method for teaching a child to read is the phonics system. This involves giving children the tools they need to decode the mysteries of the written word by breaking down words phonetically. This system is actually an extension of the 'baby talk' parents use instinctively to communicate with their little ones. Leading American educator Beverly K Eakman, quoting from an Associated Press article, explains the connection:

"Every infant needs to master the phonetic elements of speech…. parents' baby talk universally exaggerates the vowel sounds in a high-pitched, drawn-out, sing-song manner that allows babies to absorb key building blocks of language - especially the 'ee', 'ah' and 'oo' sounds. Tiny infants younger than six months of age, say researchers, are learning their very first words and 'learn to categorise vowel sounds that are meaningful in their native languages while ignoring the subtle variations'. Apparently… 'biology has structured us [parents] to know what to do. When the biology of people produces this effect across three cultures [America, Sweden and Russia]… that tells you something.

What it tells us is that the sounds of language are important, and that in an alphabetic structure, it is a crime not to teach children how to relate these sounds to certain letters and letter combinations, thereby enabling them to break the 'code' of written language. But by high school today, spelling instruction generally means placing a bunch of unrelated words on the chalkboard and telling children to learn them for a test next week. No approach is given concerning how to proceed in a logical way to spell them. In other words, there is no transfer value from one list of words to the next."

THE 'WHOLE-WORD' METHOD
Psychiatry's contribution to illiteracy has been the introduction of the 'whole-word' system of reading tuition. Otherwise known as 'Look-Say' or 'Sight-Word', this program was introduced by Wundt graduate and psychologist James Cattell, a Teacher's College faculty member. Here, the child is taught, not phonetics, but to memorise each individual word as a picture. When the system was first introduced, many teachers were uncomfortable deserting what had traditionally worked, and so mixed whole-word with phonetics to produce a combined reading program. In whole-word, the context has been removed, namely, that rules applied to one word can no longer be transferred to interpreting another, thus preventing the child from building an aggregate system of reading expertise. In his 1955 landmark book, Why Johnny Can't Read, Rudolph Flesch remarks that teacher's colleges throughout the world soon began receiving textbooks on how to teach reading using whole-word. The results were predictably disastrous. San Diego Unified School District in Southern California, for example, experienced a 50% dive in the median reading skills of its students in just one year (1990-1991) after adopting the catastrophic method.

Today we have a veritable epidemic of dyslexia and illiteracy. Another industry has grown up around these 'special needs' kids to help them with their 'psychological' problems. "Their eyes move in funny patterns," some counsellors remark (Could this be evidence of a brain disorder?) In actual fact, the poor mite can't learn a huge vocabulary since his brain has to learn all the different pictures that constitute the words of his language. The result is bad spelling, despair, and perhaps most damaging, a stigmatising psychological label that the child is somehow 'mentally impaired' - a label the child will carry with him for the rest of his life.

Today, red marks on exam papers are regarded as 'demeaning' and possibly to blame for some of the 'mental disorders' from which today's children apparently suffer. The child is thus not consistently corrected either on their writing or speech. When the child comes into contact with words he hasn't memorised, particularly ones that are near look-alikes, he begins to exhibit what teachers believe is a typical learning disability. Educator Eakman:

"Take for example two random sentences taken from a typical textbook:

• "Thomas Jefferson was the first president to be inaugurated in Washington."
• "As the Spirit of St Louis touched down on the turf, the crowds surged toward it."

Using the currently voguish 'whole language'… approach, based on sight memory and context clues alone, a student by seventh grade [13 years old] typically will read these lines as follows:
"Thomas Jefferson was the first president to be assassinated in Washington."
"As the Spirit of St Louis rolled along the surf, the cowards surged towards it."

Naturally this student will do poorly on academic tests. Because of the nature of his errors, the rest of the selections will make no sense to him. The student wonders why Thomas Jefferson was assassinated. The rest of the paragraph seems to indicate the man lived on a good while. Did the Spirit of St Louis have water-landing gear? Why did cowards go up to it instead of away from it? Passed on from grade to grade, this student will eventually throw up his hands in exasperation because nothing in any of his classes makes any sense. What kind of self-esteem do you think he will have?"

Illiteracy, according to a number of studies, has been found to be a decisive factor in former prisoners returning to a life of crime. After all, if you cannot read properly, or have low academic standards and poor scholastic achievements, the employment options are not tremendously welcoming. Michael Brunner, a Research Fellow from the US National Institute of Justice, and author of Retarding America: The Imprisonment of Potential, reports that an overwhelming number of prisoners are not 'learning impaired' but actually quite intelligent. Once taught how to read properly using the phonics method, their self-confidence and esteem rise significantly and they find renewed determination to turn their lives around once they are released. Brunner calls the teaching of reading by the whole-word method 'programmed retardation'.

A 1989 US News & World Report article noted that American schools are actually encouraged to brand children as learning disordered (LD) so they can qualify for the supplementary federal funds earmarked for the handicapped.

THE MATHEMATICS SCANDAL
Mathematics is another example of a discipline that relies on a progressive mastery of skills. So if a student drops the ball early on by not grasping some of the fundamental rules and principles, their progress will quickly falter and halt. Today, many kids are allowed to use calculators in class without grasping the basic skills of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, which underpin further progress. Maths embodies personal initiative and problem-solving, which is the bugaboo of the Teacher's College ethic of dumbing down. The context is once again removed, so a student who struggles with algebra, for instance, fails at the first hurdle if they are not taught the context of why they must learn the discipline. They cannot conceptualise what they are doing, but rather perform the tasks by rote. If they do not understand a particular step, large classes often prevent the teacher from giving an individual helping hand. The student does not want to appear stupid by asking for help in front of his classmates. In Retarding America, Brunner hits the nail on the head:

"What brings about the delinquency is not academic failure per se, but a sustained frustration which results from continued failure to achieve selected academic goals. When frustration can find no resolution into constructive or productive activity, one response… is aggressive, anti-social behaviour. Other responses are regression, resignation. These have been well documented from clinical research conducted with both animals and humans….

The anti-social aggression that Pavlov was able to create in the laboratory is being created in tens of thousands of classrooms across America…. All the ingredients necessary to create… anti-social aggression through sustained frustration are present: There is an unachievable goal… because the means of achieving it… are absent. The student nevertheless is continually pressured to achieve it by teachers, parents and peers…. Finally the student not only has no alternative for achieving the goal, but… is not allowed to leave the failure-producing environment as a result of compulsory attendance laws. For those who do learn to read [mainly those with good visual memories], they cannot grasp the magnitude of resentment and hostility that is generated in non-readers over time, due to unrelenting frustration from which there is no escape. For many, this frustration explodes into delinquency or… violent forms of social aggression."

As further generations of illiterates or academic failures are produced, these parents themselves understand the frustrations their children are undergoing. They too see no purpose behind academic striving because it didn't work for them either. Those students who do excel are often vilified by the majority of under-achievers, so it becomes a mark of the damned to do well in class. 'Teacher's pet', 'You little pus' and other denigrating epithets can actually cause a bright pupil to down-regulate themselves in order to avoid catching flak in the playground during break. Thus, conforming to your under-achieving peers becomes a necessity of survival and popularity. And all of us want to survive and be popular.

HISTORY, GEOGRAPHY, ETC.
Other subjects are also blighted. As politically correct history books began to flood American schools, major human events became marginalised in the footnotes, while the liberation movements of homosexual rights, minority sexual preferences, and those of African, Native, Asian and female Americans were brought to the fore to satisfy the social agendas of Teacher's College. Walter McDougall of the Foreign Policy Institute, a Pulitzer-prize winner, believes that education today is nothing but an ongoing effort "to mandate an alternate reality…. There is no question that [school history books today] presume to explain US history by ignoring Lockean individualism, disparaging George Washington and defending… pornography on the Internet."

Elsewhere in the world, revisionism has been well underway. Hollywood routinely produces realistic-looking movies that have reinvented key events in history. Many of the social policies of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and their forebears, which brought with them the encouragement of individualism, personal endeavour and scholastic achievement, have been severely disparaged and misreported, not only in the liberal press, but also through TV documentaries, films, debates and, yes, school textbooks. Eakman remarks:

"In 'United States History: In the Course of Human Events', the Aztecs are portrayed as victims of the Spanish conquerors; cannibalistic practices likened to other 'advanced cultures' of the time (moral equivalence). The Renaissance [a noteworthy period of personal initiative] gets seven lines of text; the Enlightenment gets six lines; the Reformation gets none at all! George Washington [America's first patriot] is likened to a boring fellow of ordinary talent who is more symbol than fact. Even a terrorist like César Chavez gets more praise - and more space - than George Washington. Indeed the name of George Washington as a designation for schools is now being removed in several localities because he once owned slaves, another good excuse to excise an important historical figure from the American culture.

…Take another series, entitled 'History of Us', put out by Oxford University Press and approved for use in fifth-, sixth- and seventh-grade classrooms nationwide.… This 10-volume series by former journalist Joy Hakim… [has] not a semblance of objectivity. Even the publisher admits - and arrogantly supports - Hakim's bias: 'She [Hakim] is very negative about Reagan, but she believes that history is going to agree with her,' said an Oxford University press spokesperson. Who cares what history 'is going to agree with' somewhere down the road? Do the blatantly political beliefs of an individual belong in a child's history book?"

Geography too is so badly taught that, during my research on this subject in the United States over a ten-year period, it was actually quite rare to find a 15- to 20-year-old who could name seven countries on the continent of Europe. Many would quote by rote the nations that had been discussed in recent news items on CNN, such as Iraq, Israel or Libya.

The level of indoctrination that goes on in the media is of course well known. In spite of earnestly declaring in debates that 'Not all Muslims are terrorists', 'all Catholic priests are not paedophiles' and 'blacks are not exclusively muggers, social security fraudsters and drug-dealers', the stereotypes are apologetically hammered home through careful selection of the news items covered. Very few 'good news' items are broadcast, reinforcing a feeling of social despair that 'the world is going to hell in a handbasket'.

IN CONCLUSION
If a child is doing poorly at school, either with general academics, or specifically with their reading, maths, etc., the following questions should be asked:

· How effective is the level of discipline you apply to your child?
· Does your child do what you say, or is s/he rebellious?
· Does your child's teacher have control of the class?
· Has your child been taught to read using phonics or the whole- word method?
· Does your child eat junk/processed food, such as burger meals, fried foods, kebabs, fizzy drinks and sugar-laden foods?
· Does your child drink adequate amounts of water?
· Does your child take nutritional supplementation?
· Does your child have food allergies?
· Does your child live in a toxic environment?
· Does your child exhibit any physical problems, such as migraine headaches, asthma, constant colds, depression, listlessness or eczema?
· Does your child mix with the wrong crowd?
· Does your child speak well?
· Is your child naughty?
· Is your child a leader or a follower?
· Is your child a good or bad influence on others?

These and other questions can determine where the potential problems lie. While teachers often do a great job, some don't, and it is important to identify teacher problems, if they exist. Equally, it is important not to pathologise into an illness kids being kids. My research shows that many of the problems children face today result from poor diet, poor parental discipline, poor teacher discipline and an aberrant and politically skewed curriculum designed to dumb children down and teach them to 'fit in' with the amoral new globalist society that is struggling to be born. The point is, all these elements, with the possible exception of world politics, can be controlled by the parents, if the parents have the will to make their voices heard.
Copyright © 2004 Phillip Day
Extracted from The Mind Game

Further Resources
The Mind Game by Phillip Day

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