The Idiocracy of America

"The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to
them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which
would result from their intervention in the world as transformers
of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role
impressed  on them,  the more they  tend simply  to  adapt  to the
world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them."
Paulo Freire

It’s been awhile since I’ve been on Zaadz as I wanted to take a little more time for myself and my son with trips to Colorado, the Grand Canyon, and California twice this summer. There is just something about the summer for kids that encourages a time of exploring your own personal freedoms and having time to really get to know your family and friends outside of the school scene.

 We had a great time this summer with hiking, surfing, riding motorcycles and just having a good time. But today it all ends as tomorrow my son begins the 5^th grade.  On this his last day of summer he has been spending time with his best friend when at lunch time I saw them eating a bag of Doritos as if they couldn’t get enough of them. I asked them to read me the ingredient list and there out of 38 or so ingredients was number 8, Monosodium Glutamate.  I explained to them as best I could the potential dangers of MSG as a neuron-exciter that literally excites the brain cells to death. You see MSG is a drug and a neurotransmitter which stimulates the brain cell activity. MSG "tricks" the brain into thinking the food you are eating tastes good and you want more. Every try to eat just one Doritos?....exactly my point.  Needless to say they both stopped eating the chips and I encouraged them to eat some fresh fruits or some organic cereals instead.

 So I decided to spend a little time on the computer and try and pull up some of the research when as I was trolling through You Tube I came across this video which has just gone super viral with over 2,300,000 hits in just TWO DAYS! And if you add the copy cat videos its well over 3,000,000 hits! It has over 10,000 comments and is being blogged more then any other video on the internet while being played on radio stations through out the country.  And what is this video? Just more proof of the ominous red flags that our society has been in a perpetual state of a manipulated dumbing down. It is a clip from the recently aired Miss Teen USA 2007 with Ms. South Carolina answering a simple question. Take a look....

 This idea of a dumbing down is certainly not new as the education of the masses has been a big part of every economic society whose need is to have trained labor force to keep the capital of industry turning at a profitable pace. It is this capitalistic exploitation of humanity that wishes the masses to be given only enough education as is necessary to get the job done.

Professor Caroll Quigley who received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D in history from Harvard University wrote in his famous history book entitled “Tragedy And Hope,” that the elite families of Russia saw that the capitalism in the west was to exceed their industrial base for the simple reason that America was educating its lower social classes to perform the necessary job functions that unskilled labor could not.

 Bernard de Mandeville confirmed this idea years earlier when in his The Fable of the Bees of  1714 (the book which Adam Smith used as the basis of his1776 Wealth of Nations, the capitalist Bible) writes:

 Bernard de Mandeville

It comes as no surprise then that we see the owners of corporate interests such as the Rockefellers, Fords, Morgans, Browns, Harrimans, Du Ponts, and other ruling families who desire nothing more then obedient, efficient workers who cannot think for themselves.

"In our dream, we have limitless resources, and the people yield themselves
with perfect docility to our molding hand. The present educational conventions
fade from our minds; and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will
upon a  grateful and responsive folk.  We shall not try to make these people or
any of their children  into philosophers or  men of learning or  science. We are
not to raise  up from among  them authors,  orators,  poets, or men  of letters.
We  shall  not  search for  embryo great  artists,  painters, musicians. Nor will
we  cherish even the  humbler ambition to raise up from among  them lawyers,
doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we now have ample supply."

Fredrick Gates

It is exactly this philosophy of training and not educating the masses through various techniques that these industrialists sought. In 1895 funding by Rockefeller enabled the famous John Deweyto establish a laboratory at the University of Chicago to study psychological principles and experimental techniques of learning.  Followed in 1896-1920: by what Gatto, John Taylor in The Underground History of American Education states as  "A small group of industrialists and financiers, together with their private charitable foundations, subsidized university chairs, university researchers, and school administrators, and spent more money on forced schooling than the government itself did in this laissez-faire fashion a system of modern schooling was constructed without public participation."

 
By 1917, Gatto says, "the major administrative jobs in American schooling were under the control of "the Education Trust": representatives of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harvard, Stanford, University of Chicago, and the National Education Association. The chief end, wrote Benjamin Kidd, was to "impose on the young the ideal of subordination." Gatto called Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Henry Ford "The Four Architects of Modern Forced Schooling" who thought that modern industry needed "workers who know nothing".

 To pursue this materialist dream these “Architects” of public education followed the principles Wilhelm Wundt, G. Stanley Hall, James McKeen Cattell, E. L. Thorndike, and others of like ilk who felt that psychology should think only in terms of measurable behavior of what could be measured and quantified, or Ken Wilbur’s upper right quadrant. Think Pavlov here with the intent that 'Public education must limit itself to training working class students to carry out whatever task they are given to do and to accept the commands of their superiors.'

 It was the teachings of Wilhelm Wundt rector at the University of Leipzig in Germany, where many American educators were trained such as his disciple G. Stanley Hall who became known for his studies of child development and his 1904  two-volume work entitled Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relation to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education, welding experimental psychology to child education. At Johns Hopkins University he set about building up the first American laboratory for psychology and in1887 founded and edited the American Journal of Psychology, the first journal of its kind in the United States.

  To get an idea of how this man felt about education, you only need to read his ideas concerning it,

G. Stanley Hall

"We must overcome the fetishism of the alphabet, of
the multiplication tables, of grammars, of scales, and
of bibliolatry . . . it would be no serious loss if a child
never learned to read."

 
Of course he speaks of the working class when he describes them as a,
 

"great army of incapables, shading down to those who should be
in schools  for  dullards or  subnormal children,  for those whose
mental development heredity decrees a slow pace and an early arrest."

 
By 1934 education was defined in An Outline of Educational Psychology in these terms:  
 

 Sounds again like Pavlovian training so it doesn’t take much of a rocket scientist to see what is really going on here. By the time we get to 1968, John Goodlad who headed up the Division of Educational Studies at Emory University at the time has said,

  "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."

 "Learning and Teaching in the Future," Today's Education
(Journal of the National Education Association)

So what we see here is a class struggle between the elite and the working class over the who shall have the power. This for all intent and purposes is the greatest of all wars that has ever been fought and the American public is losing. America needs to wake up to what little power they have left  to transform and take back the power of the rights of the individual for freedom and to educate the children to think for themselves.

Horace Mann wrote in 1848 that:

If one class possesses all the wealth and the education, while the
residue of society is ignorant and poor, it matters not by what name
the relation between them may be called; the latter, in fact and in truth,
will be the servile dependents and subjects of the former.

Yet it is exactly our educational system that is today dumbing down our future generations to produce a more docile workforce trained to keep the economic engine going while remaining good servile citizens.

Today there is a war taken place, a war for the minds of our children and the future of the freedoms we value. In 2000, Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt,  former Senior Policy Advisor in the U.S. Department of Education, blew the whistle in the `80s on government activities withheld from the public when she published

 Click picture for free copy

In it she writes:

“In retrospect, I had just found out that the United States was engaged in war. People write important books about war: books documenting the battles fought, the names of the generals involved, the names of those who fired the first shot. This book is simply a history book about another kind of war:  one fought using psychological methods;  a one-hundred-year war;  a different, more deadly war than any in which our country has ever been involved;  a war about which the average American hasn't the foggiest idea.. The reason Americans do not understand this war is because it has been fought in secret-in the schools of our nation, using our children who are captive in classrooms. The wagers of this war are using very sophisticated and effective tools:

•  Hegelian Dialectic (common ground, consensus and compromise)  Gradualism (two steps forward; one step backward) Semantic deception (redefining terms to get agreement without understanding).

 I want people to know that if the government schools are allowed to teach children K-12 using Pavlovian/Skinnerian animal training methods-which provide tangible rewards only for correct answers-there can be no freedom.

 Why? People 'trained'-not educated-by such educational techniques will be fearful of taking principled, sometimes controversial, stands when called for because these people will have been programmed to speak up only if a positive reward or response is forthcoming. The price of freedom has often been paid with pain and loneliness.”

But in today's society we dont want to suffer pain for reward, we want our reward now, the instant gratification culture that produces documentary's such as STUPIDITY.

Mercury as we all know is one of the most neurotoxic substances known to man yet we have allowed this to be given to our newborns which is why Autism is on the rise and cognitive abilities are declining steadily.

And the propaganda machine would like you to actually
think that mercury is good for you. Take a look.
 

If you want to see what Mercury does to neurons,
just click here. And now we have toys laced with lead!

 It is just this power of the media that is owned by 5 corporations that have helped to produce what Neil Postman, author of Amusing Ourselves to Death calls his 1993 book, : Technopoly - The Surrender of Culture to Technology, a condition of culture in which human judgment and subjective thought are suspended and replaced with humans behaving like machines for efficiency of production and the advancement of our economic systems.

 
IN a 1996 interview on PBS Postman is quoted as saying,

“I don't think any of us can do much about the rapid growth of new technology. However, it is possible for us to learn how to control our own uses of technology. The "forum" that I think is best suited for this is our educational system. If students get a sound education in the history, social effects and psychological biases of technology, they may grow to be adults who use technology rather than be used by it.”

Cover of Amusing Ourselves to Death
by Neil Postman

But some even argue that the use of this Technopoly is having its most significant impact on the pliant and malleable minds of our children. Take the simple cartoon programs for children that some argue are nothing more the socialist propaganda machines that teach our children to just be good workers. Shows like “Bob the Builder” or  Thomas the Tank Engine who is happy only when he is working with the other trains in ''Thomas & Friends."  Thomas has as his deepest desire to show his boss, Sir Topham Hatt, that he is  efficient, productive, and ''really useful." A stretch....maybe…maybe not.

What can be said is that the combination of “Education Reforms” and the exponential growth and spread of chemicals and toxins that are in our foods, water and vaccines  have slowly taken our republic to a Democracy that has created an Idocracy.It has even created our pupptiered leaders who even have mainstream media like MSN asking is Preident Bush an Idiot?

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire exposed our educational system with these insightful words and call to liberation of our children who hold our future when he wrote,

"Who are better prepared than the oppressed to understand the terrible significance of an oppressive society? Who suffer the effects of oppression more than the oppressed? Who can better understand the necessity of liberation? They will not gain this liberation by chance but through the praxis of their quest for it, through their recognition of the necessity to fight for it. And this fight, because of the purpose given it by the oppressed, will actually constitute an act of love opposing the lovelessness which lies at the heart of the oppressors' violence, lovelessness even when clothed in false generosity."

So when you see the poor girl from South Carolina on You Tube , TV,  or  hear her on the radio, realize that this is the product of our educational system that has been manipulated for the purpose of creating a generation of kids trained to do what they are told.  Zaadz holds within it the possibilty of extending the love necessary to educate and enlighten those around us to take action and DO SOMETHING to CHANGE THE WORLD and make it a better place for our children. With truth comes pain and the responsibilty to act upon that truth. Like facing your personal shadow, our society has a shadow side that needs the light of truth thrown upon it. Be that light and change the world, one child at a time.

DEO