A History of Betrayal: Subversion of Education

Psychiatrists and psychologists in the last century opened the door to chaos in the classroom by undermining morality and selfrespect, relegating schools to testing grounds for perverse theories and treating children as animals to be trained and conditioned.

EDWARD LEE THORNDIKE, animal psychologist, experimented on monkeys, rats, cats, mice, chickens and other animals, then applied his techniques to children. He stated, “It will of course, be understood that directly or indirectly, soon or late, every advance in the sciences of human nature will contribute to our success in controlling human nature.”

PAUL S CHRODER, professor of psychiatry, addressed the first conference of the German Society for Child Psychiatry and Therapeutic Education in 1940, attended by the elite of Nazi psychiatry, and proclaimed: “Child psychiatry has to ... help to integrate (hereditarily) damaged or inadequate children for their own and the public’s good … under constant expert selection of the valuable and educable ones with just as strict and resolute a sacrifice of those deemed predominantly worthless and uneducable.”

J.R. REES, co-founder of the World Federation for Mental Health (WFMH), spoke of psychiatry permeating every education activity and boasted that it had made a “useful attack” upon the “teaching profession” for the purpose of promoting “our particular point of view.”

G. BROCK C HISHOLM, co-founder of the WFMH, said, “If the race is to be freed from its crippling burden of good and evil it must be psychiatrists who take the original responsibility.”

JOHN D EWEY, psychologist and promoter of the “man is an animal” theory, labeled the urge to teach children to read early in life a “perversion,” and advocated that schools should take on the role of social, rather than academic, institutions.

G. STANLEY H ALL, first president of the American Psychological Association, explained education for the masses was not necessa ry. “We must overcome the fetishism of the alphabet, of the multiplication tables, of grammar,” he said. “It would be no serious loss if a child never learned to read.”

JAMES CATTELL, a later American Psychological Association president, theorized that “little is gained by teaching a child sounds and letters as the first step to being able to read.” His “whole word” reading method proved to be disastrous, crashing literacy rates everywhere it was used.

MANFRED MÜLLER-KÜPPERS, of the German Society for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, asserted in the 1970s that there should be “no provisions for school attendance without child psychiatric examinations.”

The influence is still prevalent. In 2003, psychiatrists and psychologists advised a U.S. New Freedom Commission on Mental Health to recommend, “[T]he early detection of mental health problems in [school] children … through routine and comprehensive testing and screening.”

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