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SUBVERTING LEARNING Psychiatry Versus Education
The undermining of traditional education and values can be traced to a German
psychologist, Wilhelm Wundt of Leipzig University, who founded �experimental
psychology� in 1879. Declaring that man is an animal, with no soul, he
claimed that thought was merely the result of brain activity�-a false
premise that has remained the basis of psychiatry until this day.
Wundt was a strong advocate of Gottlieb Fichte, head of psychology at the
University of Berlin in 1810, who believed that �Education should aim
at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will
be incapable � of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters
would have wished.�
Influential educational psychologist Friedrich Wilhelm Meumann, professor
of philosophy and education at Leipzig University, sought to radically
change schools by the �oppression of the children�s natural inclinations.�
His book Mental Hygiene in the Schools became required reading for several
generations of education students in Germany and he propagated the idea that
schools should be used for �preventative mental health functions.�
Slowly but surely, these views began to permeate our schools through both
psychology and psychiatry. Key players implementing Wundt�s theories in
the United States included Edward Lee Thorndike, John Dewey, James Earl
Russell, James Cattell and William James, who became known as the �Father
of American Psychology.� Cattell, president of the American Psychological
Association, eliminated phonics and introduced the �whole word method,�
forcing children to memorize words without understanding the logical sequence
of letters or sounds.
In his 1929 book, Elementary Principles of Education, Thorndike called
for a reduction in educational basics: �Artificial exercises, like drills
on phonetics, multiplication tables, and formal writing movements, are
used to a wasteful degree.
Subjects such as arithmetic, language, and history include content that is intrinsically
of little value.� With his Wundtian, animal-psychology background, Thorndike
did not see students as self-willed individuals, capable of choice and decision,
but rather as stimulus-response animals. �The aim of the teacher,� Thorndike
said, �is to produce desirable and prevent undesirable changes in human beings
by producing and preventing certain responses.�
Teachers were to look for psychological outcomes. Psychiatrists and
psychologists said three sources of �stress� had to be eliminated from the schools:
1) school failure, 2) a curriculum centered on academics, and 3) disciplinary
procedures. School failure was seen as the chief villain, leading to �feelings
of inferiority� and behavioral problems like truancy and an unsocial attitude.
The solution was to eliminate the emphasis on academics and, thereby, rid the
student of the stress of school failure.
In 1945 Canadian psychiatrist G. Brock Chisholm, director of the World Health
Organization (WHO) and co-founder of the World Federation for Mental Health
(WFMH) claimed that the idea of �good and bad� had caused �frustration,
inferiority, neurosis and inability to enjoy living.� Therefore, �the
re-interpretation and eventually eradication of the concept of right and
wrong� was one of the �objectives of practically all effective psychotherapy.�
Within a few short years, Ralph Tyler, the president of the Carnegie Foundation
(provider of private funding for education and testing), published Basic
Principles of Curriculum and Instruction, declaring that the �real
purpose of education is � to bring about significant changes in the students�
pattern of behavior.� Referred to as �progressive education,� it meant
targeting the child�s emotions, feelings, beliefs, and, as a secondary
objective, his intellect.
Benjamin Bloom, who introduced �Mastery Learning� into education, declared
that the purpose of education was �to change the thoughts, feelings, and
actions of children.� In his 1950s book, A Taxonomy of Educational
Objectives, he described his idea of mastery: the end result of teaching
�critical thinking,� is a �subjective judgment � resulting in personal
values/opinions with no real right or wrong answers.� Therefore, education
should be a �process of challenging students� fixed beliefs.� Consequently,
schools were encouraged to make the child�s belief system the primary
target of their budgets.
Should there be any doubt about the impact of this totalitarian initiative,
during a discussion of the Holocaust in one New York school recently,
one student commented, �Of course I dislike the Nazis, but who is to say
that they are morally wrong?�
John Dewey, Edward Lee Thorndike, James Cattell, William James, and G. Stanley
Hall, psychologists, were all students of Wilhelm Wundt or his theories,
and pushed into implementation their harmful experimental ideas, making
schools places to manipulate children, not educate them. These theories
were forced into the education system with disastrous results�soaring
illiteracy, school dropout rates and youth crime. American James Cattell,
after studying in Germany under Wundt, developed destructive teaching
theories which proved a dismal failure, despite 124 studies over 70 years
that tried to show otherwise.
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