A WEEKLY COMMENTARY
Year Nineteen ... Number Forty-Seven ... November 24, 1972
PROOFS OF A CONSPIRACY TO BUILD
A TOTAL, MANAGED GLOBAL SOCIETY
PART TWELVE
AN EDUCATIONAL REVOLUTION
"WITHOUT THE BLOODBATH"?
There is today, in the literature concerning governmental reorganization, social and welfare reorganization, educational reorganization, and every other kind of reorganization, the constant recurrence of the word "revolution." Such use of the word has no reference to the Reds and other radicals who are attacking "the Establishment"; nor to those who are engaged in counter-revolution as ultra-conservatives. Rather, this use of the word "revolution" refers to those who are in high positions in Government (the Nixon Revolution, for example), and to those who are in positions of trust, who are responsible leaders, and who are quick to admit that they are "leading a revolution." An example of this in the educational field recently was brought to our attention: The UC News, issued weekly by the University of California, published the following in its issue of Feb. 8, 1972:
"EDUCATIONAL 'REVOLUTION' NEAR, SAYS UCR EXPERT"
"Riverside -- Public education in the United States is headed for a revolution -- a drastic change in who runs the schools, what is taught and who learns, a University of California, Riverside, educator believes.
"Dr. Laurence Iannaccone, a professor of education and administration at UC Riverside, one of the nation's foremost experts on public education, said that change of a magnitude rivalling the transformation that took place in American education in the early 1900s, will occur before 1980.
"'There's no question that public education will undergo a revolution in the next ten years,' he said, 'The issue is how we are to avoid the bloodbath that may accompany it.'
According to Iannaccone, the new concern about education has been magnified by changes in population, the electronic media, growing awareness of racial and ethnic issues, and by taxpayer dissatisfaction over mounting taxes. The solution, he says, is a complete restructuring of school organization, and a shift in funding responsibilities." (End of quotation; italics added).
His solution, in other words, is universal application of the method called Planning-Programming-Budgeting system (PPBS).
When PPBS is applied to education, it becomes especially difficult to dig through the layers of semantic confusion and planned word-camouflage, and get down to the basic dangers of the method. Therefore, it seems expedient, first, to define some of the more commonly used terms. This should make it easier to understand what will follow. The definitions are those used by Rand Corporation, by public administrators, and by the educationists who are promoting PPBS:
PLANNING, PROGRAMMING, BUDGETING SYSTEM (PPBS) - "A systematic approach to the allocation of limited resources for the accomplishment of priority objectives."
GOAL - "A statement of broad direction, general purpose, or intent. A goal is general and timeless."
OBJECTIVE - "A desired accomplishment which can be measured within a given time frame."
ALTERNATIVES - "Possible objectives and means of obtaining them."
SYSTEM - "A system involves many parts, or components, that operate independently and in combination to achieve stated goals or mission objectives."
PROGRAM - "A unique combination of personnel, facilities, equipment and supplies, which operate together to accomplish common objectives."
SYSTEM ANALYSIS (also called the Systems Approach, or Systems Management) - "The process of evaluating the inputs, the costs, and the resources required of a program, as well as evaluating the outputs, the service, the benefits and the payoffs."
FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS - "The technique of breaking down a mission into an organization of jobs or tasks performed."
TAXONOMY - Systematics, or Systems Analysis as applied to education; "The study of the general principles of scientific classification."
Concerning this last term "taxonomy" -- About ten years ago a group of psychologists, behavioral scientists and educators under the leadership of Benjamin Bloom, came up with what they labeled "the taxonomy of educational objectives." By the probable process of merely enlarging on the original experimental findings of Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (who worked under the aegis of Joseph Stalin and the urging of Secret Police Chief Lavrentia Berea), Bloom and his associates classified the behavioral objectives of modern education into three categories, which they called cognitive, affective, and psychomotor.
Interpretation:
The cognitive domain in education is concerned with the gaining of knowledge, and with recall or memory.
The affective domain has to do with what the student believes, what his values and his attitudes are.
The psychomotor domain is concerned with what the student does or can do under certain stimuli; his motor performance.
More simply: Bloom's taxonomy classifies each student according to:
1) What he knows,
2) How he feels about it,
3) What he does about it.
The PPBS elite adopted and adapted Dr. Bloom's taxonomy and "the essence of the PPB System (as applied to education) is to be able to evaluate student performance in each of these three domains," declares Joseph P. Bean, M.D. "Therefore, behavioral objectives are written for each course to determine what the child learns (knows), what his attitudes are (feels) and what action he is able to take (does). The objectives pre-determine what knowledge is necessary or good, what attitudes the child should have, and what action is considered desirable. The right of parents to determine what values and attitudes they wish to develop is bypassed, and the objectives generate attitudes often inconsistent with those the parents prefer."
Dr. Bean was a member of the Glendale, California School Board, resigned because he found he could do nothing in that capacity to halt the flow of the "River of Pollution" which is the public education system in his State and in the United States. In a classic statement of resignation from the school board, Dr. Bean concluded with these words:
". . . Only about ten percent of the decisions affecting school districts are made by the local board of education, the River of Education is too highly contaminated for this small fraction of influence to make an impression at the local level.
"When a new trustee is elected to a local board of education, he intends, of course, to represent the residents who elected him. But usually the new board member, within a matter of six weeks, finds himself representing the educational establishment instead of the residents. When parents come before the board to make requests, they are often treated rudely and as enemies of the board. Rarely will a board member continue to identify with the parents and to serve them and their children. With their districts 90% controlled by the federal and state governments, parents live under complete tyranny when their own local boards identify with the administrative staff instead of the people whom they were elected to represent.
"There is nothing new about attempts to control another person's behavior. Physical force has been used since just after man appeared on earth. However, the techniques of warfare more recently developed, have led to the invention of new weapons which relegate nuclear explosives to the category of the bow and arrow. It is generally agreed that of these new weapons (which include hypnosis, traditional psycho-therapy, behavior modifying drugs, brain surgery on the masses, enzyme inhibitors, and implanted electrodes in the brain) operant conditioning is the most specific and easiest of manipulation. Its implementation is being accomplished on hundreds of millions of persons on this planet at this moment.
"When you consider that the ultimate goal of warfare is the control of the behavior of the vanquished by the victor, we are therefore, in the greatest conflict in the history of mankind. Welcome to World War III."
(End of quotation)
All of these new weapons mentioned by Dr. Bean (plus others such as sensitivity training, sex education, the religion of humanism and data bank surveillance) have been integrated into and become a part of the vast arsenal of PPBS.
When the PPBS elite concentrates on the task of controlling human behavior, the emphasis is on the schools of the nation. The older generation -- those on the other side of the alleged generation gap -- are expendable and their number diminshes with the years. It is the more expedient course with these "wrongly educated grown-ups" not to convert but to coerce. The red tape of governmental restrictions and regulations, the oppression of income tax soul-scrutiny, fear of losing social security, health and welfare benefits, the pesterings of pettifogging bureaucrats; such weapons of coercion keep most of the "over thirty" group anxious to keep in line.
But with the youth there is the need for conversion to a new way of life. And forced education is the perfect vehicle when it is driven and directed by a PPB System which determines what each youth is to know, feel and do.
The PPBS elite will, of course, insist that its design for the schools is merely to get the most out of every dollar spent; to make the teacher and the administrator accountable for the work he should do. Here is the way the designers of PPBS explain it:
"Let us suppose that a school spends a budgeted amount of money for a particular program. It is desirable to learn whether the dollars spent are producing the results expected. To determine the success of the program, behavioral or performance objectives for the class must be written down. The teacher then is to give the type of instruction which will enable the class to meet these written objectives, and within a given time block. Testing is then done to determine whether the students in the class actually did meet the written objectives. Thus, PPBS is merely a system of cost accounting, nothing more."
This is what the proponents of PPBS will tell you. Up to a point, they are correct; it is a system of cost accounting. But, it also is so very much more!
The programming, or taxonomy, has three parts: know, feel, and do. Under PPBS, the knowledge imparted is of a peculiar nature. Johnny can no longer read, write, spell, add or subtract satisfactorily; but he is given controlled amounts of certain scientific, technological, physiological, sociological, and political information. The academic is glossed over, the technical and professional are stressed; so that to know is to be prepared functionally for the new society.
In the "affective" (feel) domain, PPBS 'programs' the student with values and attitudes that are in conflict with his home training. And in the "action" (do) domain, he is programmed to political and social action, and to sexual action befitting an animal rather than a human being.
We appreciate Dr. Bean's description, because he was on the "inside" of the system long enough to observe it from the professional point of view. He writes:
"When the teacher (under PPBS) has completed an instructional unit and has tested the students, the test results are assigned symbols and computerized. The information flows to a regional data collection and processing center, one of several in each state. There a student profile is built for each student in the region. From this center the data flow to a large data bank serving one or more states (eventually, one of the ten federeal regions into which the Nation has been divided -- Ed.) In this master bank an enormous amount of information is permanently stored on each student.
"The Rand Corporation, which assisted with the theoretical construction of a PPB for schools, affirms that the entire responsibility for the PPBS operation must reside with one person at the top. 'No one at a lower level has the authority or the right or ability to acquire the knowledge required to perform the necessary task. . . ' says Rand.
"After students have been evaluated for the first time to determine how well they have achieved the stated objectives, this programmer at the top will be in a position to modify, delete, or add to the objectives, to achieve a standardization of objectives for all classrooms in every school in any one subject. After three or four testings or evaluations, the programmer will no doubt have standardized the objectives for every classroom, and the usual decision-makers will be locked out of the process. The power of the programmer (the one man at the top) bypasses the board of education, the superintendent of the school, and the parents. Even the teacher, who is given a chance to write the first set of objectives, loses out because the teacher's power to influence the objectives will be removed by the programmer; the teacher will truly be a facilitator and a manager of the classroom, but not a teacher at all.
"After each child is programmed with the pre-determined knowledge, values, and potential skills, he will be standardized and averaged out, leveled off at a base-line of mediocrity. Subject matter as we know it will no longer exist and very few other aspects of education will remain. The more than forty million children in our nation's schools will be insensitive and unnatural, and will be capable of only highly directive behavior, each holding identical points of view.
"Educators wishing to initiate the use of behavioral objectives in a school district first set the stage for their operations. The use of objectives is a means of creating change in the district, and the persons responsible for the change process are called change agents. Change agentry is a sociological mechanism now widely used in education. Strategies for initiating and managing the change process are taught in seminars to future change agents.
"The change agent first deliberately subjects the school or district to disequilibrium and sets in motion the forces necessary to change and re-direct the school. When the intended state of disequilibrium has been achieved, the system is said to be unfrozen. To crystallize the institutional thrust in a new direction, i.e., to re-freeze the system, behavioral objectives in the three domains (know, feel, do) are written. The objectives reflect the new direction (new methods, course content, point of view, values and desired ends) for the school . . . .
"Under PPBS management, the information input to the student will be limited; random encounter in the learning process will be eliminated; instruction will be highly prescribed; and programming toward a particular ideological, philosophical, political and social point of view will be the chief characteristic of the system.
"The greatest threat to human freedom which faces man today is a new system of weapons for mind control. Man has always been subject to enslavement by force or by economics. The technological (including chemical) mechanisms now perfected provide a new dimension in enslavement, mind control, which will dwarf the first two. . . .
"PPBS has evolved out of a long history of developments through research in pscyhology, sociology, economics, mathematics, anthropology and political science. Planned Programming and Budgeting was developed from 1956-63 by Charles Hitch at the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica with federal funds. It is considered an achievement in political science, rather than an advance in economics. It is described by sociologists as a political administrative technique. Think about that when your school superintendent, principal or teacher tells you it is an improved format for accounting."
(End of quotation)
For those who want to know "who" is responsible for this mind control enslavement of the public schools, here is a bit of evidence: When the California Department of Education began working (over three years ago) on a PPBS operational model for all California schools, the international accounting firm of Peat, Marwick and Mitchell was engaged to develop the model.
The Senior Partner of this international firm is Walter E. Hansen, who is a member of the Council on Foriegn Relations, as well as a member of the United Nations Association of the United States. As for the place of PPBS in the world government concept, the following quotation from Science Magazine, Feb. 1971, should tell the story:
"The cost-benefit analysis (planned programming and budgeting) of Charles Hitch, when employed at Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, California, has been listed as a political social science innovation by scholars, along with other innovations designated 'Pol' to include Lenin's theory of one-party organization and revolution, the Fabian Socialist movement of gradual transformation toward socialism, Gandhi's large-scale nonviolent political action in India, and Mao Tse-tung's peasant and guerilla organization and government."
(To Be Continued)
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For information concerning this letter, write: DON BELL REPORTS, P.O. Box 2223, Palm Beach, Florida 33480