Little Manchurian Candidates
- From: "RedJade" <mistressredjade@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 10 Mar 2006 08:09:28 -0800
Little Manchurian Candidates
By Matt James
"One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them,
One ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them."
--Tolkien
Our six-year-old daughter was so excited to start school. At our first
parent-teacher conference, Barb and I expected to hear the usual
compliments and heartwarming anecdotes about our bright little angel.
and music recitals, we had learned that parents always say nice thingsFrom our experiences with activities like T-ball and soccer, or dance
about the children of others. If the compliments are sometimes
unrealistic or excessive, well, parenting is tough work. We can all use
the encouragement.
I guess we had been spoiled. Jenny's teacher got right to the point.
She had some negatives to address. For one thing, Jenny was struggling
with her reading. The teacher confessed that one of the most difficult
parts of her job was deflating parents with the news that their
children were simply not exceptional. Jenny was, at best, an average
reader. She was not an Eagle; she was a Pony. Our job was to learn to
enjoy her as a 40-watt bulb rather than a bright light. Was it my
imagination, or did this middle-aged matron's sweet smile contain a
trace of malice as she related these tidings?
I was confused by this assessment of Jenny's reading abilities because
it simply didn't fit in with her prior history. She had a love affair
with books for her entire childhood. We have a photograph of her at 11
months of age staring earnestly at the contents of an open book. I
remember reading to her when she was three. I stopped for some reason,
but she continued the narration. She knew her stories by heart. Like
many other children, Jenny had learned to read at home. She was a
bookworm, and she was an experienced and passionate reader before she
ever started first grade.
The teacher went on to explain that Jenny cried too much at school and
that we needed to correct this problem with the appropriate discipline.
Barb and I exchanged glances but didn't argue. We were in shock.
I was curious about the crying. Jenny was such a happy child. I asked
her that night what made her sad at school. Expecting to hear about
something on the playground, I was surprised by her answer. The
listening-hour stories made her sad:
Once upon a time there was a daddy duck with seven ducklings. They
ranged in age down to the youngest (who reminded Jenny of a first
grader). The daddy was mean. One day he demanded that all his children
learn three tasks, such as running, swimming, and diving. If a duckling
was unable to master all of the tasks, he would be banished from the
family to live with the chickens. The youngsters struggled under the
cruel eye of their father. When it came to diving, the first grader
floundered and was sent away to live with the chickens.
This was the story Jenny related, in her own words, as an example. I
heard it told a second time several years later, by my cousin Nancy, as
a sample of objectionable curriculum. We were impressed with the
coincidence, since our families resided in different states.
Jenny told me she also cried over stories in her readers. They made her
sad and frustrated in some way. What a mess! In one evening we had
found out that Jenny was unhappy at school, that her teacher thought
she was a poor reader and a dim bulb, and that she heard mean tales
during listening-hour that I wouldn't repeat to hardened convicts. What
in the name of heaven was going on at this school?
I was determined to get to the bottom of things. Since they didn't send
books home with students in the younger grades, I went to the school
the following day and spent a couple of hours reviewing the elementary
readers. As I read, my eyes opened wider and wider. I had assumed the
purpose of the reading curriculum was to stimulate the juvenile
imagination and teach reading skills. Instead, I saw material saturated
with, to borrow another parent's language, "an unadvertised agenda
promoting parental alienation, loss of identity and self-confidence,
group-dependence, passivity, and anti-intellectualism."
I once daydreamed through a basic psychology class in medical school
which described the work of Pavlov and B.F Skinner in the twentieth
century. Their conclusions were that animal (and human) behaviors can
be encouraged or discouraged by associating them with pleasure or pain.
This is such an obvious fact of nature. It is amazing that anyone would
bother to prove it with experimentation, as if the carrot and the stick
haven't been used since time began.
In behaviorist experiments various stimuli, such as food or electrical
shocks, were used as rewards or deterrents. Over time, due to animal
memory, a pattern of behavior could be established without food or
shocks coming into play. This educational or training process is called
"conditioning." With enough conditioning, the dog will stop chasing
cars.
As I read the stories and poems in Jenny's readers, I was astonished to
discover that they were alive, in their own way, with the theories and
practices of these dead scientists. But the animals to be trained
weren't dogs or rats. They were our young students. Pleasure and pain
signals were embedded into the reading material in a consistent way.
Given the vicarious nature of the reading experience, and by
identifying with the protagonists in the stories, it was our first
graders who were "learning" certain attitudes and behaviors.
When a child-figure in the stories split away from his group, for
example, he would get rained on, his toes would get cold in the snow,
or he would experience some other form of discomfort or torment.
Similar material was repeated ad infinitum. Through their reading, our
students would feel the stinging rain and the pain of freezing toes.
They would learn the lesson like one of Pavlov's dogs: avoid the pain,
stay with the group.
The stories in the readers consistently associated individual
initiative with emotional or physical pain. Consider the example of the
little squirrel whose wheel falls off his wagon. When he tries to
replace it, the wagon rides with an awkward and embarrassing bump,
noticeable to his friends, who then tease him about it. Another attempt
to repair the wheel results in an accident, with bruising and bleeding
and more humiliation. The cumulative effect of this and similar story
lines, given the vicarious nature of the reading experience, would be
to discourage initiative and reduce self-confidence in the first
grader.
Animal dads, moms, and grandparents were portrayed over and over in
various combinations as mean, stupid, unreliable, bungling, impotent or
incompetent. Relationships with their children were almost always
dysfunctional; communication and reciprocal trust were non-existent. A
toxic mom or dad, for instance, might have stepped in to help our
youthful squirrel repair his wagon, only to make matters worse and
wreak emotional havoc in the process. Jenny's heart would be lacerated
by stories which constantly portrayed parent/child relationships as
strained, cruel, or distant. I could see her crying with hurt or
frustration.
It occurred to me that over the long run, at some level of
consciousness, our daughter would have to hold us accountable for
permitting her to be tortured in school. Logically, Barb and I had to
be stupid, unreliable, uncaring, or impotent, just like the parents in
the books. By sending her to school, we were validating the message in
her readers, contributing significantly to the parental alienation
curriculum. Continuing in her school-based reading series, Jenny's
relationship with us would have become tarnished or eroded, and an
element of bitterness or cynicism might have crept into her
personality.
I borrow the term "anti-intellectualism" to describe another dominant
theme in the readers. Many of the compositions were, essentially, word
salad. They lacked intrinsic interest, coherence, or continuity, and
they often demonstrated a sort of anti-rationality. The stories and the
corresponding questions seemed to require the student to suspend the
natural operations of his intellect, such as the desire to make sense
out of things or the impulse to be curious. Under this yoke, a student
could learn to hate reading or even thought itself.
The following "story" and "comprehension" questions are representative
of the anti-intellectualism that I found in the readers:
Once upon a time there was a little green mouse who hopped after a
tiger onto a yellow airplane. The plane turned into a big red bird in
flight, and the mouse turned into a blue pumpkin. The pumpkin fell to
the ground and its seeds grew into pots and pans. Blah, blah, blah
1) "What color was the mouse?"
2) "Why do mice turn into pumpkins?"
3) "How do seeds grow?"
I can see children getting frustrated over material like this. It is
debatable as to which facet of the exercise is more onerous, the
reading or the "comprehension." I almost incline to the latter. Among
other concerns, I wonder if it is a good thing to pressure children to
respond to stupid or unanswerable questions. Such a process would lead
to passivity and a loss of confidence, to a little engine that
couldn't.
According to Pavlov and B.F. Skinner, repetition of unpleasant reading
experiences would turn a student off to the reading activity.
Predictable consequences would be a child who hates reading and loses
out on vast intellectual benefits and development. In addition, his
reading failure would tax his self-confidence, and he could be branded
with one of society's popular labels such as dyslexia.
I considered Jenny's reading struggles in the context of performance
expectations as well as grading and comparisons with other children. It
seemed as if she faced a nasty dilemma: force herself to read
alienating material, or disengage and then disappoint parents, teachers
and self. What an impossible predicament for a young child. Once sunny
and blue, the skies had turned dark and stormy for our happy little
girl whose only offense had been to attend her friendly neighborhood
school at the innocent age of six.
It has occurred to me that the cause of America's illiteracy crisis has
been discovered. It is the reading curriculum in our schools.
Unfortunately, the damage to children appears to extend way beyond
reading failure. One wonders if the hidden agenda in the readers has
created our victim culture, a generation of withdrawn and resentful
children, alienated from themselves, their parents, society, books and
ideas.
I was reminded of the plight of our neighbors. The father and mother
were loving, dedicated parents. He was an accountant and she was a
homemaker and community leader. They were nice people, and so were
their children. The two teenagers were bright but got poor grades and
hated school. They hung out with the crowd and participated in the kind
of self-destructive behaviors that are commonplace today. I asked these
young people why they would behave in ways which would cause pain for
themselves or their loved ones. They smiled quizzically and professed
not to know. Maybe the ideas that moved them truly were subconscious.
We are all familiar with kids like this (Our own kids are kids like
this, or they come too close for comfort). They spend a lot of time
"doing nothing" with like-minded friends. Passive-aggressive with
suppressed individuality, they all seem cut from the same mold. Self
mutilation with tattoos and body armor is almost universal. Some of
their groups are virtually masochistic cults. Sadism is the other side
of the masochism coin.
That so many of these dysfunctional teenagers come from loving homes
and neat families is inexplicable and shocking, until you realize that
they have all been tortured together in school since the first grade.
They are a batch of little Manchurian Candidates with attitude, victims
of the obscure behaviorism that I found, and that others have found
before and since, in school readers.
Barb and I had seen some perplexing changes in Jenny's reading since
she started in first grade. For one thing, she had stopped reading her
favorite books and stories at home. Before starting school, she had
feasted on Grimm's Fairy Tales. Although she still begged us to read
these to her, she now explained that she was not supposed to read them
herself, according to her understanding from her teacher, because they
contained big words and content in advance of her abilities. Barb and
I, holding our tongues, exchanged tortured grimaces and cross-eyed
glances.
When reviewing the school readers, I had noticed an impoverished
vocabulary, composed mostly of three and four letter words. I brought
this up with the teacher. She explained that the readers were
integrated into a district policy that no more than five hundred new
words be introduced to students during any grade level. The idea was to
protect children from the dizzying and confusing effects of an
overabundance of words and ideas. I nodded as if I understood, but I
didn't really get it.
Barb and I had clearly used the wrong approach with Jenny. We had
allowed her to read anything she wanted and had provided her with a
flourishing home library. Furthermore, we had encouraged her to run
around in the grassy meadows and on the sandy beaches. She must have
collided with great numbers of unfamiliar words and ideas, as well as a
perilous diversity of flowers and sea shells. It's a wonder she
survived at all.
We considered the various elements of Jenny's brief experience in first
grade. She had a clueless teacher. She was regressing in her reading
skills, vocabulary, and enthusiasm. She was being indoctrinated with
character destroying qualities like passivity and group dependence. Her
intellectual development was being stunted and she was being bombarded
with a curriculum of parental alienation.
Judging by her crying in the classroom, she was part of a captive
audience being repeatedly exposed to painful stimuli. To put it
plainly, she was the victim of ongoing torture and cruelty. Along with
her classmates, she was becoming, as one of her school poems pointed
out, "Small, small, small, just a tiny, tiny, tiny piece of it all."
_____
In our state at that time, compulsory education began at the age of
eight. Jenny was not obliged by law to attend school. With our various
concerns, we pulled her out of school while we tried to figure out what
to do.
.
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