The Standard Review

Improved Behaviorism and Worse Behavior

Policy makers and their supporters claim that people's behaviors are becoming worse. More specifically they claim that children's behavior is becoming worse. However, these same policy makers and supporters are claiming that behavioral products, and the techniques are advancing.
 
For the purpose of my focus here; whether their evaluation of behavior is correct doesn't really matter. My point is the claim behavioral conditioning is advancing or that the products are become more sophisticated and humane doesn't fit how the attitude toward the people receiving them is becoming more desperate. This desperation is causing more severe and dangerous methods of control along with those who implement them often becoming less empathetic toward those receiving them.

The behaviorists in the U.S. are involved in turf wars, which include how Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) is marketed. The kinder and gentler Positive Behavioral Support (PBS) is being marketed by some as the answer to outdated and no-longer-appropriate "old school" ABA. However, the foundational principals set by earlier behaviorists who found ways to market the application of this new science provide the newest products their legitimacy. Now that it's been established that people don't possess what their treatment harms, there are fewer objections.

You of course can't read much about how the entire approach of behaviorism is inappropriate at best and very dangerous at worst because there is no market for such criticism. In the same way that the mental health industry is designed to improve the lives of everyone but the one who receives treatment, behavior modification is evaluated by those who live with, educate, and implement the treatment rather than those who receive it. This means that professionals and other authorities are prohibited from knowing the harmful effects as well as prohibited from sharing views that would harm the marketing potential of the product.

It's important to understand how those who receive behavior modification are trained to be compliant. Therefore, it's likely that someone who would otherwise tell how abusive the treatment has been will be concerned about the likely punishment that results from doing so.

The work of behaviorists could not become more humane during the same time that the lists of types of people who are seen to need the service is growing, the behaviors being treated are seen to be more severe, and the laws which provide protection for the treated are increasingly aiding the treatment providers with protection instead.

There are reports that advocacy efforts have increased during this time. However, this has not been nearly sufficient to meet the demand  for the protection needed. While institutions over the years have added carpet and air conditioning, this has been disguised as and substituted for the needed protection against abuse. Furthermore, protection agencies which have been developed during this time have primarily provided more power to a specific subset of parents of children with disabilities while providing the disabled with powerful sounding names like consumer as a substitute.

More people are being incarcerated now than ever before and there are a broader set of laws for which they can be punished. Behaviorists work toward providing children with particular grades and labels, which will determine their path at earlier ages. Their goal is to have more rules (and have only a single set) and have them be applied to a broader set of people. It's ideal to believe that morality and ability won't be lumped together, but it's not practical.

The same type of marketing specialists who promote Fruit Loops and Apple Jacks by using fruit names and describing how including oats will benefit your heart will use positive names and the endorsement of well compensated scientists to sell behavior modification. Until or unless those who receive the treatment begin to be consulted and continually monitored and questioned as to its effectiveness and potential for abuse, you can be sure that along with better behaviorism you are buying sugar-coated law enforcement at the expense of the heart, mind, and soul of the most vulnerable people.

Activists Compromising Everything

 

Every time activists in the U.S. have sought to reform the mental health/developmental disabilities/ mental retardation/etc. system, their efforts (which always became compromises) ultimately strengthened the system and made it more difficult to stop.

Dorothea Dix came along when a change was obviously needed and set a president for how reform was to take place. Mainly, this reformation put the determination of rights for those mainly affected by the system in the hands of political opportunists.

 The response to the public recognition of the abuses in places like Willowbrook included the creation the Protection and Advocacy agency which protected the system from being independently investigated.

In the same way, that sterilization was originally sold as a right, forceable institutionalization law are sold as the way to ensure that those who were in the most need of care could be assured adequate support.

Today it's obvious to those who are treated the worst by this system that it was never designed for their benefit but is instead an unfair weapon in the class war for allowing the judicial system to incarcerate misfits and promote the careers of politicians.

There is no mystery in why such low standards are used to evaluate science regarding autism or why the pharmaceutical companies have  started a new propaganda campaign to promote their new products due to the ritalin campaign getting old.

Of course the behaviorists are getting away with more abuse than ever (including murder) and the solution is described as impossible due to the severity of the behavior problems. The abuse is being exposed mainly by those who are advocating more formal integration of standard behaviorism in schools by using laws that claim that children will be safer.

A class war is determined by hierarchy. The people at the bottom of the ladder know very well how the system works and are listened to the least. If you don't yet see that compromise is not an option it's mainly because you aren't at the bottom yet. However, if you review the history of the system and analyze how quickly the system is expanding to include you, you'll understand that either you or someone very close to you soon will be.

Autism and Imagination Deficits

 

When evaluating how well people are able to perform, behave, or learn it would be practical to include an evaluation of the teachers and those who are available to provide an example. These factors are typically not included in the evaluation as much as they need to be and the cycle of burdening those who are most convenient continues to harm everyone's future.

For several decades a community established by and for persons with disabilities has attempted to raise awareness that disability is natural. The alternative view has been the standard and continues to stifle the growth of our communities as well as the broader society.

It would be helpful if labels that describe deficits or a stage of someone's learning was used to provide more support and accommodation. Unfortunately, however, instead the growing industry of psychology(which encourages the psychiatric industry and adds to their corporate earnings) does more to isolate, disenfranchise, and prevent opportunities for the people who are labeled.

This article " Social skills in autism 'improved when patients choose own activities" indicates that research shows the child with autism benefits from choosing their own recreational activities. As simple and obvious as this sounds, the fact that it is even researched and reported is a reminder of how the public is unaware of the dehumanization mainstream commercial autism campaigns are encouraging.

Psychology is a product of the glorification of societies scholastic achievement process and is used to rank people accordingly so that the people who are already powerful pursuant to the advantages this system has provided can be portrayed to the public as having earned this elevated status.

People are not ranked as having a disability, deficit, or less than the standard rate of learning so that society can be altered to provide them with more opportunities. Instead the ranking (whether expressed as pity for their inferiority, disgust for their character flaws, or it's used to blame someone or something for making people appear less valuable or more by the contrast) of people by psychologist and school officials is a method of exclusion.

 
 

Much of the inappropriate behavioral treatment for autistics is not understood as being that due to false impressions pursuant to fear campaigns that justify teacher abuse and advocate their less severe forms of punishment and restraint rather than to abolish them.

This accompanies claims that most treatment deemed inappropriate is excessive rather than unnecessary. This prevents people from looking very closely at the core issues which need radical alteration and encourage them to make the unnecessary political compromises as though that's their only choice.

As a society, we seem to overlook the futility and often destructive results from our constant commercial based ranking of everything  and every person as well as every aspect of them.

The majority of people compete for a small fraction of the world's resources based on claims that we are either more deserving of privilege or accommodation due to our superiority or the severity of our need while allowing a greater percentage of resources to be hoarded and wasted by an elite few who then use their advantage to exploit us.

Insults, bullying, and most of the unnecessary fighting that results from our futile system of ranking is not due to any one being superior or even believing themselves to be. It is instead due to the fear of our own inability and weakness that we have been fooled into believing we can hide from.

We're taught to avoid the competition that causes us shame by making someone else look worse so we don't have to risk the defeat which is possible with attempting to become better. This is similar to accusing others of something that appears worse than what we've done in order to avoid appearing guilty. This is completely unimaginative as well as counterproductive.

Weakness and vulnerability in others are not what stagnates human progress. It is also not the weakness and vulnerability in ourselves. It is instead the needless fear and shame we associate with having to face our weakness and the risks involved with trying to do better.

Of course autistics do better when provided with choices and opportunities. Everyone does.

Others may claim they choose someone's (child, student, disabled, elderly, etc.) activities because that someone needs it and isn't wise enough to make their own choices, but it's often just more convenient to do so. Being given an opportunity to make choices lead to better understanding, more confidence, empowerment, and ultimately better choices.

Furthermore, when people use clinical evaluations to describe a behavior without considering how the language is insulting it alters the direction of future research as well as shape public opinion, and the group being researched is less empowered as a result. No one is helped by that.

The claims that autistics are less imaginative have been associated with similar claims that we lack a theory of mind and even empathy. Rather than seeing how different sensory experience might make people even more sensitive (although expressed differently) to the emotions of others, society's commitment to ranking has instead encouraged negative stereotypes. This has led to unnecessary blame in relationships and even unjust suspicion of violence when statistics don't support the claims.

The survival of our species is dependent on the acceptance of diversity, which includes weaknesses in others as well as ourselves. People are weaker or stronger, younger or older, and have a variety of different symptoms and deficits that range in severity. We as humans are perfectly capable of making decisions as to how we can accommodate and empower each other (and protect ourselves if necessary) by evaluating any given situation with any number of diverse human expressions that are present at any given time. Too often our judgement is impaired by attempting to apply a fatally flawed system of ranking to a situation rather than accepting what intuition would otherwise make clear.

When we choose to face our weakness, we are better able to appreciate all the good and bad that life has to offer and by accepting life on life's terms, we can enjoy living, laughing, and loving a lot more. Fear and doubt are what inhibit an imagination and circumstances are not what decide those things. We can all do better by making better choices.

Smart Enough to Avoid Punishment

 

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In an ideal society, a label that indicated an intelligence deficit would be beneficial. It could be used to provide either accommodations or more realistic and focused expectations. However, the way these labels have been used by the compulsory school system in the United States has taught us to relate this to a value system that can be quite harmful.
 

 The method used for making this judgment is severely limited in both accuracy and practicality. The American justice system depends on such arbitrary evaluations to provide more latitude within law enforcement, which leads to agents having more unlimited control. If this system's leadership were challenged more so that they were required to explain the reasoning behind punishments for the population labeled (either by formal diagnosis or socially acceptable insult) as stupid, crazy, and immoral/lacking in character development, this would ultimately encourage everyone to take more responsibility. It's difficult for people to understand a responsibility and the benefits for accepting it when their leaders aren't willing to.

Thinking skills typically have much less to do with brainpower and formal training than the advertising for academia would lead people to believe. The tests to evaluate aptitude and academic progress provides advantages for a small number of people. The rest is shown  to instead be inferior and taught to be compliant.

The problems faced by business owners during the industrial revolution were met by them claiming that unnatural and inappropriate breeding was a threat to necessary progress and the future of the human race. These claims were used to justify their scientific proposals for population control, which continues to play a dominant role in politics and the judicial system.

Francis Galton called the science eugenics.

"Galton invented the term eugenics in 1883 and set down many of his observations and conclusions in a book, Inquiries into human faculty and its development.[13] He believed that a scheme of 'marks' for family merit should be defined, and early marriage between families of high rank be encouraged by provision of monetary incentives."

Here is some of what has been said by respected people who have influenced the public perceptions of this supposed problem.

This is one example:

“It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind...
Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
[1.1] Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in Buck v. Bell

 
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And here are others:

"It does not, however, seem impossible that by an attention to breed, a certain degree of improvement, similar to that among animals, might take place among men. Whether intellect could be communicated may be a matter of doubt: but size, strength, beauty, complexion, and perhaps even longevity are in a degree transmissible... As the human race could not be improved in this way, without condemning all the bad specimens to celibacy, it is not probable, that an attention to breed should ever become general."
- Thomas R. Malthus. An Essay on Population. 1798

 AND

"In order to stabilize world population, we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it is just as bad not to say it."
- Jacques Cousteau,  1991 UNESCO courier

And here: 

Margaret Sanger, the Founder of Planned Parenthood, advocated eugenics, describing it as a way to eliminate "human waste" from society.

"Everywhere we see poverty and large families going hand in hand. Those least fit to carry on the race are increasing most rapidly. People who cannot support their own offspring are encouraged by Church and State to produce large families. Many of the children thus begotten are diseased or feeble-minded; many become criminals. The burden of supporting these unwanted types has to be bourne by the healthy elements of the nation. Funds that should be used to raise the standard of our civilization are diverted to the maintenance of those who should never have been born."

 

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And here:

 
In support of the eugenics movement, (Theodore) Roosevelt wrote that

"it is obvious that if in the future racial qualities are to be improved, the improving must be wrought mainly by favoring the fecundity [fertility] of the worthy types... At present, we do just the reverse. There is no check to the fecundity of those who are subnormal..."

 
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And here:

John Harvey Kellogg (1852-1943) a major figure in the eugenics movement founded the American Medical Missionary Board (but soon changed its name to the Race Betterment Foundation). Kellogg himself was an important and respected figure who authored numerous medical and eugenics treatises in order to lobby for policy of "national eugenics." Kellogg, who launched the breakfast cereals industry by introducing granola to the American public as a health food.

The corporate experiment established by Americans (known as the United States) has traditionally attempted to divide and conquer the unwanted public. One method for achieving this is by encouraging confusion over the meaning of personal responsibility. Rather than encourage each other and work together to challenge unfair elitist domination,  society is instead obsessed with following the traditions of unreasonable standards for critical evaluations.

In this video, State Controlled Consciousness, John Taylor Gatto explains how compulsory schooling is used to provide an expanded military that protects the rules which are decided by the state. The United States adopted this tool of government from Prussia, which encourages us to believe that there is little or no value to an individual human or their creative process. Since the rules can be taught by motivating people to avoid punishment, the rules don't get challenged and the elite who possessed the power is allowed to preserve it.

When the government control becomes an unregulated obsession for an elite few, the remaining public is following standards that they instinctively know lacks the sound judgment. At this point, they can either choose to revolutionize the system, or they can instead become apathetic and frustrated from being unable to trust their neighbors or even themselves and their own judgment.

The advances in technology are now accelerating dramatically pursuant to the insatiable appetite of consumers. This appetite was encouraged so that the market could be deceptively described as the answer to the world's problems. This provided industry leaders with more power and ultimately more authority. Most all scientific discoveries are encouraged and glorified based on the establishment of the same misplaced faith in an unregulated market. This creates advantages for a few people and is used as the justification for excluding the majority for being invalid.

An appetite for technical accuracy has been established in accordance with the encouragement of the myth that we can decide the accuracy of information based on the same rigorous scientific evaluations. Due to the lack of ethical regulations that would encourage us to evaluate ideas, we are accepting commercial brands of truth and hyper critically micro managing each other in a depressingly hopeless and fatal way.

Psychology is a brand of processing ideas. It is promoted in order to encourage the validity in scholastic pursuits. The academic industry advertises that those who achieve their awards are superior in  ability, judgment, and character. The science of human behavior(as it's described) is mainly used as a political tool for controlling the public. It's used more as a method for controlling thoughts and behaviors than  for understanding them. It enslaves consumers by outwitting them rather than teaching productive ways for evaluating and using information.

A society that was truly concerned with justice and human rights would not be allowing the continuing abuse of people based on a punitive justice system deceptively defined as the mental health industry. In such a society, the abuses associated with Applied behavioral analysis (ABA)  (originally researched to determine methods of manipulating prisoners of war) would have been enough to warrant an appropriate investigation. Instead, the harmful traditions of the public school system (which have gotten worse since the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was established) continue so that radical change is not seen as necessary. The leadership along with their past misdeeds continues to go unchallenged while voters continue to be taught that most all political compromise is necessary.

Since the state agencies defined as Protection and Advocacy have become practically as ineffective as those that serve vocational rehabilitation needs, the concerned parents of schoolchildren who are being abused are deceptively provided with a substitute solution. Rather than look at how the nature of Applied Behavioral Analysis will likely be implemented in an abusive way, the bureaucratic leaders look for ways to justify and protect their reputation. Instead of admitting their mistakes and making the radical changes which are needed, they instead direct the public's attention to teachers being inadequately trained in the proper use of this supposed "discipline".

A newer and better type of ABA described as Statewide Positive Behavioral Support has been substituted for the important regulation that is needed for teachers abusing authority. The goal of the school system (despite the way typically presented) is to reestablish behavior standards as the focus of compulsory education for most students so that federal laws are easier to enforce.

A society that was truly concerned with justice and human rights for everyone would be able to look at the origins and traditions of the public school system and find better ways to help more students become prepared for adulthood. This would include of course addressing the problems presented by intelligence quotient (I.Q.) test, which were based on eugenic goals and finding more appropriate means of evaluating students.

However, in order to avoid accepting this responsibility, the lack of student achievement was used to explain the need for more exclusive standardized test, which was sold by legislation called No Child Left Behind. (Of course this achieves the opposite goal from the one that the name suggests.)

 

Apathy and hyper criticism is two sides of the same coin. Both encourage an attitude that impedes progress and promotes dependence and oppression. Commercial advertisement provides a constant source of frustration and dissatisfaction by teaching people to evaluate their worth in relation to the type of people they can never become who own things that they can never afford.

"The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House"~ Audre Lorde

Blaming each other only weakens us so that we are vulnerable to deception. The majority of people are not empowered by standard evaluations, and, unless we challenge those standards we will never recognize and trust the value in our neighbors and in ourselves and we will destroy ourselves in the process.

Personal responsibility should not divide and weaken us so that we can be manipulated by fear and doubt. People don't need to be convinced of the rewards which come from the achievement of truly worthwhile goals. When people believe in themselves and their own ability, they find ways to do things and naturally avoid the punishment which comes from either failure or cheating.

 The value in ourselves which we need to recognize in order to be more successful becomes more apparent when we are willing to accept the same in others. This kind of experience is what will sustain humanity and ultimately the human race.

 

Compulsive People Fixing Disorder

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There could never be an official diagnosis for Compulsive People Fixing Disorder (CPFD). It just wouldn't be appropriate for this disgraceful behavior to be focused on in an open and honest way. To do so would challenge too many established authorities and too many traditions that preserve their power. If it was officially recognized as inappropriate or morally wrong, how could boundaries be set for the diagnostic criteria and how could the treatment specialist prove that the application of their technique didn't reflect their own symptoms?

People without the disorder would be healthy but so out of step with others that whatever  inconsistencies could be identified from their conduct would be heavily scrutinised, magnified, and micro-managed. Over comers of the disorder would quickly relapse when they tried to help others overcome using traditional therapeutic persuasion.

People who consistently operate only within the realm of control won't recognize healthier options because to see and understand that requires trust. Trust and control are exclusive behaviors.

This is a serious disorder (unofficially of course) and affects more people than any other. Our cultural expectations in personal and business relationships have become dependent on controlling and fixing due to how we have established this thinking as a societal norm for the sake of convenience. This encourages people to be cunning, manipulative, and harshly aggressive in their relationships and the convenience ultimately demands a very high price.

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The exploitation of people with disabilities and supposed weakness plays a vital role in how our society operates and there is not much effort made to challenge tradition. Too often people want things to change without the discomfort and conflict that accompany challenging the core issues and attitudes that support the harmful policies. We are taught that to attempt such things show us to be uncompromising, noncompliant, and unreasonable. It's more convenient that we show the established authorities, that we are ashamed of what they call our weakness and grateful we have been spared an even worse treatment.

As long as we as a society depend so heavily on control to solve everything, we will have less trust, which makes control something people are even more dependent on in an unhealthy way and there will need to be harsher and stricter methods.

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Trust may resolve many confusing and ineffective relationship patterns but depenance/control just leaves people feeling betrayed, which encourages contempt and bitterness in the treated person who then won't be committed to the process.... Besides diagnosis, treatment, and therapy for social inappropriateness isn't designed to empower the one who receives it. It's designed to give better control to established authority and to upset, confuse, exploit, and exclude people with inconvenient expressions of diversity, so that the abuse they receive will appear justified to the valued/voting public.

The Protected Community

Learning different perspectives of American history reminds me that much of the leadership problem in the past century resulted from a distorted view of community. The philosophy involved seems to liken a community to a chain and the metaphor that describes the philosophy is: "a chain is only as strong as the weakest link."

Such thought designs are contrary to creative and innovative thinking. In a chain, each link serves the same purpose and can therefor be appropriately judged by the standardized test for strength and ranked accordingly. However, it's not natural for people to provide this convenience, and it's dangerous to attempt to demand it.

Unfortunately, many aspects of society are influenced by this type of thinking.

When the goal of a community is for individuals to have no other value than the way they serve it, it will either seek to be efficient, which leads to extreme and unreasonable methods of exclusion, or it will seek to be inclusive in convienient/pitiful-based charity ways, which ultimately lead to the same conclusion.

If you give people something to do that is seen as having no particular value, that value judgment will ultimately extend to how people themselves are seen and societies exclusion and elimination of them, which will simply be more covert and nuanced. When the community doesn't recognize this exercise in futility it can be much worse than if they did, and were seeing the need to address it.

This thinking is particularly detrimental to the respect and dignity of persons with disabilities, and it lends itself very conveniently to unnecessary behavioral standards and their strict enforcement.

The absurdity is never so clear as when this affects advocacy related to autism. Some have even suggested that there is an autism community which of course is impossible. The way to ensure that negative stereotypes about autistics continue and that the political system remains unchallenged so that educational and vocational opportunities are unattainable to the majority is by keeping advocates involved in club activities and meaningless personality-based debates.

When one person exploits their advantage for deciding public policy by using the claim that whatever a publicly recognized authority presumes is someone's severity of symptoms (or lack of them) is the way to distinguish their right to voice their view rather than evaluate what the view is, and someone else argues, the environment is effectively stagnant and progress is impossible.

It's the same with someone who describes causation and another who refutes the scientific evidence or someone who suggests that regulating an abuse of persons with disabilities in jails, mental institutions, and schools with federally mandated behavioral programs is an appropriate compromise. There's no way to judge scientific evidence or the sincere concern for individual welfare of the people involved in policymaking if people are aware of the corruption that tends to rule how these systems operate. Even so, these personality/popularity contests are what often pass for Internet autism discussions.

I can't imagine how anyone could trust the compromises and incremental alterations that are made by policymakers with regard to the rights of persons with a disability when the negotiation chambers for policymakers are patterned identically to the way of our judicial system.

The two party system defines much of how people debate issues. It presupposes that compromise is imperative and limits our choices. As long as each idea can only be ranked by the narrow context of how it compares with another, which can be influenced in an unlimited number of unfair advantages which we're forbidden to discuss, we are hostage to the stagnation and exclusion that the leadership defines as progressive.

The idea that the United States operates with three separate branches of government is misleading. Our judicial system in all its forms is a futile exercise in a political debate, and it's rare that an idea which isn't presented by someone who has been identified as a player/compromiser within the system is ever considered.

Of course intelligence is judged by standardized test, which was designed by people who were mainly interested in population control/eugenics. Of course there is a streamlining of the labeled schoolchildren to expedite class divisions, institutionalization and disenfranchisement and prevent challenges to the top-down elitist control. Of course the US medical system is completely chaotic and harmful to most of the public. Of course that medical system is primarily funded by the sale and distribution of mind altering drugs that are introduced  to schoolchildren at an early age to provide teachers with more control.... we aren't taught that we can trust the average public citizen like we do the policymakers. Therefore, if we can't trust the public they will have to be controlled rather than risk any challenges to the status quo (which were taught is progressive).

We can't make all our decisions with convenience being the top priority and expect to maintain any type of security. People act more chaotically when they have less encouragement to think and when thinking is suppressed through intimidation, exclusion, and a constant barrage of images that encourage immediate gratification and hopelessness for the sake of community and solidarity, there will of course less trust and more attempts to regain a sense of control through violence.

People can't keep feeding the monster they want to destroy. Effective change requires that we radically broaden our acceptance of diversity in order to strengthen the community rather than continuing to be unfairly exclusive for the sake of protection and security. It's important that more people understand how few people are actually represented in the policy decisions that are made, which govern their lives and how wide the realm of disenfranchisement extends.

If people are thinking, they will find more ways to be compassionate and inclusive but if convenience and distrust are more important we will recognize more types of uselessness, and the only creative thinking will be used to find methods for exterminating the excess. These danger affects everyone and thinking for solutions is imperative.

Solving Jigsaw Puzzles with a Hammer

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The current proposed methods for improved learning all seem to suggest that behavioral intervention cannot be separated from the process. This is in keeping with the very old myth that children are born broken and must be fixed.

This belief system is not being challenged, and yet it has developed from the aspirations of educators who are following the designs of government rulers and industry leaders. To these designers, thinking and creativity are a threat, and it is more important to them that behavior follows a particular pattern than for it to be healthy, ethical, or even individually productive.

The design does not encourage learning as secondary to the importance of arbitrary and fluctuating behavioral standards, but rather it suggests that, unless learning is nothing more than a byproduct of standardized behavior, it has no importance at all. The goal is to empower the collective rather than the individual and the regulations which are used to promote this goal would support a very small elite based on eliminating the majority of competitors.

The biggest obstacle in empowering citizens who are subjected to the abuses of these regulations and unreasonable standards is helping them to realize that they are not lacking in important skills or knowledge. They have been taught to believe this about themselves due to methods of mental conditioning, which are justified by the Royal label "education".

Our leaders are not superior thinkers at all. The harmful motivation behind their goals prevents the designers from thinking clearly and making rational decisions. If their agenda is not prevented, they will learn about the price after its too late. It reminds me of someone piecing together a jigsaw puzzle with a hammer. While it may provide a temporary convenience to believe that your efforts are progressive, once you're able to see what the combined efforts have produced, the mistake will become apparent.

The public education system in the United States has never been much more than an experiment in social engineering. Whomever doesn't fit and can't be forced to fit (like the inconvenient pieces of a jigsaw puzzle) will get discarded.

The engineers sought first to create a belief system that would serve the leadership based on the claim that it was best for everyone (the collective).

 
In Chapter 2 of The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto it says:

Participatory Democracy Put To The Sword

"Thirty-odd years later, between 1967 and 1974, teacher training in the United States was covertly revamped through coordinated efforts of a small number of private foundations, select universities, global corporations, think tanks, and government agencies, all coordinated through the U.S. Office of Education and through key state education departments like those in California, Texas, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and New York.

Important milestones of the transformation were: 1) an extensive government exercise in futurology called Designing Education for the Future, 2) the Behavioral Science Teacher Education Project, and 3) Benjamin Bloom’s multivolume Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, an enormous manual of over a thousand pages which, in time, impacted every school in America. While other documents exist, these three are appropriate touchstones of the whole, serving to make clear the nature of the project underway."

The second of these is:


"The second document, the gigantic Behavioral Science Teacher Education Project, outlined teaching reforms to be forced on the country after 1967. If you ever want to hunt this thing down, it bears the U.S. Office of Education Contract Number OEC-0-9-320424-4042 (B10). The document sets out clearly the intentions of its creators—nothing less than "impersonal manipulation" through schooling of a future America in which "few will be able to maintain control over their opinions," an America in which "each individual receives at birth a multi-purpose identification number" which enables employers and other controllers to keep track of underlings and to expose them to direct or subliminal influence when necessary. Readers learned that "chemical experimentation" on minors would be normal procedure in this post-1967 world, a pointed foreshadowing of the massive Ritalin interventions which now accompany the practice of forced schooling."

This means that what individuals think doesn't matter to the collective leadership. This would certainly mean that anyone receiving a diagnosis of learning disability or developmental disability (which describes behavioral deficits) such as autism is given the least amount of respect and the harshest form of punishment. Recently, the bill HR 4247 proposed that all teachers be trained in using restraint and seclusion. Such training would be taught in classes for Positive Behavioral Support. What is claimed was that the individual states were not using force appropriately and therefore, must be governed federally.

The corruption and abuse that American citizens now face at the hands of the medical industry are due to the funding of that industry primarily resulting from the sale and distribution of mind altering/compliance inducing drugs. The way this mass marketing campaign was successful began with using the Diagnostic Statistical Manual (DSM) to show how the least valued students were behaviorally impaired and learning disabled.

"The Behavioral Science Teacher Education Project identified the future as one "in which a small elite" will control all important matters, one where participatory democracy will largely disappear. Children are made to see, through school experiences, that their classmates are so cruel and irresponsible, so inadequate to the task of self-discipline, and so ignorant they need to be controlled and regulated for society’s good. Under such a logical regime, school terror can only be regarded as good advertising. It is sobering to think of mass schooling as a vast demonstration project of human inadequacy, but that is at least one of its functions."

I can't see how there could be any question that the regulations for behavioral modification would be set at the federal level of government.

"In a speech he gave before businessmen prior to the First World War, Woodrow Wilson made this unabashed disclosure:

   " We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks."

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Some of the ideas which led to Wilson's statements were:

"Occasional Letter Number One

"Between 1896 and 1920, a small group of industrialists and financiers, together with their private charitable foundations, subsidized university chairs, university researchers, and school administrators, spent more money on forced schooling than the government itself did. Carnegie and Rockefeller, as late as 1915, were spending more themselves. In this laissez-faire fashion a system of modern schooling was constructed without public participation. The motives for this are undoubtedly mixed, but it will be useful for you to hear a few excerpts from the first mission statement of Rockefeller’s General Education Board as they occur in a document called Occasional Letter Number One (1906):

    "In our dreams...people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions [intellectual and character education] 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 men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple...we will organize children...and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.""

Recent events such as the Wikileaks and regulations that are now being encouraged to prevent citizens from using the Internet for questioning corporations serve as reminders that more than ever it is important to radically challenge governmental standards and the abuses of  corporations.

On the Wikileaks situation, it says here:

"What is really going on here is a war over control of the Internet, and whether or not the Internet can actually serve its ultimate purpose—which is to allow citizens to band together and democratize the checks on the world’s most powerful factions."

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The idea that compromises must be made within the political realm are usually at this point a way of preventing democracy and the progress the democratic process encourages. It is impractical and even dangerous to believe that our public institutions will provide what they claim.

The first step to liberation is realizing that we have choices. Once we can accept the responsibility and the empowerment that comes with those choices we will have fewer reasons to fear those who govern us and our fear-driven emotions will have less control over our lives.

Competency on Trial

 

 

Societal arrogance, prejudice, and exploitation are never more evident than when a formal court trial is used to declare a person's competency. Judges who preside over these trials are in no way believing that the sentence they issue has anything whatsoever to do with the persons ability or lack of it, to act appropriately or provide for themselves. This process is strictly an extension of the psychiatric industry and the institutional mentality. It reflects how the corporations/insurance companies have been able to trade what is still described as the service they provide in exchange for these customer referrals.

It is practically impossible to dispute the corporate ties to governmental agency in these matters but no one directly involved ever tries. The way that society strictly enforces competency judgments in the informal ways dictates to the judicial system as well as the industry that there is no reason to be concerned that their deceit and miscarriage of justice will ever be challenged.

It really won't matter much if people who are more widely recognized  refrain from using terms such as retarded or even retard if we continue to recklessly toss about ridiculous and unfounded allegations of incompetence the way we do with terms such as idiot, moron, stupid, and uneducated. All of these terms were created to support the glorification of a very narrow standardized scholastic achievement test. This is a system of ranking and the goal of those who benefit from this is for people to take their focus away from what they are learning and what they don't know, and ignore the discouragement they get from trying to understand their environment in order to instead remain hostage to the social games for cutting each other down and tearing apart each other.


The earliest recorded use of the north American continent being used by Europeans for institutionalization date back to shortly after the invasion of 1492, which is flatteringly referred to as when the "settlers" first arrived. The plantations were set up to use slave labor, and the slaves were brought or natives were captured for that purpose. This was the beginning of a political and judicial system that depended on an institutional mentality.

One example of how this is continuing is by laws, which are made for status offense.

"Status offenses may include consumption of alcohol, tobacco smoking, truancy, and running away from home.

These acts may be illegal for persons under a certain age, while remaining legal for all others, which makes them status offenses.

Status offense may also apply to other classes, including laws forbidding ownership of firearms by felons, where such ownership is otherwise legal.

Laws that prohibit certain actions to certain persons based on their sex, race, nationality, religion, etc., are also status offenses. A law that prohibits men from using public toilets intended for women, or a law that prohibits the use of a drinking fountain by people of a given race, or a law that sets a curfew for people below a certain age, are examples of status offenses, although they are not always thought of as such."

In similar fashion:



"During the mid-1600's, the colonies began to pass laws called slave codes. In general, these codes prohibited slaves from owning weapons, receiving an education, meeting one another or moving about without the permission of their masters, and testifying against white people in court. Slaves received harsher punishments for some crimes than white people. A master usually received less punishment for killing a slave than for killing a free person for the same reason. Slaves on small farms probably had more freedom than plantation slaves, and slaves in urban areas had fewer restrictions in many cases than slaves in rural areas."

 

I see no indication that the laws in the United States are ever relaxed so that any person with any class distinction can be judged more fairly. Instead when there are nuances in the laws it typically indicates a contradiction and provides more authority to the law enforcement which supports oppression.

It says here of a formal competency evaluation:


"In the United States criminal justice system, a competency evaluation is an assessment of the ability of a defendant to understand and rationally participate in a court process.

Competency was originally established by the Supreme Court of the United States as the evaluation of a defendant's competence to proceed to trial.[1]

In a subsequent ruling, the Court held that that an prisoner facing the death penalty must be evaluated as competent to be executed, meaning that he must be
capable of understanding why he has received the death penalty and the effect that the penalty will have.[2] In further rulings, competence was also enlarged to include evaluation of the defendant's competence to plead guilty and competence to waive the right to counsel.[3]"

AND

"The American Bar Association's Criminal Justice Mental Health Standards stated in 1994 that the issue of a defendant's current mental incompetence is the single most important issue in the criminal mental health field, noting that an estimated 24,000 to 60,000 forensic evaluations of a criminal defendant's competency to stand trial were performed every year in the United States.[4] Although estimates vary, a 1973 estimate put the number of competence evaluations at 25,000 to 36,000 each year. There are indications that the number of evaluations of criminal defendants is rising. One comparison of estimates between 1983 and 2004 suggest the annual number rose from 50,000 to 60,000 criminal competency evaluations respectively.[5]" "

Mental health agencies in the United States worked very closely with drug enforcement agencies in order to justify the class war falsely labeled "the war on drugs". The newest agency being used to confuse the distinction between recreational drug use which is not sponsored by a government approved and subsidized pharmaceutical company and criminal activity is SAMHSA (The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration).


This agency has been used to promote the recovery model which blurs the line between self-improvement and the responsibility that accompanies being an individual and that of mandated responsibility from a judicial agency which is used to permit corporate irresponsibility. Although several recent court hearings have found compulsory attendance for Alcoholics Anonymous meetings as a condition of parole to be unconstitutional, this continues to be a typical practice for judges.

In the same way that Henry Ford used publications for spreading anti-Semitic propaganda and socialist values that aided his company, Randolph Hearst used similar means for settling labor issues by publishing false information about the dangers of marijuana use and its relation to racial minorities and crime.

That's described in this article:

A highly disproportionate number of black and Hispanic people in the United States are tried, convicted, and sentenced for drug charges and are similarly abused by the psychiatric system. The scholars in Europe such as Sir Francis Galton encouraged this miscarriage of justice.  Galton defined race purification and population control as eugenics based on the work of his cousin Charles Darwin. Drapetomania is the name of the psychological disorder which shows the intentions of the most revered American doctors such as Benjamin Rush. Samuel Cartwright, a student of Rush, established psychiatric label, Drapetomania:


"Cartwright described the disorder — which, he said, was "unknown to our medical authorities, although its diagnostic symptom, the absconding from service, is well known to our planters and overseers"[4] — in a paper delivered before the Medical Association of Louisiana[5] that was widely reprinted.

He stated that the malady was a consequence of masters who "made themselves too familiar with [slaves], treating them as equals."[6]

    "If any one or more of them, at any time, are inclined to raise their heads to a level with their master or overseer, humanity and their own good requires that they should be punished until they fall into that submissive state which was intended for them to occupy. They have only to be kept in that state, and treated like children to prevent and cure them from running away." [7]


Psychiatry evaluates the degree to which someone is behaving normally based on statistics from people who accept a list of character flaws that comes with a psychological label and enables them to receive medication and therapy.

This says of the classification of mental disorders:


"The widely used DSM and ICD classifications employ operational definitions.[1] There is a significant scientific debate about the relative validity of a "categorical" versus a "dimensional" system of classification, as well as significant controversy about the role of science and values in classification schemes and the professional, legal and social uses to which they are put."

To whatever degree, any of this is discussed within an academic environment, it does not change how the labeling of the persons intelligence quotient, psychological profile, and heritage are used to determine a person's human rights as well as their potential liberties.

Judge Rotenberg had a behavioral treatment research facility named after him based on his ability to use his position of court judge to show how autistics would seek aversive treatment to cure their malady if only they were competent enough to do so.

It says here:

"While this litigation was taking place, in late 1985 and early 1986, JRC brought one of its seriously self-abusive, autistic students before the Bristol County Probate Court for a substituted judgment hearing that was held by Chief Judge Ernest Rotenberg. After hearing testimony on both sides of the issue, Judge Rotenberg determined: (1) that the student was incompetent to make her own medical treatment decisions; and (2) that the child, if competent, would have chosen treatment that included the use of the aversives that JRC had been employing, prior to the decision by the administrative judge. This substituted judgment hearing was the same type of hearing that was required in Massachusetts for individuals for whom agencies wished to employ psychotropic medication (or other intrusive medical procedures) and who were incompetent to make their own treatment decisions."

What had to happen is that in order to sustain the belief that children are born broken and need fixing by state-sponsored institutions psychological labels need to be used in the same way that they had previously been used on slaves based on the claim that the means for their treatment was justified by the end result and that they were not competent enough to choose what was best for their own welfare.


When people today think of combating autism it would be helpful to remember that:

"In 1961, President John F. Kennedy created the President’s Panel on Mental Retardation and called upon America to address the significant needs of people with intellectual disabilities and their desire to be a part of everyday life in America. The Panel submitted its first report, “Combating Mental Retardation,” which led to Congressional action to establish new programs for people with intellectual disabilities, including hospital improvement programs."

This article decribes very well a trend that has occured since then:

New Down syndrome test could increase ‘eugenic’ abortions


"Studies in the United States and the United Kingdom have claimed that as many as 9 in 10 unborn children diagnosed with Down syndrome are aborted.

Carol Boys, chief executive of the Down’s Syndrome Association in Great Britain, recently told the BBC that the less invasive blood test will make pre-natal testing safer and more common."

AND

“In the 1960s, we were told that legal abortion would be a rare tragic act in cases of exceptional hardship. In the ‘70s abortion began to be both decried and accepted as birth control. In the ‘80s respected geneticists pointed out that it was cheaper to hunt for and abort Down’s babies than to raise them. By the ‘90s that observation had been widely put into action. Now we are refining and extending our eugenic vision, with new tests and abortion as our central tools.”

Surveys of primary care physicians indicate that very few doctors encourage women whose unborn babies are diagnosed with Down syndrome to continue their pregnancies."

When describing Autism Speaks Eugenic Agenda, ABFH wrote this:

"But for the most part, they've managed to put up a somewhat plausible pretense of being a mainstream charity that just wants to prevent suffering, and so forth. Most of the material on their website is carefully designed to keep the public unaware of their close ideological affinity with the white supremacist agenda of creating a master race through eugenics. A casual reader might not notice a page featuring the views of Dr. James Watson, with whom Bob and Suzanne Wright had a friendly chat regarding autism genetic research at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory:


autismspeaks.org/inthenews/wrights_cold_spring_harbor.php"

The Rottenburg center has aided other school's in providing them with the authority which encourages an atmosphere of abuse by being examples this kind of regulation manipulation:


"The Department of Education has the authority to approve private school programs for the purpose of providing special education to publicly funded school age students with disabilities.  Under this authority, the Department reviews the program’s educational components as well as its compliance with general health and safety standards.  Judge Rotenberg Education Center (“the program” or “JRC”) operates a program for students with significant disabilities in which it utilizes a behavioral modification program of rewards (positive reinforcers) and punishments (aversives).  The aversives used by JRC include restraint, electric skin shock (“GED”), and the delaying or withholding of food in order to decelerate problematic behaviors. 

Although JRC is licensed by two state agencies, the Department of Early Education and Care (EEC) and the Department of Mental Retardation (DMR), it is under DMR’s authority that JRC’s use of aversives is regulated.  In addition to DMR’s regulation of JRC in this regard, JRC’s use of aversives with an individual student must be authorized by the probate court under a “substituted judgment proceeding.”  This means that for each student for whom JRC wishes to use aversives, it must submit to the probate court a behavioral plan that the court must approve and annually review.  In addition, the court appoints an attorney to represent the student’s interests in the court proceeding and the student’s attorney may request an independent clinical review of the behavioral plan submitted by JRC regarding the student."

Behavioral programs such as Applied Behavioral Analysis would never be considered an educational approach if it weren't for the school system equating appropriate and sophisticated behavior as equal in importance to the acquisition of knowledge. Nothing is more relative and practically useless than the labels society uses to declare a person's competence.

However, JRC is not the exception to the rule (although more is known about their abuses). This behavioral treatment center/mental institution/juvinille punishment and rehabilitation center can't be
 penalized or effectively requested to change until we look at how their methods are in keeping with the goals that progressive education has always maintained.


This describes John Dewey's aspirations for
 compulsory schooling:

John Dewey: Education Was Never About Learning

"(Makow) – No one has had a more pernicious effect on American education, and by extension the corruption of American society today than John Dewey. Born in 1859, John Dewey turned historic American values and logic upside down.

In Dewey’s view, the individual existed only to serve society. “Socialization” (i.e., the individual’s conformity to a group) was seen as more important than factual learning. This twisted view of education infected all of his work, resulting in a century of ever diminishing American academic achievement, with the resultant corruption of American society."

AND

"Incredibly, Dewey ridiculed the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, declaring that knowledge was only valid and worthwhile if “society” decided so.

If the Powers That Be (“society”) decided literature, or geometry, or chemistry is no longer a valid pursuit, but multicultural studies, minority oppression, and remedial basket weaving are, then the individual should have no alternative to that course of education.

Every virtue, including curiosity, resourcefulness, competitiveness, ethical conduct, right reasoning, rhetorical skills, logic and inventiveness — could be considered to be “vices” overnight if the Powers That Be (“Society”) decided they were no longer desirable."

 

I can only imagine that within a week of the introduction of compulsory schooling, parents began to compete with each other to show which of them, by producing offspring, had created a superior product. I'm sure that almost immediately one mother rushed out to put a bumper sticker on the rear of the horse that drew the family carriage which said," my kid made the honor roll." The neighboring parent chose to advertise, "my kids got autism, but I love them anyway." It must not have been long after that when some parent told the news reporter, "I would've driven my carriage off the side of a bridge if it weren't for my competent kids which would also be destroyed in the accident." It may have taken a little time, but I'll bet similar behavior began fairly soon after this age appropriate ranking system began.

People involved in progressive education politics often frame discussions in a way, which encourages the false belief that they are all looking for the best ways to include and provide for the majority of the public. It has never been this way and in the same way that the US political system is falsely defined by two parties in competition with each other, our involvement in these meaningless debates supports the myth of everyone being involved in a noble effort.

It's silly to consider someone to be superior (which is what positive labels of achievement or ability ultimately do) without considering the validity of the standard of measurement. If there is an agenda to provide some people with positive labels, they can then use to their advantage at the expense of most others that receive negative ones, then it's silly, arrogant, and a way to support and mimic corporate values to present your own label or that of someone close to you as being valid due to a fair standard of evaluation.

The people who are behind government decisions that use a person's success and achievement along with another person's lack of it as a means for keeping them hostage don't care about your abilities or your achievements and only present glorified labels to dissuade the public from looking too closely at the flaws in the system and challenging it.


The system can change. Diversity can be encouraged, and we can learn to empower each other. However, this will not happen pursuant to continuing to honor the system and its values which has been used to prevent our empowerment. The system itself was designed and is sustained as an end unto itself. Until we find an appropriate means to encourage our own individual creativity and redefine institutions as a means to our individual goals everyone (whether formally involved in the system or disenfranchised by it) will remain hostage to the inappropriate values it has taught us.

Abuse is the Standard Treatment, and Objections are Punished

What the young woman in the following video is reporting is typical and reflects the common standard. What is highly unusual as well as admirable is that this woman's personal standards are such that she sees the victim's welfare as top priority, and she's willing to act based on principal.

The school is acting on behalf of their reputation and willing to sacrifice anyone's welfare in order to preserve the system. This is how it got so bad in the first place. Until the entire system is seen as promoting an environment where abuse is inevitable and their deceit is questioned by more people who will face the consequences of reporting it, this will continue.

 

Abuse of Children With Autism in School

 

 

 

 

Accurate Speech versus Effective Communication

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The ways similar subjects relate to one another can be difficult to understand due to how morality and ethics, separate from other subjects, are typically decided individually based more on emotion than practicality. Collective mentality is how governments contradict the emotions and mental process of the individual and teach them to de-value themselves and their creative spirit. When people describe all things being relative without considering this, discussion becomes chaotic.

Despite the goal of creating appropriate and accurate standards of speech being impossible, people tend to argue as if one person's ability to meet the standards can be measured as greater than another. In the same way, that information is given a royal endorsement with only a few options being explored (and a few royals allowed to express different ideas) variations of verbal expression are used to determine people's ability and the value of their ideas. In the world of academics the silliness of this standard judgment seems less understood by those involved in the process.

The goal of scientific research is mainly to encourage the validity of science and protect what has been described as knowledge by a scientist. The definition given by Wikipedia for science is here.

We have no way of knowing who were the best thinkers in ancient Greece because the standard of measurement excluded most people from even being considered. The thoughts they described were within a narrow realm of the beliefs and ideas that questioned the superiority of the empire's methods were never considered valid. Long before eugenics was a word used for the elimination of invalids Aristotle and Plato published these views: (note this site is described as a Nazi fan site)

These so called superior thinkers showed contempt for independent decisions and variety of ideas. They wrote rule books for others that were considered the best humans to follow so that the State would always be honored and would make decisions about whose life was valuable and whose was not. This was, and still is, considered by the most valued members of society who mainly influence decisions about public policy, to be the best way to preserve what is considered civilization.

In several hundred years, the philosophy that protected this empire has changed very little because those who have had power have used it to eliminate diversity, promote slavery, and discourage all types of independence and democracy.

For example, the empirical ambitions of the United States are promoted in very similar ways to that of ancient Greece. Only a very few of the considered elite are even included as being valuable citizens who achieve a high school education.

It says here:

"This report finds that only about half of all students served by the main school systems in the nation's 50 largest cities graduate from high school."

Part of the myth that sustains poverty and oppression in the United States is that we have a continuum of opportunity rather than dividing spectrums according to class and economic distinction. This supports the myth that our political system is a democracy and that opportunities for economic success (and sometimes even survival) is not predetermined.

In this article by John Taylor Gatto, he describes how the leadership in the United States set up the compulsory education program we have today based on the success of a similar model used in Prussia to discourage democracy and free thought in favor of a powerful military. Those targeted for this type of education were not those who were thought to be the future leaders but instead were expected to be soldiers or exploited factory workers who would do well at following orders.

On the other hand, the leadership of the United States, is provided a very different type of education where their esteem and the validity of their ideas are encouraged.

In this interview Gatto explains more about the validity of the standardized tests given to US public school students. Here is an excerpt from the interview: (JTG is an abbreviation for John Taylor Gatto)


"MP: That's exactly the problem. See, if your kid is already scoring 95 percent on the standardized tests, you think, "Boy, this is great, right?"

JTG: No! The tests don't measure what they purport to measure. I guarantee you they don't do that. Let me give you an experiment you could run anywhere in this country and it will work. I used to take the kids who scored the very highest on the standardized tests. I would say, "I will demonstrate to you that you don't know how to read, even though your test score says that you know how to read better than anybody in the school." So I'd get these groups together, I mean, I'd do this year after year, and I would give them an extremely simple classic book to read, Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front. It's still in print, sells more copies in the year 2000 than it ever sold in 1928 when it was printed. It's a story of teenagers in the first world war. It's written in teenage language, with teenage concepts, and there are hardly any three-syllable words in the book, I mean it's mostly one- or two-syllable words, so it's extremely simple to read. I said, "I will give you an open book test on the first 20 pages of that book, and I will be very surprised if anyone in here passes the test.

See, standardized tests, even though all the questions look different, really arrange themselves in six, seven, or eight different patterns of extracting information from the reading selection. In actual fact there are about 168 separate ways to extract information from a reading selection. Most people who read a lot learn those things automatically; they don't have to be taught them. But when you're taught reading, and when you think the prize is getting a high score on a standardized test, what happens inside your mind (this is really diabolical) is, if you're efficient, you tend to concentrate harder on the things that you recognize will show up as questions and answers on the test. You may not be aware you're doing that, but it will happen inevitably. As a consequence, out of the 168, you miss about 160 types of information that are in the reading selection."

 

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Here Gatto explains:




"The Fear Of Common Intelligence

The fear of common people learning too much is a recurrent theme in state records around the world. The founder of the Chinese state, the Emperor Ts’in She Hwang-ti, burned the work of the philosophers for fear their ideas would poison his own plans. The Caliph Ùmar of Syria wrote instructions to destroy the perhaps apocryphal library at Alexandria, using this airtight syllogism:

If these writings of the Greeks agree with the Book of God they are useless and need not be preserved; if they disagree they are pernicious and ought to be destroyed.2

Literary bonfires in Nazi Germany are often invoked as a vivid symbol of the deepest barbarism of the twentieth century, but extensive press coverage ended the book burning by stirring public uneasiness worldwide. Much more effective have been those silent blast furnaces used by public library systems and great American universities to dispose of 3 million excess books annually because of a shortage of shelf space. Why aren’t they given to schools?

There are other ways to burn books without matches. Consider the great leap forward undertaken in the modern Turkish state under Kemal Ataturk. Unlike Hitler, who burned only some of the past, Ataturk burned it all without fire by radically changing the Turkish national alphabet so that all the vital writings of the past were entombed in an obsolete symbol system. Not a single Turk voted to have this done, yet all accepted it.

From 1929 on, all books and newspapers were printed in the new alphabet. All documents were composed in it. All schoolchildren were instructed in it and no other. The classics of Persia, Arabia, and Turkey vanished without a trace for the next generation. Obliterate the national memory bound up in history and literature, sift carefully what can be translated, and you open a gulf between old and young, past and present, which can’t be bridged, rendering children vulnerable to any form of synthetic lore authorities deem advisable.

 
Turkish experimentation is echoed today in mainland China where a fifth of the population of the planet is cut off from the long past of Chinese literature and philosophy, one of the very few significant bodies of thought on the human record. The method being used is a radical simplification of the characters of the language which will have, in the fullness of time, the same effect as burning books, putting them effectively out of reach. Lord Lindsay of Birker, a professor at Yenching University outside Beijing where I recently went to see for myself the effects of Westernization on the young Chinese elite, says the generation educated entirely in simplified characters will have difficulty reading anything published in China before the late 1950s.

First, said Plato, wipe the slate clean.

There are many ways to burn books without a match. You can order the reading of childish books to be substituted for serious ones, as we have done. You can simplify the language you allow in school books to the point that students become disgusted with reading because it demeans them, being thinner gruel than their spoken speech. We have done that, too. One subtle and very effective strategy is to fill books with pictures and lively graphics so they trivialize words in the same fashion the worst tabloid newspapers do – forcing pictures and graphs into space where readers should be building pictures of their own, preempting space into which personal intellect should be expanding. In this we are the world’s master.

Samuel Johnson entered a note into his diary several hundred years ago about the powerful effect reading Hamlet was having upon him. He was nine at the time. Abraham Cowley wrote of his "infinite delight" with Spenser’s Faerie Queen – an epic poem that treats moral values allegorically in nine-line stanzas that never existed before Spenser (and hardly since). He spoke of his pleasure with its "Stories of Knights and Giants and Monsters and Brave Houses." Cowley was twelve at the time. It couldn’t have been an easy read in 1630 for anyone, and it’s beyond the reach of many elite college graduates today. What happened? The answer is that Dick and Jane happened. "Frank had a dog. His name was Spot." That happened."

 

 

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So the goal of standard education is to standardize people and standardize their behavior. This is consistent with encouraging Applied Behavior Analysis in schools and more specifically Statewide Positive Behavioral Support. If all people can be seen as being motivated by the same things, they can be ranked accordingly. This ranking is how individuals and individualistic views are discouraged.

People who communicate differently and may be more prone to different views and alternatives to tradition are a threat to polite society. Neurological differences (including autism) are not and cannot be respected while at the same time respecting tradition, scholastics, and politics. This realm is opposed to all types of diversity and all types of creative thinking.

The Internet is not inclusive of people with neurological differences. The exclusion of autistic people is supported by advocates who are interested more in a convenient tradition and showing how several autistics are already meeting the standards rather than revealing the contradiction and broadening those standards with a new way of looking at communication which traditional leaders have not yet explored.

If there is to be a change in how autistic people are treated it will come from listening to autistic people rather than continuing to honor the ongoing traditional attitude of ambitious scientists and politicians who demean and exclude us.