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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.
“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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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.
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