The Standard Review

Public Relations and Fractured Individuals

 

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The choices people make regarding which cause they champion and how they champion it are too often decided based on the appeal of having an influence that more of the public recognizes rather than on what is most important and what an individual is best suited to affect.

The biggest dangers that accompany hierarchical values (which affects who's advocacy is considered valid) come from how people are falsely taught about equal opportunities. The royal views of the "chosen" advocates and politicians are often used to discourage alternative ideas, and they can support the same oppression these people claim to be advocating against.

Advocates on the internet are often reminded of the narrowness of how oppression is described and how few expressions that oppose that narrowness are recognized as valid. The way that neurodiversity is important tends to be hidden by those who abuse the term. As a narrow political agenda it has practically no value at all.

The speed at which information can be transferred today by the increasingly larger number of people provides both for the opportunity of liberation as well as the ease for how those with the most resources can instead exploit more people.

The way that people strive today to find what is considered the best information and the most popular way to express it is very much entangled with the ways that the richest and powerful people control the media and promote a set of standard values, which encourages how the public is pathologized and shamed in the interest of population control.

 

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The expectation of responsibility is placed on the people with the least resources. Since they can't express themselves in ways that public relations specialist teaches as being best, what they say and do is ranked accordingly.

Disenfranchisement is the key to exploitation. Once someone can be described by a popular resource as inconvenient and disconnected from what politicians have declared to be an appropriate society, they can be declared an enemy and abused in a way that is justified in society as well as in the legal system.

It says here of Horace Mann:

 
"Arguing that universal public education was the best way to turn the nation's unruly children into disciplined, judicious republican citizens, Mann won widespread approval from modernizers, especially in his Whig Party, for building public schools. Indeed, most states adopted one version or another of the system he established in Massachusetts, especially the program for "normal schools" to train professional teachers[1]. Mann has been credited by many educational historians as the "Father of the Common School Movement"[2]."

AND:

"Under the auspices of the board, but at his own expense, he went to Europe in 1843 to visit schools, especially in Prussia, and his seventh annual report, published after his return, embodied the results of his tour. Many editions of this report were printed, not only in Massachusetts, but in other states, in some cases by private individuals and in others by legislatures; several editions were issued in England. In 1852, he supported the decision to adopt the Prussian education system in Massachusetts. Shortly after Massachusetts adopted the Prussian system, the Governor of New York set up the same method in twelve different New York schools on a trial basis."

It says here of the Prussian education system:

History

During the 18th century, the Kingdom of Prussia was among the first countries in the world to introduce tax-funded and generally compulsory primary education, comprising an eight-year course of primary education, called Volksschule. It provided not only the skills needed in an early industrialized world (reading, writing and arithmetic), but also a strict education in ethics, duty, discipline and obedience. Affluent children often went on to attend preparatory private schools for an additional four years, but the general population had virtually no access to secondary education.

Lutheran influence

Historically, the Lutheran denomination had a strong influence on German culture, including its education. Martin Luther advocated compulsory schooling and this idea became a model for schools throughout Germany.

Pietist influence

Pietism, a reformist group within Lutheranism, forged a political alliance with the King of Prussia based on a mutual interest in breaking the dominance of the Lutheran state church. The Prussian Kings, Calvinists among Lutherans, feared the influence of the Lutheran state church and its close connections with the provincial nobility, while Pietists suffered from persecution by the Lutheran orthodoxy. Bolstered by royal patronage, Pietism replaced the Lutheran church as the effective state religion by the 1760s.

Pietist theology stressed the need for "inner spirituality", which can only come about through the reading of Scripture. Consequently, Pietists helped form the principles of the modern public school system, including the stress on literacy.


The political motivations of the King of Prussia

Seeking to replace the controlling functions of the local aristocracy, the Prussian court attempted to instill social obedience in the citizens through indoctrination. Every individual had to become convinced, in the core of his being, that the King was just, his decisions always right, and the need for obedience paramount.[citation needed]

The schools imposed an official language, to the prejudice of ethnic groups living in Prussia. The purpose of the system was to instill loyalty to the Crown and to train young men for the military and the bureaucracy. As the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, a key influence on the system, said, "If you want to influence [the student] at all, you must do more than merely talk to him; you must fashion him, and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than what you wish him to will." [1


John Taylor Gatto[1] (born December 15, 1935[2]) is an American retired school teacher of 29 years and 8 months experience in the classroom and author of several books on education. He is an activist critical of compulsory schooling and of what he characterizes as the hegemonic nature of discourse on education and the education professions.

He has many educational videos on this subject which can be found on YouTube. This is my favorite and I think a good introduction to understanding what he teaches:

John Taylor Gatto - State Controlled Consciousness


“The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house”

 Audre Lorde


Radical change needs to occur for anything similar to the ideal of neurodiversity to be respected in the United States. Our school systems as well as the political realm where decisions are made about how it is run are designed to discourage neurodiversity in every way. The way to encourage it is to face the oppressive nature of how our present system works to provide for the elite at the expense of the majority. It's important to not be used by the system in a way that promotes and protects its tradition of oppression.

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.

Designing Disorder

 

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What threatens the continuation of the human species more than the ignorance of those who carry that label is the acceptance of wisdom and knowledge of those who do the labeling.  What gets declared modern culture, western civilization, and scientific knowledge, receives a great deal of unearned respect and praise due to the many myths, which are advertised by those who have the power and means to do so.  These are of course the people who benefit from such beliefs.

Compulsory education was never meant to be a liberator the way it's often claimed, and it was always understood by those who promoted this discipline that most people would be excluded by it.

By praising this institution, children were taught racism, consumerism, bullying, and many fantastic notions about the nature of humans.

The worst of what is promoted in schools is that leaders who are said to have earned that position are able to determine the nature of human thought patterns, promote particular public policy,advance warfare research using unwilling vulnerable subjects, harshly discriminate against diverse expression and alternatives to tradition in order to promote progress and a more civilized atmosphere.

 

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Nothing has been used more to exploit people than the unrealistic hopes and expectations of modern medicine.  With so many willing to trust in the magic potions created in the royal name of science this industry naturally chose to diversify and work with government officials to establish law and order according to a new science/product called psychology.  This was added to the use of toxic potions meant to subdue and encourage compliance (called psychiatry)and the whole system works together to show how only a few elites are able to escape intellectual deficits and thinking disorders.

 

The one unique ability common to all creatures is that of cooperating with nature AND influencing their own future according to their understanding, of how they fit.  It's not natural for people to believe that they don't fit.  To encourage such myths require the aid of government, scholastic's, social engineers, and commercial advertising.

Nothing could help to discourage humans more than the belief that their ability to think and plan is disordered so that they feel vulnerable, dependent, and useless.

Communication disorders (also given the convenient title of thinking disorders) are due to diversity of the human species which influence how people think and express themselves in different ways.  Disorder comes from a lack of acceptance and an attempt to understand the difference and yet the different individual rather than the system which created this supposed order as the result of prejudice, receives the blame. 

We're configured in a variety of ways and have a multitude of experiences which science and medicine cannot track, study, or create statistics for.  We have a mind which no microscope or sophisticated scientific instrument can provide a better understanding of. 

If we're to maintain our dignity and encourage hope to fellow men and women, we must understand that it is the system which governs us that is incapable of determining a positive outcome for our future despite their attempts to do so.  Order will come from the creativity we command when we choose to question our oppressors and think outside of the narrow context we have been taught to worship by the name of science, medicine, and scholastic achievement.

Empathy is Always a Decision and Discrimination is Always Pathetic

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Describing autistics or anyone with a developmental disorder by using pejoratives indicating intellectual deficits is insane. The standards were set in order to provide support to racial and class hierarchies, and they were never meant to provide anyone with an aid. Belief in intellectual superiority just doesn't make sense.

Mental health agencies are overwhelmingly using the request for aid to register and discriminate against classes much more than providing any type of assistance.

Worst of all, autistics are seen as un-empathetic. That's the most pathetic expression of modern cultural bias and the most dangerous attribution for any group of people.


People do have a variety of differences and even deficits according to standards (I am someone who has many)but traditionally mainstream society has proven itself incapable of differentiating between the compassionate act of helping others and the degrading of people who need different types of help and/or accommodation outside of the mainstream.

Autism is a developmental disorder which can't be identified by pathology nor can that be the basis for autism treatments.


Reguading the rights of the "mentally deficient":

"Our most basic human rights which we are guaranteed by the United States Constitution - rights even granted to killers, rapists, and terrorists, are denied to people who have been labeled "mentally-ill." The burden of proof for involuntary commitment is based solely on "probable cause", "reasonable grounds", or "a reason to believe" that there is a danger to self or others. By contrast, for a criminal to be convicted of a crime and incarcerated, his violation of the law has to be proven "beyond a reasonable doubt."David @ mentalhealthstigma.com

Concerning how people seeking different types of aid have traditionally been judged from a perspective which is according to state-sponsored morality:


Thomas Szasz

Mental illness: psychiatry's phlogiston

" While alchemy changed into chemistry, the soul changed into the mind and sins became sicknesses (of the mind). The early alienists (physicians who claimed special expertise regarding the diagnosis and treatment of mental illnesses) frankly acknowledged this metamorphosis. However, instead of recognising that it was an early manifestation of a move from a religious to a secular outlook on human behaviour, they attributed it to scientific advances and believed that a set of new brain diseases had been discovered which they called "mental diseases".

AND:

"Domination-Submission

The typical mental patient is a conscious adult who has not been declared legally incompetent. "Seriously mentally disordered patients neither lack insight, nor is their competency impaired to the degree previously believed," writes George Hoyer, a professor at the Institute of Community Medicine, University of Tromsoe, Norway.(4) Moreover, mental patients are regularly considered competent to do some things, but not others, for example, competent to live independently, but not competent to reject psychiatric drug treatment; competent to stand trial, but not competent to represent themselves in court; competent to vote, but not competent to leave the hospital.(2) "

AND:

"Paradoxically, the old, prescientific-religious explanation of human behaviour is more faithful to the facts than the modern, scientific-psychiatric explanation of it. When man invents the Perfect Judge and calls him "God," he creates an arbiter who does not distinguish between two kinds of conduct-one rational, for which man is responsible, and another irrational, for which he is not. Being held responsible for our actions is what renders us fully human: it is the glory with which God endows everyone, and the burden He imposes on everyone. Erroneous explanations of the material world lead to physical catastrophes, false explanations of the human condition, to moral catastrophes."

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Concerning the ways in which psychiatry and psychology were designed to identify control minorities according to the hierarchy of racial myth:

Psychiatry: the use and abuse of

"Psychiatry arose about 300 years ago from two main sources: the need to control and put away "lunatics" who were disturbing the social order in European cities, and from a  growing interest in the study of the "mind" in European medical circles. Since both psychology and psychiatry developed together at a time when the powerful myths of racism were being refined and integrated into European culture, racist thinking became an integral part of the system of psychiatry that Europe developed and exported around the globe (source: Fernando, Forensic Pyschiatry, Race and Culture. Routledge, London and New York, 1998). Even the U.S. was not immune.

Hailed as the founder of American psychiatry, Benjamin Rush (1746-1813) theorized that a cure for having black skin "would add to the happiness of the Negro" as it was not God but nature that marked the black man --that his blackness is "a sign not of his congenital sin but of his congenital illness." (Szas, Thomas: The Manufacture of Madness)."

 The contributions of Benjamin Rush

"During the 1790s, the Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush, for example, explained skin color—specifically, blackness—as a product of diet, custom, and disease. In his 1792 address to the American Philosophical Society, he argued that blackness was a product of leprosy, which caused the skin to become "black, thick and greasy." The disease "induces a morbid sensibility in the nerves," an "insensibility [that] belongs in a peculiar manner to the Negroes." "They bear," he elaborated, "surgical operations much better than white people, and what would be a cause of insupportable pain to a white man, a Negro would almost disregard." Charles White concurred. "The thicker" the skin, he opined, "the duller must be the sense of touch." Little wonder, then, "that Negroes have not that lively and delicate sense of touch that the whites have." Such deliberations suggest that scholars of skin and touch who tend to treat them in the same breath do so for good reason. As the philosopher Steven Connor explained, touch is—and was—distinguished by its "two-sidedness." A quality especially apparent in the hand, "the active or formative faculty of the skin" means that skin both touches and is touched."

A general continuity marked proslavery thinking and some antebellum southern medical thinking about race and skin. Black skin was commonly associated with insensitivity, and the growing demand for slave labor lent the stereotype an important currency.
The proslavery ideologues Josiah Priest (a New Yorker), George R. Gliddon, and Josiah Nott all concluded that blacks naturally had thick skins, a thickness that had nothing to do with Rush's environmental explanation. Gliddon even suggested their "comparatively thick" skin was really an indication of "an extra skin in the negro." Some southern physicians, though, stressed the nervous system in their thinking about black hapticity. Samuel Cartwright echoed the common wisdom but offered a new twist that contravened much of slaveholders' thinking. Cartwright agreed that blacks had thick skin but filed the caveat that they had an "excess of nervous matter," which ministered "to the senses." He believed that slaves were especially given to "sensuality, at the expense of intellectuality." In reaffirming one stereotype (that of the merely sensuous slave, sans reason), Cartwright had to concede that while "their skin is very thick it is as sensitive, when they are in perfect health, as that of children, and like them, [they] fear the rod." This argument put an uncomfortable spin on the slaveholders' understanding of black hapticity: while it endorsed the cherished belief that black slaves were childlike, it also exposed masters to abolitionist charges that physical punishment of black, highly sensitive skin was especially cruel.'^"

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It doesn't make sense to place a priority on fixing treatments before or without fixing the attitudes and beliefs which have created the stigma. No matter what tool people are given, they are going to act based on how they think. If people think they are justified in what they believe is the basis for behavior, they will find a method for that treating behavior based on that belief.

Stigma is the basis for all political judgments of atypical behavior.

Science/medicine has an agenda and will change the standards only to fit that agenda. Social models of disorders create empowerment and ability in order to oppose and redirect the discrimination that science intends.

Intellect and emotional stability are major concerns for the increasingly growing number of people who have an inconvenient need for different types of accessibility. The judgments for these are unreasonable as well as unpractical. However, never, ever, ever should any group of people be stigmatized as being un-empathetic based on undetermined behavior. It's a dangerous convenience that society cannot afford.

Choosing to Trust in How You Think

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While the physical brain can be located and altered along with the nervous system it commands, there is practically no way to evaluate the capacity of a human's ability based on the operation of their brain. The brain is an organ within the human body which has always been the focus of the most frivolous preoccupations of our species.

People who study how the brain operates usually have their research funded by someone or some group wanting to learn how to manipulate people. Their interest is in exploring how to alter the way a person thinks by making them physically vulnerable.

Since physical vulnerability is believed to result in people experiencing fear, manipulating the central nervous system by way of the brain is used to weaken people with hopes they will react fearfully and in more primitive ways. That will hopefully result in their accepting suggestions that would otherwise seem unreasonable. People who are not fearful will be more likely to trust in themselves to know what their senses suggest is true.

The belief that humans are so vulnerable to suggestion has provided behavior modification specialists (otherwise known as social designers) to use extraordinary measures to research manipulative methods. The process of this research seems based on a maniacal obsession. These people are so inebriated with the illusion of controlling others that they have lost control of them selves.

100 years ago social engineers encouraged the validation of European aristocracy by providing funding of a new religion based on racial superiority. It was fraudulently introduced to the public as a scientific discovery. Therefore, the public accepted it as being provable and thus, rational.

This was originally confined to what got called psychology. It was first described as a way of analyzing behavior but later merged with Western medicine and was described as psychiatry. This way government officials could physically debilitate and therefore, restrain public enemies who were seen as immoral and then alter how their brains operated with the use of regulated chemicals.

This oppressive tool was also used in the United States in order to preserve white supremacy doctrine. The same justification for white American domination of other cultures was the goal. This was done by teaching that the purpose of our existence was limited to the survival of the fittest, and that white people had therefore, not acted immorally in their quest for domination. This supported the claim that they deserved what had been won with the aid of the British empire. 

 

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The technological advances which have been made over the past century have been used primarily for the manipulation of a culture that is dependent on others that make decisions for us. Mass marketing campaigns on radio, television, and the Internet has become the most predominant way of teaching people how to think and therefore, what to buy.

Education is mistakenly taught to people as being a liberator even though it is completely unreasonable to see that as the goal for those who fund it. Because funders of education have not been able to use segregation of race effectively for accomplishing their goals, they have merged with psychology to create the illusion of normality and sub-normal behavior. This coordinates with highly exclusionary standardized tests.

Our hope is in the free will that we too often forget we have. By believing that the standardized tests (which are used far beyond the scope of classrooms) are the determination of our worth as humans, we remain dependent on behavioral modification specialists/social designers.

Allowing these designers to be so irresponsible can render them incapable of the mature compassion they need to govern their own lives. When we don't take responsibility for ourselves, we encourage the same in others.

No matter what government leaders and their political servants teach us about our capability, no one and nothing can change our mind. Many of us still have the legal freedom to exercise much of our personal judgment and make many decisions about how we live. Once we start trusting in our independent ability to think and be rational our liberation will be the natural result.

Restraint and Seclusion are Encouraged in the House (H.R. 4247)

Yesterday the Washington Post ran this story of propaganda: House approves bill to limit physical restraint of students. I wrote this more factual based blog post several days ago: The Exclusive Rights to Restrain and Seclude. Joe opposed the suggestions made in the post as well as in the comments about how restraint and seclusion could be reduced. His responses were typical of the widely believed myths about what disability actually means in the United States and how it has traditionally been dealt with.

What is behind many of these myths is the view that the government just isn't doing enough for disabled people in order to support, encourage, and protect them. If the problem was just that it could have been easily overcome a long time ago. The alternative view which exposes that myth is typically met with a misleading conditioned response that is polarizing to any discussion about it.

This polarization lends the discussion to the very problems that civil rights activists are supposedly trying to fight against. What happens is that the discussion is limited so that the person with the least established power(power of course being established by the compliance of mainstream objectives and their rationale) has the least opportunity to have their argument validated. This is how abusive cycles are protected.

If America was as free as the privileged who surround themselves with(and protect their illusions with) the mythical images from the commercial media claim then the "love it or leave it" attitude in politics would have some validity. Since it's not that way at all it has no validity.

In the past 200 years since the United States was declared as a nation very little has occurred in terms of establishing civil rights for its citizens in comparison to what is predominately reported. In the last several decades restraint and seclusion has increased dramatically for persons with disabilities. Based on the ways that these trends have been identified by how they are encouraged there is every indication that these abuses will increase a great deal more in the next decade.

This bill provides for stronger regulations and therefore, stronger penalties on the people whom restraint and seclusion are used on. It provides more leniency and government support to the people who use those oppressive tools. Unfortunately, it is advertised as being the opposite.

The reason for behavioral interventions which have included restraint and seclusion being encouraged in institutions (which now includes public schools) were based on the idea that disability is the expression of noncompliance and that disabled people are more likely to become violent. As Sadderbutwisergirl pointed out very well in the previous discussion:

"However, it is very easy for someone to convince people that actions that would be considered abusive on "normal" kids is actually beneficial for kids with neurological disabilities."

also, as Wayward pointed out very well:

"Let’s close ALL the bad schools. Be they the School of Shock or the School of PBS … who has greased all the political wheels but is just as insidious and harmful."


It's difficult for me to understand how anyone could believe that the same ABA philosophy which describes autism as a behavioral disorder and which is behind the abuses at the Judge Rotenberg Center will be helpful to autistics in an ABA/PBS classroom.


The United States has always had an institutional mentality and behavioral interventions have been designed based on the harmful bigoted views which are used to legitimize the abuses made by the staff who are in charge at institutions.

The establishment of institutions of every sort is very typical of how the American government displays its fear of independent thinking. From the first Puritan's war on the neurodiverse to the educational system based on military ideals and racist standardized tests, which were created by eugenicists, the United States has always had difficulty establishing freedom of religion or freedom from religion. The separation of church and state provides too much power to the majority of citizens for the most powerful to allow it.

Psychology is a public institution in the United States. Commercial brands of psychology are subsidized by state and federal funds. What this provides for the government is a state-sponsored morality (a different type of church) which can be used as to legitimize punishment on the least resourceful citizens. This is behind the way that the restraint and seclusion bill is designed to provide authority to teachers and school systems to use restraint and seclusion legitimately.

This bill is an example of the way that Democratic politicians seize power from the most vulnerable citizens by building their own political power base and creating more dependence from them on bureaucracy, which then becomes bigger and more powerful.

Support for this bill is the encouragement of a throw-up-your-hands-and-do-nothing, conspiracy-based, pessimistic outlook that has encouraged the problem that the bill claims to be targeting. State-sponsored religion has always led nations to become more oppressive of the majority of citizens rather than less, and it has led to the worst cases of abuse and even murder.

Since the people who are hurt the worst by this legislation are not being allowed to voice their opinion about it, it's obvious that they aren't who the legislation intends to help. What happens to the most vulnerable among us will eventually happen to everyone because abusing the most vulnerable makes us all weaker and therefore, more vulnerable also.

The laws governing the way that disabled people are treated (especially when mentality is defined as the basis for disability) have always been among the most deceitful, they have been supported by so-called disability activist, and they have led to the worst cases of abuse. For that reason alone every proposed legislation of this type should be seen as highly suspect for how it can be used in oppressive ways.

The Exclusive Rights to Restrain and Seclude

I would certainly hope that a civil rights group involved in the political advocacy of disabled people would be involved in campaigning against abusive behavioral treatments. Unfortunately, though,  TASH is one such organization that has gotten involved and is endorsing the use of Applied Behavioral Analysis in the form of Positive Behavioral Supports.

Positive Behavioral Support is a treatment program that was designed to promote political agendas that would encourage an exclusive and narrow philosophy of what normal/typical behavior is and how the demand for it should be implemented. It was meant to combat the disruption in institutions caused by lack of compliance. Statewide Positive Behavioral Support is a political agency designed to enforce their brand of discipline in schools, and other institutions who work with disabled people.

Parents have been upset for a long time when schools abuse their authority to punish and restrain children, and force them into seclusion rooms. TASH has been promoting PBS as an alternative to the abuses of the ABA in places such as Judge Rotenberg Center since the 1980s. It is reported here in Positive Behavior Support: A Paternalistic Utopian Delusion that:


"Peer review is the hallmark of scientific publication. This involves the review of research papers by experts in a given field prior to the publication to ensure that they meet standards of originality, validity and value to the field. These reviews are supposed to be based on scientific standards, not ideological ones. As early as the 1980s, The Association for Persons with Severe Handicaps (TASH), after passing a resolution banning the use of aversive procedures, began using an ideological standard for publishing articles in their journal and four papers presented at international conference."

It also says:

"TASH, as would be expected endorses PBS(TASH, 2000b). Then again, Lou Brown (1990) describe TASH is unique among disability organizations in, among other things, "addressing the ideological". True enough, and fair enough because TASH describes itself on its website as a "civil right's organization". (TASHn.d.). It does not follow, then, that publication in the journal are peer-reviewed in the same sense as articles in behavioral science journals, or as a result the articles in their journal can be cited in support of scientific assertions of truth. Yet, such as implied by PBS advocates in many of their writings. Alas, the newly established Journal of Positive Behavior Interventions published by Pro-Ed (2002) may not be much more scientifically defensible, but at least the title represents truth in advertising. The same players, however, publish in both places, may have difficulty differentiating their beliefs from reality consistent with PBS ideas, and will probably continue to wrap up reinforcement in fancy new clothes. It has to be hoped that the research this new journal will publish will not misrepresent aversive processes in behavioral analysis, other behavioral analysts, and see her efforts to help others when some element of aversive motivation is openly employed, as has categorized some TASH articles (Mulick 1990)."

PBS is a vehicle that is being used to promote a social movement. It is not new at all, but rather it is a new packaging on old ideals of social reform and discipline.

This paper relates the value systems described in PBS to the movements behind such ideologies as social Darwinism and the eugenics movement. The article warns against "deriving morality from science" which has lead to the death of millions in the 20th century. In the same way that the dangers of these movements have been suppressed, PBS and the agenda behind it has been completely misrepresented for political reasons. It says:

"The concept of ideology traces its roots to Marxist political philosophy, and refers to the social influences that both generate and sustain the way in which people come to understand their world and to shape their social agenda (Belkin, 1998). Values refer to the things people actively pursue, both for themselves and for others who may wish to influence. Thus, the novelty of PBS and the combination of science and value systems.



For those of you who are regular readers of this blog you may have noticed that it says at the top that this is a team blog with authors Ed and Wayward. Until now Wayward had not wanted her contribution acknowledged. She wrote to me yesterday and said that we could look forward to blog post here written by her very soon. I'm so glad. :)

I want to acknowledge and express my appreciation to her for her contribution with this blog. She helped with setting up this blog, naming it, designing it, and promoting it. She has help with editing some of my blog posts and consistently sends me valuable information including important websites. All that I know about the subject of Positive Behavioral Support, I learned from her. Thanks Wayward. :)

Wayward is a parent with dyslexia in Southern California, who has a teen on the autism spectrum. Her child was abused in a PBS classroom. She found that agencies such as Protection and Advocacy had no interest in listening to the abuses of PBS violations.

The following discussion occurred recently on LBRB. The post was dedicated to the federal investigation of Judge Rotenberg Center (JRC). What I've copied here is  the exchange between Wayward (commenting as wondering) and Nancy Weiss.



Nancy Weiss says:

So glad to see so many comments on this. I want to reply to a few. I did invite the ASA to sign on. They declined with a somewhat cryptic reply. In response to discussion here I just sent an email to them asking for more of an explanation. I will share more when I hear from them (or if I don’t!).

I am working now on next steps. I’m looking at setting up some meetings with DOJ and other DC officials to lay the groundwork for a successful outcome. While it’s clear that anyone reading the letter that was sent is going to be horrified (and that every word is documented), spend an hour with Matt Israel and the JRC parents, and that same person is going to come away realizing, at the very least, that this is a complex issue. Not that this minimizes our point or weakens our resolve in any way, but we need to make sure that the DOJ investigators aren’t snowed. Many a journalist has gone in there horrified and come out wondering. He is very convincing.

I very much value the support and suggestions of people who participate in this blog; if you have ideas about next steps, I welcome them. You can comment here and I’ll read or if you’d prefer, send me an email ([email protected]). I truly appreciate knowing there are others out there who keep this issue in their hearts.—Nancy

Posted on February 27th, 2010

wondering says:

Would this be the same Nancy Weiss, the MSW behaviorist, who lobbies for PBS - aka enforced ABA - in schools?




Nancy Weiss says:

Hi, all—Just wanted to respond to the question, is this “the same Nancy Weiss, the MSW behaviorist, who lobbies for PBS - aka enforced ABA - in schools”. I’m not sure if there is another Nancy Weiss or confusion about what I advocate for. I used to be the Executive Director of TASH. I believe in behavioral supports that are totally person (and family) centered and directed. I definitely don’t believe in enforced ABA or enforced anything for that matter.

My dear friend Herb Lovett once said to me, “Look here’s the deal. You’ve got to imagine that when you get to the pearly gates, everyone you ever helped with behavioral issues is going to be lined up. Some number of them are going to come up to you, shake your hand, clap you on the shoulder and thank you for helping to make their lives better. The rest are going to haul back and slug you in the jaw. Your job is to make sure you’ve got a line of people who want to shake your hand”. It is with this in mind that I’ve done my work for a great many years.

When I was at TASH I wrote an article called, “It May Be Non-Aversive But Is It Non-Coercive?: The Ethics of Behavior Change in the Modern Age”. A version of that article was later published (co-authored with Tim Knoster) in the Journal of Positive Behavioral Interventions.

Here’s a quote from the original article that I think gives a sense of what I believe about all this:
“Positive approaches are only those which enhance the lives of the people with whom we work; they are characterized by collaboration versus control. They focus more on illumination (or understanding the meanings and purposes of the challenging behaviors from the individual’s point of view) than on elimination (or simply reducing behaviors we perceive to be unacceptable). There is no question that some people with disabilities have behaviors that are dangerous, disruptive or otherwise difficult. I am not one who believes that because all people are to be valued and respected equally that all behaviors are equally acceptable. Some people (both with and without disabilities) exhibit behaviors that interfere with the quality of their own lives and the lives of the people with whom they interact. We have a responsibility to offer supports for people to change behaviors that are dangerous, disruptive, or interfere with their ability to achieve goals they have set for themselves. Our responsibility, however, is to do this in ways that value, enhance, and include people, rather than through the use of methods that are coercive and too often, come dangerously close to revenge.”

I’m happy to send the full versions of these articles or one I wrote recently on the future of disability supports. Here are a few quotes from that one (from a list of what I hope for the future):
— Society will be just as unwilling to tolerate the abusive treatment of people with disabilities as they are the mistreatment of others. I hope for a day when, if information became known about substandard treatment for people with disabilities, the public would rise up with the same energy and outrage as when the abuses of prisoners at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib became public. Our tolerance of a different standard betrays the degree to which people with disabilities are still inherently devalued.
— It will be recognized that institutions and other highly controlled congregate settings are not good for people and they will become a thing of the past.
— We will finally figure out that it is not only unethical but downright illogical to respond to people’s desperate attempts to assert a degree of control over their lives by imposing greater and greater amounts of power over them.

Just write if you’d like the full text of any of these. I believe each person (and kids’ families) know better than anyone what’s best for them—the job of professionals is to provide supports that people want and offer opportunities for full, engaged lives as envisioned by the person who chooses to receive supports from that organization.—Nancy

Posted on February 28th, 2010

wondering says:

My child was physically abused at a school using ABA/PBS—in a district using mandated PBS…this is why I ask. Several of those on the list of signatories declined to help in any manner (to put it politely). It seems we all agree that abuse at JRC is terrible, but it can’t happen within a PBS framework. And, if it happens, it will be buried.

PBS can often be a stringent form of ABA—especially in the US school systems. It pervades all areas and restricts freedoms. Please see the three-tiered PBS model to be aware of what is being advocated for. The top tier is utterly restrictive.

Let’s close ALL the bad schools. Be they the School of Shock or the School of PBS … who has greased all the political wheels but is just as insidious and harmful.


Unfortunately, Nancy Weiss seems to be lacking in her recognition for how the behavioral treatments she endorses (with the backing of TASH) will affect the public who is heard from the least. The question has never been whether or not restraint and seclusion will be used or whether or not it will become seen as even more necessary. The goal is to promote PBS as a comprehensive behavioral approach for everyone.

The only request that politicians are making with proposals such as this H.R. 4247: Preventing Harmful Restraint and Seclusion in Schools Act is that one particular ideology be awarded the title of absolutely correct and that one particular agency be given supreme charge of enforcing disciplinary action of societal misfits that challenge that correctness.

The Mysterious and The Disorderly

The people who are typically involved in debating United States public programs and making decisions about those programs rarely mention the relationship dynamics of the program and the one using the program from the users' point of view. By not understanding this viewpoint the separation between the people in command of the program and those who are supposed to benefit from it the most is widened. This provides the environment where trust is betrayed and authority is abused.

Public programs for education, vocational training, disability rehabilitation, and punishment for crimes are all similar in many respects. In the same way that an attorney can refer to another court's decision to support their current case, each public program is designed to protect all the others. Again this encourages an environment where people in authority must make demands and enforce rules rather than encourage a healthy and trusting environment where people can understand and learn with dignity and mutual respect.

The attitudes influencing how disabled people are treated in the United States depend on bigoted descriptions about our ability to make sound judgments. Preventing the majority of the public from being involved in public policy is not only the basis for corrupt politics, but it is part of the reason that disabled people are excluded and abused. Being seen as unfit to think in competent and sound ways allows for the most powerful peoples judgments to remain unchallenged.

Among the first people to be treated for lacking competency and sanity in the United States were people considered to be witches.

It says in Wikipedia of the Salem witch trials:

"The patriarchal beliefs that Puritans held in the community added further stresses. Women, they believed, should be totally subservient to men. By nature, a woman was more likely to enlist in the Devil's service than was a man, and women were considered lustful by nature. In addition, the small-town atmosphere made secrets difficult to keep and people's opinions about their neighbors were generally accepted as fact. In an age where the philosophy "children should be seen and not heard" was taken at face value, children were at the bottom of the social ladder. Toys and games were seen as idle and playing was discouraged. Girls had additional restrictions placed upon them and were trained from a young age to spin yarn, cook, sew, weave, serve their husbands and bear their children, while boys were able to go hunting, fishing, exploring in the forest, and often became apprentices to carpenters and smiths.

In accordance with Puritan beliefs, the majority of accused 'witches' were unmarried or recently widowed land-owning women; according to the law if no legal heir existed upon the owner's death, title to the land would revert to the previous owner, or (if no previous owner could be determined) to the colony.[citation needed] This made witch-hunting a possible method of acquiring a profitable piece of property."

With all our sophisticated knowledge medical officials (the government's clergy of today) see those witchcraft symptoms like this:

Medical theories about the reported afflictions

Main article: Medical and psychological explanations of bewitchment

"The cause of the symptoms of those who claimed affliction continues to be a subject of interest. Various medical and psychological explanations for the observed symptoms have been explored by researchers, including psychological hysteria in response to Indian attacks, convulsive ergotism caused by eating rye bread made from grain infected by the fungus Claviceps purpurea (which is the natural substance from which LSD is derived),[72], an epidemic of bird-borne encephalitis lethargica, and sleep paralysis to explain the nighttime attacks alleged by some of the accusers,[73]. Other modern academic historians are less inclined to believe that the cause for the behavior was biological, exploring instead motivations of jealousy, spite and a need for attention to explain behavior they contend was simply acting."

Basically this describes post traumatic stress disorder, psychosomatic ailments, tripping on drugs, physical disease, and sleep disorders OR character defects such as jealousy, spite, or faking it.

The way such symptoms are often treated in more modern times is based on the claim that the disordered are defiant and violent and the proof is still not necessary. In this way, I think we still have similar types of mythology used in government as what was used to protect a corrupt social order during the witch trials.

In a similar way that witches were tested by attempting to drown them and then excused if they escaped, today we often describe someone who denies having a psychological disorder by such denial being a symptom of the disorder.

No one who was accused during the time of the trials could effectively explain or defend their behavior. It required someone who the government and court saw as more competent, sane, and socially acceptable to speak on their behalf. A growing percentage of the US population today can be confined, restrained, secluded, and drugged with chemicals that are potentially life-threatening without cause.

In the same way that children during the witch trials were at the bottom of the social ladder and taught to be seen and not heard we have younger children than ever being treated for misbehavior or psychiatric disorders with harmful drugs. For adults who take these drugs, there is evidence that they live 25 years less than the average person. Since the drugging of children was more recently adopted we have no idea how many years may be taken off their lives due to the drugs.

In the same way that the opinions of neighbors could be used to convict witches, there are laws in effect, that allow practically anyone to have someone suspected of mental illness incarcerated and held indefinitely without trial.

The National Alliance for Mentally Ill (NAMI) was very quickly made into an oppressive group run by the pharmaceutical industry, federal policymakers, and the families of the mentally ill. In a similar way, all the efforts that may have otherwise been provided autistics with better situations have so far been dominated by unscrupulous and opportunistic business owners, parent run organizations, and politicians who support our segregation along with harmful treatments.

There are still very strict rules for people judged incompetent and psychologically and/or neurologically impaired. The number of people who are given a voice in how public policy determines how we are treated is relatively very small. Typical public policies can't be met with typical political approaches at this point to create the needed changes. The excuses for politics not being challenged are not practical for anyone but those who are already in the typically empowered positions of authority. For understanding autism, the observers need to trust those being observed more to prevent making the typical wrong assumptions that usually lead to exclusion and mistreatment.

Science and Thinking

When different minds are explored science is typically used to find methods of treatment which are based on preconceived hierarchical notions of what type of people should be preserved and promoted and what type shouldn't. Even if there is a clearly defined dysfunction of the brain that can be positively altered by scientific methods, there aren't many ways that anyone would know the best, safest, and the most efficient way to create such an alteration because the focus of the research is normalization and mind control of this population rather than their preservation or health.

Some have suggested that the dramatic increase in the diagnosis of learning disabilities, psychological maladjustment, and neurological disorders is the result of societal failure and a more toxic environment. Rather than look at whether or not this is true I believe it is more important to look at how different cultures have approached social reformation based on scientific research, what the goals were, and who the goals were designed to serve.

Faith based programs such as religion are certainly one way that is used to govern or reform a society. The practice of psychology as a whole (with all its inconsistencies and the variety of ways it's practiced) is basically faith based so it is a religion in that sense even though scientific research is used to promote it.

Within such religions, rules are established of right and wrong so that one type of behavior is praised while another is rebuked. Punishment (both physical and verbal) along with expulsion is a powerful motivator, but I don't think there is any more powerful motivator than shame. That feeling of shame goes a long way in keeping people in their place and out of the way.

Unfortunately, the goals of social reformation go much further than reducing crime and promoting ethics.The laws are used more in ways that shame is encouraged for societal misfits and unpopular subcultures. Having fewer acceptable expressions will help to promote the narrow set of products and services that have already proven to stimulate the economy. With fewer diverse expressions being recognized and accepted the companies that already have power will keep it as will the people who run them.

To treat learning disabilities schools claim to have special classrooms to help. The main focus of public schools however is to promote as many successful graduates as possible so the separation is really more geared toward providing the most likely to succeed with an opportunity to not be held back by being in the presence of these less capable students.

Deinstitutionalization for people with mental illness has provided little or no real changes in how this population is understood and treated, and therefore, it's not even a Band-Aid on the problem but more of a way to distract people from the more important issues.

Prescribing psychiatric medication is described as an art rather than a science because even if they could better understand the brain functions involved, the goal of mental health has always been to protect the public.

Science will likely not be useful for empowering people with learning impairments or psychological and neurological disorders as long as the promotion of certain products which are marketed with little or no regulations is what is mainly influencing the research.

The best scientists can do to help autistic people within such an environment is to refute bogus claims like "vaccinations cause autism" and "normalizing behavioral programs are needed to treat autism".

As long as the prejudices about autism have such a influence in what may be considered by some as "scientific research" or "scientific discovery" the human rights of autistic people will not be served by scientific thinking.