The Standard Review

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.

Who is Barney

I am not a fan of Barney the purple dinosaur. I am insulted by this non-character as someone who grew up with television icons who taught kids to be a part of the new generation rather than accept being treated in patronizing and charitable tones. Such tones claim no-culture will be our future rather than recognizing the realities of the multi-culture which we all must ultimately learn to accept.

Many of us within this previous generation of children were entertained by groovy dogs, energetic boomer-age educators who were both progressive and hip, and the type of creativity and fascination  which provided seemingly limitless possibilities. We didn't have a lot of faith that the generation of our grandparents or what had most recently been defined as the establishment would provide us many securities or hope for our future.

On a national level, many children in the U.S. as a multi-cultured group, were taught a new set of ideals through the unification of the electric box which made home bearable. The one hope which was represented by this box (which originally presented that hope in moving one-dimensional dull images) was that whatever change was going to occur was something that we had the opportunity to be a part of.

The earliest collective environment (outside of the virtual one led by three networks of airwaves) I was exposed to was not one of hope. It was one of despair. This was not a network or culture at all but was a set of individuals defined by society by what we were not rather than what we were. We were designed by our designated title; the disabled. Our limitations of education, training, job security, and income were what (by contrast) defined us to many influential local and national leaders and rule makers as less-than-human elements within a dumping ground necessary for serving to secure societies progressive mobility.

The hope which television inspired many children to believe in was explosively confronted with a grim reality when many of these same children learned how societal expectations and prejudices which lacked the empathy we had hoped for were determining our worth. Subcultures which claimed to be accepting of diversity were (beyond the idealism often promoted by children s television) unwilling to promote the acceptance of human frailty that made them feel vulnerable and alone when confronted by practical interactions with the broader public.

Along with diversity of human characteristics were the humans who possessed them. It may have been just our differences and even our frailties (which were close enough to what others saw as undesirable aspects of their own humanness) that led these liberal thinkers to place rigid and unreasonable standards on their brothers and sisters. However, somehow too many of them were willing to conveniently ignore that along with those human characteristics and frailties that were (to them) seemingly unmanageable and sometimes even repulsive, were humans not so different than themselves. They were too willing to ignore what this exclusivity did to their own minds and souls as well as how it would create an ultimately destructive societal pattern of division and grief.

For a truly inclusive multicultural society, we will not need to make room for disabled people. Instead of being a less respected subculture, people who are now considered disabled for any reason, would (with such an ideal) be another part of our society who are respected for our abilities, accommodated, enabled, and encouraged to reach our potential, and above all else, will be seen as another aspect of the human spectrum (regardless of what is seen as our productive performance) rather than a less recognized and less valuable burden or waste to society.

Competition among individuals and even individual cultures, in order to empower a broader base to a unified multicultural society, goes too far when dominance over the other individual or individual cultures degrades and demeans our very existence.

Just as the world cannot afford the unrestricted race for dominance that many nations are now involved with, the United States can no longer afford to be seen by the rest of the world as having Imperial aspirations.

The segregation that has resulted from the unrestricted and unregulated power struggles within the United States has not made us more powerful but has instead weakened and diluted our spirit with fear and greed.

I would hope that the world has renewed confidence due to the recent decisions made by the voting public within the United States. The disability community has a much better opportunity for empowerment with this new presidential administration.

The social model, rather than the medical model, of disability refers to who we are as people. Deficits and combination of deficits that are defined by medical models are rarely what limits our access to opportunities. We are instead limited by a society who is only willing to continue to create and secure the accommodations for opportunities to those who have traditionally been designated with this privilege.

The labels of deficits and sets of deficits designated to individuals by the medical community as defining someone as unworthy of accommodations reflect and define many societal issues. In this way autistic people, as we are designated rank by this ill-defined spectrum of deficits called the autism spectrum (that was chosen by those who have created the DSM-IV as a standard for such measurement) are separated by that definition alone.

Claiming that any way a person's value to society and the opportunities they deserve is defined by where diagnosticians claim we fit along this deficit spectrum that is so unfairly and poorly designed, and that this definition can appropriately decide who is are more deserving of opportunities and respect than another, encourages and promotes a destructive cycle.

If our current class system was determined by anything other than how particular groups are seen as more worthy of opportunities, the majority of people would be empowered rather than the minority. We don't need a redistribution of wealth. That's a misrepresented answer to the wrong question. We need a reevaluation of our standards that determines who is seen as worthy of opportunities.

Once there is a renewed (and hopefully more realistic as well as comprehensive) faith in our selves as diverse, distinctive, and respect-worthy individuals and cultures, the wealth of previously unrecognized and untapped human resources will naturally be recognized and empowered within diverse humans so that the fear of scarcity will no longer rule anyone.

So often life not only imitates art or entertainment, it is what teaches us how we look at and therefore evaluate people's worth. By what characters such as Barney the purple dinosaur teach us, we learn that manners and complacent following of established tradition will provide us all with charity rather than empowerment, and disabling goodwill rather than opportunities. This charitable outlook has afforded us nothing but magical notions of quick and/or abusive fixes along with false promises that we will be cared for by those who are more knowledgeable and wiser about our needs. It's time that we all start expressing and promoting our unique characteristics as well as the ones we see in others, along with being more accepting of our frailities and the ones we see in others, before the Barney's of this world are the ones who rule it.