Eradicating Right and Wrong

In March 1998, Andrew Golden, 11, and Cousin Mitchell Johnson, 13, sounded the alarm at Westside Middle School in Arkansas, prompting students and teachers to crowd into the courtyard. Then the two boys opened fire, randomly shooting at their victims, killing four students and one teacher.

 

In Germany, during final preparations for school examinations in 2002, an expelled student killed 18 people and then himself. In Japan, a 14-year-old beheaded his 11-year-old friend, while another teen stabbed an elderly neighbor to death because he wanted to experience killing someone. A drastic increase in school violence has been reported in Japan, Canada, Israel and France. In the U.K., there are now special schools for disruptive, sometimes violent youngsters who have been permanently excluded from other schools.

 

There are many possible explanations why – violence on television, the accessibility of guns and other weapons among them.

 

Yes, children can be influenced by violence on TV. Yes, guns are accessible. So are knives. They were also available 40 years ago, and children didn’t go out and coolly commit premeditated massacres with them.

 

To discover the true reason, it is necessary to examine modem schools, especially the programs for teaching moral values. In education in the United States, morals have been heavily and adversely focused upon since 1967, when “values clarification” first appeared in schools.

 

“Values clarification” initially emerged from Germany and was introduced into United States’ classrooms under various names: sensitivity training, encounter groups, self-esteem training, moral reasoning, conflict resolution and critical thinking, to name a few. None are any more than mental techniques designed to modify behavior or more bluntly, alter young people’s values.

 

Children and teenagers are manipulated and molded with the purpose of bringing about certain desired psychological “outcomes.” This process involves breaking down and subtly invalidating the child’s already acquired values – in particular, his family’s values – and replacing them with the idea that there is no set right or wrong, only personal opinion.

 

Tom DeWeese of the American Policy Foundation tells the story of a 9-year-old boy who “told his mother that he ranked lumberjacks in the same class as murderers and bigots” after a values clarification class. “These psychologically-based programs are harming children. … It’s mind control from womb to tomb,” said DeWeese.

 

According to William Kilpatrick, author of Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right From Wrong, “[N]o time is spent providing moral guidance or forming character. The virtues are not explained or discussed, no models of good behavior are provided, and no reason is given why a boy or girl should want to be good in the first place.”

 

Educator Beverly Eakman describes the impact of psychiatric and psychological influence on schools: “Their clear and stated agenda has been to jettison systematic, academic, knowledge-based curricula.”

At least five teens responsible for school massacres had undergone psychological behavior modification school programs like “death education” or “anger management.”

 

The Arkansas school health and social science curriculum included “conflict resolution” classes emphasizing that students “examine the possible causes of conflict in schools, families and communities” and “demonstrate strategies to prevent and manage conflict in healthy ways.” The Westside Arkansas school shooting was triggered by one of the boys breaking up with a girlfriend, which he apparently “solved” by coldly killing his fellow students. And while “anger management” is claimed to teach individuals to control their aggression and anger, in one class, a boy beat up a classmate so badly that six days later the boy was still in the hospital.

 

Death education, a psychological experiment that has been used in many countries since the 1970s, requires children to discuss suicide, and write their own wills and epitaphs. One U.S. “death education” (euphemistically called “forensic education”) class involved taking students to a deserted river shoreline to observe a mock crime scene complete with a “dismembered mannequin in the car trunk, a severed arm in a grocery bag and a bloody hacksaw.”

 

In Kyoto, Japan, in a bizarre attempt to educate children about violence, a teacher disguised in a cap and sunglasses, and brandishing a 20-inch metal rod, burst into a class of 11-year-olds sending them stumbling over desks and chairs trying to escape.

 

Concerned parents and educators cite Columbine High School shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold as prime examples of the failure of “anger management” and “death education.”

 

Harris was taking an antidepressant that can cause violent mania. He and Klebold had attended court ordered psychological counseling, including “anger management.” Further, Harris was told to imagine his own death. He later dreamt that he and Klebold went on a shooting rampage in a shopping center. After turning the story of his dream in to his teacher, Harris and Klebold acted it out by killing a teacher, their classmates and themselves.

 

By combining a value-neutral system or “anger management” together with a heavy emphasis on the “educational” use of violence-inducing, psychiatric drugs, one has created a powder keg waiting for a spark.