The successful indoctrination of a nation: "...change man's basic values and attitudes"

I wrote about 'teaching as a subversive activity' here, and I talked about the I word- indoctrination. This is a subject we should think about and think about more seriously.  Instead, when the word comes up we want to tease somebody about tinfoil hats.

I wonder why that's such a typical response (mine, too).

We tend to look at public education in a piecemeal fashion- we consider a single textbook, a particular teacher.  We don't think about the fact that the teacher we like is only involved in a small part of the over all school experience. The teacher doesn't choose the curriculum in a public school, and usually only has time (or inclination) to read the materials for his or her class, not the materials and supplementary information for previous or subsequent years.

There are certain attitudes and beliefs being fed to our students in cumulative bits, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little (Isaiah 28).

It may not seem like such a big deal that the word problem's in this year's math text never include any stay at home moms, but do include plenty of examples of working moms. But the effect of 12 years of this is cumulative.  It seem like a small thing when the history book for a given year devotes more time to Marilyn Monroe than to Martha Washington, but when, every year, more space is devoted to pop culture icons than to the Martha Washingtons, a message is being communicated and received without the recipient ever realizing what's happening.

I have talked before about the profound attitute shifts over the last thirty-forty years as seen in our national attitude towards abortion. In the 1970s pro-lifers pointed out that abortion would be used as birth control and as eugenics tool to weed out the 'undesirables.' Out loud and in public, pro-abortion proponents insisted that would never happen- and now that it has, this is no longer seen as a problem, it's actually embraced- and worse.  Pro-lifers said that killing babies in the womb would lead to killing them out of the womb, and pro-aborts said no, that would obviously never happen:

Consider the opinion of 'medical ethicists' associated with Oxford University:

"...It is not possible to damage a newborn by preventing her from developing the potentiality to become a person in the morally relevant sense …
What we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.”

There are a lot of ironies in that article that I don't have time to go into now.  Another irony is the response people feel when I use the word 'pro-abort' for those who will not vote to limit abortion.  That's also a result of successful indoctrination. 

It's the reason why Christians have accepted the Pill, even though it is an abortificient.Does that seem over the top?

Carefully consider the following document and the date- I know it's long and blogs are really designed for short, and our attention span has been trained for short as well. But this is really something to think about:

“REVISED REPORT OF POPULATION SUBCOMMITTEE, GOVERNOR’S ADVISORY COUNCIL ON Environmental Quality” for the State of Michigan, to be used at the April 6, 1971 meeting of the subcommittee...

1971- two years before Roe V. Wade, which made abortion the law of the land.

Concept of a Population Goal 

In general, the Subcommittee was in agreement with U.S. Senate Resolution No. 214, as follows:
That it is the policy of the United States to develop, encourage, and implement at the earliest possible time, the necessary policies, attitudes, social standards, and actions which will by voluntary means consistent with human rights and individual conscience, stabilize the population of the United States and thereby promote the future well-being of the citizens of this Nation and the entire world. 

There are a number of questions raised and unproven assumptions wrapped up in that paragraph, but it gets worse (the emphasis added below is mine):

It was the feeling of the Subcommittee that the intent of the above Resolution should be encouraged by voluntary means and due consideration given to human rights. However, in order to accomplish the above goal, state and federal legislation must accompany this intent to provide disincentives. 

II. Optimum Goal
An optimum goal is to be considered in preference to a maximum carrying capacity. As a starting point, zero population growth is the recommended goal for the citizens of Michigan.... That the human population on a finite “space ship” cannot increase indefinitely is obvious. What is not so obvious is what constitutes an “optimum” level of population and the methods by which it is to be limited....
III. How Does Society Obtain Population Control? 

These are unelected officials blithely assuming that 'population control' is their proper mandate, and the proper function of unelected governmental officials.  They also just take it for granted that zero population growth is an appropriate goal. It's interesting to reflect upon the fact that many of us left school believing these things as well without even realizing that we'd been taught to believe them. But let's continue:

Constraints on population size can be divided into two types, biological and social. Biological constraints include the limitation of those energies and chemicals required to drive human society as a biological system.... Societal constraints are more appropriate since the human population explosion is basically a social problem. There are three classes of social institutions which can be utilized to obtain population control. These are the political, economic and education systems. Each of these represent powerful control systems which help to regulate the behavior of our society.

A wide range of public policies are available by which man can affect population size. Some policies can seek to change man’s basic values and attitudes with respect to the issues of population size. Other policies can seek to directly affect man’s behaviors which have consequences for population size. Some suggested policy goals are listed. 

Think about this carefully.Did you think the educational system was designed to promote literacy and math skills?  No, it's about 'regulating the behavior,' including behavior in the area of population control. More than behavior, it's about changing 'basic values and attitudes.' Yes, here they are speaking specifically in regard to population size, but a government institution mandating hours of access to the nation's children, well, that is a very useful hammer that has been applied to more than one 'problem.
Does your gorge rise over the idea of these unelected officials, paid for by taxpayers, sitting in a back room somewhere discussing changing the basic values and attitudes of the taxpayers without their awareness or agreement?  If not, why not?

General Public Understanding
Having children is a public interest as well as a private interest. Likewise, the use of the environment must be understood to be a collective responsibility rather than a private or individual responsibility, since the costs and the benefits of the use of the environment are indivisible to all members of the collectivity. This idea runs counter to the underlying ethic of individualism and privateness of our society, but is basic if we are to mobilize the collective will which is necessary for social action. To change such a basic set of attitudes and values requires cooperation from the full range of opinion leaders in the society. A program of education for leaders in all sectors of society, such as religious, economic, political, educational, technical, etc., is therefore called for. 

Just in case you weren't sure about the previous paragraph, yes, they really meant what they said about meddling about in and changing your basic values and attitudes about family size- and isn't it interesting that this goes under the Orwellian title of reproductive 'choice?'
Not only are schools co-opted for this propaganda exercise, so are religious and political leaders.
 

Since basic attitudes and values are formed early in life, and since it is the youth of society who are yet capable of determining the size of future families, a program for all levels of formal education can be a powerful way to change society’s attitudes and values on the question of population size as outlined above. 

The idea that family size is a collective, social responsibility rather than just an individual responsibility can be fostered both directly by exhortations by opinion leaders and in the schools, and indirectly by the actions that government and other institutions in society take. For example, the proposal to eliminate the income tax exemption for children in excess of the two-child family limit can be a powerful way for government to symbolize its determination that family size is a collective responsibility. 

A 'program for all levels of formal education' is here admitted to be a powerful way to change your attitudes and values.  Yes, specifically on population control. I would note here that 'they' were successful.  I would also note that there is no reason whatsoever to imagine that using the schools for indoctrination has been limited to this issue.

Public understanding of the interdependent nature of our natural and man-made environment is also important for enlightened public support for population control policies. A state-wide education program concerning ecology and population biology is needed for both student and adult segments of our society. This will require vigorous action to remove the topic of sex from the closets of obscurity in which conservative elements in our society have placed it.... 

What year was this?  1971. Did you imagine that the reason we have sex ed in the public schools instead of at home where it belongs is because parents just weren't doing their job?  But that's not the reason give here.  The reason here is that parents were not passing on the values and beliefs about procreation that these unelected officials determined children should believe.

Cultural Changes
Two types of cultural changes are needed in order to reduce the population increase: reduce the desired size of families, and reduce the social pressure to marry and have a family. Large families can be changed from an economic asset to an economic liability if all members of society can be offered the prospect that through work, saving, and deferred spending they can achieve economic security for themselves and their children. For the already affluent middle class, larger families can be made an economic liability by increasing the incentives for and the costs of advanced education for their children....

I'd say these efforts were successful on all fronts, wouldn't you?  And you didn't even know what was happening. You imagined it was just a spontaneous cultural shift, our attitudes devaluing marriage, delaying starting a family, even the costs of higher education and the very personal issue of desired family size.
 

Cultural changes to reduce the social pressure to marry and have a family can be pursued by changing educational materials which glorify married life and family life as the only “normal” life pattern, by granting greater public recognition to non-married and non-family life styles, by facilitating careers for single women.... 

I'd say that rates a wow, wouldn't you?  Who writes your kid's textbooks? Who wrote yours? Who chose the particular story problems, the short stories in the readers, the essays, the direction of the science textbooks when discussing sociology or ecology?  Did you know that essentially 3 textbook companies control the curriculum for 75% of the schools?

Direct Behavior Changes Two general types of public policies are distributive policies and regulative policies. Distributive policies involve the distribution of resources and opportunities to people who choose to modify their behavior to conform with the socially desired patterns. They thus operate as incentives rather than as official constraints. Examples include the elimination of tax incentives for larger families, monetary incentives for sterilization or adopted families, and removing the income tax discrimination against single citizens.... 

Regulative policies involve direct constraints on behavior and necessarily generate greater political conflict than distributive policies. This is because regulative policies eliminate the element of voluntary choice and apply automatically and categorically to a whole class of people or of behaviors. Examples of such regulative policies designed to control population growth include forced sterilization and restrictive licensing procedures to marry and to have children. However, it does not seem necessary, desirable, or feasible to involve regulative policies for population control at this time.

  This is probably the real reason working moms get a childcare tax credit and moms who stay home do not, even though they also sometimes need to pay for child care, don't you think?  And don't you love leaving the door open for forced sterilization and licensing child bearing with that 'at this time?'  Ominious.

More ominous:

One regulative type policy which is now in effect and which allows population increase is the law forbidding abortion. Restrictions against abortions should be removed to allow individual choice in the use of this back-up method of birth control.... 

1971, and those naive pro-lifers who argued that abortion would be used as birth control never realized that for the movers and shakers in the pro-abortion movement this was always a planned feature, not a bug.  This also means that when they replied with scoffing and dismissive 'that's not going to happen'- at least some of them were lying.

A general acceptance of birth control to obtain population stability will create a more static ethnic, cultural and racial structure in society. Minority groups will continue to stay at a numerical minority. Minority problems are basically social and should be solved in that manner. An equilibrium condition will also alter the structure of our economic relationship both within our society (a shift from an expanding economy to a competitive displacement economy) and between other countries that will still be experiencing increasing populations.... Immediate consideration must be given to (1) the development of an integrated social control of our population size and growth, and (2) the impact of a steady stable condition on our society. The scope and complexity of this task requires the attention of a highly professional team whose talents and professional training are equal to the challenge. It is the recommendation of the Council that such a team be brought together and charged with the prompt development of the details of this program and reporting back to the Council.

Emphasis, again, added. Not so very long ago Christians believed that children were a blessing. Christians did not use birth control, and especially not abortificients. Do we really think that it was due to a careful study of scripture that this ethic changed within the church?



Abortion was seen as a 'back up method of birth control' by policy makers in 1971. That hasn't changed. They just didn't want you in on it.

Let's think about this bit again:

Cultural changes to reduce the social pressure to marry and have a family can be pursued by changing educational materials which glorify married life and family life as the only “normal” life pattern, by granting greater public recognition to non-married and non-family life styles, by facilitating careers for single women...

We must change educational materials which glorify married and family life, there must be greater recognition of non-family life styles. 1971!!!

Christians have been just as indoctrinated as their peers in the world, and we have followed along docile like (maybe, if we're really careful,  a decade or two behind, but that's all), blindly accepting these changes as just some sort of culturally neutral reality that just 'happened.'

We have accepted these changes in our values imposed on us from without in every area, sex education, the role of mothers in the world force, 'non-family life styles', family size, the timing of marriage, overpopulation, and more. We have been successfully indoctrinated. Congratulations on joining the collective group think.


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