Watch and Learn

I used to Volunteer through Area agency on Aging for a retired school teacher. As we got to know each other she shared some things about being a teacher. One of the things she spoke to me about was Outcome Based Education, which turns out is not Education at all, but a way to change the student to think the way the teacher...system...wants them to. I had heard of Outcome Based Education before, and ran into much difficulty with the public school which our children attended in the early years before we finally obeyed our calling and homschooled them. This retired teacher gave me a manual that the teachers were given to systematically change the "beliefs" of students that did not fit
"their" norm. The manual also described in detail the "Outcome" that was encouraged...expected in the students lives. This finally confirmed to me that these ideas were not just the idle thinking of an individual teacher, but there was a "plan".
Years later, actually today, I came across a video of Charlotte Iserbyt. She served as Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), U.S. Department of Education, during the first Reagan Administration, where she first blew the whistle on a major technology initiative which would control curriculum in America's classrooms."
It comes as no surprise that this "plan" is much bigger than I realized all those years ago. The deceit and audacity is always amazing, and goes so far as using "sensitivity training" on the teachers and principals.
© Monika Hardy