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    Default Re: When Vested Interests Take Education over...

    How Inuit parents teach kids to control their anger

    Michaeleen Doucleff and Jane Greenhalgh NPR
    Wed, 13 Mar 2019 09:01 UTC



    Myna Ishulutak (upper right, in blue jacket) lived a seminomadic life as a child. Above: photos of the girl and her family in the hunting camp of Qipisa during the summer of 1974. © Jean Briggs Collection / American Philosophical Society


    Back in the 1960s, a Harvard graduate student made a landmark discovery about the nature of human anger.

    At age 34, Jean Briggs traveled above the Arctic Circle and lived out on the tundra for 17 months. There were no roads, no heating systems, no grocery stores. Winter temperatures could easily dip below minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit.

    Briggs persuaded an Inuit family to "adopt" her and "try to keep her alive," as the anthropologist wrote in 1970.

    At the time, many Inuit families lived similar to the way their ancestors had for thousands of years. They built igloos in the winter and tents in the summer. "And we ate only what the animals provided, such as fish, seal and caribou," says Myna Ishulutak, a film producer and language teacher who lived a similar lifestyle as a young girl.

    Briggs quickly realized something remarkable was going on in these families: The adults had an extraordinary ability to control their anger.
    "They never acted in anger toward me, although they were angry with me an awful lot," Briggs told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. in an interview.
    Even just showing a smidgen of frustration or irritation was considered weak and childlike, Briggs observed.

    For instance, one time someone knocked a boiling pot of tea across the igloo, damaging the ice floor. No one changed their expression. "Too bad," the offender said calmly and went to refill the teapot.

    In another instance, a fishing line - which had taken days to braid - immediately broke on the first use. No one flinched in anger. "Sew it together," someone said quietly.

    By contrast, Briggs seemed like a wild child, even though she was trying very hard to control her anger. "My ways were so much cruder, less considerate and more impulsive," she told the CBC. "[I was] often impulsive in an antisocial sort of way. I would sulk or I would snap or I would do something that they never did."

    Briggs, who died in 2016, wrote up her observations in her first book, Never in Anger. But she was left with a lingering question: How do Inuit parents instill this ability in their children? How do Inuit take tantrum-prone toddlers and turn them into cool-headed adults?

    Then in 1971, Briggs found a clue.

    She was walking on a stony beach in the Arctic when she saw a young mother playing with her toddler - a little boy about 2 years old. The mom picked up a pebble and said, "'Hit me! Go on. Hit me harder,'" Briggs remembered.

    The boy threw the rock at his mother, and she exclaimed, "Ooooww. That hurts!"

    Briggs was completely befuddled. The mom seemed to be teaching the child the opposite of what parents want. And her actions seemed to contradict everything Briggs knew about Inuit culture.

    "I thought, 'What is going on here?' " Briggs said in the radio interview.

    Turns out, the mom was executing a powerful parenting tool to teach her child how to control his anger - and one of the most intriguing parenting strategies I've come across.

    No scolding, no timeouts
    It's early December in the Arctic town of Iqaluit, Canada. And at 2 p.m., the sun is already calling it a day. Outside, the temperature is a balmy minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit. A light snow is swirling.

    I've come to this seaside town, after reading Briggs' book, in search of parenting wisdom, especially when it comes to teaching children to control their emotions. Right off the plane, I start collecting data.

    I sit with elders in their 80s and 90s while they lunch on "country food" -stewed seal, frozen beluga whale and raw caribou. I talk with moms selling hand-sewn sealskin jackets at a high school craft fair. And I attend a parenting class, where day care instructors learn how their ancestors raised small children hundreds - perhaps even thousands - of years ago.

    Across the board, all the moms mention one golden rule: Don't shout or yell at small children.

    Traditional Inuit parenting is incredibly nurturing and tender. If you took all the parenting styles around the world and ranked them by their gentleness, the Inuit approach would likely rank near the top. (They even have a special kiss for babies, where you put your nose against the cheek and sniff the skin.)

    The culture views scolding - or even speaking to children in an angry voice - as inappropriate, says Lisa Ipeelie, a radio producer and mom who grew up with 12 siblings. "When they're little, it doesn't help to raise your voice," she says. "It will just make your own heart rate go up."

    Even if the child hits you or bites you, there's no raising your voice?
    "No," Ipeelie says with a giggle that seems to emphasize how silly my question is. "With little kids, you often think they're pushing your buttons, but that's not what's going on. They're upset about something, and you have to figure out what it is."
    Traditionally, the Inuit saw yelling at a small child as demeaning. It's as if the adult is having a tantrum; it's basically stooping to the level of the child, Briggs documented.

    Elders I spoke with say intense colonization over the past century is damaging these traditions. And, so, the community is working hard to keep the parenting approach intact.

    Goota Jaw is at the front line of this effort. She teaches the parenting class at the Arctic College. Her own parenting style is so gentle that she doesn't even believe in giving a child a timeout for misbehaving.
    "Shouting, 'Think about what you just did. Go to your room!' " Jaw says. "I disagree with that. That's not how we teach our children. Instead you are just teaching children to run away."
    And you are teaching them to be angry, says clinical psychologist and author Laura Markham. "When we yell at a child - or even threaten with something like 'I'm starting to get angry,' we're training the child to yell," says Markham. "We're training them to yell when they get upset and that yelling solves problems."

    In contrast, parents who control their own anger are helping their children learn to do the same, Markham says. "Kids learn emotional regulation from us."

    I asked Markham if the Inuit's no-yelling policy might be their first secret of raising cool-headed kids. "Absolutely," she says.

    Playing soccer with your head
    Now at some level, all moms and dads know they shouldn't yell at kids. But if you don't scold or talk in an angry tone, how do you discipline? How do you keep your 3-year-old from running into the road? Or punching her big brother?

    For thousands of years, the Inuit have relied on an ancient tool with an ingenious twist: "We use storytelling to discipline," Jaw says.

    Jaw isn't talking about fairy tales, where a child needs to decipher the moral. These are oral stories passed down from one generation of Inuit to the next, designed to sculpt kids' behaviors in the moment.Sometimes even save their lives.

    For example, how do you teach kids to stay away from the ocean, where they could easily drown? Instead of yelling, "Don't go near the water!" Jaw says Inuit parents take a pre-emptive approach and tell kids a special story about what's inside the water. "It's the sea monster," Jaw says, with a giant pouch on its back just for little kids.
    "If a child walks too close to the water, the monster will put you in his pouch, drag you down to the ocean and adopt you out to another family," Jaw says.

    "Then we don't need to yell at a child," Jaw says, "because she is already getting the message."
    Inuit parents have an array of stories to help children learn respectful behavior, too. For example, to get kids to listen to their parents, there is a story about ear wax, says film producer Myna Ishulutak.

    "My parents would check inside our ears, and if there was too much wax in there, it meant we were not listening," she says.

    And parents tell their kids: If you don't ask before taking food, long fingers could reach out and grab you, Ishulutak says.

    Then there's the story of northern lights, which helps kids learn to keep their hats on in the winter.

    "Our parents told us that if we went out without a hat, the northern lights are going to take your head off and use it as a soccer ball," Ishulutak says. "We used to be so scared!" she exclaims and then erupts in laughter.

    At first, these stories seemed to me a bit too scary for little children. And my knee-jerk reaction was to dismiss them. But my opinion flipped 180 degrees after I watched my own daughter's response to similar tales - and after I learned more about humanity's intricate relationship with storytelling.

    Oral storytelling is what's known as a human universal. For tens of thousands of years, it has been a key way that parents teach children about values and how to behave.

    Modern hunter-gatherer groups use stories to teach sharing, respect for both genders and conflict avoidance, a recent study reported, after analyzing 89 different tribes. With the Agta, a hunter-gatherer population of the Philippines, good storytelling skills are prized more than hunting skills or medicinal knowledge, the study found.

    Today many American parents outsource their oral storytelling to screens. And in doing so, I wonder if we're missing out on an easy - and effective - way of disciplining and changing behavior. Could small children be somehow "wired" to learn through stories?
    "Well, I'd say kids learn well through narrative and explanations," says psychologist Deena Weisberg at Villanova University, who studies how small children interpret fiction.

    "We learn best through things that are interesting to us. And stories, by their nature, can have lots of things in them that are much more interesting in a way that bare statements don't."

    Stories with a dash of danger pull in kids like magnets, Weisberg says. And they turn a tension-ridden activity like disciplining into a playful interaction that's - dare, I say it - fun.
    "Don't discount the playfulness of storytelling," Weisberg says.

    "With stories, kids get to see stuff happen that doesn't really happen in real life. Kids think that's fun. Adults think it's fun, too."
    Why don't you hit me?
    Back up in Iqaluit, Myna Ishulutak is reminiscing about her childhood out on the land. She and her family lived in a hunting camp with about 60 other people. When she was a teenager, her family settled in a town.

    "I miss living on the land so much," she says as we eat a dinner of baked Arctic char. "We lived in a sod house. And when we woke up in the morning, everything would be frozen until we lit the oil lamp."

    I ask her if she's familiar with the work of Jean Briggs. Her answer leaves me speechless.

    Ishulutak reaches into her purse and brings out Briggs' second book, Inuit Morality Play, which details the life of a 3-year-old girl dubbed Chubby Maata.

    "This book is about me and my family," Ishulutak says. "I am Chubby Maata."

    In the early 1970s, when Ishulutak was about 3 years old, her family welcomed Briggs into their home for six months and allowed her to study the intimate details of their child's day-to-day life.

    What Briggs documented is a central component to raising cool-headed kids.

    When a child in the camp acted in anger - hit someone or had a tantrum - there was no punishment. Instead, the parents waited for the child to calm down and then, in a peaceful moment, did something that Shakespeare would understand all too well: They put on a drama. (As the Bard once wrote, "the play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king.")
    "The idea is to give the child experiences that will lead the child to develop rational thinking," Briggs told the CBC in 2011.
    In a nutshell, the parent would act out what happened when the child misbehaved, including the real-life consequences of that behavior.

    The parent always had a playful, fun tone. And typically the performance starts with a question, tempting the child to misbehave.

    For example, if the child is hitting others, the mom may start a drama by asking: "Why don't you hit me?"

    Then the child has to think: "What should I do?" If the child takes the bait and hits the mom, she doesn't scold or yell but instead acts out the consequences. "Ow, that hurts!" she might exclaim.

    The mom continues to emphasize the consequences by asking a follow-up question. For example: "Don't you like me?" or "Are you a baby?" She is getting across the idea that hitting hurts people's feelings, and "big girls" wouldn't hit. But, again, all questions are asked with a hint of playfulness.

    The parent repeats the drama from time to time until the child stops hitting the mom during the dramas and the misbehavior ends.

    Ishulutak says these dramas teach children not to be provoked easily. "They teach you to be strong emotionally," she says, "to not take everything so seriously or to be scared of teasing."

    Psychologist Peggy Miller, at the University of Illinois, agrees: "When you're little, you learn that people will provoke you, and these dramas teach you to think and maintain some equilibrium."

    In other words, the dramas offer kids a chance to practice controlling their anger, Miller says, during times when they're not actually angry.

    This practice is likely critical for children learning to control their anger. Because here's the thing about anger: Once someone is already angry, it is not easy for that person to squelch it - even for adults.

    "When you try to control or change your emotions in the moment, that's a really hard thing to do," says Lisa Feldman Barrett, a psychologist at Northeastern University who studies how emotions work.

    But if you practice having a different response or a different emotion at times when you're not angry, you'll have a better chance of managing your anger in those hot-button moments, Feldman Barrett says.

    "That practice is essentially helping to rewire your brain to be able to make a different emotion [besides anger] much more easily," she says.

    This emotional practice may be even more important for children, says psychologist Markham, because kids' brains are still developing the circuitry needed for self-control.

    "Children have all kinds of big emotions," she says. "They don't have much prefrontal cortex yet. So what we do in responding to our child's emotions shapes their brain."

    Markham recommends an approach close to that used by Inuit parents. When the kid misbehaves, she suggests, wait until everyone is calm. Then in a peaceful moment, go over what happened with the child. You can simply tell them the story about what occurred or use two stuffed animals to act it out.

    "Those approaches develop self-control," Markham says.

    Just be sure you do two things when you replay the misbehavior, she says. First, keep the child involved by asking many questions. For example, if the child has a hitting problem, you might stop midway through the puppet show and ask,"Bobby, wants to hit right now. Should he?"

    Second, be sure to keep it fun. Many parents overlook play as a tool for discipline, Markham says. But fantasy play offers oodles of opportunities to teach children proper behavior.
    "Play is their work," Markham says.

    "That's how they learn about the world and about their experiences."

    Which seems to be something the Inuit have known for hundreds, perhaps even, thousands of years.
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    Default Re: When Vested Interests Take Education over...

    Quote Posted by Hervé (here)

    Briggs, who died in 2016, wrote up her observations in her first book, Never in Anger. But she was left with a lingering question: How do Inuit parents instill this ability in their children? How do Inuit take tantrum-prone toddlers and turn them into cool-headed adults?

    [ ... ]

    "I miss living on the land so much," she says as we eat a dinner of baked Arctic char. "We lived in a sod house. And when we woke up in the morning, everything would be frozen until we lit the oil lamp."

    I ask her if she's familiar with the work of Jean Briggs. Her answer leaves me speechless.

    Ishulutak reaches into her purse and brings out Briggs' second book, Inuit Morality Play, which details the life of a 3-year-old girl dubbed Chubby Maata.

    "This book is about me and my family," Ishulutak says. "I am Chubby Maata."

    In the early 1970s, when Ishulutak was about 3 years old, her family welcomed Briggs into their home for six months and allowed her to study the intimate details of their child's day-to-day life.

    What Briggs documented is a central component to raising cool-headed kids.
    Fantastic and wonderful.

    I couldn't find Jean Briggs' first book, but here's her second one:
    Last edited by Bill Ryan; 15th March 2019 at 20:24.

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    Default Re: When Vested Interests Take Education over...

    Very interesting article Hervé, thank you.

    There are always stories and long pauses while talking with Inuits. A much gentler and slower way of life. As long as alcool does not mix in it. And guess what, they are almost 100% meat eaters lolll.

    For how to teach emotional control to children, their ways is absolutely right and is very very useful to get children to participate to anything, more if it is difficult. Stories showing the how and why, the consequences, with fun in it are always fruitful.

    I used it constantly to explain the how and why of the incredible amount of difficult therapies my daughter would have, playing the end result if needed, getting her own imanigation involved. I never had problem with her participating to therapies, even when difficult, she always collaborated. First because she loved her mom, second because she understood. The problems started only when she became a late teenager.

    And she was sent in her room only twice in all her lifetime. It literally was not necessary.
    Last edited by Flash; 17th March 2019 at 00:31.
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    Default Re: When Vested Interests Take Education over...

    15 Examples of Globalist Doublespeak

    By Henry Makow PhD. (henrymakow.com)
    March 23, 2019
    (Updated from August 13, 2017)



    Just as the skewed term "isolationist" was applied to Americans who opposed US participation in the Cabalist bankers' second white genocide (the Second World War,) a slew of new terms frogmarch humanity into the Cabalist Orwellian NWO.

    "White supremacist" and "white nationalist" is applied to people of European Christian descent who do not wish to become minorities in their own countries. They are slandered and reviled,accused of "hate" for the crime of retaining their heritage. Mossad mass murders are blamed on them.

    Language is mind control, part of the Globalist satanic dispensation.

    "Haters" are the people Organized Jewry hates. "Far right" is anyone who opposes Communism, which is the bankers' tyrannical monopoly over EVERYTHING -- mental or material. The media lulls us into complacency but world wars were just a facade behind which they erected a totalitarian state. Society is under vicious occult attack.
    "We shall purify the idea [of God] by identifying it with the nation of Israel, which has become its own Messiah. The advent of it will be facilitated by the final triumph of Israel... " (i.e. Reality will be inverted so that Cabalist Jews will replace God at the top. They will redefine reality according to their own interests and perversions)
    -Otto Kahn - Illuminati Banker Unveiled Method of Control
    --------------------------------------------------

    By Henry Makow PhD.
    (Updated from August 13, 2017)

    Here are 15 words the Illuminati have inverted in order to control us.

    1. "White nationalist" and "white supremacist" are terms used to describe people who wish to be masters in their own homes, and to maintain their European and Christian national heritage. The fact that these terms are universally used in the mass media reflects the reach of this genocidal and satanic subversion. Israel, Asia and Africa are allowed to keep their racial and cultural character (for now) but the West is expected to open its doors and subsidize millions of mostly uneducated people from an alien culture. The West has always welcomed ethnic minorities but now they are used by globalists to replace the founding peoples.


    2. A "Terrorist" - is anyone who doesn't have an air force. Terrorists who are trained and funded by the Illuminati are not terrorists but "insurgents." Palestinians who shoot popgun rockets and kill 1-2 Israelis are "terrorists." They have "terror-tunnels" although no terror attacks have emanated from them. Israelis who in 2014 used aeroplanes, missiles and bombs to kill over 2000 civilians, including 500 children, and demolish apartment blocks are not "terrorists." They are "defending themselves."

    When Al Queda supposedly attacked the World Trade Center, they are "terrorists." When they are taking down Syria's Al Assad, they are "insurgents."

    3. "Hate" and "hate speech" is anything organized Jewry and Freemasonry hates to hear, i.e.resistance to their hateful plan to dehumanize and enslave the human race. The Talmud which regards non-Jews as animals destined to serve Jews. But it is never named as hate.

    To accuse people who are merely defending their culture and heritage of "hate" is a vicious slander and the epitome of hate itself.

    In my experience, most conservatives do not hate anyone.

    I hate evil and am not ashamed to admit it. Think of it - add the D to evil and you have the Devil. They are trying to outlaw hatred of the Devil.

    Only the people or things they hate are allowed. Look at their pathological hatred of Trump.

    4. "Anti Semitism" is supposedly a racial prejudice. However, Jewish bankers admit to using Jews to replace God, abolish all other races, nations and religions, and establish a satanic dispensation on earth. No wonder, people are "anti-Semitic." The Illuminati buzzword "anti Semitism" is actually anti-Satanism, resistance to this attack on God and man.



    5. "Homophobia" is actually resistance to the Masonic Jewish attack on gender identity under the guise of "gay rights." The real hate is heterophobia, the attack on heterosexual institutions like marriage and family. There are four million links to "homophobia" on Google, 25 times as many as to "heterophobia" (160,000.) Heterophobia is barely recognized as a word, an example of how language is used to reshape society. "Pride" as in "gay pride" is another word they have soiled. Why would anyone be "proud" to engage in dysfunctional, self-destructive behavior?

    Recently "transphobia" has been added to this mind-bending vocabulary.

    6. "Sexism" is supposedly hostility to women. In fact, sexism is heterosexuality. By acknowledging the differences between the sexes, sexists are woman's best friends. Similarly, "feminism" pretends to champion women while actually denying their femininity, encouraging lesbianism and depriving them of their special social role of mother and wife.

    7. "Racism" supposedly is hostility to other races. In fact, when they don't claim to be superior, so-called "racists" are the best friends of other races because they like other races and don't want them to disappear. They celebrate differences and recognize that mankind is a family. Of course, no one should be expected to forfeit their racial and cultural heritage to satisfy a sick Zionist agenda. "Anti-racists" favor miscegenation so that all races but Israeli Jews will disappear.

    Again the term is used selectively. Barbaric murders of white farmers in South Africa get a pass in our virtue signalling media. Israelis treat Palestinians like animals and kill them with impunity. No problem. But impune the virtue of one of their privileged minorities, and it's career over.

    8. "Diversity" pretends to celebrate all ethnic and sexual differences. In fact, it is aimed at curbing genuine diversity by eradicating the influence of European Christian (heterosexual) culture. Promoters of "diversity" are first to shut down diverse opinions.

    9. Cisgender is another term. It means you identify with gender corresponding to your genitals. By referring to be as cisgendered instead of heterosexual, it makes what is healthy and natural appear like a mental choice, which corresponds to transgender ideology they are driving down our throats.

    10. "Human rights." These are privileges conferred on select people who are used to deprive other people of their human rights. "Gay rights," for example, are used to undermine the heterosexual and family identity of 98% of the population by convincing them that sick is healthy and unnatural is natural.



    11. "Patriot" Act. The name uses the 9-11 Illuminati false-flag to gut real human rights and justify constant war and a surveillance state. It is the "Treason Act." Truly we have entered an Orwellian era of doublespeak.

    12. "Conspiracy" - According to the Illuminati media, "conspiracy" denotes the preposterous concept that some people might target others without advertising the fact and providing the victim with advance warning. (In fact, Western society has been shaped by a Masonic-Jewish conspiracy against God and man.)

    13. "Tolerance" is applied selectively, e.g. tolerance for expression of occult beliefs; zero tolerance for Christian belief.

    14. "Free Speech" - Snuff films and pornography is free speech but criticism of homosexuality or diversity is "hate."

    15. "Equality" - the notion that different things are the same. i.e. gay marriage is the same as heterosexual marriage; men in combat are the same as women in combat.


    Cabalists are reality-creators. They make a reality through their ownership of the education system and the mass media. Naturally, they use language to invert the truth and slander their opponents. In their hands, language is our enemy.

    Let's reclaim those buzzwords and say, I am proud to be an "anti-Semite, homophobe, sexist and racist" because it means I am resisting tyranny and defending my identity. I demand real diversity, human rights and patriotism, not doublespeak.



    The only real "hate" and "terror" originates from the Illuminati who hate both God and man.

    ---
    Honourable Mentions- "Sexual liberation" - Sex in the context of love is beautiful. Done to satisfy an urge, it is ugly. Sexual liberation is degradation and enslavement to lust.

    I welcome your suggestions for the Illuminati lexicon.

    -----------------------------------------

    First Comment from Michael G:

    A few words I would add to your lexicon are these.

    discrimination: If you do not accept all forms of evil at all times, you are "discriminating".


    globalism ("global warming", "global economy"): The globalists are tacking the word "global" in front of everything these days. Even before "global warming" was revealed as a hoax, it was never truly "global" because it did not occur across 100% of the globe concurrently. There is no "global economy", only sovereign economies being attacked at the same time. Another favorite phrase of theirs is "this affects us all" (i.e. "We are all one"). Does the death of Robin Williams really affect the citizens of Myanmar? No.

    empowerment: Performing half-naked on stage and simulating sex acts is called "empowerment". It is actually enslavement to handlers, immorality, and demonic forces. Notice how the feminists never protest the sexual objectification of Miley Cyrus. That is because she is promoting the same thing as they are: Sexual immorality.

    bullying: If you don't support Gay Supremacy you are a "bully" or "bigot." However, if you persecute Christians you are not.
    "La réalité est un rêve que l'on fait atterrir" San Antonio AKA F. Dard

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    Default Re: When Vested Interests Take Education over...

    A case study of how Pharma is killing science

    Celeste McGovern World Mercury Project
    Mon, 25 Mar 2019 14:32 UTC


    Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Note:
    Even the editors of the leading medical and scientific journals admit that Pharmaceutical companies have taken control of the medical publication industry so completely that most peer-reviewed articles about pharmaceutical products are the product of manipulation and fraud. In 2003, Dr. Richard Horton, the editor-in-Chief of The Lancet, the world's most prestigious medical journal acknowledged that peer-reviewed journals have "devolved into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry " Science, he added "has taken a turn toward darkness." The BMJ (British Medical Journal) editor Dr Peter Doshi concurred, adding that data cited in many articles "is insufficient to the point of being misleading." Former New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) editor, Marcia Angel observes that: "It is no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published or to rely on the judgement of trusted physicians...I take no pleasure in this conclusion which I reached reluctantly over my two decades as editor of the New England Journal of Medicine."

    Medical journals are today utterly dependent on pharmaceutical industry advertising which can account for up to 99% of revenues. Journal editors routinely accept kickbacks from Pharma. This power has given Pharma the capacity to plant fraudulent studies about vaccine safety and to kill or force retraction of peer-reviewed studies that raise questions about vaccine safety and efficacy. The latest casualty in Pharma's war against truth is an alarming 2019 study showing grotesque behavioral abnormalities in sheep injected with aluminum adjuvants similar to those found in Merck's Gardasil and Hepatitis B vaccines.
    Elsevier's "withdrawal" of a small veterinary study breaks all the rules of scientific publishing. The biggest name in scientific literature has produced fake medical journals for Merck's advertisers before, so yanking a study that doesn't pass the vaccine industry's sniff test would be nothing. Celeste McGovern looks at a case study of how Pharma is killing science.

    It's not often that veterinary research is so controversial that it falls into the jaws of censorship zealots. That is exactly what happened recently, however, when editors at a science journal suddenly turned on a small Spanish sheep study which they had already peer-reviewed and published and stamped it: "WITHDRAWN" - the equivalent of a scarlet letter "A" in the science publishing world. This was not about shoddy science or ethical breaches; an editor tried to soothe the outraged veterinary professor at the head of the research. But the focus was "delicate" and "controversial" and someone - some anonymous letter-writer - had wanted the study removed, and the journal acquiesced.
    "Dear Dr. Luján,

    "I wanted to step in here to say that your manuscript is not being retracted - which implies wrongdoing and could damage your professional reputation," Anne-Marie Pordon, publisher of Pharmacology and Pharmaceutical Sciences titles for Elsevier journals interjected in a heated e-mail exchange between the lead researcher and various editors. "We are withdrawing the paper, which does not imply misconduct in any way. There will be simply a statement that says "This paper has been withdrawn at the request of the _____" (Authors or Editors in the blank.)" Pick your poison. You remove it, or we remove it.
    Mercky past
    Elsevier journals are described as "one of the world's major providers of science, technical and medical information." They also have a skeleton or two in the closet. A decade ago, they were exposed in a private injury case for being paid by Merck to manufacture and distribute two completely fake journals to market Merck's drugs. They looked like authentic, peer-reviewed science journals, but they contained only favorable studies about the use of Merck's deadly Vioxx and another drug with potentially fatal side effects. Nowhere did they disclose that they were paid advertising for Merck. Four more fake Elsevier journals were sponsored by unnamed pharmaceutical companies.
    "I've seen no shortage of creativity emanating from the marketing departments of drug companies," consumer advocate Peter Lurie of the non-profit Public Citizen told The Scientist after he reviewed Elsevier's fake science journals.

    "But even for someone as jaded as me, this is a new wrinkle."
    An Elsevier press release said the company regretted the "unacceptable practice" of its Australian office. The scandal evoked a flurry of news stories and then it disappeared. Elsevier never revealed the sum they received from Merck or the names of the other pharmaceutical firms that had bought fake science from them. There was no penalty. And there was no authority or oversight agency willing or able to keep Elsevier from doing it, or something similar, again.

    Secret critic
    Fast forward to 2019. There was no doubt by any party in the email exchange between Elsevier's editors and Lluís Luján, the professor of veterinary pathology at the University of Zaragoza, Spain, and lead author of the "controversial" sheep study, that this was highly unusual publishing practice.

    Luján was obviously livid with a request that he withdraw his own study which had already been peer-reviewed and published online by Elsevier's journal Pharmacological Research. He flatly refused. It's hard to imagine a scientist who believes in the integrity of his research doing otherwise. "Withdrawn," unlike what Pordon tried to claim, is virtually synonymous with "retracted" in the science world and everybody knows it. It is a death sentence for a paper.

    Pharmacological Research's editor-in-chief, Emilio Clementi, a professor of pharmacology at the University of Milan presented Luján with "concerns from the readership" - a list of accusations of flaws with his methodology to respond to. Later in correspondence, "concerns from the readership" morphed into "a signed note of concern from a reader" but the letter writer's identity was kept secret - a big red flag that something foul was afoot.

    Ordinarily, if someone has objections to the methodology in a published science paper, they send a letter to the editors. It is difficult to think of any circumstance that the identity of the letter-writer would be hidden. The only reason someone might want to hide their identity is if they had a conflict of interest - like, they worked promoting a relevant pharmaceutical, for example. In any case, letters to the editors are posted on "Letters to the Editors" pages and rebutted by authors there.

    That was not all that was strange, however. Luján answered all the accusations, noting that they were based on flawed assumptions and appeared to be deliberately "misleading" and "spurious." They seemed to have been written by someone with very little knowledge of veterinary research or methodology of behavioural science research.

    Ignored advice
    Clearly defeated on that front, Clementi decided that Luján would have to re-present all of his raw data to the journal's statistical editor, Elia Biganzoli as well. In his emails, Biganzoli remarked, revealingly, that the work focused on a "very delicate issue in science" with many "controversial aspects." He cited a review paper by a self-described "vaccine activist" and pharmaceutically-funded researcher, David Hawkes as being absent from the citations on the list. Hardly a crime. Scientists cite the papers they see as valuable and relevant. Excluding an outlying opinion review paper which contains no original science is not irregular.

    In any case, Biganzoli still didn't think there was reason to withdraw. "I don't think that withdrawal of the paper should be advised," he wrote to the Elsevier editors. "Withdrawing the paper for these reasons would imply a similar action on many other works. At present, this option would not be sustainable."

    Besides, Biganzoli said, "the exploratory nature of the paper is implicit" and the researchers themselves said so in the paper.

    Clementi and Pordon must not have liked this. They ignored their own expert, stamped the paper "WITHDRAWN" anyway and scrubbed it from the print publishing line-up. They must have known they were breaking understood rules of science publishing, the Committee on Publishing Ethics (COPE) and Elsevier's own code of ethics. Did they consider if they were setting a dangerous publishing precedent? Or if they were denigrating science- the pursuit of truth, wherever the trail leads, and whomever it offends?

    Stalin-style science censorship should make people, particularly scientists, curious. Just what did the sheep study find? Why would a small veterinary study have sparked such attention - and denunciation? How could a mainstream science journal nullify publishing protocols to retract sound science they have already peer-reviewed and published? Who wields such power over scientific publishing?

    Baffling illness
    To begin, the study's lead author, Lluís Luján, could hardly be described as controversial. With 30 years experience in the field of animal pathology, Luján is a sort of Spanish version of a James Herriot country vet - affable, respected by farmers, students and his peers alike. There is not usually much controversy in determining the cause of death of farm animals in northern Spain. Yet Luján stumbled into one of the most controversial arenas of our time more than a decade ago when he was called out to see an oddly-diseased flock in the Aragon region of Spain, where he lives and works.

    After the first cold snap of the winter of 2007, Luján arrived at a sheep farm not far from his veterinary faculty. The farmer was worried; he had worked among sheep his whole life and he'd never seen or heard of anything like this. Initially, just a few animals in his flock were affected, starting about six years earlier. A number of veterinarians had come to see his sheep already and they had seen pockets of this on other farms, but they had not known what to do. The sheep had mostly recovered by spring or summer in the past, but this was the worst the farmer had seen. Now almost all of his flock was affected.


    As soon as he saw the animals, Luján could see that the sheep were ill. They were emaciated and their raw, pink skin showed where great patches of wool were missing from their flanks. This was a sure sign they were wool biting, obsessively yanking the wool from their flock mates and chomping it. Wool biting is well-documented as a behavioural anomaly in veterinary journals but it is not well understood. It has been studied in relation to overcrowded conditions, animal "boredom" and nutritional deficiencies, but none of these factors had adequately explained the phenomenon and they certainly weren't the cause of these severe cases Luján was looking at. These animals were restless and skittish. Some were lethargic and weak. Some had tremors and could barely stand.

    As a pathologist and an academic, Luján was familiar with sheep disease but this was nothing he could easily diagnose. He began testing to rule out the usual culprits: pathogens like viruses, bacteria and parasites. He wondered about an environmental toxin, too, so he tested the animals' water, their food, the soil they grazed on. In the meantime, he did what he could to alleviate the symptoms. He changed their diets and some management practises and had them vaccinated again. The test results were unrevealing.

    A veterinarian from the government administration was called to the farm and he rang Luján. "Lluís, I've just been to the sheep Auschwitz," he said wryly. "What do you make of it?"

    Luján recommended that the animals be put down as a precautionary measure. The government would compensate the farmer and give him new sheep.

    The epidemic
    About two years later in 2009, Lujan was in his office when the fax machine hummed and a government animal health authority bulletin announced a round of bluetongue vaccination for the region. There was nothing remarkable in this. Bluetongue is a noncontagious, viral disease transmitted by midges to ruminants. It causes fever and swelling of the mouth and gums as well as a tell-tale protruding cyanotic tongue. A virulent strain can kill a third of a flock and it had re-emerged in northern Europe in 2006 and spread throughout Belgium, Germany, the UK and Spain by 2007 and 2008. The European Union was responding with the widest vaccination campaign in ovine history, targeting about 90 million animals throughout the continent with a total of four vaccines and boosters against two strains of the virus in less than a month.

    Over the next few weeks, Luján's phone began to ring. Farmers from all over the region were reporting outbreaks and bizarre disease symptoms that he had seen before. Some of them were linking it directly to the recent bluetongue vaccines.

    The mystery illness was sweeping across Spain. Initially, just a few sheep were ill. They became agitated and nervous. They were wool biting. Some clenched their teeth. Some became lethargic and reluctant to move. It was easy to see involuntary tremors of their great brown eyeballs. A few were transiently blind. They were disoriented and unresponsive. After a few days, most of the animals recovered but the most severely affected of the flock collapsed in seizures and died.

    When the weather turned cold, a second wave of the illness affected thousands of sheep, sometimes wiping out entire flocks. These animals lost weight and looked emaciated. They had muscle tremors and weakness. Some had a light but constant tilt to their heads. Farmers reported pregnant ewes aborting spontaneously. Thousands of animals were stuporous. Many became unresponsive, dropped to their front quarters, become comatose and died.

    'Oh my god, it can't be the vaccine'
    Veterinarians began vigorously investigating the baffling disease that was decimating the Spanish sheep industry. Luján was not surprised that, despite their tremendous efforts, their tests were coming up empty-handed. He had done them all before himself, on the sheep "Auschwitz" farm.

    He was reeling, however. Asked how the idea that a vaccine could be causing this disease impacted him at the time, Lujan gripped a stone ledge beside him as if to brace himself. In other words, it was earth shaking.
    "Oh, my God. It can't be the vaccine," he recalls thinking.

    "I couldn't believe it. But it was just too much coincidence."
    He began poring over journals on Pubmed and one evening, he found a description of what he was seeing in the sheep in a human immunology journal describing a condition called ASIA - Autoimmune/Inflammatory Syndrome Induced by Adjuvants. Aluminum adjuvants used in human vaccines - and like that used in the bluetongue sheep vaccine - were known to elicit a hyperactive immune response in some people, and to set off immune system cascades that could later manifest as overt autoimmune disease. The aluminum ingredient in vaccines was connected to diseases such as encephalitis, macrophagic myofasciitis and Gulf War Illness. The Spanish sheep disease sounded very similar to this post-vaccination disease described in humans. It was after 1 am and Luján shot an email off to the author, immunologist Yehuda Shoenfeld, director of the Zabludowicz Center for Autoimmune Diseases associated with Tel Aviv University, a giant in the field of autoimmune disease with more than 1,500 published papers in immunology, and he hoped he might hear from him eventually. The next morning, to his surprise, Shoenfeld had already replied.

    Inducing disease experimentally
    Luján's team published a paper in 2013 describing the mystery illness that they now called "Ovine ASIA" and the post mortem findings of 64 affected sheep from the Zaragoza region of Spain. The wasted corpses of the animals had markedly thickened nerves that were easily visible, protruding on their abdomens and backs and down their legs. Dissection revealed that they had meningoencephalitis-like disease, their brains were inflamed and there was evidence of "severe neuron necrosis." Special techniques revealed aluminum in their nerve tissue.

    More crucially, the researchers were able to induce the disease in a small number of sheep by giving them repeated aluminum-containing vaccinations. These vaccinated sheep lost on average 8.5% of their body fat compared to controls, they showed nervous behaviour changes - depressed, lethargic behaviour alternating with skittishness - they had light fluid around their hearts, and aluminum was detected in their nervous tissue at the late study stage. The veterinarians concluded: "A huge research effort is needed in this field to help understand this process, something that will be of great benefit for both human and animals."

    A study like should have sent shock waves through public health agencies worldwide and triggered a storm of research on the aluminum additive given in ever-increasing doses in animal - and childhood - vaccines. A year later, however, Luján was presenting the findings to researchers at the 2014 Autoimmune Congress in Nice, France. "We are supposed to balance the benefits of vaccines against the adverse events," he concluded in a somewhat frustrated tone of urgency. "What is sold is [the message] that vaccines have only beneficial effects, and the rest is forgotten or ignored, or nobody wants to hear about it." He had no idea how prescient those words were.

    Three troubling discoveries
    Luján's team of veterinarians undertook to expand the research themselves in the meantime and recently they published three studies based on their findings:

    Granulomas

    One study, published in Veterinary Pathology, describes how 84 lambs were divided into three treatment groups of 28 animals each: the first got 19 aluminum-containing vaccines injections over 15 months, the second, got shots of the aluminum adjuvant ingredient alone, and the third, a control group, received saline. Post mortem studies revealed that all of the vaccinated sheep and 92.3% of the lambs who got adjuvant-only injections, but none of the control animals, developed "granulomas" - cyst-like nodules of white blood cells loaded with the neurotoxic metal aluminum. These granulomas were at the injection site and in nearby lymph nodes - evidence that aluminum used in vaccines is not inert or excreted rapidly from the body as public health officials have maintained since they began using it in vaccines in the 1920s. It is swallowed up by macrophages and transported to lymph nodes. Other studies have shown that from the lymph nodes, aluminum slowly translocates to distant sites around the body and accumulates in the brain. The vaccinated sheep had more of these granulomas than the aluminum-only group.

    Genetic changes. A second study from the Spanish research was published about the same time in the journal, Frontiers in Immunology. This examined changes that the vaccines and adjuvants alone induced and concluded that "it seems that aluminum-containing adjuvants are not simple delivery vehicles for antigens, but also induce endogenous danger signals that can stimulate the immune system."

    Bizarre behavioural changes. The third and final study, the one which Elsevier suddenly withdrew after publication from Pharmacological Research, described the behavioural changes observed in the vaccinated and aluminum-only animals compared to the controls. After just seven inoculations, the vaccinated and aluminum -adjuvant targeted animals only, began compulsive wool biting - the behaviour that has perplexed and annoyed farmers but was also very apparent in the ovine ASIA syndrome. None of the adjuvant-only or controls, housed in identical conditions, exhibited the bizarre behaviour.

    The breed of sheep used, Rasa Aragonesa, is a particularly gregarious breed not inclined to solitude, so when animals began seeking isolation it was readily noticed by the researchers. So were bizarre behaviours like rubbing repeatedly against fences and biting flock mates.

    The anonymous letter-writer
    It was this study that some "concerned reader" with apparent connections to Elsevier - wanted out of the journal. In all his correspondences, Pharmacological Research's editor-in-chief Clementi refused to identify who wrote it. This is bizarre departure from publishing protocol. The most obvious reason someone would want anonymity is to hide a conflict of interest. If they are a lackey of the aluminum-adjuvanted vaccine industry, for example, their letter would be on par with a letter from the tobacco industry criticizing research on smoking and cancer. Rubbish.

    At one point, Luján inquired if the writer wasn't David Hawkes himself, the small-fry virologist from Australia whose paper was cited by Biganzoli. Hawkes is a self-described "passionate advocate of vaccination"; he administrates an Australian group whose mission is to "relegate anti-vaccination campaigners to irrelevance." He also works for a company whose stated mission is to promote and expand uptake of the HPV vaccine in Australia. The HPV vaccine has the highest load of aluminum adjuvants of any vaccine on the market. VCS, whose research is financed by Merck, would hardly want word getting out on aluminum vaccines creating granulomas and weird behaviour in sheep just when their government-supported product to test HPV vaccinated women is taking off.

    Conflicts of interest



    In 2018, Hawkes published - in one of Elsevier's journals, no less - a paper calling ASIA syndrome, as recorded in hundreds of cases, a "twenty first century equivalent to the boy who cried 'wolf' in Aesop's fable." Hawkes' paper notes that "three publications by the advocates of ASIA were recently retracted from peer-reviewed journals" and calls for "an immediate moratorium on animal experiments of ASIA until an independent inquiry has been conducted to determine the existence of a clinically relevant syndrome, identifiable as ASIA in humans."

    It's interesting that the "withdrawal" of the three other ASIA studies were just as baffling as the current sheep study saga. It's also interesting that Hawkes' co-author, Rohan Ameratunga was himself commissioned by the New Zealand government to "review the existence of ASIA" for payment. Was this the kind of "independent" review they wanted? Ameratunga declared his conflict of interest on the paper as a practising allergy specialist who prescribes aluminium-containing injections - themselves suspect in literature for inducing ASIA syndrome.

    Ironically, on this Elsevier paper, Hawkes didn't disclose his own conflicts of interest as a vaccine advocacy group administrator or as an employee of a company that promotes an aluminum-loaded vaccine - an ethical breach in scientific publishing if ever there was one.

    Ghost Ship Media emailed David Hawkes to ask him if he wrote the letter as was suggested in the correspondence between the editors and researcher. He didn't reply. Pordon and Clementi declined to comment as well. Of course, given its past financial dealings with the company, maybe the letter was from a friend at Merck .

    'Boycott Elsevier'

    Other scientists are observing the sheep study saga. Colleagues of Luján wrote Elsevier to protest. Christopher Exley, a professor of bioinorganic chemistry at Keele University, UK, and a leading authority on aluminum in disease is not at all surprised. "The same happened for a paper published in Vaccine and a Letter published in Toxicology, both Elsevier journals," he says. "A recent attempt was made to do the same on a paper published in the Journal of Inorganic Biochemistry."

    Exley refers to pro-vaccine activists like Hawkes and the publishers at Elsevier as "perpetrators of these crimes against science" and says "editors giving in to pressures of this ilk from Elsevier should be ashamed."

    "Scientists should boycott Elsevier," he says.

    The cat cancer example
    "It's a very tough moment for all of us," Luján remarks.

    "Elsevier has thousands of journals and this shows that some of them have no scientific integrity. They are not independent."

    "This is a very simple study," adds Luján, who will seek to republish his findings elsewhere.

    "This is experimental research that can be done again and can be done very cheap. Just repeat it."
    The fact that public health isn't interested in repeating the study is baffling to him. The danger of aluminum in animal vaccines is already well-documented, he says, pointing to the phenomenon of cancer at the injection site in cats . Veterinary researchers saw the problem and removed aluminum from cat vaccines. A recent study from Switzerland revealed that while aluminum-containing vaccines were in use there, related feline cancers increased steadily but since the aluminum-adjuvanted shots were abandoned in 2008, injection site cancers have all but disappeared. Vet pharmaceuticals advertise vaccines as "aluminum-free."
    "You have the proof it can be done," says Luján.

    "In a few years, all vaccines can be clean of aluminum. It questions why this material keeps being used."
    Already he adds, veterinarians he knows have simply stopped vaccinating sheep with aluminum-containing vaccines to avoid health problems. One colleague told him that every time he reported ASIA symptoms to oversight agencies, his complaints were ignored.
    "I don't have the problem anymore because I don't vaccinate anymore," he told Luján.

    "I just assumed the risk."
    "I think this is why they are afraid of this," Luján says, "because in this business we have to look at the risks, and this a very big one."

    'Work on something else'
    There appears to be a problem admitting there is a problem, however. Luján's research documents the dangers to animals of a toxin that is given in increasing quantities to children. Neurotoxic aluminum is used in numerous human vaccines - against HPV, hepatitis, pneumococcal disease, meningitis and many more in the pike. The trials of these vaccines use aluminum adjuvant or other vaccines containing aluminum as 'placebos', rendering them useless for detecting a problem. Vaccinated versus unvaccinated studies are not done. Aluminum vaccines have never been tested for their combined effects in children. Long-term studies are scant - and they are published by scientists who work for the vaccine industry in the journals we know have had a financial relationship with the vaccine industry. A big problem in sheep should signal, at the very least, concern about a potential problem in humans.

    "There are dogmas," Luján says. The biggest dogma in the 21st century is that vaccines are totally safe. That nothing can go wrong, ever. "That's why we are being targeted. They want to send a message: don't get into this business. Work on something else. They just want the thing to disappear."

    If only it were so easy.


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    Troll-hood motto: Never, ever, however, whatsoever, to anyone, a point concede.

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    Default Re: When Vested Interests Take Education over...

    Forget this article: Mass amnesia and the internet

    Ewan Morrison Psychology Today
    Tue, 20 Aug 2019 06:54 UTC



    We have entered a new era of mass Historical Amnesia, and oddly enough, we really seem to be enjoying it. To force a metaphor, it's like we're burning the entire library of history so we can toast marshmallows on the flames.

    The main reason for this new period of forgetting is the internet. And this is ironic because the internet was supposed to be the great engine of eternal remembering, the infinite library of Jorge Luis Borges brought to life. Once information entered the net it was supposed to remain there, fixed and saved forever, or so the pioneering seers of the internet proclaimed back in the 90s. However, without us realizing it, the internet has unleashed a spate of unintended consequences — as all unmonitored mass psycho-social experiments tend to, and all are connected to different aspects of amnesia; from brain function to historical erasure.

    The first form of the New Amnesia is the shrinkage of concentration spans caused by mobile phone usage. A Microsoft Corp study of 2015 revealed that the attention spans decreased from 12 seconds on average in 2000 to just 8.25 seconds in 2015. That's a human attention span which is shorter than that of a goldfish (9 seconds). This is going on while we rewire our brains to skim and flick, with the average phone user picking up their phone 1,500 times per week, or 214 times a day. That's a lot of distraction.

    In "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains," journalist Nicholas Carr claimed that the internet is teaching our brains, through neuroplasticity, to inhabit a distracted mode, more and more of the time. We're fooling ourselves into thinking we're multi-tasking when all we are doing is learning how to skim, forget and move on. This habit prevents people from retaining content because so much information is being presented at the same time. We're overloaded and we're forgetting even as we watch.

    In our increasingly tech-dependent society exposure to cell phone radiation may also negatively affect the brains of adolescents, causing potentially harmful effects to their memory performance, according to a research team at the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute. We're also becoming dependent on the internet to 'be our memory for us'. Rather than trawl our minds for facts, we jump on Google. How many times have you done this yourself, when stuck for a word or fact while in company with friends? "Wait," you say 'I'll Google it". As a result, we're letting natural personal brain memory atrophy and 'digital dementia' is occurring, according to German neuroscientist Manfred Spitzer.

    We're also scrambling the historical record through a plague of misattribution. It may not seem that important but, for example, the philosophers Epictetus (55-135AD) and Epicurus (341-270 BC) are now hopelessly confused with each other on internet quote-memes. Tragic really as Epictetus wrote at length on the dangers of Epicureanism. On a more trivial level — unless you're in the music business — the pop song "My Sharona" (1979) by "The Knack" is misattributed to The Ramones, across millions of views with dozens of social media and music sites duplicating the attribution error.

    Politicians are also increasingly credited with things they didn't say. There's "9 popular quotes commonly misattributed to Abe Lincoln." Hillary Clinton has had to fight off quotes attributed to her that she never uttered, while Donald Trump used the saying, "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win," during his 2016 presidential campaign, attributing it, as many others have done, to Mahatma Ghandi; but there is no record of Ghandi ever having said this. Misattribution online only gets compounded over time. It acts like a palimpsest; erasing the truth that lay beneath it.


    Maya Angelou reading at Clinton inauguration (1993) © Wikipedia

    In 2015, a Maya Angelou commemorative stamp featured a quote she didn't write:
    "A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song."
    The quote actually comes from Joan Walsh Anglund, a children's book author, from her poetry collection "A Cup of Sun" in 1967. The misattribution originated from internet memes and no one noticed the mistake until it was already too late. The commemorative stamp with the epic misquote was endorsed at a large opening ceremony attended by Oprah Winfrey and Michelle Obama, so the misattribution entered history with a fanfare.

    It's rather disturbing, given that the stamp was originally commissioned as a result of a political petition to the United States Postal Service. A petition which included the argument: "Stamps have featured people for their notable accomplishments in the arts. They have included American heroes, but one is missing." Ironically, and sadly, the stamp ended up embodying just how little factual history matters to us today.

    Witness also the current internet debate as to whether Stalin did in fact say that famous horrific quote attributed to him on many internet sites: "The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions a statistic." Or whether it was, in fact, said by Oliver Cromwell, as The Independent argues or even an unnamed Frenchman in a 1948 edition of the Atlantic Magazine. And of course this confusion has knock-on effects on how we perceive Stalin, who is currently becoming popular again, as is Mao Zedong, thanks to the historical revisionism and historical amnesia. This is greatly facilitated by the internet with its websites and memes that claim that real communism has never been attempted or that the genocides, purges and man-made famines of Mao and Stalin, which collectively amount to between 60 and 120 million unnatural deaths, have been greatly exaggerated.

    The internet is particularly good at creating historical confusion around the issue of just how many deaths the communists were guilty of in the 20th century (as I explored in another essay). It is as if the internet was a machine that was invented to perpetuate and multiply the cynical postmodern mantra that there is no such thing as singular truth, only conflicting narratives of the truth. But wait, who even said that — was it Michel Foucault or Mao Zedong? Or both?

    Then there is the phenomenon of pranking on Wikipedia, one that exposes just how easy it is to tamper with history within the online encyclopedia and get away with it. In one noticeable, and light-hearted, incident, British journalist Hugo Rifkind on the day of the announcement of the royal wedding of Prince William went to the Wikipedia page for "29 April" and added some text to it. He inserted fictitious information about Queen Victoria — injuring her toe during a fly-fishing trip in Scotland in 1872. The information was then duly repeated by two of the top national newspapers in the UK — which ironically, were then later used to verify Rifkind's Wikipedia entry in a kind of informational ouroboros. Other Wikipedia pranks are not so light and extend to historical hoaxes and defamation. The gold standard for Wikipedia entries is, after all, not some notion of objective truth but that of "verifiability."


    Part 2
    There are places on the net with less exacting standards, and they can be used by people with toxic political agendas to create verification of their political beliefs through false attribution to historical figures. For example, there is the much-cited quotation attributed to Voltaire
    "To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize."

    Bust of Voltaire (1694-1778)

    The quote became a trending "quote of the day" in 2012, but is now believed to have originated not with Voltaire, but with White Supremacists in the same year. This "Voltaire quote" has circulated widely and has been used by both liberals and people on the right: for example by Donald Trump Jr in a tweet. Some variations of the meme design later introduced the Star of David, and in this way, anti-Semites managed to make it appear that they had the historical backing of Voltaire and the Enlightenment.

    History becomes deliberately distorted through such processes, and there are no real safeguards to stop this happening on the net.

    Then there is erasure through "Cyber-Mobbing"; this is when accusations or false accusations are made on social media that then lead to accused people being disgraced in their public and private lives, their social media accounts being suspended or shut down, their reputations and careers destroyed, and the history of their lives rewritten.

    Many innocent people have been destroyed by this process, as was illustrated by the tragic tale of "Ana Meyer," who had her personal, sexual, and medical histories rewritten online by as many as 100 trolls who wrote posts that were "explicitly designed to make her unemployable."

    Deliberate erasure extends beyond people that we do not agree with into facts we don't like, as when a group of activists decided to "erase a scientist from history" on Wikipedia. Respected German paleontologist Günter Bechly (specializing in fossil dragonflies) was an atheist who then converted to Catholicism and became an outspoken proponent of Intelligent Design. His Wikipedia page was erased for a period of time, due to pressure from "editors," downgrading the value of his scientific work.

    Certain activist types now build entire internet identities around silencing individuals that they hate online. And this rush to erase, this fear of letting enemies speak, leads to a reduction of the spaces in which history can debate. The internet has given disproportionate power to small but organized single-issue political groups intent on wiping people they target from digital history.

    Then there is sensitivity censorship by social media, as when a post or account is deemed "too shocking, disrespectful, or sensational" for Facebook. As when Facebook blocked a fundraising video for The Wounded Blue, a charity for wounded police officers, from its platform. This sensitivity-censorship phenomenon has its offline equivalent in university and high school classrooms with trigger warnings — to protect sensitive students.

    However, the idea that trigger warnings are an effective way to prevent sensitive or traumatized students from being disturbed has been thrown into doubt by a recent study from Harvard psychologists Payton Jones, Richard McNally, and Benjamin Bellet. In it, they found "substantial evidence that trigger warnings counter-therapeutically reinforce survivors' view of their trauma as central to their identity." Trigger warnings and sensitivity censorship actually have the capacity to make trauma survivors more self-conscious and fearful.

    The parts of history that some people might find distressing also can't be separated from historical facts that people might find distressing because they clash with their own political bias. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Facebook is complicit in working with foreign governments in censoring online content for political reasons, such as in the case of censorship of an unflattering image of the King of Thailand shopping with a mistress. So, facts and images get written out of history.

    History itself is subject to the problem of Algorithmic bias and this leads to the state of "Eternal-Nowness" that we live with every day online. This is the biasing of internet algorithmic search results to what is new and what is popular in the now. What is trending? Since young people use the internet more, and young people have less historical knowledge, the algorithms consider The Kardashians and The Great British Bake Off to be of greater significance than the Great British debate between 20th-century economists Keynes and Hayek.

    There is also nowness-bias due to the fact that the greatest thinkers in history were peer-reviewed in learned papers, not reviewed on vlogs and blogs, not liked or clicked; so, according to the algorithms, Beyonce is millions of times more important than Henri Bergson.

    Thus, thinkers whose work has never been turned into a free-to-download digital file are simply getting lost from history, and news stories that predate digitization are getting lost, forgotten, or simply can't be accessed online. Unless the work of an author, philosopher, artist, or scientist is suddenly popularized and makes it into the digital world, then they are in danger of being lost from the internet.

    Filter Bubbles on the net, caused by the "personalization" of our searches, and the suggestions we're fed by algorithms that track our internet lives, also make sure that we only ever get the same picture of history and politics over and over again. The same view that our filter-bubble-buddies share.

    It used to be that we believed the internet was a portal to everyone in the world; now, since personalization, everything you post or share is only seen by the group of about 10 of the filter-bubble-buddies with whom you are most regularly in contact. This tiny group of online friends is your "organic reach" — what Wired calls our "hyper-personalized tribes."

    The shrinking of the organic reach and the shrinking size of our filter bubbles are a direct result of internet platforms attempting to monetize our content. If you want to reach a wider audience, break out of your filter bubble, and speak to more than 10 people, you now have to pay to "boost your post."

    Objective history fragments under the force of internet personalization; we end up with historical narratives pre-selected for us, histories that make us and our top-10 filter-bubble-buddies feel good about ourselves. If I and my nine friends are interested in the radical politics of the 60s, that's pretty much all we'll be spoon-fed by the personalized net. We also receive history and politics info with pre-selected enemies whom we can hate with one click and share with our filter-bubble-buddies.

    Even Bill Gates warned us about this. Our view of the world goes from being a glasshouse to a mirrored cube. Our view of history becomes that which backs up the attitudes we and our filter-bubble-buddies already have.

    In this restricted historical worldview, we get fed news stories and opinions that are created to make us click more, so we get horror, controversy, and fear-mongering along the lines of exactly the same news subjects that we and our friends reacted to before. It's not hard to see how political polarization and fear of people with different views from us can grow from this, and how filter-bubble personalized history leads to exaggerated, simplified, and biased views of history.

    Sadly, this is the unintended result of the rather more trivial project, run by Internet monopolies, to personalize your feed to get you to buy more stuff. A recent study showed that 93 percent of companies see an uplift in sales as a result of personalization, while 88 percent of modern consumers now expect that their online activity will be personalized to their own tastes.

    So personalisation won't be going away anytime soon. It's like we're saying, "We trashed the entire system of political debate and messed up our knowledge of history, but hey, no worries, I just got recommended a great new pair of sneakers."

    With all these factors, we're witnessing the slow demise of historical learning not by one single vast conspiracy but by a process of a thousand small deletions, omissions, and shrugs of the shoulders, as we move on to the next exciting thing.

    But never mind, you can forget this too.

    Now, what's next?


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    Default Re: When Vested Interests Take Education over...

    So, who/what were/are these Vested Interests which were/are so interested in the kids' and adults' education?

    Here is a blast from the past about it:

    Posted by Hervé (here)

    Billionaires are Behind Communism - Reece Committee

    Henry Makow May 5, 2018


    Norman Dodd (1899-1987) was a banker/bank manager, worked as a financial advisor and served as chief investigator in 1953 for U.S. Congressman B. Carroll Reece Special Committee on Tax Exempt Foundations (commonly referred to as the Reece Committee).

    Most of America's great fortunes were made by men chosen by the Rothschilds and given the money to become monopolies. Naturally, they share the Rothschild goal of worldwide Communism, which is essentially a monopoly over everything- money, power, belief & thought. Thus they must destroy all collective forces - race, religion (God), nation and family (gender).

    As this article indicates, they used tax-exempt foundations to re-engineer America in the direction of Communism. Their mandate was "to alter life in the United States that we can be comfortably merged with the Soviet Union." This is the origin of endless war, globalism, miscegenation, feminism, "gay rights," gun control, political correctness, multiculturalism etc. Communism is pretty much a fait accompli in the West.

    The following historical account is excerpted from Charlotte Iserbyt's book The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, page 46-48:

    -----------------------------------------------------------

    Investigate Tax Exempt Foundations
    by Charlotte Iserbyt
    (Excerpt by henrymakow.com)


    B. Carroll Reece

    NORMAN DODD, A YALE GRADUATE, INTELLECTUAL AND NEW YORK CITY INVESTMENT BANKER, was chosen to be the research director for the Reece Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1953. The Reece Committee was named for its creator, Rep. Carroll Reece of Tennessee, (above) and was formed to investigate the status of tax-exempt foundations.

    Dodd sent committee questionnaires to numerous foundations, and as a result of one such request, Joseph E. Johnson, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, invited Dodd to send a committee staffer to Carnegie headquarters in New York City to examine the minutes of the meetings of the foundation's trustees. These minutes had long since been stored away in a warehouse. Obviously, Johnson, who was a close friend of former Carnegie Endowment's president and Soviet spy Alger Hiss, had no idea what was in them. [Word is the staffer went insane because of what she found.]

    ENDLESS WAR
    The minutes revealed that in 1910 the Carnegie Endowment's trustees asked themselves this question:
    "Is there any way known to man more effective than war, to so alter the life of an entire people?"

    (John D. Rockefeller)


    For a year the trustees sought an effective "peaceful" method to "alter the life of an entire people." Ultimately, they concluded that war was the most effective way to change people. Consequently, the trustees of the "Carnegie Endowment for International Peace" next asked themselves: "How do we involve the United States in a war?" And they answered,
    "We must control the diplomatic machinery of the United States by first gaining control of the State Department."
    Norman Dodd stated that the trustees' minutes reinforced what the Reece Committee had uncovered elsewhere about the Carnegie Endowment:
    "It had already become a powerful policy-making force inside the State Department."
    During those early years of the Carnegie Endowment, war clouds were already forming over Europe and the opportunity of enactment of their plan was drawing near. History proved that World War I did indeed have an enormous impact on the American people. For the first time in our history, large numbers of wives and mothers had to leave their homes to work in war factories, thus effectively eroding woman's historic role as the "heart" of the family.

    The sanctity of the family itself was placed in jeopardy. Life in America was so thoroughly changed that, according to Dodd's findings,
    "[T]he trustees had the brashness to congratulate themselves on the wisdom and validity of their original decision."
    They sent a confidential message to President Woodrow Wilson, insisting that the war not be ended too quickly.


    EDUCATION
    After the war, the Carnegie Endowment trustees reasoned that if they could get control of education in the United States they would be able to prevent a return to the way of life as it had been prior to the war. They recruited the Rockefeller Foundation to assist in such a monumental task. According to Dodd's Reece Committee report:
    "They divided the task into parts, giving to the Rockefeller Foundation the responsibility of altering education as it pertains to domestic subjects, but Carnegie retained the task of altering our education in foreign affairs and about international relations."

    Rowan Gaither

    During a subsequent personal meeting with Mr. Dodd, President Rowan Gaither (above) of the Ford Foundation said,
    "Mr. Dodd, we invited you to come here because we thought that perhaps, off the record, you would be kind enough to tell us why the Congress is interested in the operations of foundations such as ours?"
    Gaither answered his own rhetorical question with a startling admission:
    "Mr. Dodd, all of us here at the policy making level of the foundation have at one time or another served in the OSS [Office of Strategic Services, CIA forerunner] or the European Economic Administration, operating under directives from the White House. We operate under those same directives.... The substance under which we operate is that we shall use our grant making power to so alter life in the United States that we can be comfortably merged with the Soviet Union."
    Stunned, Dodd replied,
    "Why don't you tell the American people what you just told me and you could save the taxpayers thousands of dollars set aside for this investigation?"
    Gaither responded,
    "Mr. Dodd, we wouldn't think of doing that."
    In public, of course, Gaither never admitted what he had revealed in private. However, on numerous public occasions, Norman Dodd repeated what Gaither had said, and was neither sued by Gaither nor challenged by the Ford Foundation. Dodd was subsequently warned that:
    "If you proceed with the investigation as you have outlined, you will be killed."

    Wayne Hays

    The Reece Committee never completely finished its work of investigating and receiving testimony in open hearings involving the representatives of the major tax-exempt foundations. The process was completely disrupted and finally derailed by the deliberately disruptive activity of one of its members, Congressman Wayne Hays of Ohio, (above).

    According to general counsel for the Reece Committee, Renee A. Wormser's account in Foundations: Their Power and Influence (Devin-Adair: New York, 1958, p. 341):
    "[Hays] was frank enough to tell us that he had been put on the committee by Mr. [Sam] Rayburn, the Democratic Leader in the House, as the equivalent of a watchdog. Just what he was to 'watch' was not made clear until it became apparent that Mr. Hays was making it his business to frustrate the investigation to the greatest extent possible."

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    Default Re: When Vested Interests Take Education over...

    When the ideologues come for the kids

    Andrew Sullivan New York Magazine
    Fri, 20 Sep 2019 00:01 UTC


    © Mesamong/Getty Images

    Like any religion, wokeness understands the need to convert children. The old Jesuit motto (sometimes attributed to Voltaire) was, after all, "Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man." And so I was moved but not particularly surprised by George Packer's tale of a progressive school banishing separate restrooms for boys and girls because this reinforces the gender binary. The school did not inform parents of this, of course:
    Parents only heard about it when children started arriving home desperate to get to the bathroom after holding it in all day. Girls told their parents mortifying stories of having a boy kick open their stall door. Boys described being afraid to use the urinals. Our son reported that his classmates, without any collective decision, had simply gone back to the old system, regardless of the new signage: Boys were using the former boys' rooms, girls the former girls' rooms. This return to the familiar was what politicians call a "commonsense solution." It was also kind of heartbreaking.
    As an analogy for the price of progressivism, it's close to perfect. Authorities impose an ideology onto reality; reality slowly fights back. The question is simply how much damage is done by this kind of utopianism before it crumbles under its own weight. Simple solutions — like a separate, individual gender-neutral bathroom for the tiny minority with gender dysphoria or anyone else — are out of bounds. They are, after all, reinforcing the idea that girls and boys are different. And we cannot allow biology, evolution, reproductive strategy, hormones, chromosomes, and the customs of every single human culture since the beginning of time to interfere with "social justice."

    It's also vital to expose children to the fact of their race as the core constituent of their identity. Here is an essay written by a woke teacher about the difficulty of teaching "White boys":
    I spend a lot of my days worried about White boys. I worry about White boys who barely try and expect to be rewarded, who barely care and can't stand being called on it, who imagine they can go through school without learning much without it impacting in any way the capacity for their future success, just because it never has before.
    This sounds to me as if he is describing, well, boys of any race. And when boys are labeled as "White" (note the capital "W") and this requires specific rules not applied to nonwhite boys, they often — surprise! — don't like it:
    This week, a student spoke up in class to say that every time a particular writer talked about White people and their role in racism, he would start to feel really guilty, and it made him not want to listen ... I try to keep an arm around the boys who most need it, but it's hard, because I'm also not willing to give an inch on making my room safe for my students of color. It's not their job to keep hurting while White boys figure it out.
    Children, in other words, are being taught to think constantly about race, and to feel guilty if they are the wrong one. And, of course, if they resist, that merely proves the point. A boy who doesn't think he is personally responsible for racism is merely reflecting "white fragility" which is a function of "white supremacy." QED. No one seems to have thought through the implications of telling white boys that their core identity is their "whiteness," or worried that indoctrinating kids into white identity might lead quite a few to, yes, become "white identitarians" of the far right.

    One of the key aspects about social-justice theory is that it's completely unfalsifiable (as well as unreadable); it's a closed circle that refers only to itself and its own categories. (For a searing take down of this huge academic con, check out Douglas Murray's superb new book, The Madness of Crowds.) The forces involved — "white supremacy," "patriarchy," "heterosexism" — are all invisible to the naked eye, like the Holy Spirit. Their philosophical origins — an attempt by structuralist French philosophers to rescue what was left of Marxism in the 1960s and 1970s — are generally obscured in any practical context. Like religion, you cannot prove any of its doctrines empirically, but children are being forced into believing them anyway. This is hard, of course, as this teacher explains: "I'm trying. I am. But you know how the saying goes: You can lead a White male to anti-racism, but you can't make him think."

    The racism, sexism, and condescension in those sentences! (The teacher, by the way, is not some outlier. In 2014, he was named Minnesota's Teacher of the Year!) Having taken one form of religion out of the public schools, the social-justice left is now replacing it with the doctrines of intersectionality.

    Last week, I defended drag queens reading stories to kids in libraries. I don't take back my words. Getting children interested in reading with costumed clowns strikes me as harmless. But when I was directed to the website of Drag Queen Story Hours, I found the following:
    [DQSH] captures the imagination and play of the gender fluidity of childhood and gives kids glamorous, positive, and unabashedly queer role models. In spaces like this, kids are able to see people who defy rigid gender restrictions and imagine a world where people can present as they wish, where dress up is real.
    However well-meant, this is indoctrination into an ideology, not campy encouragement for reading and fun.

    And then there is the disturbing "social justice" response to gender-nonconforming boys and girls. Increasingly, girly boys and tomboys are being told that gender trumps sex, and if a boy is effeminate or bookish or freaked out by team sports, he may actually be a girl, and if a girl is rough and tumble, sporty, and plays with boys, she may actually be a boy.

    In the last few years in Western societies, as these notions have spread, the number of children identifying as trans has skyrocketed. In Sweden, the number of kids diagnosed with gender dysphoria, a phenomenon stable and rare for decades, has, from 2013 to 2016, increased almost tenfold. In New Zealand, the rate of girls identifying as boys has quadrupled in the same period of time; in Britain, where one NHS clinic is dedicated to trans kids, there were around a hundred girls being treated in 2011; by 2017, there were 1,400.

    Possibly this sudden surge is a sign of pent-up demand, as trans kids emerge from the shadows, which, of course, is a great and overdue thing. The suffering of trans kids can be intense and has been ignored for far too long. But maybe it's also some gender non-conforming kids falling prey to adult suggestions, or caused by social contagion. Almost certainly it's both. But one reason to worry about the new explosion in gender dysphoria is that it seems recently to be driven by girls identifying as boys rather than the other way round. Female sexuality is more fluid and complex than male sexuality, so perhaps girls are more susceptible to ideological suggestion, especially when they are also taught that being a woman means being oppressed.

    In the case of merely confused or less informed kids, the consequences of treatment can be permanent. Many of these prepubescent trans-identifying children are put on puberty blockers, drugs that suppress a child's normal hormonal development, and were originally designed for prostate cancer and premature puberty. The use of these drugs for gender dysphoria is off-label, unapproved by the FDA; there have been no long-term trials to gauge the safety or effectiveness of them for gender dysphoria, and the evidence we have of the side effects of these drugs in FDA-approved treatment is horrifying. Among adults, the FDA has received 24,000 reports of adverse reactions, over half of which it deemed serious. Parents are pressured into giving these drugs to their kids on the grounds that the alternative could be their child's suicide. Imagine the toll of making a decision about your child like that?

    Eighty-five percent of gender-dysphoric children grow out of the condition — and most turn out to be gay. Yes, some are genuinely trans and can and should benefit from treatment. And social transition is fine. But children cannot know for certain who they are sexually or emotionally until they have matured past puberty. Fixing their "gender identity" when they're 7 or 8, or even earlier, administering puberty blockers to kids as young as 12, is a huge leap in the dark in a short period of time. It cannot be transphobic to believe that no child's body should be irreparably altered until they are of an age and a certainty to make that decision themselves.

    I don't have children, but I sure worry about gay kids in this context. I remember being taunted by some other kids when I was young — they suggested that because I was mildly gender-nonconforming, I must be a girl. If my teachers and parents and doctors had adopted this new ideology, I might never have found the happiness of being gay and comfort in being male. How many gay kids, I wonder, are now being led into permanent physical damage or surgery that may be life-saving for many, but catastrophic for others, who come to realize they made a mistake. And what are gay adults doing to protect them? Nothing. Only a few ornery feminists, God bless them, are querying this.

    In some ways, the extremism of the new transgender ideology also risks becoming homophobic. Instead of seeing effeminate men as one kind of masculinity, as legitimate as any other, transgenderism insists that girliness requires being a biological girl. Similarly, a tomboy is not allowed to expand the bandwidth of what being female can mean, but must be put into the category of male. In my view, this is not progressive; it's deeply regressive. There's a reason why Iran is a world leader in sex-reassignment surgery, and why the mullahs pay for it. Homosexuality in Iran is so anathema that gay boys must be turned into girls, and lesbian girls into boys, to conform to heterosexual norms. Sound a little too familiar?

    Adults are increasingly forced to obey the new norms of "social justice" or be fired, demoted, ostracized, or canceled. Many resist; many stay quiet; a few succumb and convert. Children have no such options.

    Indoctrinate yourselves as much as you want to, guys. It's a free country. But hey, teacher — leave those kids alone.


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    Default Re: When Vested Interests Take Education over...

    Kindergarten Teachers Are Quitting, and Here Is Why
    Comments from exasperated kindergarten teachers throughout the country.
    Posted Dec 20, 2019
    Peter Gray, Ph.D
    https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl...-here-is-why?f

    "Last month, I posted an article describing the stand that kindergarten teachers in Brookline, Massachusetts, took in protesting the policies imposed upon them from above—the excessive testing, dreary drill, and lack of opportunity for playful, creative, joyful activities. The post went somewhat viral, quickly receiving over 200,000 views and more than 80 comments. Most of the comments were in support of the protesting teachers, and many added further confirmation that the child abuse occurring in Brookline kindergartens is occurring in kindergartens throughout the country.

    The abuse is occurring not because kindergarten teachers are mean. Most of them are kindhearted people who love children; that’s why they chose the career that they did (though this may change over time as the loving ones quit). The abuse is occurring because the teachers are not being allowed to do what they believe and know is right. They are being required to follow policies imposed from above by people who know little about children and don’t have to see the anger, anxiety, and tears that the teachers see in the classrooms. If teachers are at fault, they are so primarily for lack of courage to resist the outrageous demands imposed on them and on the children in their classrooms.

    In recent years, I've heard from many elementary school teachers who are quitting, or taking early retirement, because they are no longer willing to take part in an educational system that is harming children. I heard from a new set of them in the comments section of that post describing the Brookline protest. Here, below, are quotations from 16 of those comments. The first 14 are all from different kindergarten teachers, and the final two are from teachers of later grades, who describe the debilitating effects on children as they go beyond kindergarten.

    Read them, weep, and then ask yourself what you can do to help remedy this damage created by politicians and narrow-minded educational policymakers who look at numbers and not children.

    “I had to retire in 2017 because I could not take the pressure of having to force my 5- and 6-year-old students to sit with books… no talking allowed. …. I taught for 18 years and in the last 3 years teaching this stuff to my sweet little kinders I heard students cry, talk about how they didn’t understand, say they hated reading time, and act out. We were basically regurgitating the curriculum script. It was awful. I hated going to work that last 2 years with all the stress of academic achievement expectations… All administrators want to hear is the exact same stuff from one room to another from school to school.

    “Teachers have been complaining about more testing every year. And every year we hear, ‘We’ll look into that,’ and every year someone higher up decides, ‘We need more data.’ That, in turn, means more testing, more seatwork, and less play. I personally couldn’t take it anymore and took early retirement.”

    “I worked part-time as an art teacher in a kindergarten class. The kindergarten teacher was a drill sergeant, moving the kids from one activity to the next in 15-minute segments. This was covering math, reading, printing letters, etc. Those kids were mostly wound up, usually not settling down. I eventually quit, because I couldn't stand to be around that barking teacher; I can only imagine how the kids felt.

    “I have taught kindergarten for nearly 40 years. Common Core expectations for kindergarten seem to have trickled down from the top, and the people who wrote it thought that they could legislate quicker child development… Kindergartners are expected to write sentences and stories, have math discourse, and take tests on the computer. Many of them can't even cross the midline and write an X yet… Schools are being driven by ‘data’; and kindergarten teachers are being asked to reduce their students to numbers. Please, let’s allow them to play!!”

    "I taught kindergarten for the last 18 years of my 35-year career. My classroom was play-centered and I think filled with very happy children. I retired 13 years ago, and I’m appalled when I speak to friends who are still teaching. Especially in kindergarten, but throughout school classrooms, there is much too much pressure put on children… Play and unstructured time allow children the chance to explore and find their path in the world.”

    “I’ve taught kindergarten for 25 years and I can tell you that this article is spot on. Last week I gave my 5-year-olds a reading assessment that required them to infer the meaning of ‘bifocals’ after hearing a 5-paragraph story about Ben Franklin (the story had no pictures). This is the kind of madness that permeates curriculum design for kindergarten. I’m retiring earlier than I had planned because I just can’t be a part of this any longer.”

    “This heartbroken kindergarten teacher just couldn’t teach ‘firstergarten’ anymore and retired early. I go back to help my teacher buddies who are still being forced to torture children every day with developmentally inappropriate schedules, expectations, and curriculum."

    “I wanted to be a developmental K teacher, but by the time I received my credential, things went from bad to worse in K classrooms across America. I foolishly thought I could sneak art and play in, but I was wrong. The Curriculum Cops showed up in the class I was doing my student teaching in, and that was the beginning of the end for me. Now I just sub and sneak in fun for the kids whenever I can. Teaching is dull, dry, and stressful when you have to force small children to do what they are not ready to do… The powers that be are getting away with this because teachers (myself included) don’t do anything except complain. When are we going to stand up and say, ‘Enough is enough’?”

    “As a retired early childhood teacher and administrator, I am saddened by the focus and evaluative assessments used to measure growth embedded in public education at this time. Our state mandates assessment that is strictly academic for pre-K and K. Those scores are then 50 percent of the teacher evaluation. If you want to keep your job, you must place focus on academic learning instead of kinesthetic, developmentally appropriate brain, social, and emotional growth.”

    “I have been a teacher’s aide for 15 years... We are asking these 5- and 6-year-olds to do things that they are not emotionally able to do, and we are now seeing many young children with anxiety.”

    “Words that have come out of my mouth this fall: ‘We do NOT play in kindergarten. Do not do that again!’ (to a student building a very cool 3D scorpion with the math blocks instead of completing his assigned task to practice addition.) ‘No, I cannot read Pete the Cat to you. We have to do our reading’ (90 minutes of a scripted daily lesson). ‘Those clips (hanging from the ceiling) are for when we do art. No, we cannot do any art. We have to do our reading lesson’ (my kinders get to go to a 40-minute art class once a month). ‘No, you cannot look at the books/play with the toys’ (literacy toys and games). ‘No, we cannot do a science experiment. We have to do our reading.’ ‘No, we cannot color. We have to do our reading." … I hate my job. Love my kids—hate the curriculum. But I cannot afford to quit. Too close to retirement to start over.”

    “I’ve been teaching kindergarten for thirteen years. In my first year, kids were expected to read at A or B level by the end of the year. That’s a book that follows a pattern and changes one word and only requires the kid to show some reading behaviors and phonemic awareness… Now it’s D level. Those books include multiple lines of text on one page and do not follow a pattern. They include long vowels and digraphs. Kids have to know all 42 phonemic sounds and their variations in spelling, as well as numerous sight words that don’t follow phonics rules. Sure, some kids rise to the challenge. Their brains are ready and they’re eager to learn. Most, however, don’t…Pushing them to read causes stress. I’ve seen a rise in anxiety in my kids, avoidance of tasks that are 'too hard,' and some pretty impressive breakdowns or meltdowns. I’ve also seen a drop in executive function, imagination, and ability to sit and focus…. I have to give them about 13 different required formal tests throughout the year. Thirteen! I’m seeing assessment fatigue. Who knew five- and six-year-olds could burn out? They certainly can, and I worry about how they’ll continue through school for the 12 years after I have them.”

    “Kindergarten should be a transition—with plenty of play and student-centered learning—from nursery to first-grade academic curriculum, but instead children are forgoing that transition. They are being thrown into a structured environment that is requiring them to be mini robots. They have to sit for extended periods of time (even adults find that hard), they have to use ‘brain’ power without the aid of free movement to stave off boredom. They are not required to use their imaginations or ask questions that stimulate interaction with teachers and peers. … Kindergarten classrooms shouldn’t have desks and chairs; they should have centers, reading nooks, educational and fun games, and space to explore.”

    “I was horrified as a teacher as each school year brought new demands on our five-year-olds. Many of these children were not in preschool, so kindergarten was their first exposure to education. We were required to test them immediately for letter sounds, rhyming, counting, shapes, name writing, adding, and of course words. I was sickened by our practice. A few of the kindergarten teachers tried to fight the system. We presented common sense ideas for play and social skills. This was not embraced by our administration leaders. After many years in kindergarten, I chose to move to second grade. I can tell you the children are socially awkward as well as burnt out by 7 and 8. What the heck are we doing to our children? We are creating a society that will hate to be educated and have serious anxiety and social skill issues.”

    “I teach second grade. I see an ever-increasing gap in social-emotional skills and basics such as pencil grip and penmanship. Outbursts and attitudes of failure enter my room. My mission is to repair that, and then do my best to help them find time to find their passions and talents. The ‘must do’ rigor, drill and kill, and workbooks for all subjects without integration do not let me apply my talent to the craft of education.”

    “I have never been a Kindergarten teacher, but I have taught fourth- to eighth-grade students for 37 years… In 2006, I left the classroom to serve the school district in another capacity… I returned to the district as a substitute in 2015. When I subbed at the school where I had taught from 1997 to 2006, I was shocked to see the misery of the students. They now walked the hallways looking down at their feet. No more smiles, no more laughter from the classrooms. In 2017, I was asked to take over as a long-term sub for a [6th grade] teacher who retired… I had to use the lesson plans given to me… Students were supposed to read silently and answer questions about their reading every day… I spoke to the principal and the assistant principal about my concern that the students were not really learning and was told that instruction had to be done this way so students could cover the material they needed to cover to be ready for tests they had to take every three weeks. The students hated the tests, and so did I… Twelve-year-old students were expected to use a computer to take several parts of a timed test for up to three hours and 45 minutes per day… After I finished my five-month term in this position, I resigned from the school district because I no longer wanted any part of this type of education that I felt was detrimental to the wellbeing of young children.”


    Wow. Did any of the commenters talk about schools they liked? Yes, four did, but none of those four were teaching in public or conventional private schools in the United States. Two, who talked about lots of play and happy kids, were teaching in Australia; another was teaching in a forest school; the fourth was involved in an early childhood center designed for play and self-directed education outside of the public school system. And then there was a mom who wrote: “My kids are 6, 4, and 2, and we left our well-ranked Boston suburban school district to move overseas. This was honestly one of the top 5 reasons we left the U.S. My kids are now in a play-based school with no national testing. It’s heaven, and we’re extremely lucky to have this option open to us.”

    -----------

    And now, what do you think? What are your experiences with early education in modern America or elsewhere? This blog is in part a forum for discussion, and your knowledge and views are valued and taken seriously by me and other readers. Make your thoughts known in the comments section below. As always, I prefer if you post your comments and questions here rather than send them to me by private email. By putting them here, you share with other readers, not just with me. I read all comments and try to respond to all serious questions if I feel I have something useful to say. "
    Peter Gray, Ph.D., research professor at Boston College, is author of Free to Learn (Basic Books) and Psychology (Worth Publishers, a college textbook now in its 8th edition). He has conducted and published research in comparative, evolutionary, developmental, and educational psychology. He did his undergraduate study at Columbia University and earned a Ph.D. in biological sciences at Rockefeller University. His current research and writing focus primarily on children's natural ways of learning and the life-long value of play. He is president of the nonprofit Alliance for Self-Directed Education and a founding board member of the nonprofit Let Grow. His own play includes not only his research and writing, but also long distance bicycling, kayaking, back-woods skiing, and vegetable gardening.
    Last edited by onawah; 29th December 2019 at 20:16.
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    Exclamation Re: When Vested Interests Take Education over...

    What is our School System Really? Who does the 'Education System' serve best?


    Read Kiosaki's new Book: FAKE: Fake Money, Fake Teachers, Fake Assets: How Lies Are Making the Poor and Middle Class Poorer

    Fake Money, Fake Teachers, Fake Assets, Robert delivers insights and answers that help ordinary people―who probably haven’t had a lot of financial education―determine what’s ‘real’ and relevant to their financial lives.
    No need to follow anyone, only consider broadening (y)our horizon of possibilities ...

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    Default Re: When Vested Interests Take Education over...

    Scary plans they have for schooling--Gates, Musk, et al...as if parents don't have enough to worry about already...
    Also posted here: https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...=1#post1366255
    How The 'Great Reset' Is Targeting Our Children & Plans To 'Reimagine' Humanity
    Jul 12, 202
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    "As we find ourselves in this new normal, we have seen long standing agendas, which have remained behind the scenes, hidden away from the public, now being offered as solutions justified by this crisis.

    The World Economic Forum's 'Great Reset' and the '4th Industrial Revolution' are perfect examples of prepackaged 'solutions' being rolled out to save us from ourselves. Today we will dive deeper into this agenda and also focus on how it may reshape our lives if the technocrats have their way.

    In this episode, Spiro is joined by John Klyczek, an Adjunct Professor, researcher, contributor to Activist Post as well as several other alternative news sites and the author of the book 'School World Order: The Technocratic Globalization of Corporatized Education'

    For generations the social engineers have used the strategy of indoctrination to target societies most impressionable minds, our children, through many avenues but primarily through our education systems. In this interview, Spiro and John Klyczek break down the how this longstanding and effective tactic is being 'reimagined' by the usual suspects, to reshape the future of humanity."
    Last edited by onawah; 13th July 2020 at 06:36.
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