Back To School And Possibly Murder

Toogood Reports ^ | September 10, 2001 | Charles A. Morse

[Starmaker]

Even Hitler and Stalin didn´t specifically target school children for murder while attending class; yet, this unprecedented phenomenon is being visited upon our children today. As parents send their children off to school this season they are distracted by the spectrum creeping on the periphery of their consciousness that their child could be mowed down by a gun-toting terrorist. Arafat may have sent the terrorist, he may have been sent by Protestant extremists in Northern Ireland, or he may be a fellow student, like at Columbine, who shows up one day in fatigues ready for mass murder. Either way, we can all agree, this evil is a symptom of a sick, depraved, and desperate trend.

The tactic of blowing up babies as a political statement was launched May 15th, 1974, when Arafat ordered his PLO to attack a kindergarten in Maalot, Israel. Three terrorists shot at a van filled with Israeli Arabs, commandeered the van, entered the school after murdering the housekeeper, his wife, and child, and then took 100 children hostage. When rescuers showed up, the terrorists threw bombs at the children and sprayed them with machine gun fire. Twenty-five were murdered, 66 wounded.

The Israeli government responded as any sane government would by issuing firearms to civilians and, like the Swiss, urged Army reservists to keep firearms at home. Teachers, parents, and grandparents of students stood guard at the schools and civilian militias, or "Mishmar Esrachi" were formed. With an armed citizenry ready to defend life, Arafat would have to change his tactics in his campaign to murder Jewish children. Hence, the suicide bomber posting himself at discothèques and pizza parlors. Arafat has put Israeli children on notice this season that they are military targets and to expect a murder campaign.

In Northern Ireland, a group calling itself the Red Hand Defenders has been targeting Roman Catholic schoolgirls with taunts and whistles as they enter the Holy Cross elementary school in Belfast. On Wednesday, Sept. 5, a pipe bomb exploded near the girls as they entered the school seriously injuring two policemen. The girls were seen fleeing in the ensuing mayhem.

In the US, the problem of child murder in school is internal and societal. Rather than being confronted with well trained, well financed, and well armed men ordered to kill, American school children are facing down their own fellow classmates. The murderers have been predominantly white, suburban, and middle-class and have come from generally liberal families. So far, every murderer on record has been on some sort of drug prescribed by a psychiatrist. Many of the murderers were obsessed with a combination of violent video games and satanic religious beliefs. Columbine, and probably other schools attended by the murderers, offered a course that used to be called "death education" but is now called "life education."

The education change agents have deliberately created the rotten atmosphere that now threatens the lives of American children. John Taylor Gatto, in his book The Underground History of American Education, writes that in 1965, as a high school teacher in Manhattan, he observed the replacement of basic discipline by a new "due process" system. He states "I watched fascinated as over a period of 100 days, the entire edifice of public schooling was turned upside down." Students prone to trouble immediately understood that the teacher was no longer in charge and that he was not likely to be disciplined, let alone expelled. All hell broke loose as school violence and general chaos began to rise.

1965 was also the year of the government mandated the "Behavioral Science Teacher Education Program (BSTEP)." Charlotte Iserbyt, in her book The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, points out that BSTEP, funded by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, was set up to "change the teacher from a transmitter of knowledge/content to a social change agent/facilitator/clinician." Teachers who refused to conform to this new "progressive" education would be purged from public education in the ensuing years.

BSTEP called for the "development of a new kind of elementary school teacher who...engages in teaching as clinical practice...and functions as a responsible agent of social change." Iserbyt states that B.F.Skinner's behaviorism is the basis of BSTEP. The program states: "Calculations of the future and how to modify it are no longer considered obscure academic pursuits. Instead, they are the business of many who are concerned about and responsible for devising various modes of social change...We are getting closer to developing effective methods of shaping the future and advancing in fundamental social and individual evolution." By 1967, BSTEP introduced "impersonal manipulation" where "few will be able to maintain control over their opinions…each individual receives at birth a multi-purpose identification number" and "chemical experimentation" would be performed on students. Columbine anyone?

American parents, teachers, and administrators should, no doubt, learn from the Israeli example and consider arming themselves as a means of protecting vulnerable school children. We shouldn´t delude ourselves into thinking that what´s going on in Israel and Northern Ireland couldn´t happen here. The American problem, however, is systemic and spiritual. Perhaps America is suffering from the weight of decades of success and prosperity. In our security, we have moved beyond thinking about survival and, in our laziness, we have allowed, under the color of law, an evil cabal of self described "change agents" to seize control of our children´s education and souls. We are paying through the nose for our children´s debauchment and death.