How Big Brother Plans Your Career

NewsMax.com / Commentary

How Big Brother Plans Your Career
Wes Vernon, NewsMax.com
Tuesday, May 14, 2002
WASHINGTON – The School to Work program, which is written into U.S. law, aims to decide for your children what line of work they should be trained and educated for, according to the needs of the state, collaborating with big business. It has all the appearances of a back-door approach to the police state.

William L. Shirer, in his book "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” cites this phenomenon in Nazi Germany:

"[The workbook was introduced] and eventually no worker could be hired unless he possessed one. In it was kept a record of his skills and employment. The workbook not only provided the State and the employer with up-to-date date on every single employee in the nation, but was used to tie a worker to the bench. If he desired to leave for other employment, his employer could retain his workbook, which meant that he could not be legally employed elsewhere.”

Robert Holland, author of "Not With My Child, You Don’t,” says the similarities of the Hitler’s "full employment” system and the School to Work Law "snapping into place” right here in the United States are "quite eerie and disturbing.”

The system won’t develop overnight, of course. For such a program to be imposed on a freedom-loving public, there must be stealth and gradualism. But the machinery for it has been written into law.

As Holland points out in a study prepared for Free Republic, School to Work legislation repeatedly makes it clear its provisions are for "all students” and "all schools.”

Many of us grew up with dreams and aspirations as to what career path we wished to follow. We may even have changed our minds or careers along the way. We followed our ambitions, often taking hard knocks and learning life’s lessons along the way.

School to Work (STW) will have none of that. Some power elites will determine your children’s careers, and see that they are trained to follow a predetermined paths. School to Work is not about educating boys and girls so they can make their own career decisions. It is about training your children to fit into whatever narrow scheme the elites have decided.

The Usual Suspects

This plan can be traced to "the usual suspects,” i.e., wealthy, powerful establishment foundations and left-wing politicians with a statist complex. State-directed skills training would fit the "national good,” as determined by the elites.

In the mid-1980s, there was a raging debate as to whether the U.S. should embark on a "national industrial policy” program. The Reagan administration had rejected the idea, much to the chagrin of left-wing politicians who felt that because many of our trading partners were making such top-down decisions for their people, obviously we couldn’t compete in a global economy unless we did likewise.

So planners did what planners always do. If the bumpkins elected by the people don’t follow the wisdom of their betters, well, the planners will simply have to work around them.

A Carnegie Corp. forum on education and the economy resulted in a Carnegie spinoff, National Center for Education and the Economy (NCEE). This entity was led by educrat Marc Tucker, who designed the grandiose Human Resource Development Plan. In 1990, NCEE unveiled the first national report boosting the "necessity” of School to Work.

Hillary, of Course

In the forefront of those boosting the plan were Arkansas lawyer Hillary Clinton and industrial consultant Ira Magaziner. This duo would later push for a national health system that went down in flames when exposed to the light of day. Those pesky voters again!

This was followed by a series of reports from the U.S. Department of Labor in the first Bush administration. One can speculate that if Ronald Reagan had been around for another term, he would have given this meddling short shrift.

Electronic Resume – for Kindergartners

These reports declared that, quoting Holland, "all schools must bend single-mindedly to the task of socializing a skilled workforce.” The plan "even offered a model electronic resume to be kept for all students, K through 12, wherein their ‘workforce competencies’ would be rated and recorded for the benefit of their future employers. It had a line identifying each child according to Social Security number.”

When the Clintons came to Washington and took the reins of power, the agenda was front and center. What followed were the 1994 School-to-Work Opportunities Act and the reauthorized Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

From all of this emerged a National Skill Standards Board, which has divided the economy into 15 sectors. The machinery for the state determining your child’s future was in place.

Next: How a computer chooses your life’s work.

THIS Article at News Max / Commentary

I don't know which aspect of School-To-Work is the scariest: that it's so determinedly, unapologetically statist and centralist, or that it managed to sneak in under the national radar, or that so many people would say it's a good idea.

Grammar and high schools were never intended to compete with trade schools. They were supposed to provide the rudiments of literacy and numeracy to the whole of the population. How on Earth could anyone rationalize turning them into "training centers" that would turn out workers for favored trades at the taxpayer's expense?

It's long past time we got the government entirely out of the education business.

Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
Visit The Palace Of Reason: http://palaceofreason.com

"School to Work is not about educating boys and girls so they can make their own career decisions. It is about training your children

Guys, FINALLY, an actual reporter has put this fact in print. If only, in the "new" media. And, THIS is what the money added to education this year by the partnership of Ted Kennedy, and George W. Bush. It is NOT just "left-wing politicians" who have "a statist complex". It is the "RepOcrats Internationale" in their "partnerships" in "bipartisan compromise". Republicans, Democrats, and even some of the leading Libertarians, and MANY of the "leadership" {whose children will go to select schools} of the "off" parties. Does anybody know the location of Holland's "study"?? Peace and love, George.

"I don't know which aspect of School-To-Work is the scariest: that it's so determinedly, unapologetically statist and centralist, or that it managed to sneak in under the national radar, or that so many people would say it's a good idea."

FP, To me it is no longer "scary", but enraging! Our most high politicians and educrats and many of their stooges know EXACTLY what they are doing. And, using VERY "pretty" words, they have sold this to an ignorant public. But, it is those politicians themselves who have imposed that ignorance. And, those who are capable of informing the public about this monstrocity are SILENT!! The major "news" media {I call them "ignore-ants" for their DELIBERATE silence in regard to this most important issue} are as evil as those who concocted this evil. TRULY "Diabolical"!!! What passes for education today is pure unadulterated EVIL!!! Peace and love, George.

The thing that Mr. Holland neglected to point out in this article is the fact the the "No Child Left Behind Act" which just passed under urging of GWB picks up where School-to-Work, Goals 2000 and The Workforce Investment Act left off - that of completely cemeting the National Curriculum that is necessary to bring all states into complete compliance. School hasn't been about REAL education since the Elementary and Secondary Education Act passed in 1965. It has been about dumbing down the population and creating "socialized", compliant citizens who look to the nanny state to fulfill their wishes and provide protection and necessities!

That whirring sound you hear from the northeast is our Founding Fathers spinning in their graves.....

More info available at The Wilson County Parents Coalition website on education.

Grammar and high schools were never intended to compete with trade schools. They were supposed to provide the rudiments of literacy and numeracy to the whole of the population.

This has been going on longer than you might think:

So the world got compulsion schooling at the end of a state bayonet for the first time in human history; modern forced schooling started in Prussia in 1819 with a clear vision of what centralized schools could deliver:
1.Obedient soldiers to the army;
2.Obedient workers to the mines;
3.Well subordinated civil servants to government;
4.Well subordinated clerks to industry
5.Citizens who thought alike about major issues. "
..."Our form of compulsory schooling is an invention of the state of Massachusetts around 1850. It was resisted - sometimes with guns - by an estimated eighty per cent of the Massachusetts population, the last outpost in Barnstable on Cape Cod not surrendering its children until the 1880's when the area was seized by militia and children marched to school under guard."

Next: How a computer chooses your life’s work.

I'm looking forward to the next installment. I heard Sam Blumenfeld say ten years ago that the push to connect schools to the "information superhighway" was to provide a means whereby departments of education could compile a very thorough dossier on each child and his family, including very important personal subjects such as religious affiliation.

The ultimate goal was/is to "remediate" the undesirable beliefs and behaviors of individual children by computer, thus bypassing the mediating influence of teachers and parents.

...the 1880's when the area was seized by militia and children marched to school under guard

And it's just kept becoming more invasive since that time. Compulsory schooling began with very few years being "required" (4 or 6, I can't remember which right now) and then progressed to 8, then to 12 and now to 13 in most states. The educrate power-elite are now attempting to make 14 compulsory and I have no doubts that they will succeed because the sheople are buying all the progaganda hook, line and sinker!!

As far as Internet access goes, you are absolutely correct! It is just another way for OUR children to be monitored by the state. The education establishment/state use the data compliled from the computers to catalog the beliefs and attitudes of the school children according to what they type and what web sites they visit and how long they spend on each. It's not just the school children either!! Comcast and AOL (I'm not sure about the other public ISPs) monitor not only which web sites are visited by their customers (supposedly in the name of marketing!), Comcast also "captures" many things that customers TYPE while on web sites (again, for "marketing" purposes!!). We have very little privacy now and if the current trends in education continue, the population won't even be concerned about it within two generations. They will have already grown accustomed to having their every move and thought monitored and will be afraid to "make waves" even if they DO care!

How can the government decide what children are going to do for a living twenty years from now? Does ANYONE have any idea of what careers are going to be available twenty years from now? Artilect Psychologist? Avatar trainer? Network neurologist? Seriously, give me a freakin' break here.

More evidence to throw on the "reasons to de-fund public education" pile.

Solution for Comcast: Zone Alarm. In addition to being a great firewall, Zone Alarm also protects you from trojans or other spyware by allowing you to specify which programs can access the internet and which ones cannot. If Comcast has installed some program on there that is capturing your keystrokes and then sending them out to their server without your knowledge or permission, Zone Alarm will detect the attempted access to the Internet and will prompt you to allow or disallow access. It gives control back to you. (If you don't know what the program is, just don't allow it access.)

And best of all, it's free! Get it here: Zone Labs website:

Another free spyware detector is called AdAware, and it lets you scan your system for spyware that has been installed and removes it. Get it here: Lavasoft AdAware

I believe the main reason for this is that the population is getting to the point such that it is too expensive to train everyone.

Who trained you to use that complex tool known as the computer? One thing we all learned in school is "learned helplessness":

Martin Seligman is responsible for the Learned Helplessness theory which had a major influence on psychological research into depression in the 1970s. Seligman discovered helplessness by accident whilst studying the effects of inescapable shock on active avoidance learning in dogs. Seligman restrained dogs in a pavlovian harness and administered several shocks (UCS) paired with a conditioned stimulus (CS) - this is the conventional CS-UCS pairing procedure used to study classical conditioning . Then these dogs were placed in a shuttle-box where they could avoid shock by jumping over a barrier. The shuttle-box was used to study the role of operant conditioning in learning. Most of the dogs failed to learn to avoid shock. Seligman argued that prior exposure to inescapable shock interfered with the ability to learn in a situation where avoidance or escape was possible. Seligman used the term Learned Helplessness to describe this phenomenon.

This is what we do with children. We "harness" them against their wills for 12 years and force-feed them knowledge. Then we are surprised when they emerge without thinking skills or even the desire to learn anything new.

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