How Witch-Hunters Operate

As I grew up in a California suburb that was largely colonized in the latter half of the 20th century with the hope of many upwardly mobile young families, I am often reminded by fellow Californians of my good fortune in spending those years between cradle and teenage wasteland nourished and sheltered by privilege. Up until high school, I even had the rare benefit of experiencing pre–Proposition 13 California public schools, a Golden Age of Education rivaling Athens, the Renaissance, or Haight-Ashbury's Summer of Self-Love. When I confess how I have trouble remembering what or if I learned much of anything during this utopian period, the wistfulness of the young Californian liberals turns to disappointment, disbelief, and rage. Yet cancel culture's recent occupation of our zeitgeist has given me a renewed appreciation of the advanced multi-year curriculum that I received during that time when occupants saturated the school with the insatiable primal energy of the id while adults were not looking. Almost all I really needed to know about witch-hunting I learned in middle school.

Witch-hunting is the biomimicry of junior high school at its peak Lord of the Flies. When I left my relatively uniform class stratum outside school, I found inside those hallowed walls of lower education a caste system so rigid and unforgiving that third-world dictatorships could complain of cultural appropriation. A hierarchy formed based on fickle pubescent popularity in a system of unearned privilege for the higher strata and soul-crushing oppression for the lower strata innocents, intimidated into a silence that prevented the truth from reaching both the apathetic guardians inside and the concerned ones outside. The fawning and fearful mobs were happy to join in the persecution to improve their own position in the hierarchy,

From the beginning of the Prussian education system 1840-1870 as devised by behaviorsts like Pavlov’s teacher Wilhelm Wundt, students were socially conditioned to themselves insist on conformity in outlook and ideation, to be their own enforcers of ideological homogeneity, to socially punish rebellious individuality. This conformity drive continues with Queen Bees and Wannabes under the personality corrosion of social media experience designed by experts in fostering addiction.
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As noted by Paolo Lioni (Leipzig Connection), the Prussian behaviorist system which sees humanity as only an aggregate of conditioned animal reactions, was spread by late 19th century psychology dept. chairmen. Pre-adolescent schooling in the Prussian model largely comprised, in effect, extended kindergarten, until age 13, when the students were formally set to fighting one another. In the Prussian model, one in 200 students, the high-elite Alphas in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, were taught to regulate the lower orders through a control hierarchy reposing on a second layer, a sub-elite of 6 in 200 students destined to become Beta administrators. Students by 2nd grade have a confidential federal identifier number indelibly setting their lifelong employment fate, universally accessible through data sharing by corporations, but unknown to parents.
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John Klyczek (School World Order: The Technocratic Globalization of Corporatized Education), a community college adjunct professor, takes this system, now using portable Chromebooks to convey operant conditioning long established in student computer software, into the period 1960-2021, with much background from Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt (The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America).
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Chromebooks are used as the vehicle for the conditioning methodology of B.F. Skinner, only to give students the bare minimum of training destining them for narrow job categories with severely limited upward mobility potential which they are assigned from early K-12. The cookie-cutter system is designed to produce legions of mindless consumers and compliant employees in gigantic corporations.
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John Taylor Gatto challenged B.F. Skinner’s method of “operant conditioning” treating human beings as lab rats. “I began to devise guerrilla exercises to allow as many of the kids I taught as possible the raw material people have always used to educate themselves: privacy, choice, freedom from surveillance, and as broad a range of situations and human associations as my limited power and resources could manage … to maneuver them into positions where they would have a chance to be their own teachers and to make themselves the major text of their own education.”

Skinner’s infant daughter Deborah, who wasn’t allowed to be touched, was the first experimental subject decades before computers confined your child’s mind in a portable Skinner box.

Fascinating self-education in the library corner of the One-Room Schoolhouse: “…the older students sometimes helping the younger with their lessons; the younger overhearing the lessons of their elders and learning them almost before they [the senior students] learned them…Two of the lessons stand out in my mind. Each took up a single sheet of paper. One of them was headed by a couple of verses of devotional poetry. Beneath the verses, the student had parsed every word in the verses, describing what part of speech it was, what grammatical form it bore (case, number, and gender for nouns and adjectives; person, number, tense, mood, and voice for verbs), what function it served in its clause, and what relation it bore to other words. The student’s performance was entirely correct. The other lesson was obviously an introductory one: the student wrote a noun in its singular and plural forms, in the nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative cases. This second student was clearly one of the younger children, as you could tell from an occasional roughness in his printing. The word in question was doulos (δοῦλος): Greek for “servant.” The children were evidently studying koine Greek, so as to be able to read the New Testament in the original tongue.” – Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes: The Rebuilding of American Culture. Recollections of the “Anne of Green Gables” One-Room Schoolhouse in Orwell Corner, Prince Edward Island by Nova Scotia, where there was no upper-limit on what children could learn.

John Taylor Gatto notes how a vast economic system irrevocably committed to the current schooling tyranny has an unreleasable deathlock on our children’s future. The arbitrary, capricious schooling policies come down from a vertical pipeline with such ingrained anonymity that school administrators have not the slightest idea from where they originate. School unions, part of the centralized master planning from the turn of the 19th century, constantly diminish the interests of teachers as ever increasing numbers of non-instructional classified personnel, who exercise no direct educational function for students’ benefit, are continually hired, padding school-district employment rolls so that the expense per student continually rises with continually diminishing educational effectiveness, each new hire contributing union dues with no bargaining or interest advantage to the teachers who actually manage children, resulting in continually diminishing compensation. Mr. Gatto calls schooling the largest public works project in history, the largest business in America and probably in the world. Textbook companies, testing companies, schooling paraphernalia and school-lunch suppliers–to diminish the autonomy of families and make the isolated individual dependent on government–educationist universities and the federal government, a gobsmacking breadth of interlocking economic and political interest-sectors, together constitute an immovable, self-interested institutional block to improving the prospects for children. The corporate consumerist and human resources management stakes in schooling have the effect that if children were ever to be taught self-reliance, autonomy and free thinking–public schools and colleges are far more rigidly doctrinaire than parochial-religious schools–if young people were ever to attain independence from the constant requirement of being taught what to think and minute oversight of what they do at all times, in schooling and employment, there would be a terrible crash in the existing, dependency-based economy. Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt asserts that if your children are undergoing standardized testing, whether in public, private, charter schools or even home-schools, they are under the system’s control. The only escape would be to go off the grid, something that is largely impossible under a worldwide control hierarchy that has turned away from enforcing its mandates through conflict to finessing its dictates in the most subtle social control system in human history, by fostering addictive divertissments to keep perpetual children of all ages constantly distracted, the calculated addiction-fostering of the social-media interface now seamlessly integrated with Skinnerian operant conditioning for lifelong cognitive tyranny, delivered with “wrap-around”/”pipeline services” in The Community School.

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