Cloning of the American Mind:
Eradicating Morality
Through Education.
Dear All:
This article was sent to us by B. K. Ekman herself. Author of Cloning the
American Mind, Eradicating Morally Through Education, and Micro Chipped, the
August 7th issue of Insight Magazine, page 45 published her latest article.
Not found on Insight's web site.
August 7, 2000
Insight Magazine
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The Seven Deadly Sins of Parental Irresponsibility
By B. K. Eakman
Among talk-show hosts who interview on education issues, the topic
dujour is school violence. Kiddie terrorism has superseded discussions about
curriculum, teaching methods and even school choice.
Funny how what once was obvious about juvenile misbehavior is
bewildering in the "Theraputic Age," when more clinical data on what makes
people tick supposedly has been collected than in any previous era.
Childhood meanness always has been a part of growing up-taunting other
youngsters, playing malicious practical jokes, including in gossip and
put-downs, vying for pecking order in snobbish (or rebel) cliques. Adults,
especially parents, used to reign in such conduct, being ever vigilant of
youthful excesses. They looked around when they changed the beds, paid
attention to the company their offspring kept (and idolized), said "No!" to
inappropriate apparel and entertainment, quashed disobedience and punished
foul language.
Fast-forward 35 years-to when our nation's leaders split hairs
over
the definition of the word "is." One has to ask: Are weapons really
so much
easier to obtain than they were, say in 1946? Or have the taboos simply
vanished? Or, more sobering: Have our kids suddenly become certifiably nuts?
As a former educator who saw the scribbling on the wall in the
1970's,
when schools started soliciting rock stars for antidrug-abuse videos (which
my eighth-graders, predictably, laughed at), I see today seven factors
turning out this nation's first generation of killer kids:
1. Promotion in schools, parenting texts and product
advertising of an
authoritarian peer subculture which
has replaced
adults' long-abdicated role in the areas
of leadership and
guidance (i.e., adults aren't the authority
figure any more.)
2. Decision-making based on consensus rather than on
principle
as a response to important dilemmas and
issues.
3. A daily routine that has youngsters spending more
time with
each other than with adults.
4. Approaches to education and child-rearing that focus
on
emotional temperature-taking instead of developing
conscience or intellect.
5. The tendency to give smaller offenses a free pass
as in "don't seat the small stuff," especially in
areas such as tact, prpriety and orderliness, so
that a child views life as a constant challenge to test
the limits of parents' and society's tolerance.
6. Proliferation and emphasis on the gruesome, ugly and
prurient in all entertainment mediums: music, film
and print. Geared toward ever-younger ages, such
fare not only desensitizes children to deplorable
and demeaning acts, but creates the impression that
one's darker nature should be fully explored.
7. A burgeoning legal drug culture which implies that no
self-discipline need to be applied to behavior, since
character is determined by a plethora of
syndromes and brain-chemistry imbalances.
Even toddlers recognize that, for the most part,
adults today just go
through the motions of child-rearing, occasionally mentoring, not wishing to
appear unyielding, inflexible, or dogmatic.
Having succumbed to counterproductive notions of
child management for
some 35 years, gullible parents and educators-who no doubt would have
apoplexy over the idea of children being seen not heard-are, ironically,
settling for compliance at any price, even if it means drugging every kid who
squirms.
Would anybody have dreamed 30 years ago that parents
would some day be
intimidated by school and day-care staff into placing kids, including
preschoolers, on prescription stimulants, antidepressants, tranquilizers and
other legal mood or mind-altering drugs? Attention-deficit/hpyeractivity
disorders are just the beginning. New mental-health
breakthroughs reveal an evolving pattern of absurdity: for example,
a psychotropic drug (a selective scrotonin-reuptake-inhibitor) for
shopaholics (oniomania) and therapies for nerds.
In the wake of the shootings at Columbine High School
in Littleton,
Colorado, experts now purvey the view that vengeful nerds may belong to the
three out of every 100 children who suffer from a mild form of pervasive
developmental disorder (i.e., don't fit in). The same experts
who promote drugs for docility still caution parents against lecturing and
scolding, advise turning toddlers into decision makers before they have
acquired either values or maturity of judgment and admonish parents who
complain of messy bedrooms, immodest apparel and coarse language. Carrying
an aspirin for a headache, of course, is a serious matter to school
officials. The bomb thrown to postwar parnents by psychologists proved to
have longer half-life and greater destructive force than the one that fell on
Hiroshima, Japan. Awash in 35 years of moral hyprocrisy and theraputic
zealotry, a confused and self- absorbed baby-boom generation today
perpetulates the dynamics of violence, even when it purports to do the
opposite through a frenzy of legislation, media campaigns and character
curriculums. The violence will continue until we rediscover our common sense.
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B.K. Eakman is executive director of the National Education Consortium and
the author of the book, Cloning of the American Mind: Eradicating Morality
Through Education.
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