By Dr. Paul Cates
The prophet Hosea warned, My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge because thou has rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no priest to me: seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget thy children. Deuteronomy 6:7
Education is defined as the task of changing someone’s behavior. It has also been called “brain washing.” There is nothing neutral about education. Everyone involved in education has an agenda and a purpose. That purpose can be for good or evil. Moreover, God said, learn not the way of the heathen. Jeremiah 10:2
In 1964, our Supreme Court took prayer out of the public schools. It removed the moral fiber of our country by replacing the Ten Commandments with “situational ethics.” It made a liar out of our Savior who said, I am the way, the truth and the light (John 14:6). He could no longer be presented as He presented Himself. He now became just a teacher and maybe a prophet, a religious leader.
How did all this come about? Instead of teaching our children as instructed in Deuteronomy, we allowed others, those with alien doctrines, to teach them. Instead of our children knowing right and wrong, everything became “relative.” We did what Ephraim did, … he hath mixed himself among the people. We lost our identity. We allowed what Ephraim allowed, strangers have devoured his strength, and he knoweth it not… Hosea 7:9.
The Romans did the same thing. When the empire was at its height, they were too busy to train their children. So, what did they do? They hired Greek teachers and philosophers to teach their children. In less than two generations, the Roman children no longer thought as Roman citizens; they thought like their Greek teachers and philosophers. The Greek teacher and philosophers did not set out to destroy Rome. They simply taught what they believed, and the Roman children became like their Greek teachers. Rome fell.
American people want education, but they want someone else to do it: some Greek teacher or philosopher.
American education has been on a decline since 1963. “A Nation at Risk” says, “…the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people.” “Some 23 million American adults are functionally illiterate…” “About 13 percent of all 17-year-olds in the United States can be considered functionally illiterate…” “International comparisons of student achievement…reveal that on 19 academic tests American students were never first or second and … were last seven times.” [A Nation at Risk, 1983 report of the National commission on excellence in Education.]
American people want an end to pedagogical fads and experimentation and a return to educational basics. They want to strengthen the “Five New Basics”: English, mathematics, science, social studies and computer science. They want more homework, a longer school day and school year, stricter discipline, tougher standards for teachers, more challenging curricula, and better textbooks.
What are the American people getting? Not the above; rather, they are getting OBE (Outcome Based Education).
Total transformation: Educational reform through OBE (Greek teacher and philosopher) is a major part of a sweeping Orwellian plan to radically restructure all of American society along revolutionary, socialist lines from top to bottom. Shirley McCure says, “what we’re into is the total restructuring of society.” [Address: 1988, National Governor’s Conference, Wichita, Kansas.]
Education is not simply a chance situation in the usual sense of change. It is a total transformation of society. Our society is in a crisis of restructuring, and you can not get away from it. You can not go into the churches, you can not go into government or into our courts or into business and hide form the fact that what we are facing is the total restructuring of our society.
The OBE transformationists envision their role as one of completely redesigning society. The OBE plan calls not only for radically changing what is taught in the schools and how it is taught, but for tying every child into a master computer system that will continuously track not only his academic progress but his beliefs, values, attitudes, medical and health records, and family history.
Under OBE, schools are scheduled for expansion not only to include day care, but to be merged with health, employment, and other social service agencies.
Parents will be drawn into OBE through mandatory “parent training” classes and a “life long learning” program that will require continuous retraining and recertification for every job.
OBE is operating in its various forms: Outcome Based Instruction – Outcome Driven Development Mode, Performance – Based Curriculum, Competency – Based Education, PACOS (People, A Course of Study), MACOS (Man, A Course of Study), and at one level or another in most of the state school systems of this country. What is amazing is that this revolutionary plan has progressed so far with so little opposition.
This educational revolution has radically altered our former republic. The thing that is impressive is that it has been peacefully accomplished by a technique that has included rewriting the English Language and altering operational definitions. Thus a delusion has been created so that the American public thinks they are talking about the same things as the educators because they are using the same words. By altering the operational definitions of words, opposite and violently hostile ideas have been presented by the same word signs. This has been America’s first experience with dialectic language used by Hitler, Marx and Lenin.
OBE is one of the latest American experiences with the Marxian dialectic. “OBE means focusing and organizing all of the school’s programs and instructional efforts around clearly defined outcomes we want tall students to demonstrate when they leave school.” [Address by William Spady, Director of the International Center on Outcome-Based restructuring (widely acknowledged as the architect of O.B.E.), 1992.]
Sounds Good?! Watch their interpretation of the above statement. Words take on meanings entirely divorced from those traditionally associated with them. Orwell’s “Newspeak” is alive and flourishing in OBE.
Defining outcomes: Most of us would “assume” it refers to the demonstration of discreet knowledge. For instance, first grade, the ability to recite, recognize and write the letters of the alphabet or numbers from 1 to 100. Not OBE. OBE is an agent of change. “The purpose of education and schools,” “…is to change the thoughts, feelings and actions of students.” School is a change agent – and the specific focus is on changing people. “The goal is to develop a new kind of elementary school teacher who…engages in teaching as clinical practice…and functions as a responsible agent of social change.” [B-Step (Behavioral Teacher Education project, 1967, U.S. office of Education, Contract # OEC-0-9-320424-4042) states in the project’s goals, “The primary goal of this influential program is stated as:”]
Rather than being taught facts, as mentioned under 1st grade, information, concepts, and essential skills in reading, writing, and arithmetic, children are engaged in supposed “higher order thinking skills,” ignoring the self-evident truth that it is impossible to employ “higher order thinking” without a base of factual knowledge. This has been forced on education by a group of pseudo-science and passing it off on society as a “higher science” when in fact it is a false religion with atheistic beliefs, doctrines and premises. Psychology was established along with sociology, to replace Christianity and by using the vehicle of education, is doing the job.
OBE curriculum is tilted heavily to the affective domain in order to manipulate and change feelings, attitudes and values.
An OBE objective for grades 9-12 states, “The student will develop communication skills, including being able to talk with one’s actual or potential partner about sexual behavior.” In the first grade, “The student will identify different types of family structures, so that no single type is seen as the only possible one.” “Write a new U.S. Constitution.” (They don’t even understand the present one.) [Oklahoma’s OBE State Guidelines.]
In OBE, “All students understand and appreciate their worth as unique and capable individuals, and exhibit self esteem.” [Statement from Pennsylvania State OBE.] What” wrong with that you say! Our leading “Christian” psychologists write and expound the same philosophy. So they do. But scripture says He must increase, but I must decrease. John 3:30. The scriptures say the opposite, but through the false religion of psychology, a lie is made into an acceptable truth.
In teaching reading, phonics is excluded. The “whole language” and “look-say” method are accepted. These methods are responsible for our pandemic illiterate society today.
“Cooperative learning” is stressed by organizing virtually all learning activities in group activities. Individual excellence is discouraged as the group is allowed to progress only as a unit. When every child has mastered the stated behavioral goals, they can move on. “Group think” is in, individuality, competition, personal striving is out.
A permanent computer file or “portfolio” is established for each child, complete with detailed school, health, medical and family records. The student is trapped in a computer-driven behavior modification curriculum. This is just like Dr. Skinner’s pigeons. This is just like Hitler’s, Stalin’s, Lenin’s and others’ Marxian philosophy.
Teachers are likewise trapped in this computer-driven, behavior modification curriculum. If their students don’t “successfully” achieve or “regurgitate” the “correct” response, the teachers will lose their teaching credentials and be weeded out of the “teaching,” “brain washing,” “behavioral modification,” “false-religion” profession.
In OBE, parents are required to take “effective parenting” classes. “Community service” is required for both children and parents. Training for “global citizenship” is established as the primary purpose.
As Rome saw her country destroyed and her children turn against her, so will “outcome based education’s” objective be achieved in American education, or should I say formally American education.
They are now training and producing the citizen of the new “one world order”!
[Dr. Paul Cates holds a B.A.-Psychology, M.A.-Special Education: Teaching the Child with Learning Disabilities, and a Ph.D.-Curriculum & Instruction.