Western Indoctrination

People feel less free in a totalitarian state than in a democratic one, but they have one advantage...they know they are being controlled whereas in a "free" society such as ours, people are unaware of how they are being manipulated therefore making our system of control much more powerful because it's impossible to resist or rise up against a system of control that the majority of the people are ignorant.

Nazi Germany is a perfect example of how efficacious western indoctrination can be. Germany was considered one of the most advanced civilizations the world has ever seen. German people lead the world in many areas such as art, science, technology, literature and philosophy, yet disintegrated into a barbaric shop of horrors in the blink of an eye, with the consent of these "civilized, progressive" people.

One is more likely to remember something if he or she is experiencing a heightened sense of emotion at the same time. The Bush Administration, in particular, knows this all too well and is very good at controlling what they want us to remember and distracting us from what they don't want us to remember.

Our educational system does not teach us the necessary critical thinking skills to combat propaganda or indoctrination rather we teach our students to be sponges, absorbing the "right" answers, many times, without thinking about why these answers are "right". In other words, students are prepared to join the herd so that group think can continue preserving the status quo. "No Child Left Behind" emphasizing test scores encourages teachers to teach the test, further indoctrinating our future American citizens, instead of teaching them to evaluate, solve, reason and gain a deeper understanding of the subject matter in order for them to think for themselves.

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Is "No Child Left Behind" a Dollars Game Only?

Is NCLB is just another way to enrich private companies and individuals, especially those close to President George W. Bush and his family?

Many critics of NCLB believe this to be true and there is plenty of evidence to support this charge.

It is the unreasonable proficiency goals that have convinced many that the hidden agenda of NCLB is to sacrifice the public education system in the name of profit, either through the development of expensive and privately produced supplementary education materials or the eventual privatization of schools. "NCLB is a dollars game and it needs to be understood on that level," says Walker. "It has nothing to do with the children -- it has to do with making people rich."

Private tutoring, for example, has witnessed explosive growth since the law's inception. ThinkEquity Partners, a San Francisco-based investment bank, estimates that public schools will funnel more than $900 million dollars to private tutors in 2006-2007, up from $300 million in 2003-2004. Textbook publishers are exacting similarly huge profits. McGraw Hill, which publishes the materials for NCLB's Reading First program, cited in its Quarterly Report that sales in the Elementary and High School market were critical to their frequent double-digit growth in earnings per share (17.6 percent in the second quarter of 2006).

The Bush administration has also provided the opposition plenty of ammunition. Ignite Learning, a company owned by the president's brother Neil and backed financially by Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talai, developed a system last year named COW, or "curriculum on wheels." COW is a high-tech instruction aide for teachers that expects to produce $5 million dollars in revenue in 2006, according to BusinessWeek. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, former First Lady Barbara Bush donated an undisclosed amount of money to the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund with explicit directions that it be spent only on educational software produced by, you guessed it, Ignite Learning.

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Bush Proposes Steep Cuts to PBS Funding

This, from a President, that wants “No Child Left Behind” and strongly promotes cleaning up what children are exposed to in the media. "No Child Left Behind" will leave many less fortunate children behind, because it encourages teachers to "teach the test" instead of providing a dynamic learning environment for young minds to flourish and prepare them for the ever changing world in which we now live.

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