An Interview with Beverly Eakman: Observing Changing Values

Michael F. Shaughnessy - 9.15.09
Senior Columnist EducationNews.org
Eastern New Mexico University
Portales, New Mexico

1. Beverly, in your 2007 book, as well as in articles, you have written quite a bit about “How Our Psychologized Classrooms Are Producing a Nation of Sitting Ducks.”  When did all of this start?

The seeds of concerns about public schools were planted during my years as an education major in college. I realized my role was not to transmit basics, or literacy, or proficiency at anything, but to promote "mental health." Texas Tech University, where I decided to go, was out in the sticks: Hicksville USA—the last place in the world one would expect to find an essentially Marxist approach to teacher education. Most of my classmates were from tiny, backwoods towns, and yet they were eating up what their education professors were pitching. Of course, the professors were appealing in part to students’ budding urge to flee the nest and become their “own person,” just like professors did on other campuses around the nation that were actually rioting and demonstrating. At least there was none of that at Tech.

The majority of our course work consisted of what we called “ed psych”: education psychology, child psychology, adolescent psychology, and so on. I thought it strange that nobody really cared whether we had a grasp of any particular subject area.

My introduction to the new thinking first came in 1966 when this “psych” professor walked in, drew several concentric circles on the chalkboard, and announced: “The first thing you kids need to know is that there’s no such thing as common sense.” He tapped the Bull’s Eye. “That’s Ego,” he said. “That’s what’s important. These other circles represent things like religion, and family, home, and so on. All of that is peripheral. Ego is the center of the universe.”

Once in the classroom, I realized courses like logic, philosophy, rhetoric and chronological history, which once helped students get a handle on modern issues, had disappeared—both in high schools and at the college-graduate level. Nothing incorporated concepts about self-reliance, property rights, limited government (especially in the context of regulatory power), or the role of religion in society. In high schools, courses like physics, chemistry, calculus, and physiology started being reserved for those with very high IQ scores, who were then skimmed off the top for better things, or else they were rounded up to "mentor" slower students.

Then as a young teacher in California, I attended workshops by behavioral experts like William Glasser, who explained how children needed to be told their every accomplishment was wonderful, even when it wasn't. Other psychologists claimed the traditional approach to teaching and raising children was "creating a thousand neurotics for every one that psychiatrists can hope to help with psychotherapy."

Childrearing advice mirrored what was going on in the schools. Parents’ magazines of the mid-1960s suddenly were filled with articles by child “experts” advising moms and pops to lay off the discipline and give children their “space.” Remember that? Don’t snoop around in your youngster’s bedroom and closet. A child has a right to privacy, and so on.

This sort of thing had a predictable effect—youngsters totally out of control. Parents soon tired of being around their children, too, and by 1978, day care was big business. But when the fire hit the fan in the 1990s at Littleton, CO; then Springfield, OR; Paducah, KY; and Santee, CA, it was the parents who got blamed for not doing all those things the “experts” had lobbied against for some 35 years. By obliterating the lines between right and wrong and advising kids to “discover their own value system,” schools suddenly were awash in disciplinary problems never previously experienced, not even in the bad old days when pupils had to stoke the fire to heat up the classroom.

Yet, child “experts” today stuck tenaciously to their misguided vision (and still do), calling the resulting atrocities “mental health issues” instead of moral issues.

2. Who, if anyone is responsible or are these just cultural changes?

The pioneers of attitude prediction, many of whom also helped establish today’s hefty list of “markers” (risk factors that supposedly signal mental illness) is long and reflects, again, the failure of the education system to teach about those who have profoundly influenced the course of modern events: individuals like Wilhelm Reich, Kurt Lewin, Theodor Adorno and Erich Fromm (Germany); A. S. Neill, A. J. Oraje and John Rawlings Rees (Great Britain); Antonio Gramsci (Italy); Anatoly Lunacharsky and Georg Lukacs (Russia); G. Brock Chishom and Ewen Cameron (Canada); and the U.S.’s own Ralph Tyler, Benjamin Bloom, John Goodlad, Theodore Sizer, Archie LaPointe, Willard Wirtz, and Ronald Havelock.  This is just a partial list.  There followed a slew of others who worked to “medicalize” the terminologies of psychology, establishing a system of numerical codes for computerization.  This lent legitimacy to what would otherwise have been considered “questionable illnesses.” The goal was to ensure that medical professionals, the media and government accepted these terms as they might “diabetes,” thereby ensuring that the mental illnesses so codified would remain indelible.

On the computer side of things, experts like Dustin Heuston, George Hall, Richard M. Jaeger, C. Philip Kearny and David E. Wiley utilized the education system to get the bugs out of data-collection, thus facilitating the stigmatization of political dissenters and resisters as damaged goods.

If most of the names above seem unfamiliar, don’t feel badly.  Most of what gets published was (and still is) located in hard-to-find professional “working” papers, meaning they do not reach general circulation.

3. You have written quite cogently about some recent observations. Can you talk about the now infamous “Lemonade stand” issue?

I was commenting in a recent article I wrote for The New American on a story in the New York Post published Aug. 16 on how police with the city’s Parks Department slapped a $50 fine, without warning, on a 10-year-old and her flummoxed dad (who responsibly accompanied her) for erecting, of all things, an “unlicensed” lemonade stand. (See story at: http://www.nypost.com/seven/08162009/news/regionalnews/sweet_lemonade_kid_lapped_184770.htm.

The very next day, the Washington Times carried an unrelated report by Iason Athanasiadis concerning how, in 1978 (the height of Boomer student activism), a brash young man named Moshen Sazegara “quit his studies at the University of Illinois to join Ayatollah Rubollah Khomeini’s return from exile to lead Iran’s Islamic Revolution” and to help establish “Iran’s Revolutionary Guard…an ideological army entrusted with safeguarding the principles of the revolution.” (See full story at: http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/aug/17/khomeini-ally-now-leads-iran-dissidents/.  Apparently, Mr. Sazegara had an eventual fall-out with the abusive, terrorist regime, and at that point more mature, he returned to the U.S. to lead a global opposition movement to the regime he once so brashly supported.

To me, these two stories highlighted a major disconnect in American policymaking:  Here’s a guy who in his youthful arrogance, bore substantial responsibility for the overthrow of a pro-Western government, plunging Iran into an 8^th-century freak show.   Yet, the U.S. not only allows him to return, but stories about him in every newspaper praise him for his work in garnering opposition to the regime.  Yet, both then and now, Sazegara is a supporter of “civil disobedience” and “protest movements.”  Where did he learn that?  Certainly not in Iran, even though he was an undergraduate student at both Sharif University of Technology in Iran and the Illinois Institute of Technology back when he was a leader of the student movement against the shah of Iran.  This smacks, or course, of dual citizenship, although I could not confirm it.  Be that as it may, he learned civil disobedience and protest in America, where universities were (and remain) steeped in Marxist strategies, primarily inciting dissent through mob psychology.  As I wrote in The New American, Sazegara would have been better off setting up lemonade stands in his college years.

Meanwhile, a little girl gets a reprimand and a fine for doing something every child used to do 25 years ago, when Sazegara was inciting protests, no matter whether it was in a public park or a neighbor’s yard.  This sort of thing reflects a huge “disconnect” in American policymaking, and it has nothing to do with terrorism, 9/11 or real crimes.  Such policies do, however, tend to acclimate citizens to fear their government at all levels, which leads inevitably to a police state.

4. What the hell kind of message is this sending to kids nowadays?

As I indicated above, I believe we are advertently or inadvertently telling our kids to fear government and acclimating them mo a police state.  We are teaching them that rules do not have to make sense, that they are arbitrary, and that, parents or no parents, average citizens has no say—which means that you can go to all the “town hall,” “focus groups,” and “committee meetings” you want, but it is all for show and in the end means nothing.  I think the little girl’s father who helped her with the lemonade stand found that out the hard way.

5. Now what’s going on in the U.S. Army, of all places?

Well, this was rather a shock to me:  The Department of defense has coined a new term for what used to be termed the “psychologically controlled environment”:  perception management (or “PM”).  Basically, it is changing attitudes, “the other side to believe what one wishes it to believe.”  In other words, propaganda via a combination of “truth projection,” operations security, cover and deception, and psychological operations.”  The Wikipedia definition adds the “imposition of falsehoods and deceptions.”  Obviously, the terms “brainwashing” and “indoctrination” and gotten a black eye in the press, so it was time not only a change of terminology, but few tweaks to the method.  PM is it, and the term first apparently hit a home run with experts at DOD, then education and marketing.  The idea is to get the masses to jump onboard and accept the new “doctrine,” but unfortunately they do not understand what it entails, most having never learned logic, philosophy and rhetoric, so they are essentially sitting ducks for in the psychopolitics game.

6. How does it relate to psychology?

To ensure that psychiatry “permeate every educational activity of national life” and “infiltrate the professional and social activities of [all] people” was a global goal that originated with a British Brigadier General, Dr. John Rawlings Rees in a 1940 speech to the National Council for Mental Hygiene. He ended on an ominous note:

“[T]hough our knowledge be incomplete…I think we must imitate the Totalitarians and organize some kind of fifth column activity.”

Canadian colleague Dr. Brock Chisholm chimed in with sinister comments of his own at the close of the War in 1946, in a speech to the World Federation of Mental Health.  He argued for “freedom from morality” and the “eventual eradication of right and wrong.” Such traditional upbringing was making children ill, he insisted.  “If the race is to be freed of its crippling burden of good and evil it must be psychiatrists who take the original responsibility.”

   Rees and Chisholm had company — in political, educational, journalistic, marketing and military circles, most ensconced within interconnected foundations, associations and “research centers” (foreign and domestic).  They became Rees’ and Chisholm’s enablers. Together, they created Rees’ dream: “a controlled psychological environment.

I mean, how did people get the impression that parents are “nonprofessionals” and therefore basically incompetent to rear their children without help from mental health specialists and child experts?  Where did we get the idea that being sad about one’s circumstances was a clinical condition to be “cured” with a drug?  Or that feeling “overwhelmed” was a mental health issue?  Or how about that child who clicks his pen repeatedly, or kicks his foot as he sits at his desk, or passing notes to classmates when he is supposed to be listening to the teacher is “hyperactive,” and in need of treatment — even drugs — to curb these annoying habits?

Well, what we saw were commercials, featuring a household news anchor or sports figure, telling us that, by golly, we can “beat depression — just like I did” by getting psychiatric counseling and drugs.  Parenting articles, including those that come in your Sunday paper, pour forth with “expert” advice via articles, advertisements, and editorials — all promoting the notion that people “have” (as in “disease”) attention-deficit disorder, anxiety disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, a reading disorder (dyslexia), and so forth?  None of these are diseases, none can be proved via any medical test.  Yet, people have bought in to the hype, and the psychopharmaceutical industry is laughing all the way to the bank.

7. How does this fly in the face of common sense?

The best way to answer that question is to cite a professor of mine who walked into my very first educational psychology course.  One the first day, he walked in and told the class:  “The first thing you kids need to understand is that there is no such thing as ‘common sense’.”

8. What are you currently working on?

I'm writing for four publications (online and print), have been interviewed for two separate documentaries.  A major film is also in the works.

9. Do you have a web site where people can learn more about you and your work?

Yes, it is www.beverlye.com.  Also, anybody can “google” my name for latest works by me or about me.