Outcome Based Education: Hegelian Dialectics, Part 3 by Denise Hohnholz

Outcome Based Education
Our Generation is lost to the truth of God, to the reality of divine revelation, to the content of God’s will, to the power of His redemption, and to the authority of His Word. For this loss is paying dearly in a swift relapse to paganism. The savages are stirring again; one can hear them rumbling and rustling in the tempo of our times. Carl F. H. Henry Twilight of a Great Civilization: The Drift to Neo-Paganism

The goal of any schooling is to indoctrinate a child with the values and understanding he needs to live life. For the Christian, this means teaching him to love the Lord with all his heart, mind and soul; to read and write so he can read the Word of God; and equip him with the skills that will enable him to support his family and be a good citizen. The humanist has a very different agenda concerning the equipping of children. To the humanist, a child is like human hardware, to be manipulated according to the needs of the government or culture. And it is to this end that government public schools in the United States were instituted.

Modern educational programs like Goals 2000, Mastery Learning, Out-come Based Education, Lifelong Learning, and many other programs, are not fashioned to develop moral, deep thinking people prepared to logically discern the truth. They are instead, designed to transform students into bored, easily manipulated people, whose overwhelming goal is to seek personal pleasure (Gatto, 2000 p. 42, 223).
The full program is incredibly complex and outside the scope of this presentation but the reader will be able to grasp the big picture of the program after reading through the full text of this section.

The student must be brought into the system and separated from adult (read parents) life as young as possible to successfully clean the child’s mental slate.
Schools must lower expectations of student ability to insure the child will not be well educated.
Teachers must use classroom control techniques based on behavior modification.
Teachers must teach affectively (emotion based as opposed to fact based) in order to confuse student values.
To be sure the indoctrination is successful the student must be assessed, remediated, and then reassessed.


Everyone when he is fully taught will be like his teacher (Luke 6:2)

Step 1. The student must be brought into the system and separated from adult life as young as possible.

One segregates children from adult life because one wishes to do something special with them – to effect some kind of social change or adaptation to one. Such segregation insulates the children from social patterns of the present and makes him more receptive to some envisioned future.
Warren Bennis, The Temporary Society

To indoctrinate a child into a socialist paradigm he must first have all prior knowledge, beliefs, and values that he comes to school with purged from his mind in order to introduce the new values he is to receive. This indoctrination is a form of brainwashing. Brainwashing is most effective when administered to a young child; the earlier a child can be indoctrinated, the easier it becomes to transform his mind. This is why the educational establishment is pushing for students to start school at an early age and promoting programs like Head Start and other early education programs. The more time a child spends in school the more time can be spent to change his thought patterns. Public schools are slowly increasing the length of the school day with the knowledge that the more time a student is in school the more complete and ingrained the new social mind set will be.
Early Americans, one of the most literate peoples in the history of the post flood world, would often teach fundamentals to their children at home and then send children to a tutor or church school at 9 or 10 years of age. Colonial parents educated their children so, when he was grown, he would become an adult who would understand the Word of God, think clearly using logic, and would be capable of supporting himself. The goals of modern education are not the same as they were for our forefathers. The goals for modern school are to teach students the new culturally correct social skills and attitudes that both industry and government demand.
Goal of today’s education is to clean a child’s mind of the kinds of thinking that will hinder socialistic human progress, and then, create in him habits of mind that will readily compliment the needs of industry and state.

Then he saith, I will return to my house from whence I came out; and when he is come he findeth it empty, swept, and garnished.
Matthew 12:43-44

Throughout their educational experience, students are often made to go through mandatory meditation-like sets of programs. Meditation, relaxation, visualization, attention control, group therapy and visualization techniques are introduced early in education process to facilitate, in the mind of the child, a blank slate. (I have personally seen this in operation in public school,, in Graduate school courses, and in Christian schools.) Jeannie Georges in her pamphlet Dialectic Education says:

“The move is toward daydreams, visualization, using pictures, and indeed, towards clearing the mind for the programmer to reprogram through stimulus/response. Parents play into the hands of the psychologists or facilitators by allowing their children to space out watching T.V. The child who sits in front of the T.V. with glazed eyes, mouth half open, tongue in the roof of his mouth, and doesn’t respond when he is spoken to, is practicing altering his consciousness. As the child practices this behavior it becomes easier for the behaviorist to train him to alter his state consciousness.”

These programs are disguised as innocent activities by simply changing the actual name of the activity to a title that sounds like something familiar. For instance, group therapy techniques might be called a discussion group or meditation might be called quiet time relaxation. These practices are designed to leave the mind blank and open to suggestion. Parents, also be aware that mindless T.V. watching produces the same mind numbing effect and leaves children open to suggestion; particularly advertising suggestions.

In their defense, today’s teachers are overburdened with requirements of the continuous new curriculum demands, special programs, overcrowded classrooms, fewer parents to help, and classrooms full of kids from divorced homes etc. Teachers often do not have the luxury of time to really study and understand the curricula they are to use, let alone master it and its implications. I believe teachers are overloaded intentionally: An overworked teacher will not have the time or energy to research the actual precepts and philosophies contained in the curriculum they are mandated to teach. However, those who choose to work with children are brought to a higher accountability. Be aware.

It were better for him that a millstone were hung about his
neck, and he cast into the sea. Luke 17:2

Step Two: Schools must lower expectations of student ability to insure the child will not be well educated.

The purpose of education and the school is to change the thoughts, feelings and actions of students. Benjamin Bloom


Children are purposefully and literally being dumbed down through long school days, block schedules and the use of the, so called, Best Educational Practices of Bloom’s Taxonomy, Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences and Whole Word Language instruction. The natural conclusion one would come to is that the longer a student is in the classroom the more he would learn. But this is not the case in dialectic education. Dialectic education is a process; and the process takes a long, long time. It takes a long time because first, it must be taught with out the knowledge of the participants and it is learned only through repetition. Add to this all the extra programs and activities a teacher is required to implement during the school day and not much factual learning takes place.

In conjunction with long school days, schools are switching to block schedules in Junior High and High School. Block schedules are not effective if a school is teaching to facts. Students retain knowledge better when they are taught daily, and most people can pay close attention to a subject only 40 to 60 minutes at a time. Block schedules were developed as an effective method in promoting dialectic thinking in students. Large blocks of time facilitates dialectic process by allowing plenty of time for students to get into small groups of two to six students and practice consensus over an issue. In a science classroom, the process might look like this: The teacher assembles small groups of three to five students to work on a genetics presentation. First the students discuss, as a group, what they are to present and how it will be presented. Once the students reach a consensus of how they will present the topic, they gather the materials they will need and each student will work on his part of the presentation. Finally, the group will present their work before the class. The group then gets a group grade, regardless of the effort, or lack of effort, of the individual participants. Most of the class time has been taken up with “process” and not authentic learning.

These students have just practiced dialectic process. The students came together in a facilitated meeting (the teacher is the trained facilitator) and they dialogue to a consensus over the project...right in the classroom. This process takes quite a bit of time. The students are taking more time to learn less, because the lesson is not about factual learning but, it is instead, about learning to do the “process”.

Many teachers foil the original purpose of the block schedule and split the time up to make several small lessons. The point is, however, that the block schedules were designed for the purpose of dialectic process, which takes a lot of time to accomplish.
Bloom’s Taxonomy uses Hegelian dialectic methods which are designed to encourage students to think in terms of opinion rather than facts.

Bloom’s Taxonomy
Evaluation Higher order thinking skills
Synthesis
Analysis
Application _______________________
Comprehension
Knowledge Lower order thinking skills


God’s word is fact. The Bible is a book of facts. Bible believing Christians are fact oriented. God is fact based and we emulate Him so we are fact based also. But Bloom says that people who are fact based are lower order thinkers. Bloom’s theory encourages teachers to focus on subjective knowledge and trivialize factual knowledge. When one bases his thinking on subjective knowledge he gives way to subjective thinking; that is, without truth being foundational to good opinions; opinions are given the importance of factual truth. Thousands of well meaning teachers around the United States are teaching to “higher order thinking skills” believing they are doing the best for their students.

...a large part of what we call “good teaching” is the teacher’s ability to attain effective objectives through challenging the students fixed believes and get them to discuss issues. Benjamin Bloom, Handbook II: Affective Domain

Hundreds of teaching programs are based on Bloom’s destructive theory and are also imbedded in all of the state’s standards (You can find your states educational standards on line). Be aware that the names of these programs change regularly: Here are a few examples: Delphi Technique, Cooperative Learning, Consensus Building, Common Ground, Values Clarification, Critical Thinking Strategies, thematic instruction, “Earth” programs are based on Bloom, OutCome Based Education, Mastery Learning, School to Work, Goals 2000, Life Long Learning, and hundreds of other programs,.

Howard Gardner, a Harvard University professor of Cognition and Education and an adjunct professor of Psychology, is known for the Theory of Multiple Intelligences as presented in his acclaimed book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (M.I. schema). This theory, developed in the 1980’s, is a powerfully influential theory in progressive education.

I read his research data and the experimental context for his theory and found it so pitifully researched it could not hold Jell-O; yet it is taught in almost every education college, both secular and Christian, in the nation. This destructive theory has a deceptive purpose; it defines a person in a narrow individual profile so he or she may be typed, or pigeon holed, to easier meet the requirements of industry. Howard Gardner, in his book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences says:

Ultimately, the educational plans that are pursued need to be orchestrated across various interest groups of society to achieve its greater goals. Individual profiles must be considered in the light of goals perused by wider society; and sometimes, in fact, individuals with gifts in certain directions must be none the less be guided along other, less favorable paths, simply because the needs of the culture are particularly urgent in that realm at the time.

If God’s modes operandi was the same as those coming out of Gardener’s theory we would not have many of the great men and women of the Bible. Gideon would have been pigeon holed as a frightened menial agrarian not worthy for great tasks; but God did not typecast him, but instead, saw past his outward demeanor and lead him to great victories for the kingdom. Ruth, the Moabitess, was a penniless heathen when she walked into Bethlehem with her mother-in-law, but, because of her Godliness and faithfulness, became a progenitor to the line of David and eventually to the Christ. Moses, who could not speak well, saved a nation...and on and on.

Whole Language: John Dewey, the developer of the first Whole Language primer in the United States, believed that a literate population who knows the facts and exercises individual judgment was the greatest threat to his envisioned utopian socialist state. To ensure a population becomes undereducated and, thereby, unable to exercise individual judgment, he developed a three pronged attack against literacy:

1. Emphasis on a Whole Language approach to reading
2. Use of some phonics to cause cognitive dissidence when taught concurrently with Whole Language
3. Rapid introduction of new word to readers

Dewey was a major contributor toward the developed Dick and Jane “Look-Say” reading curriculum so even the most intelligent children would be confused about the reading process. (Today the Look-Say method is usually called the Whole Word method; but it also has many other aliases.) He replaced learning to read through knowledge of the sounds and combinations of sounds the letters represented, to a whole word as a picture. The student must memorize a word by shape and then associate a meaning with that shape. Look-Say is primarily based on sight recognition of a word as a whole rather than breaking up the word into its primary alphabetic sound components. Children are to look at an alphabetic word as if it was a hieroglyphic picture. To learn a new word in this style children are asked to trace with their finger or draw around the word to be learned and then to look at its shape. They are then instructed to say the word that the shape represents.
Whole Language teaching also offers a small amount of phonetic training for students. When Whole Language is introduced to children they learn to think about language in a particular way. When children are introduced to an opposing style of learning, that has mutually exclusive rules, the student becomes confused and a kind of grid-lock takes over in the brain. This grid-lock is called cognitive dissidence by behavioral psychologists. Dewey knew cognitive dissidence would be the outcome of whole word language learning because of his studies of behaviorist experimentation that was taking place in socialist Russia. Dewey studied the work of Pavlov and his soviet associates, concerning experiments which attempted to induce behavioral disorganization in animals. Pavlov found that each time opposing conditioned reflexes were confronted by the subject; the subject was not able to react to the exclusion of one of the variables. It means that when a child is hit with phonics and whole-word concepts at the same time, they freeze-up. By bringing together Whole Language techniques and alphabetic writing systems, one can artificially induce the behavioral disorganization that today is called dyslexia.

The third aspect of Dewey’s overall plan was to further confuse young readers by presenting new words at such a rapid pace, that even the most intelligent children would be confused and show symptoms of behavioral disorganization. The Look- Say primers presented a new word around every 15 running words. This is an overwhelming rate for almost all new readers. Most first graders do well when they are given 200 to 300 running words before they are introduced to another new word.
Dewey devised this program to ensure that people would not read well and thereby become more easily manipulated.
John Goodman is the modern educator who took up the flame of Whole Word learning in the United States. He is mandatory reading in most teacher Colleges.

Step 3: Teachers must use classroom control techniques based on behavior modification.

There is a battle going on in the classroom over the definition of the word person. Is a person just another animal that may be manipulated, as is needed by the culture, like any other natural resource; or is he divinely created to live in fellowship with a loving Father? This is the quandary faced by teachers as they approach the question of how to discipline in the classroom or any other venue where correction of behavior is necessary. Children are deeply influenced by the type of discipline they receive. While most teachers, both secular and Christian, use a form of behaviorism to discipline students in their classrooms the Bible is explicit that a person’s behavior is to be conformed, through the shepherding of his heart, into the likeness of Christ.

Behaviorism, since the 1930’s, is the hands-down choice of discipline for both Christian and secular schools. This is because anyone who has been to a Teacher’s College is indoctrinated into the behaviorist paradigm of classroom management. The Association of Christian Schools International, a Christian educational group, teach behaviorist methods during their conventions and touts the different styles of behaviorism in their publications; as do most Christian educators.

Christian teachers who have attended secular universities, Teacher’s Colleges or educational enrichment classes, either secular or Christian, have been duped into thinking the new and improved methods of classroom discipline are devoid of moral intent; that they are neutral. This is a wrong assumption.

The only psychological force producing these perversions (The “perversions” are of thinking in terms of absolutes.) is morality and the concept of right and wrong. The reinterpretation and eventual eradication of the concept of right and wrong are the belted objectives of nearly all psychology.
The people who have been taught to believe what ever they were told by their parents or their teacher are the people who are a menace to the world. It is up to you teachers to make all these sick children well by creating the international child of the future. G. Broch Chisolm first head of the World Federation of Mental Health

Mental health is, by definition of the World Federation of Mental health and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (U.N.E.S.C.O.) is appropriate sustainable thought patterns. These “thought patterns” are not in any way, the type of thoughts the LORD tells us to think but are dialectical patterns of thought based on rebellion against God. The psychological tool to insure these thought patterns are formed in the minds of children is a process seated in Transformational Psychology. Psychological transformation is an emotional and psychological process that encompasses change through increments. The stated goal of this psychotherapy is the irradiation of the Biblical concepts of “right” and “wrong” and the implementation of a process based in the “felt needs” of people and whatever is necessary for worldly cultural progress.

All discipline programs for public schools and most Christian schools are based on the implementation of behaviorist/transformational psychology. One of the most successful discipline programs based on behaviorist/transformational psychology is Assertive Discipline developed by Lee and Marlene Canter in 1976, based on the Control Theory (a behaviorist theory) of William Glasser. The system requires the teacher be assertive in correcting behavior and is devised to help children to make good choices by giving positive rewards to students who are behaving correctly and negative penalties to students who make improper choices. To implement this in the classroom, a teacher may put a child’s name on the corner of the board if he is engaging in improper behavior, and if his behavior continues to be troubling, he will be given other check marks. These marks incur negative consequences like standing at the “wall” during recess or not being able to participate in an upcoming party: Good students who do not have check marks then receive some rewards that the “bad” students will not enjoy. There are hundreds of ways of implementing Assertive Discipline, from check marks on the board to elaborate systems touting colored Popsicle sticks and special folders taped to the student’s desk; it is all based on reward and punishment.

There are hundreds other styles of classroom discipline, but they are all, with few exceptions, based on psychological behaviorism. Assertive Discipline is based on Glasser, and Glasser was based on the work of Skinner, whose work was based on Pavlov. The basic philosophy behind behaviorism is that people are animals, and they are animals that can be manipulated to conform to certain standards through a process of rewards and punishments. The world manipulates but the Lord does not. His way of discipline is to teach to the heart of a person.
Heart has two meanings in scripture. It defines the physical heart that sends to the rest of the body the nourishment it needs to build and grow strong and it also refers to the seat of the intellect and emotions.

Keep your heart with all diligence, For out of it spring the issues of life. Put away from you a deceitful mouth, and put perverse lips far from you. Let your eyes look straight ahead, and your eyelids look right before you. Ponder the path of Your feet, And let all your ways be established. Do not turn to the right or the left; Remove your foot from evil. Proverbs 4:23


Behaviorism creates people who are able to maintain an image of being good. This type of behavior is hypocritical, like a white washed tomb: It looks good on the outside but on the inside it is full of dead men’s bones. The LORD wants the motivation of a person to reflect Him.

As for you, my son Solomon, know the God of your Father and serve him with a whole heart and a willing mind for the LORD searches all hearts and understands every intent of the thoughts. If you seek him, He will let you find Him, but, if you forsake Him he will reject you forever. 1Chronicals 28:9

The idea of “high self esteem” is part of the same hypocrisy. Behaviorism elevates people who are successful at following the rules; and these people start to think they are better than other people and, as a consequence, they become prideful. Their behavior is simply a performance that does not reflect the condition of their heart.

Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child. The rod of discipline will remove it far from him. Proverbs 22:15

This crucial verse concerning the discipline of a child is taken out of context by liberals and most Christians. First let me point out that the rod spoken of in this verse is not a 4x4 board; it is what we would call a wand today. It is a flexible shoot that would sting if a child were hit by it. The term discipline does not mean “beat him until he screams for mercy”; discipline is a rich word containing within it the sense of warning, instruction, and doctrine. The idea is that you get the child’s attention with a swat of the wand and then you sit down and have a conversation, not a lecture, directed to the heart of the child. The swat part is not the main player in this example. The important part is the conversation in which the child becomes aware of his own motives and the condition of his own heart. This is the process that leads a child to understand, with joy, the concepts of mercy and forgiveness given to us through the LORD.

I have only come across one Christian classroom management curriculum that is based fully on the word of God and not on secular psychology: Shepherding a Childs Heart in the Classroom presented by Immanuel Christian School in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania. It is filled with scripture and examples explaining the biblical way to help children to understand the gentle love Christ has for them: I highly recommend it.

Step 4: Teachers must teach affectively (emotion based as opposed to fact based; also called dialectic thought) in order to confuse the values of students.

Teachers are trained in universities and Education Colleges to teach affectively, meaning a teacher is taught to teach to feelings and opinions rather than facts. This is the cornerstone of American dialectic educational methods. Through the processing of countless teachers over several decades, graduating from state and private college’s dialectic thought has been so inculcated into American culture that even Christian organizations are practicing it. It is ubiquitous in the U.S.A. as well as in most developed countries; but almost no one has ever heard of it. This is because the system can only work if it remains hidden. The people who implement dialectic process, whether in school, government, or business, hide its nature from common people in a barrage of technical terms that change regularly. An example of this change of terms in education is Mastery Learning which was renamed Outcome-based Education and is closely associated with Life Long Learning.

Dialectic process is hidden from the common people because if they knew they were being manipulated by a process they never heard of they might be angry and refuse to participate.

Gregor Hegel describes dialectic as thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Here is how it works: First step, thesis, is to bring a group of people together who have diverse opinions and backgrounds to talk about a social problem. The second step is called antithesis. The group goal is to come to a group conclusion. This means one must compromise ones beliefs (if ever so slightly) in order to come to a group conclusion. The group now strives together toward a common goal. This blending of ideas is called synthesis because it is a melding of the opinions of all the participants. For the process to be effective the participants must continue to practice the process in a never ending cycle of small group interactions in which one continually compromise to some degree. The designers of this modern dialectic process call it an evolutionary process, because change occurs as the process is practiced over and over from childhood to death (Life Long Learning is the outcome of the never ending process of group encounters in which a person accepts [learns] new ways of thinking). The process has no goal other than mindless, ungodly, change that will bind up the minds of people so tightly that they will not be capable of truth based thought. This type of mind set is perfect for industrialists who want minimally educated people who do not have an original thought in their heads. These people will be easily manipulated to become unquestioning workers and mindless consumers open to commercial suggestions. This type of mind set is perfect for a socialist government who also desire malleable, docile workers. Do not think this is some future doom: We are already socialist...we just don’t know it yet.

Benjamin Bloom and his taxonomy, who was discussed previously, is instrumental in leading students to believe facts are for “lower order” thinkers and opinions are the basis for “higher order” thinkers. If one looks closely at the scope and sequence for public schools across the country one finds the language of Bloom’s taxonomy deeply embedded. The higher the grade level, the more a student is asked to learn through his opinion rather than through facts.

Schools are now being built with a tendency for school districts to choose to build larger schools. There are several reasons. First schools with 240 students and under tend to keep a patriarchal mind set (Dean Gotcher: 2004 lecture). This means the students will base their interaction with others and their language based on truth and facts; as if they were in a family environment. A school with more than 240 students tends to fall into dialectic thinking realm where decisions are based on how they think and feel rather than on what is right and wrong. Administrators who make school decisions do not want students to retain a patriarchal mind set, and they build large schools which encourage a dialectic frame of mind. Second, cultural diversity is necessary for the dialectic process to function. The system must have a large number of ethnic groups from different economic levels to work effectively. Dialectic can only work if there are people who come to the table with different views that can be blended. If a group of people who have the same principles come together to discuss a problem, they will end up agreeing on how to solve the problem without compromising critical areas. Large schools ensure that the student body will be diverse and better suited to processing.

Former president Clinton was and is an advocate of bringing computers into classrooms. He knew that computers were the vehicles to speed a paradigm shift toward socialism. His desire was for every student to be linked to interactive computer programs to encourage each student toward “right” beliefs and values. These programs can test the rates students are changing; they can monitor compliance and remediate students who are lagging behind. The program can tailor the curriculum to accommodate an individual student’s progress and if he cooperates or resists the pressure of the program.

Journaling is the low tech. method for changing beliefs in school children. Now, I keep a journal in which I write about my feelings, Bible verses, stories, poems etc. The journal I write is to allow me to express or remember my thoughts and ideas. This is good thing. Journaling in the classroom is a dialectic tool designed to identify a child’s felt needs through his writings and to use those felt needs to manipulate him into dialectic thinking. Most teachers have been trained to use journaling in their classroom but believe it to be just a good way to get kids to write. This is O.K. with change agents because their desire is to get children used to the idea of journaling for the rest of their life. Through journaling, a change agent can ascertain your wants and needs and manipulate you accordingly. The process is associated with what was called “brainwashing” during W.W. II.

Step 5: To be sure the indoctrination is successful the student must be
assessed, remediated and then reassessed.

Now that we know how positive reinforcement works...we can be more deliberate and hence more successful, in our cultural design. We can achieve a sort of control under which the controlled, though they are following a code much more scrupulously than was ever the case under the old system never the less feel free. They are doing what they want to do, not what they are forced to do. That’s the source of the tremendous power of positive reinforcement—there’s no restraint and no revolt. By a careful cultural design, we control not the final behavior, but the inclination to behave—the motives, the desires, the wishes. The curious thing is...that the question of freedom never arises. Walden II, B.F. Skinner

Outcome Based Education is behaviorist driven. Students become like a performing chicken I once saw at a carnival. The chicken successfully pecked out Yankee Doodle Went to Town on some amputated piano keys and then received some corn that came down a shoot into the cage. No higher thought process are involved in behaviorist training—just ring the bell or answer the question right or just control your squirmy body to someone else’s specifications and you get a star or a cupcake party.

Behaviorist modus operandi is to teach a student some specific behavior or state of mind: say, for instance, that social changers want Christian children to accept Islam as “just a different way at looking at things”. The child is first taught the objective that Islam is just another way of thinking. After the lessons on Islam the child is tested to see if he has mastered the objective given him. If the student is tested and he is seen to be convinced that Islam is just another way of looking at things then this information is documented and he will go on with his studies. If he is found to not have been convinced that Islam is acceptable, then this information is documented and the student is given the lessons over again and will then be tested again. This process repeats itself until the student passes the test with the desired outcome.

This process of monitoring and documenting every student’s progress is difficult and time consuming for a teacher in the classroom; and in fact it would be impossible to run a behaviorist classroom without the computer. The eventual goal of Outcome Based Education is for every child and every teacher have a computer. The computer then becomes the facilitator and the teacher becomes a type of administrator. New schools built today are equipped for this eventuality. (I taught in a huge new school that was built with computer stations for every student as well as teacher computers for both classroom and the teacher’s office. Within the first year students destroyed most of the classroom computers and the district was financially not able to replace them. The teachers are now overloaded with work because they must do much of the documentation that the student computers were supposed to do, plus the regular teacher daily logs.)

The student computer stores the student class work, journal entries, tests and quizzes and other information about the student. When the class is over, the student accesses the computer and chooses his favorite and best work and compiles it into a portfolio. This portfolio will eventually take the place of letter grades. All the other information the student entered into the computer is data banked along with his personal and medical records, family information and any problems he has had in school. These records include information about the way he thinks and feels, how quickly he adapts to the objectives of the course, his grades and activities. It is through this data banking that the school will determine if the students needs remediation or if he will go on. This information is not available to the student or his family, but is available to the state and prospective employers also. Ron Sunseri in his book Outcome Based Education says, “The computer becomes a tool of control for the state.”

The “outcomes” that we have been discussing are also called “standards”. You can go online and find out what the standards are for your school district. These standards are the centerpiece for dialectic change. Standards are mandated to all schools, both public and private in Washoe County (as are most counties in most states). Christian Schools are often mandated by their state to follow the state standards. By forcing Christian schools to use the state standards, the state is better able to manipulate the curriculum the school can use. It is surprising how many Christian schools follow, lock-step, what public schools are doing, thinking they are being up to date.

There is another type of powerful testing called “high stakes” tests. Steve Rea in his booklet Science Falsely So-Called describes National Tests, like the Ohio Proficiency Test, as inaccurate, but still used to “attain personal information about the student’s opinions, values, beliefs, attitudes, and feelings, and then proceed to prescribe a state approved, socially and politically correct answer, to this psychology matter.”

Let me conclude with the same quote from Charles Spurgeon that Steve Rea used to conclude Science Falsely So-Called:

I believe science, but not in what is called “science”. No proven fact in nature is opposed to revelation. The petty speculations of the pretentious we cannot reconcile with the Bible, and would not if we could. I feel like the man who said, “I can understand in some degree how these great men have found out the weight of the stars, and their distances from one another, and even how, by the spectroscope, they have discovered the materials of which they are composed: but” said he “I can not guess how they found out their names.” Just so, the fanciful part of science, so dear to many, is what we do not accept. That is the important part of science to many—that part which is a mere guess, for which the guesser fight tooth and nail. The mythology of science is as false as the mythology of the heathen; but this is the thing which is made a god of. I say again, as far as its facts are concerned, science is never in conflict with the truths of the Holy Scripture, but the hurried deductions drawn from those facts, and the inventions classed as facts, are opposed to Scripture, and necessarily so, because falsehood agrees not with truth.

You can read Part one and two here and here