Slowly, slowly, the light is beginning to dawn in why the US Government is in the business of Educating Everyone, and Healing Them, too:

	DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY
	DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES
	DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION
	DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION
	DEPARTMENT OF HOUSING AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT

{{Actually, the last time I checked, the Purple / Homeland security was signifying “education”….}}  See blogroll to right….

Abstinence Education, 2000-2010 (CFDA 93.235):  $433 million

(Guess 2007 was a banner year, and $99 million of it to nonprofits)

Top 10 Recipients

Roughly speaking, besides learning how to read, write, multiply, and not to join a gang, we also need to (AFTER or DURING the K-12 years, which are also primarily at government expense), be taught now NOT to have sex with each other, or with runaway children, but  — if someone DOES — then we also need to have projects teaching parents how to help feed and clothe the children they have begotten while, many times, in grade or high school.. . .

ANYHOW, it’s a great market niche.  INFORMATION is the HIGHEST PROFIT FIELD there is, especially downloadable, web-based, conference-holding, information mongering expertise in how to never solve a problem that was created somewhere else in the government-dominated lives that we live here.

The end result, the United States is trailing the industrial world in education its youngsters.   BUT, it’s employing a good portion of the economy in undoing the damages (supposedly) later on in life.  IN short, if someone didn’t tell me how to eat, assimilate, digest, and where to put the parts I don’t need for my body to function, I don’t know WHAT I’d do.  I’d be mentally paralyzed without advice on how to marry, how to have kids, how to stay alive during marriage, how to leave when that marriage is risky to staying a live, how to “parent” afterwards, and who the heck I “am” as a person in relationship to not only, society, my ex, my work (what’s left of it), but also in the eyes of the innumerable experts on what they don’t, personally, have to endure.  But it can certainly be tabulated and experimented upon nationwide, and perhaps with the NEXT generation, someone will get it right. . .  

Anyhow,  if you want a successful life, here’s MY advice, and it cost about $20/book (less, used, and nothing from a library). . . .

(1) UNDUMB yourself Down:

© 2000-2003 The Odysseus Group
Suite 3W  295 East 8th Street  NY, NY 10009
Phone Toll Free: 888 211-7164   Fax: 212 529-3555
E-mail:info@johntaylorgatto.com

HERE”s what a NY State Teacher of the year had to say, 4 years before the onset of VAWA or NFI (That’s “National Fatherhood Initiative” for the uninformed). . . . .

Dumbing Us Down: the Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
By John Taylor Gatto
Reviewed by Samuel L. Blumenfeld

No one in America today is better qualified to report on the true condition of our government education system than John Taylor Gatto, the now-famous educator who spent 26 years teaching in six different schools in New York City and quit because he could no longer take part in a system that destroys lives by destroying minds

In 1990 the New York “Senate named Mr. Gatto New York City Teacher of the Year. The speech he gave at that occasion, “The Psychopathic School,” amounted to a devastating indictment of public education (reprinted in BEL, May 1991, under the title “Why Schools Don’t Educate”). In 1991 Mr. Gatto was named New York State Teacher of the Year, at which occasion he gave a speech, “The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher,” so insightful of the wrong-headedness of public education that it will probably become a classic in educational literature

These two remarkable speeches, plus several others, including one entitled “We Need Less School, Not More,” were published in book form last year.  And what a powerful book it is, only 104 pages long, readable in one or two sittings.  With Outcome-Based Education being imposed on schools across America, we will get much more school, not less, and the content of that schooling will produce far more confusion than we already have.

And here are those 7 lessons.  From my decades of experience, I’d have to agree:

In his speech, “The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher,” Gatto describes the seven lessons that are taught in all public schools by all teachers in America, whether they know it or not.  He writes:

The first lesson I teach is confusion. Everything I teach is out of context.  I teach the un-relating of everything.  I teach dis-connections….Even in the best of schools a close examination of curriculum and its sequences turns up a lack of coherence, full of internal contradictions….Confusion is thrust upon kids by too many strange adults, each working along with only the thinnest relationship with each other, pretending, for the most part, to an expertise they do not possess….In a world where home is only a ghost, because both parents work…or because something else has left everybody too confused to maintain a family relation, I teach you how to accept confusion as your destiny.

The second lesson I teach is class position….The children are numbered so that if any get away they can be returned to the right class….My job is to make them like being locked together with children who bear numbers like their own.…If I do my job well, the kids can’t even imagine themselves somewhere else, because I’ve shown them how to envy and fear the better classes and how to have contempt for the dumb classes….That’s the real lesson of any rigged competition like school.  You come to know your place.

The third lesson I teach is indifference….When the bell rings I insist they drop whatever it is we have been doing and proceed quickly to the next work station.  They must turn on and off like a light switch….Bells inoculate each undertaking with indifference.

The fourth lesson I teach is emotional dependency.  By stars and red checks, smiles and frowns, prizes, honors, and disgraces, I teach kids to surrender their will to the predestinated chain of command.

The fifth lesson I teach is intellectual dependency….It is the most important lesson, that we must wait for other people better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives….[Only], the teacher can determine what my kids must study, or rather, only the people who pay me can make those decisions, which I then enforce.  If I’m told that evolution is a fact instead of a theory, I transmit that as ordered, punishing deviants who resist what I have been told to tell them to think….Successful children do the thinking I assign them with a minimum of resistance and a decent show of enthusiasm….Bad kids fight this, of course, even though they lack the concepts to know what they are fighting, struggling to make decisions for themselves about what they will learn and when they will learn it…Fortunately there are tested procedures to break the will of those who resist; it is more difficult, naturally, if the kids have respectable parents who come to their aid, but that happens less and less in spite of the bad reputation of schools.  No middle-class parents I have ever met actually believe that their kid’s school is one of the bad ones.  No one single parent in twenty-six years of teaching.

The sixth lesson I teach is provisional self-esteem….The lesson of report cards, and tests is that children should not trust themselves or their parents but should instead rely on the evaluation of certified officials.  People need to be told what they are worth.

The seventh lesson I teach is that one can’t hide.  I teach students they are always watched, that each is under constant surveillance by myself and my colleagues….The meaning of constant surveillance and denial of privacy is that no one can be trusted, that privacy is not legitimate.

These lessons, as far as I can tell, are absolutely being duplicated in the court system as well, and throughout much of the nonprofit enterprises in the Health and Human  Services sector, let alone the Education Department.

Incidentally, Samuel L. Blumenfield had a few things to say as well…

And (from the same book), about the “Psychopathic School“:

It’s just impossible for education and schooling ever to be the same thing.Schools were designed by Horace Mann and by Sears and Harper of the University of Chicago and by Thorndyke of Columbia Teachers College and by some other men to be instruments of the scientific management of a mass population. Schools are intended to produce, through the application of formulas, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled.

To a very great extent schools succeed in doing this, but in a national order increasingly disintegrated, in a national order in which the only “successful” people are independent, self-reliant, confident, and individualistic (because community life which protects the dependent and the weak is dead and only networks remain), the products of schooling are, as I’ve said, irrelevant. Well-schooled people are irrelevant. They can sell film and razor blades, push paper and talk on telephones, or sit mindlessly before a flickering computer terminal, but as human beings they are useless. Useless to others and useless to themselves.

The daily misery around us is, I think, in large measure caused by the fact that, as Paul Goodman put it thirty years ago, we force children to grow up absurd. Any reform in schooling has to deal with its absurdities.

AND THIS IS TRUE OF THE COURTS AS WELL.  HOWEVER, in the MEANTIME, if you want to become:  “independent, self-reliant, confident, and individualistic,” you might have to just stoop down to the level of the obvious, and figure out, for instance, that the “name of the game” in all of this is simply marketing information to a captive audience — and sometimes, that’s literally; meaning, in prisons, or in the courts, when it comes to “mandatory parenting education.”  Mandatory is mandatory, right?That means, you don’t get out of it.

One BIG lessons women (or men) attempting to leave violence, or situations in which they and their children are treated as if they were dumb as dirt, or less than human, or are being hurt in any manner, is to STOP knocking on doors asking for help when what’s really going on behind them is simply a business model, and info-marketing.  The word “justice”  or “help” or “prevention” on the outside of something doesn’t mean that’s what inside. 

It just might be someone fishing for clients for their nonprofit, or for that matter, for their business of counseling us how to stand up, sit down, kneel, (No offence to Catholics meant), bark, beg, heel, jump, and roll over and play dead.   If this SEEMS to remind you of obedience training for a dog, well, I think you’re showing some common sense here.  It does. 

The main point is, that you don’t BITE.  And that  you don’t run loose in packs that bite . . . .

NOW — here’s a lesson to learn. 

Web-based INFO is the cheapest product with the highest profit margin anywhere.  Our government is into it, and plenty of nonprofits also.  There’s no inventory to maintain.  It’s clean, it’s sterile, and most people are not going to really require accountability for who’s producing what, and how many lives it has or has not saved.  The people that MOST need to know this are generally the ones that don’t realize these organizations even exist when they walk into a police station, family court services office, courtroom, child support office, or domestic violence advocacy agency.

(2) “Converting Expertise into a Shippable Hard Good …

… to escape the limits of a per-hour based model.”

That’s a quote from Timothy Ferriss’s “The 4-Hour Workweek,” which I found in a Fedex Kinko’s where I was habitually copying notes to the educators of my kids, and faxing to my ex, and documenting my lawsuit.  I thought I’d just read through the thing, since my OWN time was being colossally wasted in so many areas, and my OWN formula of trying to get various entities OUT of my personal life and time so I could get back to a creative profession that I  just happened to LIKE doing (as I also liked supporting, and — when they lived here — spending time with my children, even after their Dad no longer lived here, but saw them weekends regularly).   . . . .

Do yourself a favor.  Prove me wrong –waste under $30– get the book, and read these chapters: (my quote is from Chapter 9…)

Step III: A is for Automation

Chapter 8 – Outsourcing Life: Offloading the Rest and a Taste of Geoarbitrage

Chapter 9 – Income Autopilot I: Finding the Muse

Chapter 10 – Income Autopilot II: Testing the Muse

Chapter 11 – Income Autopilot III: MBA—Management By Absence

HHS is doing that.  Prosperous businesses are.  Foundations and nonprofit entities are.  Why shouldn’t we individuals that need the most help, and are seeking it from people running conferences about which social science to demonstrate what principle on the populace next? 

While we are running from nonprofit to nonprofit, and sometimes boxing ourselves up in shelters, or seeking pro bono legal help, how can we possibly, as parents, keep pace with professionals that have their slick websites generating income already, and whose market niche is essentially approximately half the US populace, i.e., people who are divorcing?  Or leaving a partner and squabbling over children they had, including some conceived under the above “Abstinence Education” programs marketed to us under former President Bush’s regime??

Once I became unhappily unemployed and without contact with my kids (regaining contact isn’t too easy without income for an attorney, and being in pro per in the courts, which I actually think is about the only way to go, IF one can learn the rules, is also like having a target on one’s forehead) and started taking a closer look at who’s running what, wherever I worked, I found this business model.  So will you!

Wikipedia is skeptical on this one:

 the book Ferriss uses the acronym DEAL for the four main chapters. ^[3] It stands for: Definition, Elimination, Automation, and Liberation.Definition means to figure out what a person wants, get over fears, see past society’s “expectations,” and figure out what it will really cost to get where a person wants to go.

Elimination is about time management, or rather about not managing time. This is achieved applying the 80/20 rule to focus only on those tasks that contribute the majority of benefit. There’s a difference, Ferriss says, between efficiency and effectiveness. The book’s emphasis is on effectiveness.

Automation is about building a sustainable, automatic source of income. This includes techniques such as drop-shipping, automation, Google Adwords and Adsense, and outsourcing.

Liberation is dedicated to the successful automation of one’s lifestyle and the liberation from a geographical location and job. Incidentally, Ferriss notes that if somebody has a regular job, the order of steps will be DELA, not DEAL.

The book asserts that technology such as email, instant messaging, and Internet-enabled PDAs complicate life rather than simplify it.^[4] It advocates hiring virtual assistants from developing countries such as India to free up personal time.^[5]

Here’s a professional, who speaks to this field family court matters addresses, and for all I know, her materials are relevant, and good. ….  And she’s marketing them through her own publishing company.  I found this link while looking for a job in editing/writing on-line.  Being a snooper sort of person, I looked at who was wanting to hire me, and this person was in an advisory capacity:

http://claudiablack.com/contents/index.php/2.html

About Claudia

Claudia Black (not the sci-fi, Farscape actress) is a renowned addiction author, speaker and trainer internationally recognized for her pioneering and contemporary work with family systems and addictive disorders.Since the 1970’s Claudia’s work has encompassed the impact of addiction on young and adult children. She offers models of intervention and treatment related to family violence, multi-addictions, relapse, anger, depression and women’s issues. Her writings and teachings have become a standard in the field of addictions. To read just a few of the hundreds of notes she has received from all over the world, Click Here.Claudia Black is the author of all the books and audio CDs available here as well as the educational videos and Strategies Series for professionals to use with addicted clients and families affected by addiction. Claudia publishes and distributes all her materials through her own company Mac Publishing located in Washington state.Claudia designs and presents training workshops and seminars to professional audiences in the field of family service, mental health, addiction and correctional services as well as speaking in public forums about addiction and recovery. She speaks to thousands of people every year.   =========

Here’s another sample from a renowned group in the family violence field.  They too, are marketing materials, and selling some of them, including trainings, etc.  They “train the trainers,” and that’s the business they are in.  Nonprofit business is STILL business. . . .

Welcome to Domestic Abuse Intervention Programs

Domestic Abuse Intervention Programs offers domestic violence training and resources based on The Duluth Model to help community activists, domestic violence workers, practitioners in the criminal and civil justice systems, human service providers, and community leaders make a direct impact on domestic violence.

Does it say they directly help those people who are domestic violence victims?  No, they train the trainers….

Here’s a sub-group of the DAIP group, above, acronym “BWJP,” or “Battered Women’s Justice Project.”  As it says, right on the label, they too, train the trainers.  Are they getting justice for battered women?  I don’t know.  I’m one.  I’m not being battered anymore, but stalking still remains an issue, and poverty from all the years of trying to stay both alive, and employed, and knowing where my kids are, and seeking pro bono legal help, and child support enforcement, and . . . .  but I’m still hunting down that justice issue.  I have not personally spoken to any woman who actually was helped by any of these programs, although such may exist.  I do know that familicide is still happening…  Perhaps I just knocked on the wrong doors, “mea culpa.”  ANYHOW, here’s what THIS group does:

Battered Women’s Justice Project A project of Domestic Abuse Intervention Programs, the Battered Women’s Justice Project is a national resource center on the most promising practices of the civil and criminal justice systems in response to domestic violence. BWJP provides information, analyses, technical assistance, and trainings for advocates, law enforcement, prosecutors, judges, probation officers, policymakers, civil attorneys, and victims of domestic violence. BWJP partners with the National Clearinghouse for the Defense of Battered Women to provide technical assistance and consultation on cases involving battered women charged with crimes. BWJP is supported by funding from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Under grants from the Office on Violence Against Women, U.S. Department of Justice, BWJP serves as the Comprehensive Technical Assistance Provider to jurisdictions awarded Grants to Encourage Arrest Policies and Enforcement of Protection Orders, and oversees a demonstration project that is developing models for military/civilian coordinated responses to domestic violence committed by service members.

While I’m at it, let me return to that “Center for Policy Research,” above (see the chart under “Child Support Enforcement” grants.  They too, are running trainings, demonstrations, evaluations, and what-not throughout the land, and I do mean, THROUGHOUT the land. 

The Center for Policy Research (CPR) is a private, nonprofit research agency founded in 1981 to work with public and private sector service providers to plan, develop, and test projects that improve the effectiveness and efficiency of human service agencies and the justice, health and education systems. CPR provides comprehensive consulting, facilitation and survey research services and specializes in demonstration, evaluation, and basic research dealing with a broad array of human services including:

• Childcare and Education;
• Child Support;
• Child Welfare;
• Court Services;
• Health and Medical Issues;
• Incarceration and Reentry;
• Mediation and Alternative Dispute Resolution;  
• Fatherhood and Child Access;
• Poverty; and
• Violence and Intimate Partner Violence. 

To make contracting with CPR easier for federal government clients, CPR is a Management, Organizational and Business Improvement Services (MOBIS) and U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) contractor. . .

Wait a minute!  Remember John Taylor Gatto, who wrote[see above] in 1990 or so:

Schools were designed by Horace Mann and by Sears and Harper of the University of Chicago and by Thorndyke of Columbia Teachers College and by some other men to be instruments of the scientific management of a mass population. Schools are intended to produce, through the application of formulas, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled.

Mr. Gatto was not trained as an “educator,” but came into education from a successful career in copywriting.  He was simply observing what was already created.  1981 was before VAWA was passed.  It was as the family law system, and the push for mediation was being developed. 

Think that training can’t be downloaded and patented on captive audiences?  Let’s talk about Moral Reconation Therapy (TM), tested in the 80s on prison populations, and later expanded for — you name it, practically ANY population:

				FULL Product catalog—click here:
							Download
					For information on training and products, contact CCI at 901-360-1564 or click here.
		{{SAMHSA and NREPP are basically credibility organizations, SAMHSA being part of HHS, and NREPP, you can look up).

			Criminal Justice Programs:
	MRT Programs For:

PrisonsJails Therapeutic Communities Drug Courts Female Offenders Juveniles Parole & Probation Community Corrections MRT in Schools

Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment Review Journal MRT History MRT Facts MRT in Schools

Then, like any good deliverable, you need someone to actually deliver the goods.  In the case of MRT, which is essentially trying to make people behave who weren’t, before going through this training (think:  “Batterer’s Intervention,” “Marriage Counseling” “Parenting Education” “Therapeutic Supervised Visitation,” and so forth. . . . . . .):

Someone had to deliver it:

Such as:

Correctional Counseling, Inc. : Welcome!