The Mental Dismemberment of Children

This past Halloween I had an opportunity to take part in an activity that I haven’t done in a couple of decades: hand out candy to the children on Beggars’ Night.

It was fun to see the creative costumes. Some of beautiful princesses; others, usually the boys, dressed as scary monsters from movies. The scariest was, hands down, a young man who dressed up as Michael Meyers from the Halloween movies. Even the other kids wanted to stay clear of him. He had it down so well, the jump suit, the walk. He said nothing as he approached, and we carefully put the goodies in his bag.

A few of the kids simply wore outfits to look like bums or super heroes. I remember doing similar things as I prepared to rush the neighborhood in a contest to see how much I could collect. It was a good time with fine memories that rushed back as each new batch of kids came up with their open bags yelling, “Trick or Treat!”

My main attention, however, was on the little children. So innocent. Some not really sure why their parents were encouraging them to approach these strangers. And why were they giving out candy? But always, with their parent’s encouragement they accepted and said “tank too.” So sweet. They made you want to hug them.

The parents of the little ones seemed to be having the best time with the experience. You could feel their love of their children. This was a family outing. This was Americana at its best. Family. Neighbors hugging neighbors.

But as I watched this wonderful experience a thought went through my head and anger seeped into my happy feelings. I kept thinking about the following Monday when these children would be forced into the local school house, away from their loving patents and into the control of a system that was designed to take advantage of their innocence and rob them of their trust. My anger grew as I thought about how these young children, taught by their parent’s love to feel secure around others in authority, are to be subjected to a dictatorial federal system that has been transformed away from teaching basic academics to one that instead focuses on controlling and remolding the children’s minds.

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These thoughts reminded me of a story I had read several decades before, written by Ayn Rand in her collection of essays entitled The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution. In the book, Rand included a story called “The Comprachicos,” referencing characters in the book The Man Who Laughs by famed 19th-century writer Victor Hugo. Hugo said the term was a compound Spanish word meaning “child-buyers.” The Comprachicos traded in children.

Hugo went on to describe why they bought and sold the children and how they prepared them for purchase. They created monsters. Why? To make people laugh. Kings in their courts needed to laugh. The people needed side shows to make them laugh. To fill the need, the Comprachicos created freaks.

The making of freaks for everyone’s pleasure became an art form. They had a talent to disfigure. They operated to change faces into hideous masks. As Hugo described it, the process was a sort of “reverse orthopedics.” “Where God had put a straight glance, this art put a squint.” Worse, the Comprachicos became masters at erasing the child’s memory so that they had no recollection of a life before they were horribly disfigured. “Was it not always so?”

Later, in China, the process became more perfected as they learned to put the very young children in a box or a bottle so that as their little bodies grew, they grew into the shape of the container. The perfect freaks were created.

Now, why did I have such thoughts on this Halloween night? It wasn’t because of the costumes. Those were make believe and a personal choice by the children. They were simply playing.

No, my thoughts of the Comprachicos were from the second half of Rand’s article when she made her point in the telling of the Hugo story. She saw, as I see now, that the Comprachicos of our day are found in the public school classrooms. Only today, they don’t physically deform the children. Today the education system is designed to deform the children’s minds. In this way these modern day Comprachicos are much more dangerous and evil than those Hugo wrote about. It’s much more difficult to see the immediate results of the deformity. Many, even the parents, find it nearly impossible to see the destruction that is occurring. And so the Comprachicos can work out in the open in complete secrecy.

With the creation of the Federal Department of Education there grew a massive industry in mind manipulation. In November 1992, following the election of Bill Clinton to the presidency, Marc Tucker, president of the National Center for Education and the Economy (NCEE) wrote an 18-page letter to Hillary Clinton. He excitedly outlined the opportunity the Clinton administration now had to “remold the entire American system.” He provided a detailed blueprint for a revolution to completely change our nation and its citizens by training children from a very young age to properly serve the global economy.

There was little in Tucker’s plan that had anything to do with teaching how to read, write, or calculate. That wasn’t important. Instead it was a plan to control the children’s knowledge base to fit Tucker’s vision of creating the proper global citizen cog. Today, Tucker’s proposal made to Hillary Clinton that fateful day is completely in place.

It started with Goals 2000, designed to create a new system of standards that no longer taught our American system of free enterprise and limited government. In fact, it taught them that such ideas were dangerous and selfish. Then came School-to-Work, which focused on job training rather then academics. It was all glued together by a new method of psychological control called “Outcome based Education.” OBE created a computer database on every child and focused on mental, psychological, and behavioral evaluations. The databases were made available to the schools, the government, and future employers. Teachers were designated as counselors to decide if problem children needed drugs to control their behavior. Ritalin overuse was born. A system called “Transition” was employed that featured small groups of children sharing their thoughts, feelings, and opinions. Transition contains no academic significance whatsoever. It contains tactics such as role playing. Its purpose is to strip-search the students for their ideas and attitudes so that a special personal curriculum can be created to assure those attitudes, such as love of family or country, for example, can be systematically deleted. It slowly trains them to not question authority.

Today, the new term is Common Core. It simply encompasses all of these forerunners in the plan to remold American education, and ultimately change American culture by dictating the thought and belief process of its citizens.  The indoctrination of the children is now in full swing.

In 2011, the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD), another private group contracting with the Department of Education, advocated the “Whole Child Approach,” saying whole-child education is the expansion of education beyond just learning reading, writing, and arithmetic to include student health, community engagement, and social-emotional learning (SEL). The ASCD report goes on to explain that “SEL focuses on feelings, emotions, and self-reflection, leading to inclusion of social responsibility and social justice initiatives.”

The Department of Education is now planning to use the SEL process to rate schools on their “nonacademic” factors through its new initiative called the “Every Student Succeeds Act” (ESSA) that is to be enforced in the 2017-1018 school year.

The bottom line for all of this mumbo-jumbo is that children have been designated to be patients that are sick and in dire need of cure. If they believe they are unique individuals, if they love their families, believe their nation is a bastion of freedom, love God, etc., then they are deemed unhealthy, deluded, and in urgent need of care.

The “curriculum” that now surrounds them drills home the need to openly seek to change the world in areas such as healthcare, climate regulation, and “sexual politics.” Children are graded on their activism, volunteerism, and commitment to community rather than academic knowledge. Children are taught that only whites can be racist because racism is power and only whites have power. American civics is ignored. Our founding ideas are dismissed as organized slavery controlled by the rich. Capitalism is evil. Wealth must be destroyed. Government control is the answer to all questions. These things, the children are assured, are the proper attitudes, values, and beliefs. And it is their duty as citizens of the world to not only promote and carry out such ideas, but to consider any contrarian thoughts as evil, and to be stopped at all costs. These are the children of today.

In my book ERASE, I write of a process called “Globally Acceptable Truth.” This is an actual policy promoted through the United Nations. It advocates that the reason we have war, poverty, and strife is because there is too much knowledge in the world. That, we are told, forces people to struggle to understand too many ideas in order to make decisions for their lives. It’s just too much of a burden to live under. It’s the reason, we are told, that so many are failing today. They just can’t take the stress of life. So under Globally Acceptable Truth, these decisions are made for them, making their lives less stressful. That is the purpose of today’s education system.

So now, after decades of this mind control and manipulation passing as pubic education, what is the true outcome? Well, simply watch the nightly news as young people take to the streets to protest the election of Donald Trump. Listen to what they say. They are terrified at these politically incorrect ideas. They oppose policies that seek to keep our nation independent and sovereign. They label any thoughts of the reduction of federal spending programs as hateful and racist. They loath the idea that people can have differing opinions. To advocate ideas of individuality, limited government, pro-Second Amendment, sound science, free enterprise — all such ideas can now get one labeled as unstable and possibly insane. Such dangerous thoughts must be cured.

So well have these modern day Comprachicos done their job that the once happy, innocent, trusting children now need counseling and safe spaces to protect them from ideas and opinions that are outside of their acceptable truth. They are reduced to coloring books and Play-Doh to cope. Their minds have been remolded into the shape of a hideous empty vessel, kept in a state of planned constant adolescence where they remain pliable.

Many will say that the education system has failed. That’s wrong. It is working perfectly for what it’s been designed to do. If you think it has failed, that’s because you are still operating under the incorrect assumption that the purpose of schools are for teaching knowledge and learning academics. In fact, the Comprachicos of Yale and Harvard and every “institution of higher learning” and public-school classrooms have succeeded in creating the perfect, pliable, unquestioning, obedient global village idiots, ready to take their selected spot in this well-ordered utopia. Of course, in reality the process is nothing short of child abuse.

I weep for those wonderful little bright-eyed children from that Halloween night. And for all the children just like them across this country. If you dream of taking the country back, start by saving the children from mental dismemberment by these modern day Comprachicos.

To make the nation great again, Donald Trump’s new administration must set this very specific goal: Tear down the federal Department of Education and set free these young minds so that they may have a life of their own. For that is Freedom.

Tom DeWeese is one of the nation’s leading advocates of individual liberty, free enterprise, private property rights, personal privacy, back-to-basics education, and American sovereignty and independence. He serves as founder and president of the American Policy Center and editor of The DeWeese Report.