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Mental Health, Education and Social Control Part 2 (See also Part 1) By Dennis L. Cuddy, Ph.D., September 2004 |
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Mental Health, Education and Social Control Part 2 (See also Part 1) By Dennis L. Cuddy, Ph.D., September 2004 |
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The General Education Board (GEB), established by John D. Rockefeller, Sr., was chartered in 1902. And in Raymond Fosdick's memorial history of the Board, he indicated it was part of John D. Rockefeller, Jr.'s effort toward the "goal of social control." The GEB was established the year after SOCIAL CONTROL (1901) was written by Edward Alsworth Ross (Father of American Sociology), and in this book, Ross revealed that social checks and stimuli "are managed by a rather small knot of persons...the Elite....Judgment may be moulded as well as the will and the feelings."
The word, "moulded," is instructive because in THE WORLD'S WORK (August 1912), one reads "The Country School of Tomorrow" by GEB chairman Frederick Gates, declaring: "In our dreams, we have limitless resources, and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands." Not only was the GEB to be used for social control, but the Rockefeller Foundation as well.
On April 11, 1933, its president, Max Mason, assured trustees that in their program, "the Social Sciences will concern themselves with the rationalization of social control... the control of human behavior." And in July of the very next year (1934), Willard Givens (executive secretary of the National Education Association 1935-1952) declared:"A dying laissez-faire must be completely destroyed and all of us, including the 'owners,' must be subjected to a large degree of social control.... An equitable distribution of income will be sought."
If Givens' language sounds like Communism, that's because it is similar to the economic philosophy being preached in the Soviet Union at the time. And about the same time (before 1936) in the USSR, Lavrentia Berea (head of Stalin's secret police) delivered an address to American students at Lenin University, declaring:
"A psychopolitician... must recruit and use all the agencies and facilities of 'mental healing.' He must labor to increase the personnel and facilities of 'mental healing' until at last the entire field of mental science is entirely dominated by Communist principles and desires....You must labor until we have dominion over the minds and bodies of every important person in your nation....You will discover that everything will aid you in your campaign to seize, control and use a 'mental healing' to spread our doctrine and rid us of our enemies within their own borders."
At the end of the Second World War, the Rockefeller Foundation's medical director, Alan Gregg, began to fund the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations (TIHR) to undertake the kind of social psychiatry that had been developed by the army during wartime and see if it could be relevant for civilian society. Dr. John Rawlings Rees (mentioned at the beginning of Part 1 of this article) developed the "Tavistock Method," which induces and controls stress via what Rees called "psychologically controlled environments" in order to make people give up family-held beliefs under "peer pressure."
TIHR worked closely with the Research Center for Group Dynamics (mentioned in Part 1 of this article), which co-founded the National Training Laboratories (NTL) with a division of the National Education Association (NEA). One of the primary architects of the NTL (which received an initial grant of $100,000 from the Carnegie Corporation) was Willard Goslin of the NEA's Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD). Goslin was chairman of an NEA Yearbook Committee, which produced PATHS TO BETTER SCHOOLS (1945). In the book's chapter, "Citizens of the World," one reads: "Today it has become necessary for the elementary school to be actively concerned with developing...acceptance of world citizenship....The school...has as its basic objective the development of intelligent and competent world citizens."
Further promoting "world citizenship" was Dr. Ewen Cameron who, on May 5 of the year after PATHS TO BETTER SCHOOLS was published, delivered a speech titled "The Building of the Coming World Order" in which he pronounced: "What we call morals, are simply the customs, prohibitions and rules which a society maintains at any given time....The United Nations Organization deserves the support of all who are concerned with the building of a New World Order....There can be only one education anywhere on the earth and that is education for world citizenship."
Seven years later, Dr. Cameron would become president of the American Psychiatric Association, and in that same year (1953), Fabian Socialist Bertrand Russell's THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE UPON SOCIETY was published, in which he explained: "I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is mass psychology....Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for a generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen....Educational propaganda, with government help, could achieve this result in a generation. There are, however, two powerful forces opposed to such a policy: one is religion; the other is nationalism....A scientific world society cannot be stable unless there is a world government."
Russell mentioned "religion" as an obstacle to their grand design, but remember that in Part 1 of this article, Dr. John Rawlings Rees indicated they had made "a useful attack upon the Church." One way in which the attack upon the Church was pursued by its enemies was via introducing "collectivism." And in that regard, Edgar C. Bundy's COLLECTIVISM IN THE CHURCH is instructive, as he explained: "Because 'mental health' has become available as a lever to be used for promoting political and ideological designs, a word on the subject is in order....People who are normal in every sense of the word but who hold unpopular political ideas, such as opposition to world government and to the United Nations, Federal aid to education, and socialism, are now being branded by their opponents as 'lunatics,' 'nuts' and 'idiots.' Some of the mental health legislation which has been recently introduced on the state and Federal levels gives such wide latitude of interpretations to psychiatrists and politicians...that it is conceivable that anyone who takes a stand for the sovereignty of the United States, in favor of Congressional investigations...and in favor of states' rights could be committed to an asylum in order to silence opposition."
Bundy's book was published in 1958, and in that same year, the linking of psychology and the schools was furthered by Prof. Louis Kaplan of the University of Southern California. According to the LOS ANGELES EXAMINER (December 14, 1958), Prof. Kaplan said "there may be as many as 25% of America's school children who are emotionally or psychologically disturbed." He called for more psychological testing and said the teacher and school could help students resist the pull of possible negative factors in the home and neighborhood.
But have the schools really been all that helpful to children when it comes to their mental health? In the late 1950s, the National Mental Health Institute commenced a program to have public schools administer Ritalin to children classified as "dull" or "emotionally disturbed." The Institute awarded $29,000 to school officials in Montgomery County, PA, to experiment on 90 selected school children, but the program was dropped when a school director, J. E. P. Burns, M.D., objected. On September 24, 1959, Dr.Burns wrote a letter stating: "The program (administering drugs to children to increase their work output) was to last two years. During this time our public school children could have been made nervous wrecks or even worse. I presented this program to the school board and condemned the same with all of the power at my command and successfully caused the program to be dropped."
While the use of drugs on school children encountered this setback, it was only temporary (see Rep. Gallagher's quote in Part 1 of this article). In Zbigniew Brzezinski's BETWEEN TWO AGES: AMERICA'S ROLE IN THE TECHNETRONIC ERA (1970), he referred to "the increasing availability of biochemical means of human control," and said "human beings become increasingly manipulable and malleable." After reading this book, David Rockefeller named Brzezinski as the first director of the Trilateral Commission, which was established in 1973.
As stated at the first of Part 2 of this article, the Rockefeller Foundation had "social control" as a primary goal. And in Holly Sklar's edited volume, TRILATERALISM: THE TRILATERAL COMMISSION AND ELITE PLANNING FOR WORLD MANAGEMENT (1980), she related that "in a 1973 memo on the Trilateral Policy Program, then-director Brzezinski recommended the study of 'Control Over Man's Development and Behavior' as a theme for later consideration. More specifically such a task force would undertake to study 'the social-education implications of the availability, especially in advanced societies, of new means of social control.'...Trilateralism is the current attempt by ruling elites to manage both dependence and democracy---at home and abroad....Economic gain and social control are inseparable goals of trilateralism."
Connecting this desire for social control to education, in the same year Brzezinski's BETWEEN TWO AGES appeared, the NEA's ASCD published TO NURTURE HUMANENESS: COMMITMENT FOR THE ' 70s. The NEA included a disclaimer regarding the writers' opinions in the book. Nevertheless, the NEA did choose the writers and published their views. In the book, Dan Dodson (professor of educational sociology at New York University) wrote: "Social controls cannot be left to blind chance and unplanned change---usually attributed to God." John Loughary (chairman of the Department of Counseling at the University of Oregon) commented: "Many daily decisions and value judgments now made by the individual will soon be made for him." And Raymond Houghton (professor of secondary education at Rhode Island College and member of the ASCD 1970 Yearbook Committee) proclaimed: "There are those who are, on an increasingly sophisticated level, coming to know how behavior is changed....Absolute behavior control is imminent....The critical point of behavior control, in effect, is sneaking up on mankind without his self-conscious realization that a crisis is at hand. Man will not ever know that it is about to happen. He will never self-consciously know that it has happened."
One means of controlling behavior is "sensitivity training" (mentioned in Part 1 of this article and developed by the National Training Laboratories, now called the NTL Institute for Applied Behavioral Science), a primary technique used at places like Esalen where workshops such as "Advanced Training in Shamanism and Shamanic Healing" have been held. One of Esalen's directors was Virginia Satir, who was president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology, which is an international network supporting a humanistic vision of the person, fostering research and education which encourage others to share this view, and showing how this vision can be realized in the life and work of all.
Satir was also president of the "International Congress on Family Therapy" (Prague, May 1987) sponsored by the World Federation of Mental Health (WFMH), the only non-governmental organization in mental health at the time with consultative status to the United Nations and all of its relevant agencies. WFMH members influence government policies around the world and have urged the expansion of "health" to include a concern for mental and emotional development.
There will be more about this broadened definition of "health" to include "mental" and "emotional" health in Part 3 of this article.
Mental Health, Education and Social Control - Part 1
© 2004 Dennis Cuddy - All Rights ReservedDennis Laurence Cuddy, historian and political analyst, received a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (major in American History, minor in political science). Dr. Cuddy has taught at the university level, has been a political and economic risk analyst for an international consulting firm, and has been a Senior Associate with the U.S. Department of Education.
Cuddy has also testified before members of Congress on behalf of the U.S. Department of Justice. Dr. Cuddy has authored or edited seventeen books and booklets, and has written hundreds of articles appearing in newspapers around the nation, including The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and USA Today. He has been a guest on numerous radio talk shows in various parts of the country, such as ABC Radio in New York City, and he has also been a guest on the national television programs USA Today and CBS's Nightwatch.
