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Educating For The New World Order - The Role ofBehavioral Psychology
by Bev Eakman
 
This is taken from Bev's book,
Educating for the New World Order 
Uncovering the How-To Manual of Behavioral Programming
 IT WAS IN 1986, then, that Pennsylvania Group researchers - who included, by thistime, people in Washington, D.C. - felt like they had entered the Twilight Zone. Theywere looking for proof that the idea of inducing psychological conflicts in order to "cure"them did not represent establishment g, or at least did not have the blessing andendorsement of the federal government.What Group researchers expected to find was evidence to support the contention that theU.S. Department of Education and its colleagues in other government agencies really hadno idea what was going on in education; that they neither endorsed nor disapprovedbehavioral teaching strategies because they didn't understand what they were; thatofficials had allowed a branch of experimental research to be pursued at the Labs andCenters and to be promulgated in the nation's tax-supported (and even private) schoolsbecause the bureaucracy was out of control and, essentially, doing its own thing.What Pennsylvania Group researchers did not expect to find was a how-to manual with a1971 U.S. Office of Education contract number on it entitled
Training for Change Agents
; or seven volumes of "change agent studies" commissioned by the U.S. Office of Education to the Rand Corporation in 1973-74; or scores of other papers submitted bybehaviorist researchers who had obtained grants from the U.S. Office of Education forthe purpose of exploring ways to "freeze" and "unfreeze" values, " to implement change,"and to turn potentially hostile groups and committees into acquiescent, rubber-stampbodies by means of such strategies as "the Delphi Technique. "No longer was it mere speculation that federal funds for education were being used topursue behavioral objectives instead of academic ones; here were official texts anddocuments, solicited by the U.S. government, saying so specifically. With the trainingmanual in hand, it was learned also for the first time precisely how sophisticatedpsychological manipulation techniques were being used to defuse potentially hostileelements - like parent groups (PTAs), teachers, and community watchdog organizations -so that they are maneuvered into accepting programs and strategies of which they reallydo not approve.To say that the Group was shocked by this find would fail to capture the essence of themoment. The room that first examined
Training for Change Agents
looked like a massdental examination - every mouth was open.Change agent training was launched with federal funding under the EducationProfessions Development Act (1967). The original purpose of the Act was to providefunds to
local
education agencies to attract and train teachers because of the then-criticalshortage. But by the early seventies, these funds were being used by the U.S. Office of 
 
Education, under the Department of Health, Education and Welfare,
"to award grants tocolleges and universities for the training of change agents."
The Office of Educationeven ran one elementary school in Gary, Indiana, jointly with the Behavioral ResearchLabs to test change agent theories! It is not known whether parents knew anything aboutit.By following up references on "behavioral strategies," Pennsylvania Group researchersstumbled onto a series of documents about "how to gain social acceptance for aninnovation." In these documents, schools repeatedly were referred to as
"experimentallaboratories."
Each time researchers ran across terms like this, they tried using it to gainaccess to additional reference material, by author and title, from the ERIC computersystem. 'Thus, terms like
"laboratory," "behavior," "operant conditioning," "socialreinforcement," "internal-external control,"
when linked with the word
education(al)
,eventually turned up listings for "change agents" and "educational change." Subtitleswere found on "training change agents...... the role of the state facilitator," and so forth. Aless obvious subheading, "performance contracts" revealed even more change agentdocuments.One of the first papers the team read was Clyde Hall's 21-page "How to ImplementChange." In it, he explained
"the science of planned change,"
which translates to
legislated and managed change
. In one passage the reader learns that:
[i]n a managed change process an outside agent is usually involved which is referred toas a 'change agent' and the population with which it works is called the 'client system'.
 The Hall paper goes on to discuss the techniques of "freezing" and "unfreezing" attitudes- today called "programming" and "de-programming." But he was not talking aboutstudents' attitudes; he was talking about teachers' attitudes being changed - throughteacher workshops, inservice education, and revised college/university teacher educationprograms. The change agent, he states, would only be withdrawn when "the new attitudesare stabilized."It turned out that Ronald G. and Mary C. Havelock were the major sources of researchand information on change agents for the federal government. Four lengthy papers of theirs, including case studies of change agent teams in three schools, were uncovered inaddition to another text,
The Change Agents Guide to Innovation in Education
- all paidfor, in whole or in part, under government contract.But the
Training for Change Agents
text was the researchers' gold mine. It sought to justify, among other things, deceiving the public about learning programs and theirintended usages. The strategy for doing this is called, appropriately, the
 fait accompli
.The Havelocks say that in certain cases it is best not to tell the truth about the substanceof an educational program until after the fact (the
 fait accompli
), when the "profoundresults" supposedly will render its merits obvious.It is worth mentioning here the results of one change agent program on drug educationthat used peer pressure to resist drugs. According to Havelock's 1973 "Guide toInnovation in Education" (Handbook II, page 24) the program actually increased students'tolerance toward marijuana use and promiscuous sex. The change agent in charge, as wellas the program's supporters, were baffled. School authorities, of course, had gone to a lot
 
of trouble to garner community support for the class (billed, again, as a "pilot program"),so this result wasn't advertised. Nevertheless, the change agent continued to garnersupport for the program until it was placed in the curriculum over the objections of parents and the community.Another problem with this particular project, states the change agent recounting theincident, was that because he had failed to make a formal survey of parent reactions tothe course concept, a furor erupted when he announced that "teaching morals" was beingavoided. The program was to help students "make responsible value judgments" - a goalwhich, he says, he had "been intentionally sliding over ... in ... discussions with thepublic." In any case, his noble objective backfired according to the results, since thestudents became more permissive of drug use and promiscuous sex according to follow-up surveys. To minimize the damage to the program, then, the opposition was labeled"extremists" and the course, despite its disappointing results, was continued.A typical chapter subtitle (page 44) in the Havelock text,
Training for Change Agents
,reads "Extinguishing Existing Attitudes, Knowledge and Behavior." An excerpt frompage 151 states:
The first role [of the change agent] is that of advocate-organizer-agitator ... who clarifiesand defines the problem ... by helping it to surface or escalate.
 Again, the idea gets back to inducing a conflict and exploiting the results.The Rand Corporation's change agent studies - full of statistical data and very hard toobtain - are essentially a set of feasibility studies. Apparently, the federal governmentwanted to know how difficult and costly it would be to move forward with a nationalversion of the change-agent program. Volumes II and IV, respectively, of the Rand seriesare entitled F
actors Affecting Change Agent Projects and Factors Affecting Implementation and Continuation
. Without going into depth on these lengthy statisticalstudies, the titles here give a pretty good idea what the thrust of the work was. As withthe other change agent documents, the federal contract number is emblazoned plainly onthe front cover of each Rand volume.Training of change agents apparently is done through the behavioral colleges - alluded toearlier. Change agentry is not a subject one majors in, exactly; it is something one moreor less works his or her way into as a result of clinical and/or theoretical work performedin behavioral science. In other words, it appears that the kingpins in the behavioral field -CFAT people and others who already have made a name for themselves - scout outindividuals/colleagues whom they believe will make good change agents.What happens is that local education agencies (LEAS) discover at some point that theyneed help in promoting or implementing certain programs and policies. It may be a pilotprogram (one of those "innovative programs" department heads can access through theNDN computer), or a new guidance program, or some new policy they think parentswon't like. So they call on the state, the curriculum creators, or even the federal agency (if the program concerns a federal initiative or policy) to request "technical assistance." The"help" local schools may receive from the state or federal agency will come in the formof a "change agent" - sometimes called a "technical assistant" or a "facilitator."
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