The Purpose of Education is Social Engineering for the New State

To help you understand regionalism and education for social engineering

This material was published in 1959, yet still pertinent today. Today, similar techniques — using trained facilitators to achieve “consensus” with “stakeholders” — is being used under the guise of “community development,” sustainable development, mental health, education reform (to implement so-called “lifelong learning,” International Baccalaureate programs, Skills for the 21st Century, Common Core, etc.), and much more.

Social Engineering for 1984
by Jo Hindman
A little-known movement is changing the U.S.A.
The American Mercury, October 1959, pp. 48-55
http://www.unz.org/Pub/AmMercury-1959oct-00048

All bold emphasis added.

Excerpt:

AT THE White House Conference on Education in 1955, Americans were introduced to a technique known as “group dynamics”, whereby committees studying various educational subjects were manipulated into coming up with predetermined conclusions.

Excerpt:

The predetermined conclusion favoring Federal aid was to be promoted, through “group dynamics,” by a corps of “planted idea carriers” who were all set to extract the pro-Federal aid recommendation from their respective subcommittees. News of this development was spread around at the time, and produced a sense of shock in some people who were unprepared for advances toward “togetherness.”

“Group dynamics” would be disturbing enough if it were an isolated phenomenon. As it is, the technique is merely the best-publicized instance of an accumulating body of evidence which shows that a powerful movement is afoot to subject whole areas of American life to the sway of self-appointed “social engineers.” The result, according to available evidence, would be a world uncomfortably similar to that described by George Orwell in his famous novel, 1984.

At work to achieve this goal is a whole array of individual “engineers,” Government officials, planners, free-lance collectivists and crackpots. The drive pops up in many different guises, occasioned by one or another legislative proposal at the State or Federal level.

The much-agitated “mental health” issue, for example, in reality represents a dispute over one zone of the “social engineering” movement.

The principal danger of this “engineering” movement—and of such of its subdivisions as “mental health” — is that it equates certain political opinions with sanity and “right” thinking, and brands their opposition as sickness…

Excerpt:

…acceptance of “world citizenship” is linked with mental health by the following statement of the 1948 International Congress on Mental Health in London: “World citizenship can be widely extended among all peoples through the application of the principles of mental health. Principles of Mental Health cannot be successfully furthered in any society unless there is progressive acceptance of the concept of world citizenship.”

Excerpt:

To cross the threshold of the “social engineering” fraternity is to enter a realm where pretentious gobbledegook passes as everyday speech. Key words in the “engineers” vocabulary include such terms as “sociogram,” “sociodrama,” “psychotherapy,” “psychodrama,” “telephenomena,” “inter-personal relations” and other sociometric this-and-thats.

Sociometry compounds a variety of techniquesand concepts from psychology, social and cultural anthropology, psychiatry and biology; it embraces a hodge-podge of activity suggested by its weird vocabulary, which is considerably more formidable than the things it represents.

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The object of sociometry is to apply all of its techniques to the activities of human groups with such scientific exactness that their behavior will be channeled along the paths desired by the planners.

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MOST INFLUENTIAL of the “social engineers” is a man named J. L. Moreno, a Viennese social scientist who arrived in New York in 1925, forearmed with the “sociogram,” the “psychodrama” and other sociometric techniques. Soon after arrival, Moreno teamed up with Dr. Bela Schick . . .

Excerpt:

Over in Europe, Dr. Moreno apparently had been casting about for the best way of employing his new science. Ruminating on where to “plant” his ideas of reshaping human society, he rejected the idea of taking his plan to Soviet Russia, for the simple reason that a similar plan—Marxism itself—was already being tried there. So he brought his social engineering to the United States. He reminisced: “I preferred to be the midwife to an incoherent, confused, democratic way of life, than die commissar of a highly organized world.” Moreno applauded the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” but expressed distaste for Stalinist methods. He decided to replace the global socio-economic proletarian revolution with “small” sociometric revolutions.

Dr. Moreno’s views about the sociometric revolution and Dr. Schick’s connections with one of America’s most notorious Communist fronts are not the only evidence of a strong affinity between the sociometry movement and those sympathetic to Moscow.

Excerpt:

In 1955, with Margaret Mead and others of her ilk, Moreno backed a variety of one-worldism being advanced through something called “Children’s International Summer Villages.” CISV assembles children of different nationalities and races and gives them practice in living together in summer villages; this experience supposedly is a sample of future “one-world” life. The children, moreover, return to their home groups as sociometrized “agents.” Literature from CISV was distributed at a UNESCO gathering in San Francisco in 1957. UNESCO features Moreno-type sociograms in its teacher-training publications, included in the notorious booklet series, Towards World Understanding.

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Summing up the “Centerville” project in 1936, Dr. Moreno’s magazine announced: “For the first time in 20 years, since Moreno began to develop the application of his sociometric technique in European resettlement programs during World War I, sociometric principles have been applied to an open community.” The object of such experiments is to produce a predictable set of community attitudes, stimulated by “key” agents who have been placed in the community according to sociometric principles of influence and leadership.

The “Centerville” experiment has by now lapsed into obscurity, but so-called “city planning” programs and the current gigantic “metro” government plan display many symptoms of the social engineering mentality. A rough estimate of how far the movement has proceeded may be formed upon inspection of the “urban renewal” and “community redevelopment” projects, which promote the knock-down-build-up craze that is evacuating U.S. homeowners by the thousands.

THE PARALLEL MOVEMENT of “metropolitan government” also bears sociometric markings. “Metro” proposes to collect independent units of municipal government under a big super-government, and to maintain control of such bodies through something described as “appointed executive” administration. Since these proposed metropolitan districts frequently cross state lines, the very concept of government units corresponding to them makes hash of our Constitution, which vests all reserved governing powers in the several states.

Excerpt:

Apart from community planning programs and the “counseling” advocated at the school level by the engineers, there is the pyrotechnical subject of “mental health,” which has been the most widely condemned aspect of the entire movement.

According to a publication of the University of Chicago, a person with a 100 per cent mental rating would have no “defenses” at all and would simply agree to “adjust.” Social engineers say: “This type of personality is very responsive to change in the outside world and within himself.” And: “Good adjustment is attained when a patient leaves his pattern of socially unrewarded defenses for a pattern of socially acceptable defenses.”

H/T: D. Niwa