Leboydston's Blog
A filter for objective realityindoctrination centers
In reality public education as it existed in the past no longer exists. Local schools are now truly, government sponsored, run indoctrination centers.
I know how this sounds, but having worked with public education institutions for over a decade and having been involved with schools across the nation up to and including teaching at the university level.
Before that, I watched as the federal government slowly moved to change texts to promote the growing acceptance of larger and larger aspects of government control, while removing any foundational moral center, or even independent critical thinking. Instead they “directed” thinking lessons and exercises. Schools are intended to be amoral. Independent thinking is discouraged. It is purposeful.
Of course it is not stated that way, but in fact it is what it is. Under the guise of providing a safer, more accepting learning environment for our children and by reaching for a future generation of politically correct citizen above all other goals, the vast majority of local public schools have slid into the goal of not teaching critical thinking, or even basic reading, writing or math education. Instead, in each, “subject” area there is a directed seed of how to make a good citizen while teaching math, English etc. The texts have all but ignored the historical foundational truths our nation is built upon.
The goal is to remove the foundation. If you do not believe me, do the work, do the research.
The international test scores of these government schools are evidence genuine education is no longer the goal. The education system is control by two major systems at the federal level: one the teachers union and two, socialist leaning universities with an agenda outline in numerous documents. For years they have been placing each other in jobs of authority within the federal government and at high levels with many state governments. It is a closed loop. If you do not agree with their agenda (philosophy of education and government) you are out and not to be taken seriously.
The “public schools” we knew are almost all gone! They have been replaced with government run indoctrination centers. Trust me, I know how this sounds. But it is true..
We must, if we are to have a hope of reclaiming our students, do away with the Federal Department of Education. Our children are seriously at risk from this focused and deliberate intellectual attack.
Parents are responsible for the education of their children. Not the government. Parents are the experts regarding their children, not teachers, not therapist, not government school officials.
For public schools to have a chance to be effective it must be under total local control. They must be free. But freedom is the opposite of what most bureaucratic within the government schools systems desire. They are at every turn dramatically opposed to local parental control of the schools.
As long as the Feds have the money to give it will control local schools with the strings of financial rewards on those who conform.
The Federal Government’s role in Education
In the United States of America’s Constitution there is no right to an education. I know we all feel it is very important. Beyond important, it is critical for the success of our children in life and their future. We all know and agree it is true.
But the most important aspect of this critically important developmental aspect of a child’s life is the parent’s responsibility to ensure the education of their child or children. It is the parents responsibility not the government’s or societies. It is true our society; country, state, and local community have a vested interest in the education of the children but the obligation and responsibility lies with the parents.
It was not until October 17, 1979 there was even a federal department of education. It was signed into law by President Jimmy Carter. Up until that time each state guided by small local school districts (control by locally concerned parents) directed the education of the children in America. The scores and amazing productivity of our students was the standard of the world!
But since that time when Mr. Carter signed into law the federal department of education scores have steadily gone downhill. Now The United States of America is close if not on the bottom of scores when compared to developed nations.
Einstein’s definition of insanity is to expect different results when doing the same thing.
The time has come to acknowledge reality (proven by 3 decades of verifiable data). The federal government is fundamentally incapable of creating an environment in which local schools will improve the education of our children.
The time has come to abolish the Federal Department of Education!
The time has come to trust parents. The time has come to trust local school districts to know their communities and what is best for their specific needs and goals of our children/students.
Government Education?
A favorite graduate school professor of mine; Dr. George Barnard use to say: “ life is too short just to read people you agree with! ”
Critical thinking! It is the foundation of a solid healthy education. It is freedom to an artist. It is the foundation to innovation. It is the heart beat of an inventor! It is life’s blood to an entrepreneur! It is that intangible which genuinely establishes an educated person. Critical Thinking, there’s the ticket to solid well balanced educational system which leads to a healthy Democratic Republic such as America was and can be again.
In many, to many to list, published documents of the U.S. Department of Education (et. al.) the goal of successful education is to produce well rounded responsible citizen for the 21st century. Unfortunately this requires far more than just academic education. Let me quote from the United States Department of Education: ” The cornerstone of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 is academic achievement and professional success built upon a foundation of moral strength and civic virtue. As Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings has said, “We must not simply teach children how to count, we must teach them what counts.” … just one of literally thousands of similar documents. Sounds good, looks good and is almost true. There is just one huge problem.
Who’s values? Who gets to say , “what counts”? Who gets to define the morality of what is or is not a civic virtue?
What is the moral, civic virtue advocated by the US Dept of Education?
Do you understand the foundational issue here? Public Education, with purpose and forethought is establishing itself as the “State Church” in America. They get to define what is or is not moral. They, the Educators have the final say of what is a virtue. Not you, not the old fashion church, not the grandparents or traditions. No these tradional ethical systems only get in the way of those who are smarter, more moral and understand virtue far better than you. They are currently teaching and should teach your children morality from their perspective. Your understanding of what is right and wrong is just not, well, trustworthy.
No longer do they teach math, science or English composition (international scores demonstrate that clear enough). No longer do they teach skills where students think for themselves. No, in today’s America the Highest levels of Education in America want to supplant the historical role of theologians.
Critical thinking? Well read? Eclectic? Things of the past! In today’s America an Educated person yields to those who tells them what to think and what is: smart, clever, artistic and even funny. The US Dept of Education has a directed agenda who’s apparent outcome is to produce George Orwell’s 1984 citizen. To Quote Mr. Orwell from 1984: ” When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us; so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. We make him one of ourselves before we kill him. It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be.”
Diversity is not necessarily a societal strength!
Only when there is a common moral ethic is diversity a societal strength! A common moral ethic such as murder is bad, saving a life is good. Basic ideas like these which we can build a common ground of understanding on and then move to nuance.
When the fundamental understanding of good and bad, right and wrong are different there is no common ground for building a strong health community. The very fabric from which a society is woven pulls apart. If your “good” is my “bad” then we will be forever at odds and forever suspect with no common ground to build a health society. After all if it is my goal to emphasis and help build the “good” in society but since my “good” is your “bad” you will see all of my efforts as destroying your “good” in society.
For many years now we have all heard that one of the great strengths of America is its diversity. Historically when those of greatly diverse backgrounds, nations, racial groups, religions and just varied points of view or lifestyles came together in America the vast majority came with or conformed to a Judeo/Christian moral ethic. With that foundation of understand of right and wrong our very diverse forefathers built the greatest nation the world has ever known. The blend of differing insights and perspectives kept us on track with a solid rudder or the common moral ethic. Not a religion, not a church, but the moral truths derived from the blend of historical Judeo/Christian ethics tempered with truths of great western philosophers.
Now America has lost her way because of diversity without a common moral ethic or rudder.
The longer we blindly proclaim and accept platitudes like diversity is strength, without understanding that which infuses that strength, we will continue to drift into societal fraying until it is beyond repair.
Institutions, like public schools, without a foundational moral ethic, whose responsibility it is to help build educated responsible citizens have no rudder with which to guide, teach encourage and train students. Leaving children to determine ethics and or morality for themselves will simply and is truing America into a “Lord of the Flies” society.
Doubt me? Look at any inner city gang structure!
Just giving academic information without ethical/moral guidance is amoral in itself.
There is no greater demonstration of this truth than in special education community.
Autism Linked to Multisensory Integration
As most professionals who work with autistic children know Autism is linked to Multisensory issues.
In the article below we find some rather conclusive information. Is it proof positive? The verdict as far as science goes is still out. But from an empirical perspective it is very convincing.
ScienceDaily (Aug. 20, 2010) — A new study by researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University has provided concrete evidence that children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) process sensory information such as sound, touch and vision differently than typically developing children.
The study, which appears in the August 17 online issue of Autism Research, supports decades of clinical and anecdotal observations that individuals with ASD have difficulty coping with multiple sources of sensory information. The Einstein finding offers new insights into autism and could lead to objective measures for evaluating the effectiveness of autism therapies.
“One of the classic presentations of autism is the child in the corner with his hands over his ears rocking back and forth trying to block out the environment,” said senior author Sophie Molholm, Ph.D., associate professor in the Dominick P. Purpura Department of Neuroscience and of pediatrics. “People have long theorized that these children might not be integrating information across the senses very well. If you have all these sights and sounds coming at you but you can’t put them together in a meaningful way, the world can be an overwhelming place.”
The theory that autistic kids have trouble processing multisensory information has not been reliably supported by behavioral studies, and has rarely, if at all, been tested using measures of brain activity. Over the last few years, Dr. Molholm and her colleagues have been refining methods for measuring multisensory integration (MSI) using brainwave electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings.
In the current study, MSI was measured in 17 ASD children, ages 6 to 16, and 17 typically developing children matched for age and non-verbal IQ. The children watched a silent video of their choice while they were presented with unrelated sounds and vibrations. The auditory and vibrational stimuli were presented separately (creating so-called unisensory conditions) and then together (multisensory condition), which acted as the researchers’ index of MSI. The children’s EEG responses to the unisensory conditions were summed and compared to their EEG responses to multisensory conditions.
The responses of the typically developing children to the multisensory stimuli exceeded the sum of their responses to the unisensory stimuli―an indication of healthy MSI, according to the researchers. In the ASD children, by contrast, the differences between the sum of children’s unisensory responses and their MSI responses were not nearly as pronounced, indicating that these kids were not integrating multisensory information as effectively.
“Our data makes a compelling case, at least for these conditions, that there are differences in multisensory integration between the two groups,” said Dr. Molholm.
After our nerves are stimulated, “sensory information arrives in the brain’s cortex within 20 milliseconds (ms), or 20/1000ths of a second,” said co-author John Foxe, Ph.D., professor in the Dominick P. Purpura Department of Neuroscience and of pediatrics and director of research of the Children’s Evaluation and Rehabilitation Center at Einstein. “Then it takes an additional 100 to 200 ms for the brain to integrate information arriving from different senses, since many brain regions are involved in analyzing it.”
In this study, the differences between the typically developing and ASD children were most striking for that time interval in which multisensory stimuli is normally processed. “We saw robust MSI in the typically developing kids from 100 and 200 ms after sensory stimulation reached the brain’s cortex,” said Dr. Foxe. “But in the ASD kids, MSI occurred significantly later — at about 310 ms — and at a much lower level.”
“This doesn’t mean that the children with ASD didn’t integrate the information at all,” he added. “It does mean that they didn’t integrate it as effectively as they should have, given their age and maturity. They may go on to integrate well later in life. We don’t know. This is a single slice of the developmental trajectory.”
“This was a much-needed study of multisensory integration in autism,” said Barry E. Stein, Ph.D., professor and chair of neurobiology & anatomy at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, who was not involved in the Einstein study. “Using simple logic and standard techniques for electrically mapping the brain, the authors have identified defects in the way ASD individuals synthesize cues from different senses. In doing so, they have not only helped confirm the insights of parents and clinicians, but they’ve improved our understanding of how the behavioral differences in children with ASD may result from sensory anomalies.”
“Today, there’s a cottage industry — actually more like a military-industrial complex — for multisensory integration therapies for children with autism,” said Dr. Foxe. “A lot of parents’ hard-earned cash goes into these interventions, all in the absence of actual empirical evidence that there is anything wrong with MSI in these children or that these therapies do any good.”
The researchers are currently evaluating MSI in children from 6 years of age through early adulthood to better understand the developmental trajectory of multisensory integration. They also plan to study MSI in lower-functioning ASD children. “This experimental paradigm is especially good for that, because it makes so little demand on the kids,” said Dr. Foxe. “As you can imagine, asking them to do tasks doesn’t work very well.”
Support for this research was provided by Cure Autism Now, the National Institute of Mental Health, the Wallace Research Foundation and the Canadian Institute of Health Research.
Remedial training for poor readers
Recently a study by Scientists lookingat the anatomy of children’s brains during reading discovered something rather unexpected: Remedial training for poor readers results in a growth of white matter tracts in the brain, and the increase correlates with the level of improvement in sounding out words.
“This is the first evidence for an increase in white matter in response to a remedial behavioral intervention,” said lead author Marcel Just, a psychology professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and director of its Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging. “It provides evidence that repeated cognitive exercises can alter the cortical connectivity of the human brain.”
The finding could have potential beyond enhancing reading ability. If a behavioral intervention can cause brain growth, benefits might be reflected in any number of brain conditions, including autism, stroke, multiple sclerosis and traumatic brain injury, experts say.
“The evidence is mounting that the brain is wired to fix itself in so many ways,” said Dr. Thomas Insel, director of the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health. “This study bridges the divide between psychology and biology in showing how the brain responds to a cognitive challenge. We need to make use of this information and figure out ways to treat neurological conditions.”
Collecting and measuring real-time images of the working brain in poor and good readers led Just and his colleagues to identify a decrease in the white matter fibers in the poor readers compared with good readers. The area of interest is in the left frontal lobe, which governs language.
The poor readers received 100 hours of training to improve their reading skills and comprehension.
The remedial intervention actually changed the anatomy of the brain, the researchers reported recently in Neuron.
They conducted brain imaging tests before and after the remediation period on children 8 to 10 years old, including 47 with weak word decoding skills and 25 who had had good reading scores.
The researchers used a test called diffusion tensor imaging, or DTI, which measures the flow of water through the white matter tracts of the brain. This provides a snapshot of the brain’s structure and can be used to compare changes over time.
They found that those with reading problems had decreased microstructural organization of the white matter in a region of the left frontal lobe.
Most of the poor readers (35 of the 47) received remedial training for six months, and the others, including 12 poor readers, had no reading intervention. At the end of the training period, when the children were rescanned, the scientists found that “the instruction resulted in a change in white matter in the very same region that showed deficiencies in white matter before the intervention,” Just said.
The changes on the brain scan correlated with improvements on some of the reading measures, he added. Scientists have never before shown that the brain’s white matter grows in response to intense but relatively brief remedial training, the team said.
No changes were detected in the white matter in those poor readers who had no remedial intervention. “This suggests that it is not a matter of development but of the intervention itself,” Just said.
“I think as the children use these circuits over and over again, the specialized glial cells [called oligodendrocytes] that construct the white matter are building up more myelin [the protective insulation of the white matter fibers] along the axons being fired,” Just explained. This makes the neural signal travel 10 times faster and delivers a more precise signal, he said.
The finding may offer hope for other neurological problems. “There are many worlds to explore,” Just said. “It is now obvious that we are not at the mercy of our biology.”
The researchers have already begun imaging the brain at work in people with autism and have found a low connectivity in white matter. They plan to provide behavioral interventions and then retest the individuals to look for growth in white matter, which they say would suggest better connectivity between neurons.
Insel expressed enthusiasm for future prospects. “This is a great place to be,” he said. “We now have the tools to understand how cognitive strategies alter the biology of the brain.”
An Article of note from Elizabeth Landau, CNN
(CNN) — People with Asperger’s syndrome would be included in the same diagnostic group as people with autism and pervasive developmental disorders, according to new guidelines under consideration by the American Psychiatric Association.
Psychiatrists are in the process of revising the guidelines, known as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The manual has implications for how psychiatric drugs are developed and prescribed, what treatments get covered under insurance plans, which approach doctors take in treating their patients, and how patients view their own identities.
Anyone who has received a diagnosis from a mental health professional has most likely had his or her symptoms defined by the guidebook.
The revisions, which will be considered for the DSM’s fifth edition, due in 2013, were made public Wednesday at DSM5.org.
Scientifically, the distinction is correct; the research on people with these conditions has shown that Asperger’s is on the mild end of the spectrum of autistic disorders, said Dr. Michael First, professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University, who worked on the version of the DSM that is currently in use.
Of concern is that Asperger’s has been destigmatized and autism has not, he said. Over the past 15 years, communities have formed around Asperger’s, and the condition has taken on more positive tones with the notions that Albert Einstein and other intellectual luminaries may have had it.
Given that Asperger’s has become more acceptable, First favors keeping it as a diagnosis.
“This is a case where the science of the decision and social ramifications of the decision are separate,” First said.
But the DSM does not make diagnoses based on the stigma of one group over another, said Catherine Lord, director of the University of Michigan Autism and Communication Disorders Center, who is on the American Psychiatric Association committee looking at autism.
“Many people prefer to use the term Asperger’s, and we’re not saying that you can’t describe yourself that way,” she said. But the research shows “no scientific evidence that there are separate syndromes.”
Between three and six children out of every 10,000 today has an autism spectrum disorder, according to the National Institutes of Health. About two out of every 10,000 children has Asperger’s specifically, although the data are not well established, the institute said.
The new criteria require that the symptoms begin in early childhood and that deficits be measured in two areas: social interaction and communication, and the presence of repetitive behaviors and fixated interests and behaviors.
First also takes issue with “psychosis risk syndrome,” a proposed classification of the set of symptoms that sometimes precede schizophrenia.
Any new disorder added provides an opportunity for a pharmaceutical company to develop a new drug.
–Dr. Michael First, Columbia University
RELATED TOPICS
* American Psychiatric Association
* Autism Spectrum Disorders
* Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
* Eating Disorders
* Mental Health
For example, milder versions of delusions, disorganized speech and hallucinations fall under this. In First’s analysis, however, only 20 percent of people with this set of early symptoms would go on to develop schizophrenia.
That means “an unusual and unconventional adolescent who has a very rambling writing and speaking style, whose parents are concerned about the fact that their son is different, could qualify for this disorder,” he said.
This kind of diagnosis could ruin this person’s life, affecting his social life and college plans, and landing him on antipsychotic medications with strong side effects.
But Dr. Charles Raison, psychiatrist at Emory University, said there is some evidence that looking for psychosis early has tremendous benefits.
The psychiatric association’s rationale for considering psychosis risk syndrome is that psychotic illness is most effectively treated early and that intervening early may have long-lasting benefits not achievable with later therapy, the proposal said. But moving forward on putting this on the list of disorders, or in the appendix, depends on field trials.
First and Raison both lauded the association for proposing to get rid of the terms “substance abuse” and “substance dependence” and putting them under one name: addiction and related disorders, with the subheading “substance use disorders.”
Problems with thinking and memory, known as neurocognitive disorders, have been divided into “major” and “minor,” said Dr. Dan Blazer, professor of psychiatry at Duke University School of Medicine. In the past, people with “minor” impairments — for example, minor dementia — may not have been covered by insurance, and reframing the conditions in this way would include them, he said.
“Many people come seeking help because they are having some difficulty with their cognition but don’t qualify for a diagnosis currently,” said Blazer, who was part of the committee to revise the neurocognitive disorder criteria. “These are people that clearly need to be seen, and there’s a very good reason for them to be seen.”
At the same time, psychiatrists have recommended getting away from the word “dementia” because it has “outgrown its time,” Blazer said. Dementia does not accurately describe what’s going on in a person with cognitive impairment, he said.
The term will probably not disappear completely. For instance, it has not been decided whether “vascular dementia” ought to be renamed, he said.
Taking “dementia” out will probably not cause the same degree of controversy as decisions regarding autism classification because the proposed changes simply clarify what “dementia” actually means, he said.
First, however, is skeptical of this move.
“It feels to me like they’re fixing a problem that wasn’t there,” he said. “No one has ever said to me, ‘There’s a problem with the word “dementia.” ‘ ”
Blazer’s group also proposed using biological markers as guides for diagnosis. For example, several studies are ongoing to identify the signatures of Alzheimer’s disease in brain scans. No such tests are currently required by the DSM, but the revisions note that they are useful in ruling in or out certain conditions.
“We are moving toward trying to include some kind of more quantitative assessment of the severity of the condition, which will help us in this major-minor distinction,” Blazer said.
The proposed revisions also include new classifications for learning disorders. The new category “learning disabilities” will have the subcategories of dyslexia, related to reading, and dyscalculia, related to mathematics. This is a further specification of what academic skills should inform a diagnosis, Lord said.
The committees do not take insurance or drug company opportunities into account when crafting revisions to the DSM, she said. But First noted that the DSM does have these implications.
“Any new disorder added provides an opportunity for a pharmaceutical company to develop a new drug,” First said.
But Raison said the era of trying to treat an entire diagnosis is over, meaning the DSM V may have less of an impact than its predecessors in generating new drugs. As psychiatrists realize that mental illness diagnoses are sometimes vague descriptions rather than biological entities, there is a movement toward treating individual symptoms, he said.
“We’re in a bit of a backlash right now, and I think the golden age of just taking these psychiatric diagnoses as if they’re real things that exist in nature, I think those days have been winding down,” he said.
The new criteria will be available for public comment at DSM5.org until April 20. They will reviewed and refined over the next two years, during which time the American Psychiatric Association will conduct field trials to test some of the proposed revisions in real-world clinical settings.
Aspergers, the next stage in human development?
I have a staff member who genuinely believes that Aspergers is the next step in human evolution. The ability to excel in specific disciplines without the need (ability) to for social niceties is the perfect personality for the computer/digital/global is the same as local community! All one really needs are the skills which allow, or propel one to a synthesis with artificial intelligence.
Interesting idea which may not be too far off the mark, if so, then it will be a sad development. The joy of social interaction, the fun with others and the nuances of social dynamic are an essential part of what being human is all about.
It is with this goal our Social Thinking classes oriented.
Communication and Realization
Clarity of communicate with one another transcends normal social understanding.
That in and of itself should make your mind bubble!
I am not talking about just language, but actual communication! Talk, body language, and emotional language or “transpeak”!
All of us reach out to one another in the languages, or communication skills, we are raised with. I am not just speaking of English or Spanish or any other spoken language, but the languages of each family regardless of national language or local region, spoken in the home: Famlang! Famlang is also the communication unique to each family..
Words just represent ideas, but “famlang” communicates emotions and/or thoughts welded together with a desire to express our own individuality.
With that desire for individual expression within the context of local social dynamic we have the self centerpieces of family.
In that context we must yield to the solid and realization to provide for one another as individuals who chose as agents of freewill to take care of those less fortunate.
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