gat

Stripping away psychological defenses can be done through assignments to
keep diaries to be discussed in group sessions, and through role-playing
assignments, both techniques used in the original brainwashing programs in
China under Mao.
The Forbes writer, Thomas Sowell, perhaps invoking the slave states in part to rouse the reader’s
capitalist dander, could hardly have been aware himself how carefully industrial and institutional
interest had seeded Russia, China, Japan, and the Pacific Islands with the doctrine of
psychological schooling long ago, nearly at the beginning of the century, and in Japan’s case even
before that. All along we have harvested these experimental growths in foreign soil for what they
seem to prove about people-shaping.
For example, the current push for School-to-Work deep mines specific practices of the former
Soviet Union, even to the point of using identical language from Soviet texts. School-to-Work
was a project installed in Russia by Americans in the 1920s to test the advice of the
nineteenth-century Swiss aristocrat von Fellenberg that manual labor should be combined with
academic schooling. Fellenberg’s doctrine was a short-lived fad in this country in the 1830s, but
ever after it had a place in the mind of certain men of affairs and social theorists. The opportunity
afforded by Russia’s chaos after WWI seemed too promising to pass up.
The New Thought Tide
The great forced schooling plan even long ago was a global movement. Anatomizing its full scope
is well beyond my power, but I can open your eyes partway to this poorly understood dimension
of our pedagogy. Think of China, the Asian giant so prominently fixed now in headline news. Its
revolution which ended the rule of emperors and empresses was conceived, planned, and paid for
by Western money and intellectuals and by representatives of prominent families of business,
media, and finance who followed the green flag of commerce there.
This is a story abundantly related by others, but less well known is the role of ambitious Western
ideologues like Bertrand Russell, who assumed a professorship at the University of Peking in
1920, and John Dewey, who lived there for two years during the 1920s. Men like this saw a
unique chance to paint on a vast blank canvas as Cecil Rhodes had shown somewhat earlier in
Africa could be done by only a bare handful of men.
Listen to an early stage of the plan taken from a Columbia Teachers College text written in 1931.
The author is John Childs, rising academic star, friend of Dewey. The book, Education and the
Philosophy of Experimentalism:
During the World War, a brilliant group of young Chinese thinkers launched a
movement which soon became nationwide in its influence. This movement was
called in Chinese the "Hsin Szu Ch’au" which literally translated means the
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