Thanks to Danielle for letting me know that her dear grandmother, and my dear friend and intellectual support, finally has gone to her Maker. I am deeply saddened to lose our constant contact …deeply saddened.
Mary always had a great sense of timing and an equally great sense of humor. Example: After all her years brilliantly combating evil (communism) in education and other areas, she was moved to depart one day short of Biden’s inauguration.
Mary was always ahead of many of us and, I am sure she is smiling down on all of us, saying regarding tomorrow’s inauguration of Joe Biden:
“I told you so…now, how are you going to deal with the outcome of the evil perpetrated on our children and our nation, for so many years, through education.”
God bless Mary on her journey. I have no words to say how much I will miss her constant contact with me, by handmade cards, important news clips, her ongoing sense of humor in times of stress, and the example she set for all of us.
Here is just one example of her brilliance at a time few saw what was coming down the pike, taken from my book “the deliberate dumbing down of america”:
MARY THOMPSON, SECRETARY AND MEMBER OF THE SPEAKERS’ BUREAU OF THE SANTA CLARA, California Republican Women’s Federation, gave a very important speech regarding Planning,Programming, Budgeting Systems (PPBS) on June 11, 1972. Charlotte’s note: PPBS was the first nail in the coffin, ultimately resulting in Skinnerian “outcomes/performance/results-based education”.
Following are key excerpts:
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When I was first asked to speak to you about PPBS (Planning, Programming, Budgeting Systems), I inquired whether it was to be addressed to PPBS as applied to education. I shall deal with it at the education level today, however you should remember that PPBS is a tool for implementing the very restructuring of government at all levels in every area of governmental institutions. What is involved is the use of government agencies to accomplish mass behavioral change in every area….
PPBS is a plan being pushed by Federal and State governments to completely change education….
The accountability involved in PPBS means accountability to the state’s predetermined education goals….
One leader of education innovation (Shelly Umans—Management of Education) has
called it “A systematic design for education revolution.”…
In a systems management of the education process, the child himself is the product.
Note: the child… his feelings, his values, his behavior, as well as his intellectual development….
PPBS is the culmination of the “people planners” dreams….
Then in 1965 the means for accomplishing the actual restructuring of education was provided in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). President Johnson has said that he considered the ESEA the most significant single piece of legislation of his administration. Recall that it was also the same year of 1965 when the presidential order was given to introduce PPBS throughout the entire federal government. 1965 was the year which unleashed the actual restructuring of governmental processes and formally included education as a legitimate Federal government function….
PPBS is the systems management tool made possible by technology of computer hardware to affect the planned change….
In order to make an explanation of PPBS intelligible, you must also know that education itself has been redefined. Simply put, it has become the objective of education to measure and diagnose the child in order to prescribe a program to develop his feelings and emotions,values and loyalties toward predetermined behavioral objectives…. Drawing it right down to basics, we are talking about conditioned responses in human terms. Pavlov experimented on dogs!…
Taking each element of PPBS will show how the process is accomplished. PLANNING— Planning phase (please note that the process involved with a systems approach is always described in terms of “phases”) always includes the establishment of goals committees,citizens committees, needs assessment committees…. These are referred to as “community involvement.” The committees are always either self appointed or chosen— never elected.
They always include guidance from some trained “change agents” who may be administrators,curriculum personnel or local citizens. Questionnaires and surveys are used to gather data on how the community “feels” and to test community attitudes. The ingeniousness of the process is that everybody thinks he is having a voice in the direction of public schools.
Not so… for Federal change agencies, specifically regional education centers established by ESEA, influence and essentially determine terminology used in the questionnaires and surveys. The change agents at the district level then function to “identify needs and problems for change” as they have been programmed to identify them at the training sessions sponsored by Federal offices such as our Center for Planning and Evaluation in Santa Clara County. That is why the goals are essentially the same in school districts across the country.
It also explains why three years ago every school district was confronted with the Family Life Education issue at the same time…
Unknowing citizens’ committees are used by the process to generate acceptance of goals already determined. What they don’t realize is that professional change agents are operating in the behaviorist’s framework of thought and Mr. or Mrs. Citizen Parent is operating in his traditional education framework of thought. So, the local change agents are able to facilitate a group to a consensus in support of predetermined goals by using familiar, traditional terms
which carry the new behaviorist meanings….
Another name for this process is Participatory Democracy, a term by the way, which was coined by Students for a Democratic Society in their Port Huron Manifesto to identify the process for citizen participation in destruction of their own political institutions….
Richard Farson of Western Behavioral Sciences Institute made a report to the Office of Education in Sacramento in 1967. He said it this way:The application of systems analysis is aided by several phenomena that would be of help
in almost any situation of organizational change. First, it is relatively easier to make big changes than to make small ones—and systems changes are almost always big ones. Because they are big, it is difficult for people to mount resistance to them, for they go beyond the ordinary decision-making, policy-making activities of individual members of an organization. It is far easier to muster argument against a $100 expenditure for partitions than against a complete reorganization of the work flow….
Teachers, you have professional organizations to protect your professional interests. Use them to protect your personal privacy and professional integrity. Encourage organizations of teachers to take positions publicly in opposition to PPBS….
We believe the time has come to establish private schools to keep our children from falling victim to the behaviorists while there is still opportunity to do so.
BE AWARE OF THE FACT THAT THE VOUCHER SYSTEM IS LURKING IN THE WINGS TO BRING THE PRIVATE SCHOOLS INTO THE NATIONAL CONTROL [emphasis in original].
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Click on following link for Mary’s superb presentation at 2014 Exposing the Global Road to Ruin Through Education