All the coverages agonize over the impact of TV, violent music, family breakdown, etc., but fail to take into account the insidious effects of school curriculum practices that have been quietly introduced over the past few decades. The psychologist (Butterworth) quoted on page 8 has institutional blinders on. Your editorial, "The Jonesboro Tragedy," touches lightly on school matters but fails to recognize the worst contributors. The following analysis of curriculum factors reveals a pattern of practices which, taken singly, may seem innocuous; but each one gives the child a nudge in the direction of irresponsible, impulsive, or violent behaviors, so that their aggregate effect may well be characterized as "a recipe for violence."

The question needs to be asked if ALL school practices are helping with solutions, or if some are part of the problem, particularly in the light of a new book based on research at the U.S. Department of Justice: "Retarding America - The Imprisonment of Potential." (ISBN 0-89420-292-8) The book shows clear causal linkages between illiteracy and violent behavior, with reading failure as the cause. Quoting from the author's abstract: "[Students] are not receiving the type of instruction recommended by experimental research; and reading teachers [by their training] have been denied a working knowledge of . . methods . most successful in preventing reading failure and meeting the needs of handicapped readers."

Besides illiteracy, let's also look at other school factors in the light of research, psychological theory, the wisdom of the ages, and just plain common sense.

Communication for Conflict Resolution

Most conflict resolution scenarios involve improving communication. Poor reading retards language, vocabulary, and communication skills development. If people who have to interact can't communicate, their most frequent interaction is likely to be physical.

"Whole-Language" vs Communication

Many diverse language abilities make up communication skills, some of which are downplayed by the current fad of "whole-language." The fascination with so-called "invented spelling," and the encouragement to "substitute your own word" instead of figuring out EXACTLY what the author said, send a message to children that accuracy of language is unimportant. This deteriorates communication skill.

"Attitudes" Focus vs Brain Development

Aside from the moral and cultural questions of what attitudes should be taught, curriculum practices emphasizing feeling instead of thinking train the brain in-appropriately: Neurobiologist Dr. David Goodman states ("Learning From Lobotomy," HUMAN BEHAVIOR, January, 1978) that rather than studying the brain in terms of left and right hemispheres, it is more enlightening to analyze it as being divided crosswise into fore- and aft-brain hemispheres.

The aft-brain includes the regions of senses and feelings, whereas the fore-brain frontal lobes provide control functions: long-term planning, logical reasoning, inhibiting of impulses, self-control, tolerance for delayed gratification, etc., the functions we associate with maturation. So as brain areas develop in rough proportion to their usage, and students pay more attention to their feelings than to rational thinking and self-control, the frontal lobes will be under-developed, making impulsive and violent behaviors more likely. Children have been known to murder "just to see what it feels like." The "do what feels good at the time" attitude predominates.

Values Clarification, Decision-Making, & "Critical" Thinking

The majority of these kinds of activity are based on the "non-directive therapies" of Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, who admitted to problems with their use on children. Children are encouraged to adopt "values" for themselves -- even if different from those of their parents -- and to try making their own decisions on matters of life and death -- that there are no "right" or "wrong" decisions, just "different" ones -- with inadequate knowledge of consequences. The new moral relativism that questions the existence of right or truth confuses youth further.

Studies have shown that children undergoing the above types of courses under the rubric of drug- or sex-education tended to be MORE experimental than students who received no training at all. See HIDDEN DANGERS IN THE CLASSROOM, ISBN 0-938453-04-1, by Pearl Evans, based on the ideas of Dr. William Coulson, a colleague of Mssrs. Maslow and Rogers.

The Self-Esteem Scam

>From the time of Socrates we have the adage: "Knowledge of one's own ignorance is the first step toward true knowledge." And from practitioners of total quality management (TQM) a modern version: "The greatest obstacle to progress is not ignorance, but the illusion of knowledge." These wisdoms, and educational research, contradict educators' current fascination with self-esteem as a prelude to learning.

Though we are told that raising kids' self-esteem enhances learning, experiments to prove it have been UNsuccessful. In my own experience I saw many improved behaviors and attitudes and self-confidence as a RESULT of successes in learning. The psychotherapeutic value of a successful learning experience is grossly under-estimated by educators who should know better. They have the cart before the horse. Artificially inflating a non-achieving kid's ego, without giving him an inner means to nourish it, is more likely to produce arrogance and complacency than studiousness. A little humility helps.

Social Promotions Deceive When reading programs started to go non-phonetic (circa 60 years ago!) the increase in failures posed a problem. The system "solved" the problem by promoting children who cannot read, touting the theory that "holding them back would damage their psyches!" As such children age without remediation, their frustrtion, boredom, and related behavior problems increase. By graduating kids who can't read their diplomas, we condition them that performance does not matter. By "protecting" them from failure, we have guaranteed it. When the workplace rejects them, anger and alienation replace rosy illusions.

The Down-Side of Group or Cooperative Learning

Schools' fascination with "cooperative learning" (CL) puts kids in situations of learning from each other, probably imperfectly, what a teacher could have taught them better in a fraction of the time. Now think back on your own teachers you respected the most. They were the ones who TAUGHT you something. A few years of CL conditioning makes kids less respectful of teachers and more responsive to peer pressure, and secondary educators wonder why they "don't get no repect" and the kids form gangs! Cooperative learning has long been a key element of totalitarian cultures to foster group dependency and suppress individualism. It does NOT necessarily contribute to creative teamwork!

Deprecating Human Life Instead of a counterforce to the climate of abortion, assissted suicides, TV murders, etc., schools' fascination with "death education," "lifeboat" problems, and environmental education, where the earth is God and man is "the bad guy," send a message that human life is a problem rather than a sacred value. Raising parental hackles nation-wide has been the book, THE GIVER," wherein the central figure is graphically described as he "gives freedom" (executes) unwanted children. Schools using the book doggedly supported its use.

Education analyst Dr. Dennis Cuddy has cited (The Christian Conscience, December 1996) numerous examples of social programs having detrimental effects on behavior: From PARADE, October 12, 1980: Florida Family Court Judge Frank A. Orlando stated that "public schools are the heaviest contributors to delinquency." And from Ira Schwartz of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention: "People think that if kids are in school all the time there would be no delinquency. It's a myth! The rate of referrals to juvenile courts . . . is low in summer when the kids are out of school. In September it goes up!"

(Cuddy, continued) School counselors are not the answer either: A Drexel University sociologist did a 30-year follow-up of the classic "Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study" on juvenile delinquency. The original (1948) study was on 235 high-risk problem boys who were extensively counseled. A control group (matched for background and behavior) received no counseling. A 1975 follow-up by a Professor McCord (AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST, March, 1978) found the experimental subjects "more likely to commit criminal acts, be alcoholics, suffer from mental illness, die younger and have less prestigious jobs than the control group. . . Those who had more frequent contact with their counselors were more likely to be failures."

"Child-Centered" Education

The current fascination with "child/learner-centered education," as opposed to content-focussed education, is a non-researched fad which falls apart under close analysis: Above and beyond the impossible logistics of individualizing whole classes according to "individual differences," if a child is to be given such instruction as he "needs" each day, how is that "need" to be determined save by knowing what he knows and presenting the next step? BUT -- that requires focussing on CONTENT -- which the system says is a no-no! Does this lead anywhere but to absurdity? Schools which focus on well-organized CONTENT teach children more, and incur less boredom, frustration, and behavior problems.

A Recipe for Violence

Combine a tad of TV titillation, plus overstimulated feeling centers and under-developed regulatory lobes, plus defective communication skills, plus ignorance, plus arrogance -- the illusion of power to choose one's own values un-fettered by worries of possible bad or wrong decisions: mix them all together with the frustration of drowning in a sea of print while unable to read it, and you have A RECIPE FOR VIOLENCE!

And we haven't even talked about alleged Attention Deficit Disorder, which some insightful medical researchers attribute to school and environmental factors, rather than a lack of Ritalin! Since the curriculum factors described are mostly products of the various "laboratories" of the U.S. Department of Education, reducing youth violence will best be accomplished by less governmental gun controls and stll less governmental curriculum influences.

Our Prison "Problem"

To round out the perspective, consider also Justice Department data showing our prison population at an all-time high of 1.7 million inmates, and growing at annual rates around 7 percent. Money invested at 7% DOUBLES EVERY TEN YEARS! So by 2008 we'll have 3.4 million, etc. And there is no public discussion of real PREVENTION -- like noting that the jail population is 80 percent minority illiterates which our schools are producing in quantity!

Can we afford to build prisons at such rates? Should we? Is this any way to run a country? Is this a "kinder, gentler, (smarter?) nation?"

Charles M. Richardson, P.E.