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Messages - FaceKhan

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16
The Troubled Teen Industry / Alex Asch's Story
« on: November 25, 2003, 08:29:00 PM »
Nice to see someone come out of a program not messed up.

I guess its hard to be any more angry and anti-social than your typical anarchist is anyways. :razz:



On another note, anyone ever read "Bartleby" by Melville.

Its a short story. I just keep thinking about how a person would best resist incarceration and brainwashing.

What ways work, what ways don't.

I guess there are a lot of choices:

1. Fake it, conform on the outside to get out as soon as possible. The benefit is you avoid the physical pain, get your priveliges fast so you don't starve to death or get sick or go crazy and you may get out faster although not always the case. The drawback being you may start to believe what you are regurgitating and its hard to suppress the constant rage that screams kill those fucks.

2. Fight. Let loose, go psycho. Attack guards, other inmates, escape any chance you get. Benefits. You keep you mind intact, you don't give them any respect or an inch of help. You get to give those assholes what they deserve. And you may very well get kicked out if you are particulalry dangerous. The drawback being you are going to get a lot of beatings and spend most of your time there restrained or in isolation and assuming they keep you there you may be there a long time.

3. Fake it in order to escape when you get a chance. Benefits basically all the benefits of 1 except graduating early and few of the drawbacks of 2. It also gives you the benefit of well planned and thought out escapes so you won't be recaptured. Not so useful for foriegn locations though.

If I were in that situation I would probably fake it just long enough to get a chance to escape. Of course I have a low regard for the lives of my captors so I would probably find something to be used as a deadly weapon and walk out with a shiv against a senior staff member's throat. I would make them give me the keys to one of their trucks and if they came near, that staff guy is dead. Either way I am out of that place.

That goes especially if I were in a foriegn country because quite frankly, fuck those Jamaican fucks. I'd take my number two pencil and shove it through the teachers ear. Thats right I would kill to escape. The most committed wins.

In addition, cleaning chemicals make good poisons and bombs.

4. Passive resistance. Another way to make them think you are psycho and let you out. Simply shut down. Refuse to speak, refuse to listen, refuse everything. Passive resistance (for a good example read "Bartleby") is probably the most frusrating thing in the world for a person to deal with. If you really want to scare them, refuse to eat.




As for when they come to kidnap you in the first place. Simply refuse to go. Cry, fire, cry rape, cry bomb, call the cops. There is not really much need to fight them if you are not armed you will just end up in handcuffs.

There is no way you can get on a plane screaming bomb. You can make it so long and costly to get you anywhere that it won't be worth it. Every airport, every plane, every bus, every train make a scene and get the authorities involved. It will take an hour or longer to clear up each incident. It could take days to get you back on a plane. If you scream bomb, I guarantee you are never riding on a plane again.  

If they are trying to take you out of the country simply refuse. Tell the border security they are smuggling drugs, kidnapping you, terrorists.

Another good tactic is to make them carry you. They will get tired of that real quick.

Lastly fight. Tell them that you are not going with them and you will defend yourself with any force deemed necesary. Then if they insist. Make like you are gonna go and then say "I left my shoes in the kitchen." You go to the kitchen grab a knife and tell them to get the fuck out of your house or they are dead.

17
The Troubled Teen Industry / John Taylor Gatto interviewed for High times
« on: November 23, 2003, 03:17:00 PM »
In the current issue of High Times, John Taylor Gatto has a 4 page interview/article.

For those who don't know he was NY state teacher of year 3 times and is one of the biggest critics of mass public schooling.



Here is one of his old articles:

I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn't seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren't interested in learning more. And the kids were right: their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.
 
Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teachers' lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn't get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If even that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children. Who, then, is to blame?
 
We all are. My grandfather taught me that. One afternoon when I was seven I complained to him of boredom, and he batted me hard on the head. He told me that I was never to use that term in his presence again, that if I was bored it was my fault and no one else's. The obligation to amuse and instruct myself was entirely my own, and people who didn't know that were childish people, to be avoided if possible. Certainty not to be trusted. That episode cured me of boredom forever, and here and there over the years I was able to pass on the lesson to some remarkable student. For the most part, however, I found it futile to challenge the official notion that boredom and childishness were the natural state of affairs in the classroom. Often I had to defy custom, and even bend the law, to help kids break out of this trap.
 
The empire struck back, of course; childish adults regularly conflate opposition with disloyalty. I once returned from a medical leave to discover t~at all evidence of my having been granted the leave had been purposely destroyed, that my job had been terminated, and that I no longer possessed even a teaching license. After nine months of tormented effort I was able to retrieve the license when a school secretary testified to witnessing the plot unfold. In the meantime my family suffered more than I care to remember. By the time I finally retired in 1991, 1 had more than enough reason to think of our schools-with their long-term, cell-block-style, forced confinement of both students and teachers-as virtual factories of childishness. Yet I honestly could not see why they had to be that way. My own experience had revealed to me what many other teachers must learn along the way, too, yet keep to themselves for fear of reprisal: if we wanted to we could easily and inexpensively jettison the old, stupid structures and help kids take an education rather than merely receive a schooling. We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness-curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insightsimply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids to truly competent adults, and by giving each student what autonomy he or she needs in order to take a risk every now and then.
 
But we don't do that. And the more I asked why not, and persisted in thinking about the "problem" of schooling as an engineer might, the more I missed the point: What if there is no "problem" with our schools? What if they are the way they are, so expensively flying in the face of common sense and long experience in how children learn things, not because they are doing something wrong but because they are doing something right? Is it possible that George W. Bush accidentally spoke the truth when he said we would "leave no child behind"? Could it be that our schools are designed to make sure not one of them ever really grows up?
 
Do we really need school? I don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn't, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever "graduated" from a secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn't go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead. In fact, until pretty recently people who reached the age of thirteen weren't looked upon as children at all. Ariel Durant, who co-wrote an enormous, and very good, multivolume history of the world with her husband, Will, was happily married at fifteen, and who could reasonably claim that Ariel Durant was an uneducated person? Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated.
 
We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think of "success" as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, "schooling," but historically that isn't true in either an intellectual or a financial sense. And plenty of people throughout the world today find a way to educate themselves without resorting to a system of compulsory secondary schools that all too often resemble prisons. Why, then, do Americans confuse education with just such a system? What exactly is the purpose of our public schools?
 
Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century. The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold:
 
1) To make good people. 2) To make good citizens. 3) To make each person his or her personal best. These goals are still trotted out today on a regular basis, and most of us accept them in one form or another as a decent definition of public education's mission, however short schools actually fall in achieving them. But we are dead wrong. Compounding our error is the fact that the national literature holds numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling's true purpose. We have, for example, the great H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not
 
to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. ... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim ... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States... and that is its aim everywhere else.
 
Because of Mencken's reputation as a satirist, we might be tempted to dismiss this passage as a bit of hyperbolic sarcasm. His article, however, goes on to trace the template for our own educational system back to the now vanished, though never to be forgotten, military state of Prussia. And although he was certainly aware of the irony that we had recently been at war with Germany, the heir to Prussian thought and culture, Mencken was being perfectly serious here. Our educational system really is Prussian in origin, and that really is cause for concern.
 
The odd fact of a Prussian provenance for our schools pops up again and again once you know to look for it. William James alluded to it many times at the turn of the century. Orestes Brownson, the hero of Christopher Lasch's 1991 book, The True and Only Heaven, was publicly denouncing the Prussianization of American schools back in the 1840s. Horace Mann's "Seventh Annual Report" to the Massachusetts State Board of Education in 1843 is essentially a paean to the land of Frederick the Great and a call for its schooling to be brought here. That Prussian culture loomed large in America is hardly surprising, given our early association with that utopian state. A Prussian served as Washington's aide during the Revolutionary War, and so many German-speaking people had settled here by 1795 that Congress considered publishing a German-language edition of the federal laws. But what shocks is that we should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens 11 in order to render the populace "manageable."
 
It was from James Bryant Conant-president of Harvard for twenty years, WWI poison-gas specialist, WWII executive on the atomic-bomb project, high commissioner of the American zone in Germany after WWII, and truly one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century-that I first got wind of the real purposes of American schooling. Without Conant, we would probably not have the same style and degree of standardized testing that we enjoy today, nor would we be blessed with gargantuan high schools that warehouse 2,000 to 4,000 students at a time, like the famous Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado. Shortly after I retired from teaching I picked up Conant's 1959 book-length essay, The Child the Parent and the State, and was more than a little intrigued to see him mention in passing that the modem schools we attend were the result of a "revolution" engineered between 1905 and 1930. A revolution? He declines to elaborate, but he does direct the curious and the uninformed to Alexander Inglis's 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education, in which "one saw this revolution through the eyes of a revolutionary."
 
Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole.
 
Inglis breaks down the purpose - the actual purpose - of modem schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier:
 
1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.
 
2) The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.
 
3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one.
 
4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.
5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.

6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.

 
That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public education in this country. And lest you take Inglis for an isolated crank with a rather too cynical take on the educational enterprise, you should know that he was hardly alone in championing these ideas. Conant himself, building on the ideas of Horace Mann and others, campaigned tirelessly for an American school system designed along the same lines. Men like George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory schooling throughout the South, surely understood that the Prussian system was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers. In time a great number of industrial titans came to recognize the enormous profits to be had by cultivating and tending just such a herd via public education, among them Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.
 
Tre you have it. Now you know. We don't need Karl Marx's conception of a grand warfare between the classes to see that it is in the interest of complex management, economic or political, to dumb people down, to demoralize them, to divide them from one another, and to discard them if they don't conform. Class may frame the proposition, as when Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, said the following to the New York City School Teachers Association in 1909: "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." But the motives behind the disgusting decisions that bring about these ends need not be class-based at all. They can stem purely from fear, or from the by now familiar belief that "efficiency" is the paramount virtue, rather than love, lib, erty, laughter, or hope. Above all, they can stem from simple greed.
 
There were vast fortunes to be made, after all, in an economy based on mass production and organized to favor the large corporation rather than the small business or the family farm. But mass production required mass consumption, and at the turn of the twentieth century most Americans considered it both unnatural and unwise to buy things they didn't actually need. Mandatory schooling was a godsend on that count. School didn't have to train kids in any direct sense to think they should consume nonstop, because it did something even better: it encouraged them not to think at all. And that left them sitting ducks for another great invention of the modem era - marketing.
 
Now, you needn't have studied marketing to know that there are two groups of people who can always be convinced to consume more than they need to: addicts and children. School has done a pretty good job of turning our children into addicts, but it has done a spectacular job of turning our children into children. Again, this is no accident. Theorists from Plato to Rousseau to our own Dr. Inglis knew that if children could be cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and independence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older but never truly grow up. In the 1934 edition of his once well-known book Public Education in the United States, Ellwood P. Cubberley detailed and praised the way the strategy of successive school enlargements had extended childhood by two to six years, and forced schooling was at that point still quite new. This same Cubberley - who was dean of Stanford's School of Education, a textbook editor at Houghton Mifflin, and Conant's friend and correspondent at Harvard - had written the following in the 1922 edition of his book Public School Administration: "Our schools are ... factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned .... And it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down."
 
It's perfectly obvious from our society today what those specifications were. Maturity has by now been banished from nearly every aspect of our lives. Easy divorce laws have removed the need to work at relationships; easy credit has removed the need for fiscal self-control; easy entertainment has removed the need to learn to entertain oneself; easy answers have removed the need to ask questions. We have become a nation of children, happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments that would insult actual adults. We buy televisions, and then we buy the things we see on the television. We buy computers, and then we buy the things we see on the computer. We buy $150 sneakers whether we need them or not, and when they fall apart too soon we buy another pair. We drive SUVs and believe the lie that they constitute a kind of life insurance, even when we're upside-down in them. And, worst of all, we don't bat an eye when Ari Fleischer tells us to "be careful what you say," even if we remember having been told somewhere back in school that America is the land of the free. We simply buy that one too. Our schooling, as intended, has seen to it.
 
Now for the good news. Once you understand the logic behind modern schooling, its tricks and traps are fairly easy to avoid. School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they'll never be bored. Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology - all the stuff schoolteachers know well enough to avoid. Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone, and they seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired and quickly abandoned. Your children should have a more meaningful life, and they can.
 
First, though, we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. Don't let your own have their childhoods extended, not even for a day. If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a pre-teen, if Thomas Edison could publish a broadsheet at the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today), there's no telling what your own kids could do. After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.

18
The Troubled Teen Industry / Law and Order Episode
« on: November 17, 2003, 04:15:00 AM »
There is also a rerun episode where a sitting Judge raped his stepdaughter and got her pregnant and then had her committed to a juvenile prison to keep her from telling.

19
The Troubled Teen Industry / Academy at Swift River Update
« on: November 10, 2003, 01:17:00 PM »
These programs should be banned if for no other reason than they provide a very convenient place to send a kid thats already abused at home and keep them from getting help for themselves.

20
Its a lot like a Clockwork Orange. A person who obeys the rules only out of fear of physical pain is not capable of moral choice. Of course far too many parents don't really want their kids to choose anything for themselves ever so the programs have no shortage of victims on a waiting list.

21
The Troubled Teen Industry / aspen achievement academy info???
« on: November 09, 2003, 04:23:00 PM »
I have read a fair amount of stuff that indicates they are one of the programs to avoid.

22
Restraint should be used with restraint. It is designed to be a defensive activity. You restrain someone to keep them from hurting themselves or others. If it hurts its not a restraint its torture. Handcuffs are a form of restraint, grabbing someones arms is a form of restraint and even tackling a person and holding them down is a form of restraint but twisting someones arms or poking at pressure points is just a form of torture and its illegal everywhere. Its called assualt.

23
The Troubled Teen Industry / Nelly Bly Where Are You?
« on: November 06, 2003, 03:27:00 AM »
As for hiding a camera, what they really need to find is a whistle blower staff member who is willing to sneak a camera or tape recorder in over a period of time. Think like Donnie Brasco kind of situation.

These programs hire within a close knit network of program people in the United States where this kind of treatment is recognized as criminal. In foreign programs they mostly just hire locals with no training and limited english skills.

Now doing this would violate their employee confidentiality agreements but those are not valid against law enforcement or for reporting criminal activity.

24
It seems to be fixed. I think it is probably my school's dns server. It has been hacked before. One time netster replaced all the major e-commerce sites.

25
The Troubled Teen Industry / Lon on Scarcity
« on: November 04, 2003, 02:36:00 AM »
Lon claims to be an educational consultant. He runs a site where he advertises and "reviews" (never a negative word said) programs including WWASP.

In reality Lon is an industry mouthpiece and earns a living advertising and recomending dangerous and abusive programs by giving them the aura of legitimacy.

26
If I go to http://fornits.com it sends me to one of those generic search engine cybersquater sites.

www.fornits com works though.

Maybe your dns got hijacked or maybe mine did.

27
The Troubled Teen Industry / Possible law?
« on: November 03, 2003, 03:42:00 AM »
School does suck. I hated it for 10 years and finally got the fuck out and went to college early and did some unschooling.

The GED is the easiest test in the world. Everyone should take it every year starting in 6th grade and if they pass then they are graduated out of the government school bullshit and can get on with their lives.

28
The Troubled Teen Industry / Venting, needing emotional support
« on: November 01, 2003, 04:04:00 PM »
I would say do what you can to get her out. Never stop trying to convince the parents or get the place shut down. Even if it doesn't work and it often does not she will find out what you were trying to do for her.

When my friend got out after 2 months at a wildnerness program (thankfully not too fucked up of a place but a prison is still a prison) he found out that I had spent that time fighting for him. He said I was his Samurai and even his parents had to respect the lengths I was willing to go for him. His father even admitted to me what a waste of money that place was but the mother still thinks he needed it and got him to stay at this over 18 program for the last year or so at 5500 a month.

I don't understand the mentality of these parents.

I mean shit if I were a parent spending that kind of money on some program, little Johnny, my potsmoking son, better call me after the first month and tell me he wants to be a doctor or I am gonna sue the shit out of that place and cut the owners balls off.

Maybe what these parents secretly want is a fucked up kid who will be dependent on their money all his life so they can control him and make him play the stepford son at their little cocktail parties.

29
I would say you should definitely set things in motion if you think your parents are not going to listen to you and contact cps or a friend or relative to take you in.

Once you are there you will not have an opportunity to come home and give your side of the story so you better have things happening before you are sent off.

Especially if you decide to contact CPS, it may be illegal for your parents to send you away after CPS begins investigating them.

That may be your best course of action, report to cps that your are in danger (and wwasp is dangerous) and need to be removed from your parent's custody. Once that process is started your parents may not be permitted to send you away. They can probably be ordered by cps not to and they definitely can be ordered by family court not to.

30
Don't go. Its a prison not a program.

One way may be to create a safeword with your parents to come and get you. Something that you can write in a letter such as signing your letter with a different salutation than normal. Something that will pass the WWASP mail censors but indicate in no uncertain terms there is a major problem and you can't tell them about it due to being censored or threatened.

Just make sure that your parents agree that if you use the signal they will pull you out of the program no questions asked. Because if they won't do that then you can't trust them not to be manipulated by the staff into keeping you there and there will be reprisals if they tell the program you want to leave.

Of course I can tell you right now that WWASPS-TB is a concentration camp and the owners and staff ought to be hanged for crimes against humanity. Someday it will happen.


 Back out while you have a chance. Show your parents the testimony on this site.

PS. I really don't believe you anyways and if you want to truly fuck up your life by volunteering for this nightmare then your better off just slitting your wrists.



_________________
The war we fight is not against powers or principalities. It is against chaos and despair. Greater than the death of flesh is the death of hope, the death of dreams. Against this peril we can never surrender.


[ This Message was edited by: FaceKhan on 2003-10-30 13:06 ]

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