133 – Christian Education

Separation of School and State 4

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels, and Sermons

Lesson: 4-4

Genre: Talk

Track: 4

Dictation Name: A84

Location/Venue: Conference

Year:

[Tape Organizer] The following presentation was recorded at (SEPCON?) 97, the third annual conference for the Separation of School and State Alliance in Fresno California. It is copyrighted by the Alliance 1997, but you are welcome to make copies as gifts for your friends.

[Audience Leader] Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Sepcon 97’, the third annual conference for the Separation of School and State Alliance. This session is entitled: How the Dare Program Weakens your Child’s Moral Restraints, with the presenter Mr. William Coulson, the responders, Mr. James (Bovard?), and Mr. Samuel Blumenfeld. Introducing the presenters today is Mr. Jim Hill of Portland Oregon, he is the State director for American Family Association. Mr. Jim Hill? (applause)

[Jim Hill] Thank you. It is my distinct pleasure to introduce our presenter, Dr. William R. Coulson. He is a licensed psychologist who is a director of the research council on Ethno Psychology. In the 1980’s, Dr. Coulson served as a member of the technical advisory panel on drug education curricula for the U.S. Department of Education. He has also served as consultant on Ethno-Psychology for the Federal Bureau of prisons, and the office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention of the U.S. Department of Justice.

In the 1960’s Dr. Coulson was research associate to Karl Rogers, and fellow humanistic psychologist Abraham Mazwell at the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute in (?) California. Dr. Coulson has lectured widely since then on the academic illiteracy, speaking throughout the United States and in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, Trinidad, Australia, and New Zealand. Welcome now, Dr. Coulson. (applause)

[William Coulson] Thank you, thank you very much Jim, that was very kind. My script begins: “How the DARE Program Weakens your Child’s Moral Restraints” thanks to Marshall and his staff, and Jim Hill. Now, what I realize is that I ran two things together; the title of the talk is: “How the DARE Program Weakens your Child’s Moral Restraints” and my thanks to Marshall and the staff for allowing me to come here, and to Jim Hill for that nice introduction, and I would also like you to acknowledge my oldest son, Jeanie and I have seven grown children, and this is David Coulson who is going to do the overheads, David. (applause) The father of three fine young men from Pittsburgh Pennsylvania.

Date Line, Jamestown New York, October 31’st 1997 was an article in the New York Times written by Jane Gross, it begins as follows: “Inside the Civic Center here on Wednesday night, at a panel discussion called: “How do we protect our kids? Apple cheeked high school girls with shiny blond page boy hair cuts, crew necked sweaters and pleated skirts, ushered people to their seats. These were the class officers of Jamestown high school, the good girls with their parents, here to ask questions of a somber panel of AIDS experts.

On the street outside, were the girls and friends of the girls who had slept with Nushawn J. Williams, infected with AIDS and charged with a deadly swath of predatory sex here in Chautauqua County. They were the ones who had the stories, the more lurid the better to the television talk show hosts who were offering limousine rides and bright lights to those who would talk.” The New York Times.

The work that Karl Rodger and (Carol Line?)- Let’s put up the first one David, and then switch quickly to the second one- the work that Karl Rodgers and (Hal Lion?) and I did back in the 1960’s and early 70’s eventually became the talk shows of trash television, as everyone’s restraints were loosened, and confession became very public. This loosening of moral restraints hadn’t been our intention as psychologists; we’d wanted to do good work, much as today’s DARE officers want to do good work. But a perverting principle was operating in our work with the schools in the 60’s and early 70’s, before we recognized it and quit.

Simone Vial- next one Dave- gets what that principle is in this quotation: “Nothing is so beautiful, nothing so continually fresh and surprising, so full of sweet and perpetual ecstasy, as the good, the true and the beautiful; no desert is so dreary, so monotonous and boring, as evil.” But with fantasy it is the other way around, fictional good is boring and flat, while evil is varied, intriguing, attractive, and full of charm. It is the girls from the street who get invited to be on trash television, not the good girls.

Now, DARE purports to be drug prevention, specifically drug abuse resistance education by name; it is delivered by uniformed police officers, who have received two weeks of facilitator training. Karl Rodgers and two colleagues and I started the country’s first, and for a long time largest, facilitator training program in (Lahoya?) at the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute. DARE is presented mostly to 5th and 6th graders, though DARE America threatens to expand it from Kindergarten through Twelfth grade in the near future, and it is offered, I am told, in 70-80 percent of the school districts in our country.

Says the New York Times article about Jamestown New York on the subject of drugs in that small town, quote: “Drug dealers come here from New York City, from Detroit and Buffalo, to ply their trade, decked out in gold chains and dread locks, these men seduce vulnerable small town girls, so said several of the girls we interviewed.” So says the Times.

Now the Times spoke of the ‘good kids’ of Jamestown earlier, the school class officers and the like with their shiny blond page boy hair cuts, their crew neck sweaters and their pleated skirts. But the good girls didn’t get interviewed by the times, let alone invited to go to trash television in New York City. Like the talk show hosts, the Times wanted to talk to the other girls, the seduced girls and their friends who had reason to worry that they were shortly going to die; the children of the street the Times identified these other girls, somewhat surprisingly as ‘wayward girls’ the wayward girls of Jamestown. In the non-directive classroom discussion circle, as seen in DARE and similar programs like Quest and Magic Circle, and now there is even a program from R.J Reynolds, they have killed off Joe Camel, but they have got a program called Right Decisions, Right Now that they offer as a follow up to DARE, DARE is offered to 10-11 year olds in 6th grade, and Right Decisions Right Now comes to your children free, courtesy of the parents of the late Joe Camel, for kids ages 12-14. In these class room discussion circles the influence runs not from the good kids to the wayward kids, as everybody including I think the wayward kids would prefer, but the influence, the research confirms, runs from the wayward kids to the good. This on the Simone Vile principle, and confirmed many times in numerous research investigations of the effect of non-directed class room discussion circles.

In a 1969 article in Psychology Today titled: “Community, the Group Comes of Age” Karl Rodgers, the father of non-directed psychotherapy explained how this works out in groups. He said: “Imagine a person attending his or her first Human Potentials Workshop.” (Human Potential is another name for the Magic Circle Quest, Right Decisions, Right Now, DARE, kind of discussion group, but normally for adults) “Imagine someone attending their first such group, and after the initial milling around phase of the group,” Rodgers wrote, “the first significant event would be the expression of “negatively toned feelings.” This would lead to the realization,” he said, “That one’s learning is up to oneself and no one else. It is this realization and the behavior change that often follows this realization that leads promoters of DARE like programs to say that circle based education is better than traditional classroom education, because the children will come by a sense of ownership of their own group experience in the circle, they will become active learners, no longer passive recipients of the teachers wisdom.”

But Rodgers says that this ‘Freedom to Learn’ as his book title has it, is necessarily a high-risk activity. He writes, quote: “It may seem puzzling that what is most likely to follow, the expression of negative feelings, is that a member will reveal himself to the group, now in a significant way. The reason for this no doubt, is that the member has come to realize that this is in part his group. He can help make of the group whatever he wishes. He has also observed that negative feelings have been expressed, and usually have been accepted or assimilated without catastrophic results. Now to ensure this outcome, all of the programs, DARE especially, has a rule called: “No put downs.” It doesn’t matter what a child said, if they said: “Drugs are good”, no put downs. Criticism is not allowed, everything is accepted, and the children begin to test the limits of this acceptance, and ideally they find there are no such limits.

“The individual then,” writes Rodgers, “Realizes that there is freedom in this group, albeit a risky freedom. A climate of trust is beginning to develop in the group, so,” he says, “The member gambles.” What does the group member gamble? Often he gambles solidarity with the relatives and other important back-home associates, most especially solidarity with his parents. Thomas Gordon writes about that, Gordon was Karl Rodgers most famous student, and created methods based on Rodgers non-directive psychotherapy, methods called ‘parent effectiveness training’, ‘teacher effectiveness training’, ‘leader effectiveness training’, and ‘youth effectiveness training’. In these programs, he not only described the manner of wayward children, making of it a model, but in my opinion provoked the behavior of wayward children in the previously normal.

Here are three quotations from Thomas Gordon, this first one from his 1970 book Parent Effectiveness Training. “Parents are guilty,” Gordon asserts, “Of the hard sell. No wonder that in most families kids are desperately saying to their parents: “Get off my back, stop hassling me, I know what you think, you don’t need to keep telling me every day, stop lecturing me, too much, goodbye!” Gordon did not know most families, he was a psychological clinician, but he made a claim about the parents and children of most families, and in the next quotation from Thomas Gordon he says that: “In TET classes, Teacher Effectiveness Training, the following questions help teachers clarify their true values. Do I have the right to choose my own values independent of what my parents or other important people believe? Must I simply comply with what my parents said I should believe?” and the implicit, and later explicit answer, is of course no.”

And finally, this quote from Gordon in 1974 again in Teacher Effectiveness Training: “In recent years, many people have benefited greatly by participating in a relatively new group activity, most frequently called ‘Values Clarification Workshops’. For example, write a list of your strongest beliefs, the things you are most willing to stand up for, ask yourself how you came to value these things; are they really what you value and believe, or what someone, perhaps a parents, talked you into or forced you into believing? Discovering that some of your values are not based on your own real experiences, but borrowed from authority figures may free you,” says Gordon, “to discard them.”

Children exposed to ‘Values Clarification’ begin to move in the direction of waywardness, it is that simple. Because no parent wants their child to be wayward, and if you can locate in Values Clarification exercise what your parent wants, then it is incumbent on you to do the opposite. Freedom to learn, it was called. The DARE method is simple Values Clarification, as the United States Bureau of Justice Assistance which promotes DARE since 1983 readily admits, the DARE method, Values Clarification, undercuts the possibility of good influence by the officers themselves on the students who need it; if these students are bright enough they will figure out that the DARE facilitators offer themselves as authorities on drugs, and that this influence must eventually be discarded in the name of authenticity.

All good influences are to be set aside in the name of authenticity. Now, remember that Rodgers said that in the climate of psychological freedom, the groups member gambles. The gamble begins, Rodger says, with letting the group know: “Some deeper part of oneself.” One man tells of the trap in which he finds himself, feeling that communication between himself and his wife is hopeless. A priest expresses the anger that he has bottled up, he has suffered unreasonable treatment at the hands of a superior. Note that all these examples are negative. A scientist, the head of a large research department, finds the courage in the group to speak of his painful isolation, to tell the group that he has never, ever had a friend. By the time he finishes the account he is shedding some of the tears of sorrow for himself that he has held in for many years. A woman of forty tells of her absolute inability to free herself from the grip of her mother. “It has begun,” Rodgers says, “It has begun, the process that a workshop member has called the journey into the center of the self.” He says: “It is often a painful experience.” This is DARE, ladies and gentlemen.

The terms ‘facilitator’ is applied to the person who helps the discussion go deeper. The facilitator says: “Looks like you are feeling some pain Henry, can you talk about it?” Our president is genuinely good at this pain thing, he has been called ‘Our National Therapist in Chief,’ except, when he says: “It looks like you are feeling some pain,” He quickly adds: “And I will talk about it.”

Jane Gross, who reported the story in Jamestown for the Times was critical of the high school principal, Mr. Benjamin Gustafson, for not doing more to integrate the wayward girls and the good girls of the school, and for resisting: “Offers from AIDS councilors eager to visit the school.” Frankly I commend Mr. Gustafson’s reticence. Do you know what the councilors would do if they were allowed in? Pushing academics to the side of the room, they would push the chairs into a circle and they would mutter facilitisms like: “I guess I get the feeling that you resent your mother for her iron grip.”

Designed to get everyone talking about their experiences, that is what these techniques are for, the unhappier the experiences the better, and of course the girls from the street have the really interesting stories of unhappy experience to tell, and gradually their reports take over the interaction in the classroom. Jane Gross noted that in fact: “Two of the girls who said they had sex with Mr. Williams slipped into seats in the auditorium after the program had begun in Jamestown, they rolled their eyes at what they heard and they left in minutes. Their friends were the lobby, Gross writes, cutting deals with television producers; some of the girls were courted in a downtown Mexican restaurant, encouraged to telephone friends who were HIV infected. A bar tender in the restaurant, also a substitute teacher at the high school, begged the girls not to follow these new pied pipers, who wooed them with promises of lunch at the Hard Rock Café, some girls confessed to lying about what happened to them, that is how badly they wanted to go. That is how badly the experience in the DARE class is felt by the youngsters who want so much to belong, they are used to getting A’s in Math and English, and now that the subject has turned into personal experience, they all want to get A’s in personal experience too, and the wayward will show them how. Some of them will invent experiences, others will go out and have them.

Let’s do the next one, David- Len Canon, a reporter for Date Line NBC on the second of February was shown on television interviewing General Barry (McCaphree?) our National Drug Czar on the subject of DARE, and Len pointed out to the General a study that the General wasn’t entirely familiar with: “The effect on suburban DARE students in Illinois was that students used more DRUGS, following DARE they were more violent, and they had a more negative attitude towards police than the non-DARE students.” Said the drug Czar: “Oh that is twaddle, you know, it doesn’t make any sense, it doesn’t fit our experience.” That is the theory called experientialism.

Len Canon went on, he said: “So you discount this study altogether?” and the general said: “Sure, yeah.” And you ignore any research that shows it doesn’t work?” and (Mcaphree?) said: “You know, the biggest research I have got is to watch a graduation in Los Angeles with Rosie Greer and I, and parents who are Laotian and Hispanic and Gringo’s, and we are all just so positive about what these kids are doing.” That is the theory of experiential learning, that what suits me is good, and that what doesn’t suit me is well, twaddle.

Experientialism allows programs for school children to be sold, given away, or defended, without research support; it is the same philosophy introduced to a teaching order of Nuns by the Western Behavioral Sciences Team that Karl Rodgers and I shared leadership of in the late 1960’s, it is the same philosophy employed by Joe Hart, one of Karl Rodgers other famous students with Tom Gordon, in which he wrote as follows: “A new age might be coming in which faith in science will be replaced, just as faith in the church was replaced; reliance upon outside rational and experimental proofs may lead to inner intuitional and experiential truths.” DARE is the largest present incursion into the school with the philosophy and methods of experientialism; it doesn’t work, it will be the undoing of many good children. Thank you.

[Jim Hill] And now we will hear from our first responder, a Mr. James Bovard, James Bovard frequently contributes to the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, Playboy, and American Spectator, and writes occasionally for other national major newspapers. Mr. Bovard was a 1995 full recipient of the Thomas (Saz?) reward for Civil Liberties work, which is awarded by the Center For Independent thought. The following year he received the 1996 Freedom Fund Reward from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense fund of the National Rifle Association. Finally, he has authored four books which have been recognized nationally, Shakedown in 1995, Lost Rights in 1994, The Fair Trade Fraud in 1991, and The Farm Fiasco in 1989. After his most recent book, Shakedown, Forbes magazine declared Mr. Bovard: “At the top of any bureaucrats most wanted list.” Dr. Bovard? (applause)

[James Bovard] Thanks for the kind intro, I appreciate that. I want to focus on two points in the brief time I have got here. First, DARE’s role in breaking up families, and second, DARE’s power in suppressing the national media. There was a dozen stories in DARE over the years, and it is surprising to see stories from across the country of how DARE policemen go into a classroom, and encourage children to become informants against their own parents, or against their own relatives- and this is not an accident, I mean, this is something that the DARE people have known about for a long time, for instance it has been mentioned in Federal reports on how DARE operates that this is a not infrequent occurrence, I managed to get ahold of some teacher guides, confidential teacher guides for DARE, it was interesting, some of the lesson plans that the children were given, and one of them was, the children were encouraged, they were handing out this little sheet, and the children were supposed to circled the people they would contact if someone gave them some pill, for instance, and they were also told to list people to contact if someone told them to keep a secret; and they had a choice, the mother, the father, or they could also tell the law enforcement, police. And the whole idea that if someone tells a kid a secret he should run to the nearest policeman, you know, it is just so out of character with what the American values usually are.

And it is interesting to read some of the stories about these entrapment operations, because very often the children are told that the parents will not be arrested, that the parents will not have any troubles; and it doesn’t work out that way. The police come, the parents are arrested, sometimes the parents lose their jobs, the family is broken up, and in many of these cases for a very minor amount of drug violation, which are, you know, like it or not, not uncommon in American society.

It is interesting, DARE has been around since 1983, it has not been very effective, a lot of studies have shown that, however DARE is still very popular, and a lot of people have been mystified about why there has not been more of a backlash against DARE. Well, part of the reason is that DARE has been able to arm twist the national media in a number of cases, in 1994 I did a story as a freelancer, for the Washington Post Outlook section, focusing on these cases of DARE entrapment, on children turning in their parents. The story was accepted, it went back and forth in editing, and the Outlook section comes out on Sunday’s, on Friday night I saw the final version of the story, and you know, it looked pretty good. I picked up the paper on Sunday morning, it turned out that what the Washington Post had done was to add 6 paragraphs to the paper that it got straight from DARE, and the six paragraphs they never cleared with me, six paragraphs out of the blue, because the Post said that they were concerned that the study needed to be ‘balanced’. I mean, some people say that is kind of a novelty for the Washington Post- (laughter)- and this was being done in an editorial section, where the stories are normally not balanced, somebody got a point of view, and you have your arguments for the point of view. And it turned out that one of the things that the Post added was that one of the parents who got busted from the entrapment, was the Post said that it wasn’t a case of mere possession, there was evidence that the parents were drug traffickers. You know, this is something that the Post got from DARE, never checked, put it in the story, and got sued for liable. Rightfully so, the Post got hammered, I don’t know the exact amount, but they got their nose bloodied in a big way in this case, and this is what we have liable laws for, you don’t go around saying people were drug traffickers, especially taking the word of an organization that had already victimized those parents.

And this is not an isolated incidence, there was a great story by Steve (Blast?) about 6 months ago in The New Republic that showed a pattern of this across the country, there was a quote from the Date Line story a few minutes ago, what people don’t realize that that Date Line story was ready to go almost a year before it aired, but DARE continued to put pressure on NBC, and NBC caved again and again and again, the folks at NBC only aired that story after (Steve Blast’s?) story came out, because they were so embarrassed to be exposed in the New Republic for being totally cowardly towards this law enforcement pseudo education group. And there are a lot of other cases around the country that have been turned up like this, a number of college professors who have been critical of DARE have been hounded by the organization, there was a TV producer in Missouri who did a segment criticizing DARE, apparently the local DARE officers gave out his name and class, and he was flooded with phone calls from kids who would stay on the phone reading their DARE lessons, somebody came and spray painted on his house: “Crack user inside.” There was a process of mass intimidation, and this is again, not unusual.

There have been studies that show that (?) in the Midwest that in 59% of all the DARE classes, an accusation of drug use are reported, and police are bound by law to follow up on these accusations. So a system of informants has been created, and most importantly, the habit of turning children into informants, the habit of turning children into basically, for the children to have more trust in the government than their own families and their own parents, that is one of DARE’s most adverse effects. Anyhow. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Jim Hill] Its primarily the government, it is primarily Federal, State, and local government- it’s probably not the best use of tax dollars.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Jim Hill] It is primarily tax dollars, there are a lot of groups that have gotten on board, because DARE has got such a touchy, feely image- I mean, there has been some great propaganda for DARE. But I guess I am supposed to stop now.

[Jim Hill] Our second responder is Samuel L. Blumenfeld. Mr. Blumenfeld is author of seven book on education, including Is Public Education Necessary? In 1981, and The NEA, the Trojan Horse in American Education 1984. He graduated from the city college of New York, studied in France for two years, and then worked for ten years as an editor in the New York book publishing industry. One reviewer of his book The Whole Language, OBE Fraud, published in 1996 wrote: “Blumenfeld superbly documents the government education establishments seemingly deliberate effort to corrupt and sabotage educational excellence in our country.” Mr. Blumenfeld’s writings appear in diverse publications. He has taught in both public and private schools, including one for children with learning and behavioral problems. He edits his own monthly newsletter, and monitors trends in American education. And now, Mr. Blumenfeld.

[Samuel Blumenfeld] Thank you. Just some facts about DARE, DARE is an acronym, DARE, for Drug Abuse Resistance Education, apparently it was started by Daryl Gates and the Los Angeles Police Department, some, I suppose, 11 or 12 years ago, and has since expanded to thousands of schools in 50 states. In this program uniformed police officers spend an hour per week for 17 weeks with school children, mostly 5th and 6th graders, purportedly educating them to resist drug abuse, and often developing close personal attachments in the process. Now of course, they use values clarification as their technique, and none-directive psychotherapy.

Now, one of the beautiful aspects of homeschooling is that it permits you to recognize what is patently absurd in public education. Take for example the DARE program. Can you imagine homeschooling parents inviting a local uniformed policeman facilitator to come into their home, to educate their children about drugs? They would have to set aside a room where this could take place without the parents being present, because the children would be told by the policeman teacher to spy on their parents, and then turn them in if they found drugs in the house. The policeman will show the children a video on the “land of decisions and choices” and will help the children “prize and act upon their own feelings, their own freely chosen values.” He will also tell them: “You can smoke dope if you like, as long as you have considered the consequences.”

Can you imagine parents telling their children: “You can smoke dope as long as you accept the consequences?” It is the consequences which compel parents to tell their children: “Under no circumstances may you smoke dope, period.” DARE does not tell children that they must not use drugs, it tells them that they have the right to say no, implying that they also have the right to say yes.

Now, DARE teaches the child that he has the right to say no to drugs. That is like telling a child that he has a right not to commit a crime. Now what kind of screwy ethic is that? (laughter) Now, incidentally, DARE gets about 750 Million dollars from the Federal government, through the Drug Free Schools and Communities Acts. And the thing about DARE is that it doesn’t work. Because all of the studies have shown that there is no difference between youngsters who have had the DARE program, and those who haven’t. In fact, if you want to know what the present situation with drugs is, here is a clipping from the Boston Globe of September 9th, 1997, just a couple of months ago: “Drugs are a fixture in most high schools, survey asserts. The vast majority of U.S. High School students report that illegal drugs are kept, used, or sold on school grounds according to a survey released yesterday.” Etc, etc. The point is that the system, doesn’t work, DARE doesn’t work, because it uses ‘Values Clarification’. It tells kids: “You have the right to choose your own values.” That’s what it is teaching, what Tom Gordon has taught them. You have the right to choose your own values, as if: “Oh yeah, I can choose my own values,” but it doesn’t tell you what values are about. But in any case, it opens the child up to the world of the drug culture, very simply. And the interesting thing about the DARE people is that even though they know they have been criticized, even though they have been shown by studies that it doesn’t work, they have no interest in changing the program. They have no interest in trying to find out why it doesn’t work- after all, there must be a decent drug program around, something that says: “Hey, you can’t take drugs, you may not take drugs, it is absolutely forbidden- it is illegal, period.”

No, but they persist and they criticize a people like Mr. Bovard, and trash others, because they have decided that DARE is the way it is; and I will tell you why- there is 750 Million dollars at stake. That is why it thrives, and that is why you see all these bumper stickers, you know, DARE on the back of a suburban or something like that, and it looks good and it sounds great, we are all against drugs, aren’t we? But most people haven’t the faintest idea what the program is doing. It is not helping our kids, period. (applause)

[William Coulson] I get eight more minutes, thank you very much, thank you both for those comments. I of course have read Sam’s books, and I have read Mr. Bovard’s material on DARE, and I have been very impressed by it.

There was an unfortunate event earlier this month, and that is that the family research council, that wonderful organization headed by Gary Bower, came out with a qualified endorsement for DARE, writing: “Mend it, don’t end it.” I think it is a terrible mistake, and I have told them so. It is because of values clarification, you really cannot fix the DARE program because the whole philosophy behind it is wrong, it is the philosophy of subjective morality, it’s the philosophy that says that in times of rapid social change we have to look inward for guidance.

David, next to the last one that I just gave you before, I think is- yeah. I have grown to the place, next to the bottom?

I mentioned poor Hal Lion, he did a book for us, Rogers and I did this series of 17 books, and Hal was at the time that he did the book Learning to Fear, Fearing to Learning, was deputy commissioner for education when we had the U.S. Office of Education in Washington before the Department of Education. He got caught up in the spirit of experiential education, of values clarification, wrote three books, and in one of them, Karl Rodgers wrote the forwards for all of them, and in one of them what he had learned in his own group work, his own DARE like experiences, although this was long before DARE: “I have grown,” he wrote, “To the place where I now have what might be called a religion of the self, and I believe that most of the answers are within myself, and learning to tap the love and beauty and strength within myself is really a worshipping of the inner self, in essence I believe in God because I believe in me. I now meditate to the God within my own inner self, and each time I meditate I discover new resources of boundless love and beauty within myself.”

Well, Hal, and he doesn’t mind my telling you this story because it is a matter of public record, it was on the front page of the Washington Post back in 1981, got caught up in the spirit of personal growth and self exploration and expression as I said, and developed a moonlighting business when he was at the Department of Education, if you had children in gifted and talented programs in the 70’s, you were under the influence of Hal Lion because he was head of Federal Gifted and Talented programs, he was a gifted and talented young man himself, decided, having travelled up and down (?) of human needs to develop a business on the side, as a professional pimp. He was now going to fulfill his entrepreneurial needs and his sexual needs at the same time. He found a young woman who had never been a prostitute, and persuaded her that that was a good reason to try- how can you say you don’t like it if you haven’t done it? And they ran an ad in the underground newspaper right here in Arlington, and the first people to show up, they hadn’t anticipated this, was the Vice Squad, who clamped the cuffs on Hal Lion, the deputy commissioner of the U.S. Office of Education, a story that made the front page of the Washington Post, clamped the cuffs on him, and charged him with the five p’s- pimping, pandering, prostitution, pornography, and personal growth- (laughter)

I made up the personal growth one. And he went to jail, but not before telling the judge: “I am so sorry for what I have done, I now recognize it for a sickness.” And I think his court psychiatrist wanted the judge to believe that it was a clinical sickness called ‘sexual addiction,’ in fact, Hal turned up as a chapter later in a book on sexual addiction, but I don’t think that was his sickness, I think it was experiential education, it was the philosophy behind DARE which says: “No one can tell you what to do better than you can tell yourself after consulting your feelings.”

Well, it killed (Reina Shirley?) and that is the story I would like to end with. David, I am not sure where we need to go here, I will figure it out in a minute, but let me tell you what happened to Reina Shirley. Reina Shirley was an eighth grader at Potter valley Middle school in Potter Valley California, not too far from the ranch where David grew up, and where Jeanie and I still live in Mendocino County, she had gone through six years of Catholic elementary school in (Ukia?) at our Lady Saint Mary of the Angels, and then she went on to the public middle school in Potter Valley, and she was a charming and an assertive young woman, and she became the student body president.

Let’s see, what can I tell you in the brief time I have available- DARE puts no emphasis on religion, only on pop psychology, but unfortunately they had adopted the DARE program over a four year period, in the Catholic Elementary school, so she had four years of DARE, and I think that she learned the wrong lesson, she learned that the most important thing was to do that which she most deeply wanted, there is an exercise on page 25 of the DARE manual for kids which teaches them: “Don’t let anybody push you into doing something you don’t want to do.” And I am afraid that too many kids learn from that: “If I don’t want to do my home work, by golly my parents are not going to push me into it, and if I don’t want to abstain from drugs, by golly I shan’t.” And the research suggests that that is precisely what a significant number of them learned. Reina was a good student, she developed a view of the human potential that in an important sense set her against common sense, at least that part of common sense available to the tribe of Catholic elders at her elementary school. A classmate at Reina’s memorial service, a classmate in answer to the press and the public said that Reina had come to believe that: “The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do, the idea perhaps that only thus can you be assured that your choice is really not your parents’ choice but your own choice.

As bright and assertive as Reina was, the fact is that she was still a child, a child however no longer occupied by the thoughts and values of her parents and her church, but rather with her own. She set aside her parents protective values in favor of what the advertisers, the dealer, and the peer group might have to tell her, from among which she could then choose. But children are not capable of free choice, most especially, most especially of illegal activities- thank God for the research in neuroscience in recent vintage which proves to us all that children don’t have a whole brain, the wiring isn’t done yet, decisions of life and death matters are not for children.

Well, at the (Eel?) River on the 13th of march 1996, Reina between classes went to a party, the Eel river is not too far from the middle school in Potter Valley, she snorted methamphetamine, a whole lot of it, and she went out of her head, started eating rocks and stones. She was raped then by a classmate, and with a boost from the classmates uncle the drug dealer, she was tossed into the icy water. As I say, this happened between classes when she should have been on campus, reports were that she was not dragged to the river but chose to go, having made, I suppose, a ‘risk assessment’, DARE teaches children to make what they call ‘risk assessments’, she must have decided for herself that the risk of going to the river between classes for a party was okay. To have become persuaded that there might be such a risk to consider as going to the river for drugs, and as it turned out for sex, led to tragedy; in actuality there is more choice for a good eighth grade girl to snort drugs and have sex then there is for her to drive on the wrong side of the divided highway that runs near the bend in the Eel river, where three weeks later, Reina Shirley’s body was found. She was the apple of her parents eye, the local newspaper reports that Reina’s parents, Nathan and Kimberly Shirley have now split up, the mother has left for Mexico, the father has left for Florida, they have moved themselves as far as possible from the scene of their only child’s undoing. (applause)

[Audience Leader] At this time we would like to offer a chance for questions and brief comment, line up right here next to the wall, and I will do my Phil Donahue impression and let you have a chance to speak.

[Audience Member] Tally Richardson from Huntington New York. My own school district has some PTA pressure to put the DARE program in, from all we have heard of course about it, and I am in a position, I would like to offer them some alternative. I have heard all of the downside of DARE, I have read the things in Reason magazine and other things, we need, the community is hurting from the evidence that drug use is increasing, at increasingly younger ages, and I am pointing out things in our curriculum, we are looking at changes in curriculum, but we need something positive in the way of drug education that is going to hopefully turn the tide of their thinking. Do you know any program that for instance takes kids to institutions where they can see these 20 year olds whose brains have been totally wiped out by drugs, and something that will scare them straight?

[William Coulson] Well, there used to be a program called ‘Scared Straight’ in New Jersey, and for a while there it was the national model, does anybody know if that still goes on? They did exactly what you are suggesting, Charlie. One thing that Jeanie and I have tried in Mendocino County, which is in the Emerald Triangle where the high quality Sensimilla comes from, so Mendocino County kids are raised at a disadvantage, sometimes their parents grow Marijuana, and they can offer it to dealers from the city in return for crack cocaine, for example, and Methamphetamine. What we have done is to approach these kids not as potential or present drug users themselves, but as potential parents, who will be predictably concerned about drug use as their own parents are, and we give them an anonymous survey which always establishes that they don’t want their children even to smoke; for example, if they smoke themselves they are all the more determined that their children will not fall into this habit. And so, we commend them for being so smart, and then we tell them how they can have what they want, which is not to tell them how they can get their way with their children, but how they can get what is right. They are so eager to be told what is right, and they want to hear it again and again until it lodges in their brain in such a way that it cannot be removed. Karl Rodgers grew up in such a home where his parents read to him every night, and preached to him and gave him Bible verses; and in the midst of his involvement in the Human Potentials movement when he thought it was better to be a person than the child of his parents, he couldn’t escape the net that they had cast over him, and later it kept him out of trouble, when Hal Lion went to jail, Karl Rodgers was quoted on the first page on the Washington Post as saying: “It is incredible.” But it really wasn’t, it was predictable, because Hal had fallen for the line that Karl couldn’t fall for.

So I would suggest that kids be approached as incipient parents, and I think that might help.

[Audience Member] (?) Pennsylvania. I have a comment, and a question attached to it, we have a word in English that aptly fits this program, in etymological origin, and that is idiocy; because the origin of that from the Greek is ‘idios’ which means personal or private, and so what we are having here is teaching these children that they can have their own personal and private understanding of reality, which makes them idiots because they can no longer function in the larger objective reality, and I was wondering if you could talk a little about that in the larger context of this slip of society into relativism?

[Sam Blumenfeld] Well, the point that I wanted to make about this business of drugs in the schools of course, you know that Nancy Reagan coined the phrase: “Just say no.” But every day, four million children in public schools must say yes, because they are given Ritalin, they are given this pill which is a mind altering drug. And so if you are told to say yes to drugs in the morning, and then in the afternoon a fellow student offers you a little pill and says: “This will make you feel even better” – well, why should the child say no? You see. So one of the reasons I believe that drug usage is on the increase among youngsters in school is because of this prevalence of giving out drugs to kids every day, Ritalin, and we are not going to be able to get rid of Ritalin over night, it has become a real problem.

[William Coulson] Yes, I would like to second that point, it is really almost amusing to see hypocrisy of the schools as you drive past all the signs that say ‘drug free school zone’, and then see all the kids lined up outside of the principals office to get doped up for the day- and it is kind of funny, too, because it seems at some points some comments have been made that part of the reason the kids are given those drugs is so that the kids will stay in school, and the school can get its government subsidy which is based on the daily attendance. So I mean, it is a profoundly corrupting incentive for the public schools, but it works out well for the schools budget, so…

[Audience Member] What I would like to comment on is that the key note of DARE seems to be that there is no such concept as responsibility, so there is no responsibility for yourself in the future, and what will happen to your brain as a result of taking these drugs, there is no responsibility to your family, or to the society, or to your religion; there is no concept of responsibility, and it seems to me that the whole idea of a lot of education is the abdication of responsibility- freedom without responsibility.

[Sam Blumenfeld] The only point I want to make is what Tom Gordon says, ‘you have the right to choose your own values.’ Well, how can a ten year old, you know? The greatest philosophers of all time worked on that problem and never really solved it, and now we are expecting ten year olds to choose their own values, which means choose your own morality; and that of course leads to moral anarchy, that is the only thing it can lead to.

[William Coulson] Yeah, a second problem to is that if the kids are getting their values from law enforcement, then the most important value the kids are going to receive is to be submissive- to be submissive to the government authorities, and that is not a value that we favored in American society, at least in American myth culture, I mean, there are time- there it seems to be designed to supplant the government’s authority for the parents authority, and it is far more effective at doing that than a lot of people realize, and that is also one of the worst things about the program.

[Audience Member] Dr. Colson, you may recall being in Portland Oregon, I am Jim Hill from Portland Oregon, you may recall being in Portland a few years ago, and we were at the Portland school district discussing drug education with the head of the department there, and she asked you if you could make any suggestions as to what would be an effective program, and you suggested to her that one of the things she might consider would be to bring in some of the top people from the leading advertising agency in the city, and discuss with them how they sell their products with their advertising…

[William Coulson] Yes, I remember that very well Jim, I have often thought about that. She said: “Well, Dr. Coulson, we prefer to teach our children to think.” I said: “Why don’t you tell them over and over again what to do about drugs, and that is to eschew them?” and I don’t know if she knew the meaning of the word, but she said: “We prefer to teach them to think!” and I said: “But you have got to give them something to think with- as it is now, the children’s minds are stuffed with the addictive of the peer group and the dealers, you have got to give them something to think with.” They talk a lot about ‘higher order thinking’ and I am afraid what they really mean by that is original thinking, and what they mean by that is thinking that is unprecedented in your own home; you will become a ‘higher order thinker’ when you stop thinking like your parents did. So there is something quite subversive about all of this. I want to grab everyone’s good intentions in this because I want them granted to those of us who began this whole foolish enterprise, but I do think it is quite subversive.

[Jim Hill] We have time for one brief question.

[Audience Member] The rule of law says that we are to be innocent of evil, but understand that which is good, and drugs, sexual promiscuity or sexual immorality, and suicide are all evil; but in the 50’s and then the 70’s and the 80’s, we ended up with the drug education, all of the different educations. Question: is there any likelihood that we who are in the so-called conservative program would ever raise the question that the various types of education violate the rule of law? Neil Markfa.

[Samuel Blumenfeld] You know, it is really sort of ridiculous for us to discuss what is going on in the public schools when the only solution is to get rid of them. I mean, you know, that is the problem, we can discuss all of the problems, DARE is just one of the problems that confronts us because of this government education system which has gone crazy, so we are just concentrating on one area of insanity in an entirely insane system, and so there is really not much point in our discussing this, because we are not going to get rid of Ritalin, we can’t save the kids in the public schools, the only thing we can really work for is to get the government out of the education business. (applause)

[William Coulson] I am told that I get the last two minutes, and again I want to thank everyone for the opportunity to be here, I want to thank especially my son David for coming to help me, David, let’s put up that next one. This is Karl Rodgers disowning of the whole method of Rogerian or Non-directive psychotherapy, I am not alone in condemning what happened. He said: I hope Rogerian therapy goes down the drain. Yes, you can try to grow to be more often empathic and more often feel regard for this person, but it is not something you should do. And that puzzles people until they understand what had gone wrong for people like Hal, Karl, it broke his heart when he heard that Hal had gone to jail. I said that Hal didn’t mind my telling this story, and that is because he has kids of his own, and he said: “I don’t want them corrupted.” That is why it is okay to tell this story. He said: “You know, I wouldn’t have those books in my home anymore.” And I said: “You mean the ones you wrote?” and he said: “Yeah, but the ones you wrote too.” And when I said: “Why is that?” I really knew the answer, and that was because he didn’t want his children corrupted. Well, now a lot of our children can’t read- but they are still corruptible, aren’t they, and they are corruptible by bringing these methods orally into the classroom.

Let’s end on a funny note, this is from R. J. Reynolds which is having killed of Joe Camel, now has Right Decisions, Right Now in your schools. This came across my desk at the same time that the story was breaking in the newspaper about (Marv Albert?) biting people in hotels, and so there are lots of wall posters that come with this material, it is in ten thousand junior High schools and Middle schools, the people at Reynolds tell me, this program, ten thousand stupid superintendents of school who have allowed Joe Campbell’s creators to come in now with a program for kids to discuss how to make their own decisions about deadly activities. Well, as this story was breaking it came to my mind that the father, this is the only poster that has to do with parents and of course the parents are looking very glum and angry, the father is shaking his finger at his daughter and saying: “I’ve told you not to bite your little sister.” And the mother is looking rather disappointed, and says: “And nobody ever bites me.” So… Well, let’s see, let’s do one more David, in that case, yes that wasn’t such a good joke after all… (laughter)

Let’s do the next two, okay, here is R.J. Reynolds, it says that young people are unable or unwilling to turn to their parents for guidance, and this simply isn’t true; and finally David, the last one, this is not true, this is from Public Agenda: “Faith in God is important, as 66% of American youngsters age 12-17, I can always trust my parents to be the…” [Tape Ends]