SILENT WEAPONS FOR QUIET WARS
Will You Survive The Coming Financial Crash
9
© 2005 Kent Daniel Bentkowski
"Operant theory analyzes the interaction between the organism and its environment into a
three-term sequence. A successful experimental analysis identifies the environmental cues
(discriminative stimuli) which determine the occurrence of behavior (operant) and of the
environmental events (reinforcers) necessary for the establishment and maintenance of
the behavior. The theory has had a fundamental impact on psychology. It is chiefly
criticized for its exclusion of unobservable, inferred psychological states."
In other words, operant conditioning describes the system of behavior modification. Has
the reader noticed that in the above definition of operant conditioning, there is a reference
to a three-term sequence? This refers to the Hegelian three-term dialectic, which as it
says above, is necessary for the establishment and maintenance of behavior.
On February 26, 2005, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates made the following comments in a
keynote address at the National Education Summit on High Schools. During this speech,
Gates made some revealing comments concerning the American public education system
being broken:
"When we looked at the millions of students that our high schools are not preparing for
higher education --- and we looked at the damaging impact that has on their lives, we
came to a painful conclusion: America's high schools are obsolete. By obsolete, I don't
just mean that our high schools are broken, flawed, and under-funded --- though a case
could be made for every one of those points. By obsolete, I mean that our high schools ---
even when they're working exactly as designed --- cannot teach our kids what they
need to know today.
Training the workforce of tomorrow with the high schools of today is like trying to teach
kids about today's computers on a 50-year-old mainframe. It's the wrong tool for the
times. Our high schools were designed fifty years ago to meet the needs of another
age. Until we design them to meet the needs of the 21st century, we will keep limiting ---
even ruining --- the lives of millions of Americans every year.
Today, only one-third of our students graduate from high school ready for college, work,
and citizenship. The other two-thirds, most of them low-income and minority students,
are tracked into courses that won't ever get them ready for college or prepare them for a
family-wage job no matter how well the students learn or the teachers teach. This isn't
an accident or a flaw in the system; it is the system."
On February 27, 2005, the very day after Gates' speech, Maybe Logic Academy member
Metachor posted the following comment about the true goal of public education, in
response to Gates' speech:
"I work as a high-school teacher in Virginia, as does one of my parents. We both agree
with [Bill] Gates on this issue: public high school in America was never intended to
prepare children for college. The original goal of the founders of American public
education was to produce good factory workers who would obediently follow
orders to carry out simple tasks."
Charlotte Iserbyt also concurs with the above assessments of the American public
education system, in the following quote from pg. xii of the Foreword to her book:
