Congress Plotting to Psychologically Profile Children, Help Plan Best Forms of Indoctrination
Submitted by IWB, on May 4th, 2016
After passing an Obama-backed education bill that undermines parental rights and state and local control over schools under the guise of making every student “succeed,” Congress is plotting its next unconstitutional “education” scheme: a bill to fund psychological testing and profiling of your child, and the data-mining to go with it. Under the scheme, which already sailed through the U.S. Senate late last year, schools would vacuum up huge amounts of data on students, including information on their “social and emotional learning,” attitudes, values, beliefs, and more.
That data will then be shared with basically everyone, including Big Brother in Washington, D.C., and all of his cronies. The measure will also be exploited to help the federal government figure out what works when it comes to indoctrination and transforming the minds of children, proponents of the legislation hope. Critics, however, blasting the scheme as dangerous “child abuse,” are working to kill the radical S. 227 bill in the House of Representatives.
The legislation, dubbed Strengthening Education Through Research Act, or SETRA, purports to re-authorize and fund an array of expired unconstitutional Bush-era federal programs under the Education Sciences Reform Act. The Senate SETRA bill was shepherded through with “unanimous consent” and no recorded vote by Republican Senator and former U.S. Education Secretary Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, one of the key figures behind the Orwellian Obama-backed monstrosity known as the “Every Student Succeeds Act” (ESSA). Along with other establishment Republicans, Alexander conspired with the Obama administration, as they bragged later, to cement Common Core in place nationwide and shred parental rights with the unconstitutional ESSA statute. All the while, Alexander and others pretended that the bill restored state and local control over education. While the new SETRA scheme passed easily in the Senate, the legislation is currently being held up in the House amid a massive public outcry surrounding privacy rights, parental rights, and other concerns.
Under the bill, the anti-constitutional federal “education” bureaucracy, which Ronald Reagan promised to abolish but never did, would devour more than $3 billion in taxpayer money on the “research,” according to the Congressional Budget Office. Among the various schemes funded in the bill are “grants” for state governments to build more databases to house your children’s most personal information, known as “longitudinal data systems.” The legislation also funds a series of national tests. In particular, the bill aims to finance “education” research, much of it dealing with children’s subjective emotions, attitudes, values, beliefs, and other elements of what is known as the “affective” domain. As this magazine reported in February, due to efforts of the establishment and the federal government, Big Brother is now literally trying to get inside your child’s head.
So far, the most outrage on SETRA appears to have been triggered by sections 132 and 157 of the bill, which, among other concerns, expand federal “education” research into what is known as “social and emotional learning,” or SEL. Rather than focusing on academic knowledge — reading, writing, math, and so on: basically the areas parents expect their children to be learning — SEL branches into the values held by a child. If approved, that section of SETRA “will result in cultivating government-approved thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors in children,” reads a warning posted by the Florida Stop Common Core Coalition, which opposes the bill. “This already seems to be happening with Common Core and Competency Based Learning. The government has no constitutional, statutory, or moral right to collect data on any of these highly personal aspects of our children’s lives. Schools should instill academic knowledge, not explore matters rightly left to family and place of worship.”
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