Psychological Experimentation and the Ruination of Culture

Here is a link to a famous article from 1994 about how psychological experimentation ruined a number of Catholic religious orders. Lest we forget...

"The IHMs had some 60 schools when we started; at the end, they had one. There were some 560 nuns when we began. Within a year after our first interventions, 300 of them were petitioning Rome to get out of their vows."

"How I Wrecked the IHM Nuns"—The story of a repentant psychologist, an interview with Dr. William Coulson.

And a much more conspiratorial article from 1999: Carl Rogers and the IHM Nuns: Sensitivity Training, Psychological Warfare and the "Catholic Problem".

"Once the war against fascism was won, the WASP establishment turned its attention to its main demographic and political domestic opponent, namely the Catholic Church. If the WASP establishment which was instrumental in the creation and prosecution of psychological warfare was locked in a knock-down drag out political struggle with the Catholic Church over sexual and demographic issues, then it would stand to reason that they would use the former technique as a way of solving what they perceived as the latter problem.

This meant dealing with Catholic education, which was the Church’s most effective antidote to the “socialization” offered by the John Dewey-inspired public schools.

[T]he fact that the economic structure of Catholic schools is threatened with collapse by the growth of modern liberalism among young Catholic women. The Catholic school system is essentially an enterprise of nuns who work without salaries. If the supply of nuns should be cut off, the system would rapidly disintegrate...

In order to destroy the Catholic school system and thereby cripple the influence the Catholic Church had in American politics, Blanshard wanted to make sure that young Catholic women were “reared in the free and hearty atmosphere of modern America,” which meant sending them to the increasingly sexualized public schools."

And from the article The Role of Psychology in Current Educational Reform, from 1997:

Under a Rogerian regimen, he said, his students had "lost the traditional Jewish respect for knowledge, learning, and teachers," which meant, he said, "a generation of lousy professionals, since you can't learn medicine or plumbing or chemistry by T-grouping, or by 'discussion,' or by yourself."

All alike surely meant to do good, much like today's DARE officers, who apply Rogers' early methods in three-quarters of the nation's school districts. DARE means "Drug Abuse Resistance Education." DARE officers receive two weeks of training. An article distributed in training commends the Rogerian approach: "DARE never tells students, 'Don't use drugs.' Not once, in the course of seventeen lessons, does the DARE officer ever say, ‘Don't use drugs.’ Instead it works on developing the self-esteem that makes it easier to say 'no'."...The effect on suburban DARE students in Illinois was: students used more drugs, were more violent, and had a more negative attitude toward police than non-DARE students.

And another article from William Coulson: FALLACIES OF NONDIRECTIVE EDUCATION

"In schools across America, time is taken from academics to provide children with drug education, suicide education, and sex education courses; the promise is to reduce or eliminate personal experimentation with drugs, sex and suicide. That promise is false. Follow up research shows increased drug use and sexual activity after the typical classroom exercises; and from the popular "death and dying courses," there are preliminary indications that this kind of education also leads to a greater likelihood of violence against the self. The education is called "nondirective" or "affective." Teachers are instructed to withdraw to the position of "facilitator," offering students "reflective listening" and nonjudgmental acceptance instead of confident instruction. Gradually the most undisciplined children begin to take over: parked in what one commercial curriculum purveyor proudly calls "conversation circles" (a kind of enforced friendship), the experimenters among the student body begin to teach the inexperienced how to become more experimental. It's like persuading the class there's no need to take the problems of drugs, violence and premarital sex very seriously: what's needed instead is principally to uncover feelings-this instead of being instructed."