WALKING TARGETS

by B.K. Eakman

America gave up the three R's and got back the three I' ignorance, illiteracy, and illegitimacy. Parents of the postwar years wanted a ""kinder and gentler nation,'' just like former President Bush. They had just been through the horrors of World War II, and they were in no mood for a repeat performance. Americans were vulnerable, therefore, to the arguments of behavioral psychologists, which came at them, first through articles and books touting appealing but unworkable philosophies of child management that eschewed adult guidance and leadership. These messages were later repeated through colleges of education in the form of courses in ""educational psychology.'' Today⿿s schools promote success without achievement, ethics without religion, and character without morals. Clinical-sounding labels such as ""emotionally handicapped"" may make failure more palatable. They certainly make it more permanent.

302 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 7, 2007

About the author

Beverly K. Eakman is a former teacher and speechwriter, and a retired U.S. Justice Department employee. She is now a Washington, D.C.-based freelance writer and author.

Known as Education's Whistleblower, she is a veteran of over 650 nationwide radio and television talk shows and over 150 speaking engagements.

Her articles on education, mental health and privacy issues have appeared in such national publications and online news sites as NewsWithViews, Education Week, Chronicles Magazine, The Washington Times, National Review, Crisis Magazine, Vital Speeches of the Day, and The Washington Post.

She is the best-selling author of Cloning of the American Mind: Eradicating Morality through Education, Educating for the New World Order, Microchipped: How the Education Establishment Took Us Beyond Big Brother and How to Counter Group Manipulation Tactics.

Her latest book Walking Targets: How Our Psychologized Classrooms Are Producing a Nation of Sitting Ducks points to an agenda that begins with government-controlled childrearing and force-feeds young people a pseudo-education under the cover of mental health, safety, jobs, and something called lifelong learning. Walking Targets is a wake-up call for parents and educators alike. With over 40 articles covering education, family, behavioral science, mental health, privacy, political correctness and manipulation of public opinion the reader will come to see how educators and provocateurs are driving a wedge between parents and their children. "

Reviews

[William Lawrence · Rating 1 out of 5]

A right-wing rag of complaints, this book is a cruel, ad hominem list of attacks on anyone who doesn’t agree with the author’s condescending, outrageous, and outdated political views. Protestors, liberals, and most kids are just dummies to Eakman. She spends several pages ripping on the poor grammar of a student’s email (I wonder if Mary Jenkins gave permission for use of that email, if she’s even a real student). Another several pages are used to illustrate how dumb a liberal protestor was through a seemingly well-remembered dialogue she had with the person (if they too actually exist).

The entire book is an assault on psychologists and liberals for trashing society and schools. But only a psychotic person would insert a rant about how liberal education caused Al Queda to attack us in a book about schools. The title “walking targets” is an insensitive play off of school shootings, mentioned throughout the book as somehow just another result of Democratic politics, not her very own conservative shunning of psychology and psychological background checks. The shameful cover has a student in a crosshairs.

In a strange disconnect from reality and logic, the author brings terrorism into the education debate. Eakman skips rights past the warning George W. Bush received one month before the attacks (and 9 months into his presidency) and somehow blames Bill Clinton for 9/11, in a book about education? She goes on to blame liberals for allowing terrorism to come to America, but never mentions how Reagan and Bush did business with Bin Laden.

Everything in Eakman’s world is hell. She doesn’t see any of the statistical ways in which we’ve become a better society for all. Yes, there are still a lot of terrible things to complain about, and we have new problems that didn’t exist yesterday, but the world is no doubt a better, easier, safer place to live than it was during the Reagan years, which she seems so attached to for some reason. No, it’s not the rosy world of the ‘50s anymore, but that wasn’t really a very rosy world for women, blacks, and anyone other than white, wealthy males anyway.

Carter and Clinton get huge amounts of blame for the destruction of schools and society. Even though they had three terms of the presidency compared to the five Republican terms at publication date. Regardless, one huge flaw in logic is the assumption that a president is responsible for everything. A president is not a king. There is a Congress that creates laws and passes those laws with a presidential stamp of approval. In the hellish world of liberal control she paints she fails to realize that the last thirty-five years have had some kind of Republican control, certainly the last twenty years have been dominated by a dominant Republican Congress, including a Republican Congress and president for almost 8 straight years, all except for a few brief years with Democrat control of Congress in Obama’s first term (after she wrote the book).

But after all that nonsense there are some things (finally about education) that she may be on to—her desire to reinstate workbooks and repetition exercises at the elementary levels. They do work. Repetition results in learning and self-confidence. Toddlers repeat things over and over because this is a natural way of learning- just like the person learning a bar of music on the violin plays it over and over until they get it right. I’m not saying that should be the only method used, but it certainly shouldn’t be thrown out.

It’s too bad the most important truths of the education problem are lost in the mix—a true shift from academics toward “socialization and guardianship”, dumbed down curriculum, and rows replaced with “open classrooms” but it’s not just liberals who have done this, it’s libertarians and Republicans too as they sought ways to liberate students from “communist” teachings. While unions have little to do with pedagogy as she falsely asserts, Eakman is right that written assignments have been replaced by useless activities as she calls “glorified jam sessions during which kids flap their jaws without having to sit down and organize a logical sequence of thoughts” (p. 78). Eakman argues teachers should be more than just facilitators, and I agree, but this gets lost at the back of the book after 200+ pages of political rants and conspiracy theories. I also share a concern over doping kids up on pharmaceuticals, but all those politicians she seems to look up to took huge contributions from the drug companies and worked with them closely to get them huge tax breaks. Her anti-psychology rhetoric is mind boggling—let’s cut off students from counselors and psychological help, she argues. Eakman would also cut all sex and drug education from the curriculum if she could. Her positions equal more teen dropouts, drugs, pregnancies, mass violence, and suicides. Eaks! It seems the only children who are walking targets are those in Beverly Eakman’s proposed world.

[Eileen Batson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Walking Targets: How Our Psychologized Classrooms Are Producing a Nation of Sitting Ducks by Beverly K. Eakman - http://www.midnightwhistler.com - Midnight Whistler Publishers; 2007, 287 pages. $24.95 trade paperback, 6" x 9", ISBN 978-0-6151-8122-6. Foreword, Prologue, Frequently Asked Questions, Position Statement.

If you have ever wondered what happened to make our schools shooting ranges instead of halls of learning; why students from the youngest years are being given so many "tests"; or what happened to basic academics being taught, you need to read Beverly Eakman.

She has been exposing behavioral psychology's covert, attitude-manipulating agenda for more than two decades. Her current book, Walking Targets is no exception.

In this anthology of her articles, columns and speeches, She brings to light the driving an agenda of political correctness that would make Orwell proud. The reader can follow Eakman's investigative journey of how, in her words, "social adjustment and behavioral goals took the place of academics" in the U.S. educational system.

Her example of the "new values" North Carolina teachers were given to instill in their students would make Orwell proud. Concepts such as "There is no right and wrong, only conditioned responses; the collective good is more important than the individual; flexibility is more important than accomplishment," and four others that made me happy my grandkids are home-schooled.

She exposes the money-driven spread of value-shaping surveys, assessments and mental health screening programs such as TeenScreen in our schools. These "tests" are based upon subjective questionnaires that lead to prescriptions for violence-inducing antidepressants or other drugs instead of good structure and discipline for those found "at risk" with behavioral problems.

She additionally details how the privacy of our students is increasingly being undermined and is subject to "data mining" that can and will be used by to label, indoctrinate and control these individuals throughout their lives.

The five categories covered in the book: Education, Family, Behavioral Science & Mental Health, Privacy, and Political Correctness & Deception, carry the underlying theme of the mental health industry's corrosive effect on American education and individual liberty; especially those minds that are independent, creative and non-conformist.

And if we are to prevent our schools from becoming mental health clinics and disaster zones, it will be people like Beverly Eakman and books like hers that will point the way.

If knowledge is power, Walking Targets is empowerment at its finest.

About the Author

Beverly Eakman is a veteran of over 700 nationwide radio and television talk shows and over 150 speaking engagements. Her four previously published books include the bestseller Cloning of the American Mind: Eradicating Morality through Education, Educating for the New World Order, Microchipped: How the Education Establishment Took Us Beyond Big Brother and her workbook How to Counter Group Manipulation Tactics. Her articles on education, mental health and privacy issues have appeared in such national publications and online news sites as NewsWithViews, Education Week, Chronicles Magazine, The Washington Times, National Review, Crisis Magazine, Vital Speeches, and The Washington Post. my link text

[Jon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am prejudiced about this book because I publish it. But there is more to that story. When Beverly told me about the book and that it was unfinished, that she was tired and might take a break, I freaked. She could not, I said, take a break! A fireman doesn't take a break half-way up the ladder. She had to finish the book. She said she had lost her publisher, he had gone out of business as such. She said she would finish it if I would publish it. The book is sufficiently important that I said yes and Midnight Whistler Publishers was no longer a small, dormant music publishing company. Today, MWP is a small, vibrant book publishing company with WALKING TARGETS as its flagship book. It is important. You must read this book.