Spooks in the Classroom

Fourth Graders Get FBI Curriculum while music, arts and critical thinking are cut from public schools

According to the Detroit News:

It typically takes 22 weeks of training to become an FBI agent. Fourth- graders at Green Elementary will become “junior special agents” in just eight weeks. Once a week, a representative from the Macomb County FBI will visit with students to talk about various aspects of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, including evidence collection, gun safety and bombs. Students will also learn about drugs, gangs and computer safety. For students, an 8-week peek into agent’s job Williams, Candice, (1/20/2010)The Detroit News http://www.detnews.com/article/20100120/SCHOOLS/1200357Green Elementary

Sure, and they will also learn how to become enamored with authoritarianism, how to supply information on fellow schoolmates and how to prepare for the coming police state.  They will be introduced early to the regimentation of daily life and the new ‘war on youth’ that is now taking over our country. Made into little ‘confidential informants’ they will be encouraged to see others as suspects and their role as ‘agents for democracy’.

Couple this with a curriculum of No Child Left Behind where a curtain of dullness and doom falls on children each and everyday and many of them will now see a ‘future’ in the spiraling militarization and police state that is evolving in the US.   Militarized high schools is one of Arne Duncan’s favorites, as I noted in an earlier dailycensored article and at dissdentvoice.org.   He loves the discipline, so he said, so this will keep up with the new JROTC’s increasing every day, in many city ‘public schools’.

The trick is to get them while they are young, and the military industrial establishment knows this well.   Then recruiting them later for ,military service, spying on fellow citizens and accepting the ideology of surveillance and the suspect society is easier.   So we go from the phony war on drugs and the DARE program to infiltration into our elementary schools by the agents of Cointelpro — and at such a young age.   Hitler would have been proud and although references to Nazi Germany are problematic and usually off track, propagandizing children at an early age with ‘love of country and belief in patriotism’ is the hall mark of nationalism and its grotesque evolution into fascism.

While we cut music and arts, language and learning from education in the United States we make sure we have the little ‘Feds’ on hand along with the ‘security forces’ and the ‘DARE program’ to show them that civilian life is just a fantasy to be controlled.

Quoting the Michelle Brouchard, an investigative analyst at the FBI’s Clinton Township office:

Each component incorporates life lessons; Bouchard has presented the program to schools in Oakland County for the past 11 years. It works in citizenship, staying in school and staying drug-free along the way,” she said. “Every kid gets something different from it.” (ibid)

You can be sure those ‘life lessons’ will not include how corporate America is raping this country and its citizens, leading to massive poverty, massive cuts in benefits and programs for working people and the middle class. They will not learn the dirty secrets of the ‘agency’ and its directors like the morbid J. Edgar Hoover and how the FBI destroyed the Black Panther movement or spied and continues to spy on Americans and civil rights and anti-war activists.

No, they will learn the ‘movie version’, The FBI, that James Stewart and the Hollywood moguls made years ago in cahoots with J. Edgar Hoover. They will learn that there are those that are ‘good’ and those that are ‘bad’, and those that are bad are always the progressives, the civil rights marchers, the true patriots who work everyday and as ragged trousered philanthropists and then give their salaries to the corporations.  They will also learn that ‘thinking is subversive’ and thus they will be well instructed to identify with authority, hierarchy and those in power – the same multinationals that have made hell out of life.

Michael Sutton, 9, said he’s looking forward to the training.  At the end of the eight weeks, students will receive badges during a graduation ceremony. “I’m just happy to be in it,” he said (ibid).

Principal Eileen Hielscher said the program provides students will a glimpse into a potential career.  Yes, and they will learn the ethics that go with this new career.  Betrayal, deciet, lying, reverence for authority and the regimentation of their own lives as civil society and massive economic and social destruction make human waste disposal and its management the new ‘service industry’.  They will learn that obedience and obsequience is a civil act and civil disobedience is a crime.

Among the requirements to enter the program according to the Detroit News, “are honesty, intelligence and staying in shape” (ibid). The last part we know the FBI is capable of, it is the first two that we should be questioning. For the insidious history of the FBI is one of wanton lying, political assassination when necessary and brutally putting down legal protest through infiltration of political action groups, from Quakers to anti-war groups, seeking political and social change — or perhaps the rough ‘em up tactics employed in ‘Case Room’ 1 or 2, down at the FBI station house.

This is now what is morphing into education in America. Leave no child behind, except as snoops or in handcuffs.