Walking Targets
How Our Psychologized Classrooms
Are Producing a Nation of Sitting Ducks.
Reviewed by Robert Daniels.
June 8, 2008 –The subtitle of Beverly Eakman’s book brings to mind the terrrible plight of students and teachers who happen to be on the scene if the sound of gunfire breaks out.
But how did things get this way? How did such tragedies as Littleton, Colorado, and Red Lake, Minnesota, come to be part of the American educational landscape? And what else is going on in today’s schools?
If such questions ever loomed in your mind, Walking Targets will help to answer them.
Eakman has a diversified background that includes work as an educator, author and speech writer, the latter including service to the U.S. Justice Department and the late Chief Justice Warren Burger.
In this collection of her articles, columns and speeches, the reader can follow the investigative journey of how, in her words, “social adjustment and behavioral goals took the place of academics” in the U.S. educational system.
The book explores the interests that push the mental health agendas aimed at influencing and reshaping students’ - and society’s — most deeply held values and beliefs. As she describes it, today’s educators are being trained in what are nothing less than brainwashing techniques that erode students’ values and any sense of their own identity. As for the results - well, we read them in the headlines.
Walking Targets exposes the money-driven spread of mental health screening programs, based upon subjective questionnaires that lead to prescriptions for violence-inducing antidepressants or other drugs for those found “at risk.”
Objecting to the expanding use of mind-altering (and brain-damaging) drugs in American schools, Eakman writes, “Our legislators need to ask some tough questions before they allow schools to intimidate any more parents into drugging their kids into submission. Questions like: What kinds of kickbacks are pharmaceutical companies making off of these ‘disorders’? Are school psychologists and counselors helping to create killer kids?”
The Columbine disaster, she notes, among far too many others, “signals that the public school system is about to implode. More importantly, it indicates that schooling isn’t about literacy, basics or proficiency at anything, no matter what educators pretend. It’s time for Americans to send an unequivocal message to legislators and school boards to pull the plug on psychology-based education programs and practices.”
If knowledge is power, Walking Targets is empowerment at its finest.
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.
Midnight Whistler Publishers, 288 pages, $24.95
