I was, generally speaking, a fairly well-behaved kid. I’ve no reasonable explanation, then, for burning a hole in the wall of the one-room school I attended in the late 1930s.

It wasn’t an original idea. A precedent had been set by somebody who’d come and gone before I arrived at Union School the previous year as a third grader. He (I can’t imagine it was a “she”) had heated the steel rod used to stoke the fire in the stove until it was red hot, pressed the end of it against the white-painted interior wood wall near the entrance door, and pushed until it burned all the way through. The result was a very neat black hole about the size of a marble.

The blackened area around the hole looked a little like fetching eyelashes.

One cold winter morning, arriving at the tiny school after the nearest neighbor had added fresh coal to the fire and gone, but before anyone else had arrived, it occurred to me that a similar hole three or four inches to the left of the existing hole offered an interesting possibility. Using a black crayon, I could add eyebrows to good effect.

I got the hole done, but not the eyebrows. Sixth grader Naomi arrived, saw the still-smoldering new “eye,” and waited at the door to tattle to the teacher.

Confronted by high authority, my eyes-with-eyebrows project seemed less than wise, much less funny. I vaguely recall responding to Miss Woods’ observation that I could have burned the school down by mumbling something about the big community tin drinking cup hanging on a nail beside the nearby water cooler. I think I suggested that it provided the necessary insurance against disaster.

She didn’t buy it. I was sent home and told to come back with my mother or father, or both.

In the years since I burned that hole, I’ve stayed connected to schools and schooling as a student, teacher, administrator, college professor, writer of texts and professional books, contributor to academic journals, education columnist for newspapers, blogger, visitor to schools around the world, and consultant to publishers, states and foundations.

And for the last 20 years, I’ve done my best to burn holes in the myth that standardized tests are a means to the end of improving America’s schools. I haven’t the slightest doubt that if the testing tail continues to wag the education dog, it will kill the dog and with it the ability of future generations to cope with their fates.

It’s not that America’s schools don’t have really serious problems. They certainly do. And I’m not talking just about big, inner city institutions surrounded by blight, encircled by barbed wire, entered through metal detectors, patrolled by cops, and churning out dropouts, future prison inmates, and other social problems.

There are many of those, but I’m not singling them out. As a mountain of research makes clear, what ails them is primarily long-term poverty and the myriad problems poverty spawns. That’s a matter I’m not qualified to write about, but for those who think test scores actually mean something important, I’ll note in passing that Finland always ranks near the top, and their child poverty rate is less than 3%, while America’s rate is over 20% and climbing rapidly. Those who believe skilled teachers can level the education playing field enough to erase that difference in the quality of the material they’re given to work with aren’t just not in the game, they’re not even in the ball park.

Yes, include those blighted urban schools as a target of my criticism, but include also America’s many well-ordered schools in quiet, leafy suburbs. Include schools in top-scale ZIP codes that have been adopted by venture capitalists who see to it that every hint of a need is instantly met. Include schools where, before opening bells, Benz, Bentley, and BMW doors swing open and kids slide out to be greeted by name by headmasters and faculties. And include schools where chauffeur-driven limousines deliver their body-guarded charges because school policy forbids noisy arrivals by helicopter. (Yes, there are such schools.)

Consider as failing every school – public, charter, private, whatever – that assumes that corporately produced, standardized tests say something important about something important. Using test scores to guide education policy makes about as much sense as using the horoscope of whoever happens to be Secretary of State to guide US foreign policy.

That standardized tests are a useful tool for guiding education reform is a myth, pure and simple – a myth constructed from ignorance and perpetuated by misinformation, or conjured from hope and reinforced by cherry-picked data.

I grew up in Appalachia where the old adage, “You can’t make a silk purse out of sow’s ear” was familiar speech. Standardized tests are a “sow’s ear.” The only things they can measure accurately are random bits of information stored in short-term memory.

But even if every kid remembered everything taught, it’s hard to imagine a more wasteful use of teacher and learner time and taxpayer money than preparing for and taking standardized tests.

When the world changed little or not at all from generation to generation and nearly everyone was illiterate, unaided memory was essential. What needed to be known existed in the memories of the elders, and the young, living in that static world, either learned it from them or suffered the consequences.

That era is long gone. It’s over. Finished. It began to end when writing was developed, and its demise proceeded with the invention of the printing press, cheap books, photography, moving pictures, television, the Internet, search engines, and other means of information gathering and archiving. In today’s world, tests of unaided memory are about as useful as (insert another Appalachian slang expression having to do with the anatomy of boar hogs).

Standardized, subject-matter tests are worse than a waste. We’re spending billions of dollars and instructional hours on a tool that measures one thought process to the neglect of all others, wreaks havoc on the minds and emotions of teachers and learners, and diverts attention from a fundamental, ignored problem.

That problem? Longshoreman and college professor Eric Hoffer summed it up a lifetime ago. Because the world is dynamic, the future belongs not to the learned but to learners.

Read that sentence again. Then read it again. Even if standardized tests didn’t cost billions, even if they yielded something that teachers didn’t already know, even if they hadn’t narrowed the curriculum down to joke level, even if they weren’t the main generators of educational drivel, even if they weren’t driving the best teachers out of the profession, they should be abandoned because they measure the wrong thing.

The future belongs not to the learned but to learners. American education isn’t designed to produce learners, and the proof of that contention is the standardized test.

America’s system of education is designed to clone the learned. And motivated either by ignorance or greed, the wealthy and powerful, using educationally naïve celebrities as fronts, are spending obscene amounts of money to convince politicians, pundits, policymakers, and the public that this is a good and necessary thing.

Thus far, they’ve been wildly successful. If they’re not stopped, those now sitting in our classrooms won’t just witness America’s descent into Third World status, they’ll accelerate it.

On a somewhat lighter note, and in the spirit of the season, below is a link to a free gift – a complete, down-loadable book. It’s not my new What’s Worth Learning?, but it’s perhaps more appropriate for days made busy by holiday preparation: http://www.marionbrady.com/documents/TheRoadtoHell.pdf 

14 December , 2009
Countercurrents.org

As my regular readers know, I’ve spent much of this year contemplating big themes, like the long-term picture for energy, energy and monetary policy, black swans and the human penchant for valuing the present more than the future, the problems of complex systems like the energy-food-water nexus, sustainability, and the relationship between climate change and peak oil.

As this year draws to a close and I review my work, the biggest question that emerges is about why it is so incredibly difficult to reach people on these subjects.

It’s more than the usual culprits. Yes, the corporate media and the ad-supported business model are problems — like when I was called a “peak freak” on television and given no opportunity to respond to my opponent’s disinformation.

Yes, the overweening influence of corporate lobbyists has effectively neutralized policy and confused the public debate on our most serious problems. Yes, the capitalistic system favors short-term concentrated profits over long-term public good. And yes, the simple human preference for happy talk over sad stories plays a role in our denial.

The real problem is much more pervasive. Those actors cannot explain more fundamental questions:

Why has our economic theory failed us?
Why is the reality of climate change so hard to accept?
Why does climate change dominate public dialogue while the more proximate threat of peak oil remains far off the radar?
Why do we have such resistance to change?
Why would anyone ever think Dubai World was a good idea?
Why is talking about population control — arguably the only real way out of our predicament — taboo?

For over 40 years, our public dialogue has gotten progressively dumber and more polarized. The one “town hall meeting” I attended on health care was a horrifying display of tribal theater, with both sides screaming at the other and drowning out the elected official. It did not even remotely resemble intelligent discussion of issues.

Our news media have substituted entertainment for information and sponsor-endorsed opinion for neutral reportage, while the literacy of the public and the capacity for critical thought have progressively declined. Orwell, Huxley, Bradbury, Vonnegut, Chomsky, and a long line of others have decried it all along.

Yet it persists, and grows. Why?

Addicted to Fantasy

I discovered a partial answer to this question in the terrific new book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle by veteran journalist Chris Hedges. He argues that America has been slowly transformed into a nation entranced by Horatio Alger-wrapped fantasies of personal wealth, fame, and power. Our culture has been utterly subsumed by a fantasy world, he says, in which celebrity worship, dumbed-down “news,” and consumer messaging form an impenetrable veil of manipulated reality.

Hedges offers some compelling evidence: Nearly a third of the population is almost or fully illiterate. A third of high school graduates, and 42% of college graduates, never read another book for the rest of their lives. Eighty percent of U.S. families didn’t buy or read one book in 2007. We did, however, watch 28 hours a week of television. Each.

Television, where we have hundreds of channels but nothing is on… nothing but unimaginative, formulaic entertainment packages for highly crafted messages designed to make you buy, buy, buy.

Jon Stewart offered a great example this week in his takedown of Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson — a high school class valedictorian, Stanford honors graduate, and former Miss America with classical violin chops — who pretended to resort to the dictionary to find out what the words “ignoramus,” “double-dip recession,” and “czar” meant.

Instead of discussing the content or import of the leaked “Climategate” emails, Carlson cited a poll asking if global warming research had been falsified… a poll which added up to 120%. Public opinion, however dumb, is now more important than facts.

I had to sort though dozens of articles and hours of radio and television that merely repeated the corruption allegations before discovering two decent articles (at New Scientist and Real Climate) that described what the “scandalous” e-mails said and what they meant.

What I found was… nothing interesting. Just scientists, doing their regular jobs of sorting through and correcting the errors in data.

But a few words, made in private conversation and taken out of context, is all Sen. James Inhofe and his tribe of right-wing activists needed to renew their assault on climate change legislation. His effort is no doubt enabled by the fact that only 11 of the 538 members of the Senate and House have backgrounds in science or engineering, and most are functionally illiterate about energy or climate science.

In fact, the deniers have no alternate scientific theory for global warming, nor do they care to formulate one. They only need to cast doubt on the existing research and claim that the scientific process has been corrupted.

The actual significance of the science, or lack thereof, in Climategate was quickly rendered irrelevant; that irrelevance was then seized and gloriously amplified in the media. The spectacle is more exciting than the dull facts about the science, so the media only care to perpetuate the spectacle. It’s entertainment, not news.

The “climate change is bunk” message was sent, but how many Americans who heard it then spent any effort trying to figure out what the e-mail leak actually meant, as I did? I’m guessing very few.

Perhaps a third of the public now believes that there is some sort of conspiracy to destroy the economy by taking action on climate change. The obvious lack of any conspirators is irrelevant. Merely saying there is a conspiracy is enough.

Global media king Rupert Murdoch pounded the final nail into the Fourth Estate’s coffin this week in a Wall Street Journal editorial where he argued passionately that media should only give consumers what they want. Government help, non-profit status, or any other mechanism that would support journalism without a profit motive is insidiously evil in his view. Yet he asserts that merely giving customers what they want — even if they only want illusions and circuses, and have no patience for thoughtful discussion of matters like policy or science — produces a free and informed citizenry.

This seems an utterly indefensible stance. The Fourth Estate is much wider, but also considerably shallower now than it was in 1888 when Oscar Wilde wrote: “The Lords Temporal say nothing, the Lords Spiritual have nothing to say, and the House of Commons has nothing to say and says it. We are dominated by Journalism.”

Our appetite for illusion has made us, as Aldous Huxley feared, a nation of passive, self-centered consumer idiots, endlessly distracted by trivia and irrelevance, embedded in a alternate reality matrix, saturated with information we don’t comprehend, easily confused, and easily led down paths we would never choose if we were informed and thinking clearly.

Peter Pan Meets Financial Truck Bomb

If you think I’m off on a tangential rant here, let me bring it home, for it has everything to do with our utter failure to respond in a meaningful way to our impending challenges, and with investing in general.

An outstanding and extremely important recent white paper by an oil and gas exploration consultant, “The Tragedy of 21 Darts,” confirmed the worst of what I have come to understand about the game of projecting oil and gas reserves. Reserve calculations are essentially mathematical simulations, which are regularly distorted and misrepresented by the companies that claim them. As a hedge fund manager and oil and gas producer friend of mine commented on the paper, “The oil and gas business is a bunch of holes in the ground with liars on top.”

To understand what you’re buying as an oil and gas investor, you’d have to spend many hours digging through technical papers full of unfamiliar jargon. You’d have to be able to read critically and understand probability distributions. I’ve done it, and it’s hard work. Harder than most people are willing to do.

The regulators and policymakers won’t read that paper, nor will most of the industry’s investors. As a result of this ignorance, the author warns, new SEC regulations will set off “a financial truck bomb that’s going to blow away ‘proved reserves’ as a meaningful metric of oil company assets” in January. The liars will get away with it… at least until the wells run dry.

This is why peddlers of absurd fantasies about the future of oil production, like Phil Flynn and Dan Yergin, are in the press and on the TV every day, while the people like me — patiently and diligently sorting through the facts and the fictions in search of reality — are continually marginalized.

This is why wingnuts like Sen. Inhofe get more airtime than those who could explain what the science on climate change really says.

This is why simple, rational solutions to our tangle of developing crises — like resource scarcity planning, or carbon taxes, or population control — are immediately disregarded as unworkable.

And it’s why we elect leaders who massage our egos and assure us that everything will be fine, when it clearly won’t.

If it doesn’t conform to our fantasies and the people don’t want it, then men like Murdoch will ensure we don’t get it. But they’ll happily sell us snake oil like space-based solar power for as long as we keep buying it.

We are not only lost in our illusions… we’re in love with them.

We desperately want to believe that there are no physical limits to our insatiable desires, even on a finite planet. We’d rather poke holes in the multiplying signs that humanity on Planet Earth is fundamentally in overshoot than face the hard work of figuring out how to adapt and survive.

We’re clinging to 17th Century remnants of the Age of Enlightenment, still trying to believe that humanity has a special elevated place above Nature when it’s becoming increasingly obvious that it does not. Our models of the future, our economic theory, our educational regimen, our personal and cultural ambitions, our national identity, even our very conception of Man’s place in Creation have been rendered intellectually bankrupt. But we refuse to see it.

Our emotional progress is even worse. We’ve barely budged from total nihilism to tribalism… “The American way of life is non-negotiable,” and all that rot.

We can’t afford to go on this way because, as James Baldwin put it in the prologue to Hedges’ book: “People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.”

It’s Up to You Now

In the absence of rational leadership, neutral journalism for the public good, or a free and informed citizenry, the task of meeting the challenges ahead falls to each of us, individually. There is no “them” who are going to sort all this out. There is only “us.”

We have to own the problems of energy, food, water, climate change, population, and investments that don’t go sour. They’re ours.

So will be the solutions. Fortunately, there is much we can do.

Concentrate on efficiency first: Insulate your house. Get a more efficient vehicle and more efficient appliances. When an opportunity like Cash for Clunkers/Caulkers comes around, jump on it. Try to limit your driving and use public transit. Move closer to work, or vice versa.

Then do something on the supply side: Add solar PV and solar hot water to your house. Tear up your lawn and plant a vegetable garden, even if it means paying a fine to your HOA.

Rebalance your investment portfolio with a view toward long-term sustainability. Limit your exposure to dollar-denominated assets and invest in hard assets. Do your own due diligence. Eliminate your debt as quickly as possible.

Instead of hoping that your fantasies of wealth will be restored when the economy recovers, think about how you can live within your means if it never does.

And finally, don’t wait for leadership in Washington. Be a leader, wherever you are. Work toward sustainable solutions, not at town hall meetings — but with your family, neighbors, friends, and local governments.

Until next time,

Chris

Republished from Countercurrents.

“It’s well established that schools with large minority populations tend to have lower quality teachers,” Dr. Jackson said. “But it is unclear whether these schools are merely located in areas with a paucity of quality teachers, whether quality teachers avoid these schools because of the neighborhood or economic factors surrounding a school, or whether there is a direct relationship between student characteristics and teacher quality.”

Dr. Jackson’s findings suggest that it’s not neighborhoods keeping high-quality teachers away; it’s the students-and it’s directly related to their race.

“This is particularly sobering because it implies that, all else equal, black students will systematically receive lower quality instruction,” Jackson said. “This relationship may be a substantial contributor to the black-white achievement gap in American schools.”

The study focused on the Charlotte-Mecklenberg school district in North Carolina. In 2002, the district ended its race-based busing program, which distributed the district’s minority population across its schools. When the policy ended, some schools had a large and sudden inflow of black students. Since the racial makeup of the schools changed suddenly but the neighborhood and economic factors surrounding them stayed the same, Jackson could test the impact the student body itself had on teacher quality.

Using data supplied by the North Carolina Education Research Data Center, Jackson found that schools that had an increase in black enrollment suffered a decrease in their share of high-quality teachers, as measured by years of experience and certification test scores. Teacher effectiveness, as measured by teachers’ previous ability to improve student test scores, decreased in the black inflow schools as well. The change in quality for each school generally occurred in the same year that the busing program ended, indicating that teachers moved in anticipation of more black students.

“This study implies teachers may prefer a student body that is more white and less black,” Jackson says.

Black teachers were slightly more likely than white teachers to stay in the schools that experienced a black inflow, the study found. However, those black teachers who did leave black schools tended to be the highest qualified black teachers. So the decline in quality was somewhat more pronounced among black teachers than white teachers.

Just what it is about black students that pushes high-quality teachers away is hard to pin down, Dr. Jackson says. It could be that teachers are reacting to notions about black students’ achievement or income levels.

###

C. Kirabo Jackson, “Student Demographics, Teacher Sorting, and Teacher Quality: Evidence from the End of School Desegregation,” Journal of Labor Economics 27:2.

Since 1983, the Journal of Labor Economics has presented international research that examines issues affecting the economy as well as social and private behavior. The Journal publishes both theoretical and applied research results relating to the U.S. and international data. And its contributors investigate various aspects of labor economics, including supply and demand of labor services, personnel economics, distribution of income, unions and collective bargaining, applied and policy issues in labor economics, and labor markets and demographics.

This article was reposted from the University of Chicago Press Journals.

The study, which tracked schools through 2006, found that test scores had improved in the privatized schools, but scores in the rest of the city’s public schools improved at a much faster rate, leaving the privatized schools in the dust.

“By 2006, the achievement gap between the privatized group and the rest of the district was greater than it was before the intervention,” says study author Vaughan Byrnes, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University. “Both groups improved, but the privatized schools improved at a slower rate.”

Philadelphia became a national proving ground for public school privatization in 2002 when Pennsylvania state government officials took over the city’s schools. As part of the restructuring effort, 45 of the worst performing schools were turned over to Edison Schools Inc. and several other private education management organizations. The rest of the city’s schools remained under the control of the Philadelphia School District, which instituted its own reform efforts.

Byrnes’ study analyzed reading and math scores from the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment test from 1997 to 2006 at 88 middle-grades schools. Most of the schools had either grades 6-8 or a K-8 configuration. The data allowed Byrnes to look at trend lines before and after the state intervention in both privatized and non-privatized schools.

“The schools placed under private management were significantly worse off than the rest of the district in 1997,” Byrnes says. “But our data show that they were gaining on the rest of the district from 1997 to 2002-before the takeover.” After the takeover, improvement at the privatized schools accelerated, but the rest of the district accelerated faster. As a result, the privatized schools were further behind the rest of the district by 2006 than they were before the takeover.

Byrnes says his results are consistent with previous research on Philadelphia school reform efforts.

Supporters of privatization have responded to previous critical findings by arguing that improvement in the privatized schools is stunted because these schools were the worst in the district. But this study casts serious doubt on that argument, because according to Byrnes’ data, the privatized schools were not the district’s worst.

“Five of the absolute worst schools in the district were restructured but remained under public control,” Byrnes said. “Those schools did much better after 2002, outpacing the privatized schools, and perhaps even the rest of the district. That rules out the argument that the privatized schools improved more slowly because they were worse to start with.”

Byrnes says that his study was not able to address potential differences in funding between the district and privatized schools.

“[T]here is no way to know whether the total per pupil funding was more or less in the district schools or the EMO (privatized) schools,” Byrnes writes. “Therefore, the financial context of the school privatization is an issue that we were unable to examine here.”

###

Vaughan Byrnes, “Getting a Feel for the Market: The Use of Privatized School Management in Philadelphia,” American Journal of Education, May 2009.

Reposted from the University of Chicago Press Journals

Future mandates, however, might be better served by taking into account findings from a University of Illinois study suggesting the academic benefits of physical education classes, recess periods and after-school exercise programs. The research, led by Charles Hillman, a professor of kinesiology and community health and the director of the Neurocognitive Kinesiology Laboratory at Illinois, suggests that physical activity may increase students’ cognitive control – or ability to pay attention – and also result in better performance on academic achievement tests.

“The goal of the study was to see if a single acute bout of moderate
exercise – walking – was beneficial for cognitive function in a period of time afterward,” Hillman said. “This question has been asked before by our lab and others, in young adults and older adults, but it’s never been asked in children. That’s why it’s an important question.”

For each of three testing criteria, researchers noted a positive outcome linking physical activity, attention and academic achievement.

Study participants were 9-year-olds (eight girls, 12 boys) who performed a series of stimulus-discrimination tests known as flanker tasks, to assess their inhibitory control.

On one day, students were tested following a 20-minute resting period; on another day, after a 20-minute session walking on a treadmill. Students were shown congruent and incongruent stimuli on a screen and asked to push a button to respond to incongruencies.  During the testing, students were outfitted with an electrode cap to measure electroencephalographic (EEG) activity.

“What we found is that following the acute bout of walking, children performed better on the flanker task,” Hillman said. “They had a higher rate of accuracy, especially when the task was more difficult. Along with that behavioral effect, we also found that there were changes in their event-related brain potentials (ERPs) – in these neuroelectric signals that are a covert measure of attentional resource allocation.”

One aspect of the neuroelectric activity of particular interest to researchers is a measure referred to as the P3 potential. Hillman said the amplitude of the potential relates to the allocation of attentional resources.

“What we found in this particular study is, following acute bouts of walking, children had a larger P3 amplitude, suggesting that they are better able to allocate attentional resources, and this effect is greater in the more difficult conditions of the flanker test, suggesting that when the environment is more noisy – visual noise in this case – kids are better able to gate out that noise and selectively attend to the correct stimulus and act upon it.”

In an effort to see how performance on such tests relates to actual classroom learning, researchers next administered an academic achievement test. The test measured performance in three areas: reading, spelling and math.

Again, the researchers noted better test results following exercise.

“And when we assessed it, the effect was largest in reading comprehension,” Hillman said. In fact, he said, “If you go by the guidelines set forth by the Wide Range Achievement Test, the increase in reading comprehension following exercise equated to approximately a full grade level.

“Thus, the exercise effect on achievement is not statistically significant, but a meaningful difference.”

Hillman said he’s not sure why the students’ performance on the spelling and math portions of the test didn’t show as much of an improvement as did reading comprehension, but suspects it may be related to design of the experiment. Students were tested on reading comprehension first, leading him to speculate that too much time may have elapsed between the physical activity and the testing period for those subjects.

“Future attempts will definitely look at the timing,” he said. Subsequent testing also will introduce other forms of physical-activity testing.

“Treadmills are great,” Hillman said. “But kids don’t walk on treadmills, so it’s not an externally valid form of exercise for most children. We currently have an ongoing project that is looking at treadmill walking at the same intensity relative to a Wii Fit game – which is a way in which kids really do exercise.”

Still, given the preliminary study’s positive outcomes on the flanker task, ERP data and academic testing, study co-author Darla Castelli believes these early findings could be used to inform useful curricular changes.

“Modifications are very easy to integrate,” Castelli said. For example, she recommends that schools make outside playground facilities accessible before and after school.

“If this is not feasible because of safety issues, then a school-wide assembly containing a brief bout of physical activity is a possible way to begin each day,” she said. “Some schools are using the Intranet or internal TV channels to broadcast physical activity sessions that can be completed in each classroom.”

Among Castelli’s other recommendations for school personnel interested in integrating physical activity into the curriculum:

• scheduling outdoor recess as a part of each school day;

• offering formal physical education 150 minutes per week at the elementary level, 225 minutes at the secondary level;

• encouraging classroom teachers to integrate physical activity into learning.

An example of how physical movement could be introduced into an actual lesson would be “when reading poetry (about nature or the change of seasons), students could act like falling leaves,” she said.

The U. of I. study appears in the current issue of the journal Neuroscience. Along with Castelli and Hillman, co-authors are U. of I. psychology professor Art Kramer and kinesiology and community health graduate student Mathew Pontifex and undergraduate Lauren Raine.Reposted from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

(NaturalNews) Much of western society has been inherently taught through the establishment of educational institutions that knowledge of the world, people and events solely emanates from textbooks, scholars and the media. Historically, the mass education of children has facilitated in the suppression of independent thought, self-efficacy and personal responsibility leading to conformity, lack of awareness, little respect for differences and a systematic fear of change leaving individuals devoid of true spiritual knowledge. The rapidly dissolving and obsolete societal norms emanating from the mass hording of unnecessary material possessions and the unrelenting and oblivious self-enslavement through debt are but some of the many tools to keep the masses in an unconscious state of servitude and unaware of the realities of viable and necessary change.

In order to properly tackle the many challenges of today, we need radical change, new age thought and bold and dynamic tactics. The world or tomorrow should and will be an amazing place to live a unified, healthy and happy life for all creatures on earth. In order to change things from the way they are to the way they soon will be, we need valiant, open-minded individuals to begin to wake up and increase their awareness of what needs to be changed; we need to possess an unspoken reverence for the environment, animals, plants and each other; we need society to release our pervasive and media-entrenched fear of mythological external threats; we need universal knowledge in order to embrace the proper change we need to move forward as one; and we need unconditional love for every illuminating living being in this world. If each one of us can do these five things as individuals and be the change we want to see in the world, then society will slowly transform and shift from being what we could have been to what we soon will be: one vibrating conscious being devoid of manipulation, fear and greed and full of unity, passion and love.

1. Increasing Awareness

One of the keys to true change is through the awakening of the masses to independent thought and reason. Much of the western world goes through life wearing a metaphorical blindfold guided solely by the voice of conformity from the mass media and the incognizant majority. Much of the world simply believes what they have always been told without verifying the veracity of much of this information. In fact, 87 percent of the population`s only source of information is from the media. Past revolutionaries like Thomas Jefferson understood, “The advertisement is the most truthful part of a newspaper”. It is akin to an adult being fed from birth; there is no reason to seek out food if you have always been given it, unless of course we realize the food we have been given has no substance or nutrition. When we begin to question everything we have been told, only then can we arrive at our own truth. Our inborn gifts of emotional intelligence and intuition have been usurped by group think, mass negligence, blinded conformity, corporate pseudo-science and lack of true awareness. Once people understand that the first step in a fervent revolution emanates from the possession of sound awareness of what rightfully needs to be changed, then love, passion and hope will spread from one end of the globe to the other igniting the once sleeping masses to action. It is time for individuals to have awareness of how eating certain foods makes them feel, how certain thoughts can enlighten or suppress them, where their clothes are made, where the food they eat originates from, and what each of us are truly here to do. As James Thurber once said, “Let us not look back in anger or forward in fear, but around in awareness”.

2. Respect For All

Having respect for all living creatures across the globe as well as for mother earth herself, is an invaluable component in manifesting conscious change across the world. Supplanting personal greed with honor and reverence of the inherent power and love of plants, animals and each of our fellow brothers and sisters will allow the masses to awaken from their unconscious slumber of ineptitude and obliviousness. Lack of respect for others allows dormant individuals of western society to rationalize the mass slaughter of animals for food, whales for research, the destruction of natural resources and the extinction of million-year old species for monetary gain. If enough corporations pillage, plunder and poison the land in which we eat, drink and sleep on, it becomes the accepted norm from the complacent and complicit population of followers quickly desensitized by the initial egregiousness of these acts. By removing our fallacious ingrained thought patterns behind the necessity of material possessions, increased waste, over consumption and the exploitation of resources, we can then learn to replace what we use and to respect and love the earth as it was intended to be. Having respect for all living creatures will simultaneously remove societal judgement, greed and fear from all who choose to embrace such a noble and revolutionary attribute.

3. Release of Fear

One of the most powerful ways to foment change in the world is through the release of internal and external fear; fears of failure, aging, illness, death and terrorism readily hinder our spiritual growth and ascension. Once our fears have been assuaged and subsequently eliminated, our vibration is heightened and we begin to truly live with passion, love and harmony on earth. If we as individuals can begin to look objectively at the reality of our institutionalized fear, we can begin to simply acknowledge it and release it. Holding on to fear to akin to being stuck in cement, we are psychologically entrapped into making misinformed and poor decisions. The media promulgates fear on a daily basis in an attempt to keep the masses despondent and controlled by systematically over reporting the negative and the under reporting the positive and uplifting stories. This conscious focus on terrorism, disease, murder and death only seeks to paralyze the masses with fear, hopelessness and despair. The predicted result is among individuals is inefficacy for change, personal disconnectedness, anxiety, fear and ultimately, control. This integral shift from fear to courage and eventually stillness in oneself allows individuals to reclaim back their power and minds to facilitate in the greatest conscious shift the world has ever seen.

4. Universal Knowledge

Unwavering change on earth will not commence until individuals begin to possess the sound knowledge and understanding that they have the power to create the life they are destined for. This true knowledge of health, well-being, happiness and prosperity has been clandestinely hidden, suppressed and manipulated by society to keep populations fearful, ill, powerless and psychologically constrained. This illusory control is dissolved when individuals realize that the techniques used to keep them in line were unfounded and untrue. For it is knowledge of this inherent truth that escapes the majority of individuals and ostensibly maintains the unconscious, yet self-imposed prison of disease, divisiveness, fear and massive inaction. It is as if someone who was in despair and couldn`t swim was told that the depth of water they were in was 30 feet, while it was only four feet they drowned instead of simply looking down or trying to standing up. True knowledge, for those who choose to accept it, will allow individuals to save themselves while the others who chose to reject the inherent truths will continue to drown from their own conformity and misconceptions.

Our thoughts are the single most powerful way to maintain health and well-being and when needed, to heal our bodies. Thoughts, whether positive or negative, intervene on the quantum level, which is 120 million times smaller than the atomic level. Thoughts change the quanta which changes the atoms, which alters the electrons, which in turn changes the cells, then the tissue, up to the organs, then the organ systems and finally the organism. We have the power to become whatever it is we want to become, to heal whatever ailment we have manifested in life. This power is only activated through true knowledge, knowing we have these latent gifts, which have purposely been bestowed upon us in order to call upon them when in need. At birth, we inately possess much of the knowledge that we need for life, it is life itself that attempts to water down and destroy our inherent gifts of knowledge, truth and love. As Thomas Jefferson once said, “Educate and inform the whole mass of the people. . . They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty”.

5. Unconditional Love

Our minds, bodies and souls are incessantly in search of love; the love of ourselves, our families, each other and life is a powerful drive regulated by the hypothalamus in each and every one of us. All living creatures including plants, animals and humans do not just want love, they are hard-wired to need love. Those who aren`t given love at an early age simply need more to make up for it, not to be locked away devoid of love forever. Without love, we are unable to trust and without trust we are unable to love. Trust evolves from the dissolvement of fear and the makes way for one of the greatest gifts we can give to ourselves and each other. Until we truly accept and love ourselves, we cannot love our brothers and sisters. We are never taught to love ourselves, instead we are unconsciously instilled to seek out our faults, weaknesses and shortcomings and to compare ourselves to others. Society and the soon to be defunct corporate agendas have shaped us into believing we must all be the same, wear the same clothes, have the same bodies, see the same films, eat the same food, live in the same houses, work at the same jobs and believe the same tall tales.

Individuals needs to slowly awaken from their interminable slumber and increase their awareness of the world, their respect for each other while breaking free of their fears, learn as much truthful knowledge as possible and truly love ourselves and each other. Each of these five ideals will only be met if western society begins to realize that to change the world, we must first wake up and change ourselves. Thomas Jefferson put it best when he said, “Every generation needs a new revolution”. Clearly, the time for change and the impending revolution is now.

About the author

Dr. Gregory Damato enjoys a vegan lifestyle and runs a Quantum Biofeedback clinic treating various clients ranging from autism to cancer. He is currently authoring a book for parents educating on the many hidden dangers of vaccines, chemical toxicity in toys, GM foods, the effects of EMFs and EMRs and ways to combat rising childhood illness and neurological disease by naturally building immunity, detoxification and nutrition. His goal is to increase global awareness of the myriad of health issue facing us today and the fact that 100% of them are preventable and completely reversible.

Reprinted from NaturalNews.