shocking students into 'good behavior'

[undergroundpanther]

considering the post about the christian school that dragged a 15 year old girl behind a van who fell behind on her morning run...
imagine a school where the kids get shocked. This is aversive'therapy' where abuse is called negative reinforcement.A legacy of Jose delgado and b.f. skinner,both inhumane authoritarian assholes using'scientific claims' to excuse medieval witch trial tactics to control patient/students.As far as I am concerned this kind of treatment is sadistic psychopathic torture, be it in a 'Christian' setting or a school for handicapped.Aversive"reinforcement is evil.

Behaviorism and behavior modification through torment is COERCION and abuse .It must stop..There are NO excuses for this shit.


As long as Governments and Ceos can insulate themselves from feeling the results of their policies and the suffering they cause nothing will change.

***************************************************************


For their last field day of summer, the students of the Judge Rotenberg Center, a private boarding school for special-education students in Canton, Massachusetts, have gotten lucky; it is an exquisite afternoon. As cars whiz by the two-building complex, the late-September sun gleams off the basketball backboard and young bodies jostle for position on the asphalt court below. The playground in the middle of the parking lot is empty, but won't be for long: Students who earned their way out of the classroom for good behavior or class performance will get, as reward, a smooth ride on the school's newly assembled swing set.

The only thing that sets these students apart from kids at any other school in America—aside from their special-ed designation—is the electric wires running from their backpacks to their wrists. Each wire connects to a silver-dollar-sized metal disk strapped with a cloth band to the student's wrist, forearm, abdomen, thigh, or foot. Inside each student's backpack is a battery and a generator, both about the size of a VHS cassette. Each generator is uniquely coded to a single keychain transmitter kept in a clear plastic box labeled with the student's name. Staff members dressed neatly in ties and green aprons keep the boxes hooked to their belts, and their eyes trained on the students' behavior. They stand ready, if they witness a behavior they've been told to target, to flip open the box, press the button, and deliver a painful two-second electrical shock into the student at the end of the wire.

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0641,murphy,74685,6.html

[MatrixEscape]

1. Not surprising

with the Newer Newest Cruelty that is being unveiled as we see what the mind does when it has the opportunity and circumstances to one-up another -- which is what the mind is about, to me.

Why not just put electrodes in their heads and dispense with the number needed, and the voltage required to inflict the pain of teaching, control, and obedience? After all, you could simply have a small, blue-tooth style piece that the instructors could dial-in the pain with, if they wanted.

One has to wonder when this type of behavior modification, (now seen as social engineering to the nth degree via media and corporations) will be a staple, mandatory item, required in order to exist within the context of a brutally controlling and unforgiving mindset that is empowered with ever ascending, high technology?

You didn't think it was just about Play Stations, cell phones, and I-pods, did you?

Those who create and control the technology will eventually come to completely and unquestionably control the population. Within a generation or two, that kind of remotely managed, techno-coercion will seem as normal as online chats and debit cards are today. Everybody will be good, (other than the proletariat outside the "party") because they will, essentially, have no other choice.

The essence of the OP is merely a taste of a drop of water from a huge reservoir of ways and means.

[undergroundpanther]

2. Destroy the authoritarian

Hate the bully, Despise the intolerable dominators.Kill the torturer,destroy empire and end the sick game of make believe.NOW..

[MatrixEscape]

3. Love ....

You would have to end humanity itself to truly accomplish all that.

Love is still the word to apply, but we may have lost the meaning in the way it was once used to describe the reaction and action towards the despicable, inhumane, and intolerant. Words are like life forms and they conceal as they reveal.

That formula you related is either a way to become that which we hate, or to realize that we have the very same potential to be that which we hate under the right circumstances. I think the latter is most effective, though the more difficult one.

Of course, maybe you were applying a heavy does of sarcasm, I imagine?

[undergroundpanther]

6. kill the authoritarian.

Inside you and do not tolerate it running roughshod over other lives.That requires making boundaries,people who violate the boundaries get warned to stop. if they keep abusing then you leave if you can't leave fight back if you must.Because the issue is abuse of power a violation of boundaries.Love does not"cure all" it never has, never will. Because some people for reasons we may never know have no internal restrains based in empathy and lacking this they lack conscience and so abuse power to entertain themselves these types of people lacking emotion are very bored.So they torment the emotion out of others.Sometimes you have to assert a boundary with a gun.Because the person you are seeking to destroy desires to torture/and or/destroy you,even though you are not out to destroy them Boundaries are what's needed.And love cannot make the intolerable tolerable loving what is out to torture you and force you to bow down is self destruction,soul suicide.Another subtle kind of sickness that many well meaning people overlook because they refuse to see their 'tolerance' of the intolerable as abuse..again of the target/victim who's boundaries have been run over.

[MatrixEscape]

8. Then I fear ....

that the response you suggest, while practical, takes an authoritarian response to authority. It is a vicious circle and I recall similar wording being used in many mass movements and revolutions to some degree.

Again, as I noted, the word love has lost its meaning and power. It is currently an abstraction of an abstraction and a commodity of relationship, I guess.

Perhaps, mindful, inclusive compassion is a better way to put it? The wheel of blood letting has been going around and around if you look at the bigger, historical picture of our so-called progress as a species.

If the only way we can evolve and redeem these reoccurring waves of oppression is to continue to stir our collective pot with weapons in a stew that yields plates fool of more carnage and suffering for the sake of a so-called liberation from tyranny, then I have had enough of that vicious circle.

Some believe or know that they only get one life to live. This is it. They can then apply that to friends and family. Some understand that wars and even revolutions are profitable and often instigated by the same types of authoritarians that want the old boss out so that they can become the new one.

Action may be important and necessary, but this battle is being played out in the mind and that is the real front-lines right now. The same actions, historically, will give the same results and someone, (the winners) will justify rivers of blood, mountains of decimated bodies and oceans of suffering and want, after the fact.

Without something new and different and even unexpected in our approach, (like looking at our own lives and being even a modicum of the change we want to see) then we just, IMHO, keep spinning the same wheel to end-up finding ourselves merely stooges in a manipulative game like pawns on the Master's chessboard.

Am I promoting passivism? Certainly not! Strength and courage apply in our situation. However, dedication and tenacity combined with extreme patience, along with focus and understanding of mind and relationship are more powerful than the word or the sword. If you cannot see that, then you have already given up and are possibly looking at last-ditch, fight or flight measures.

If it comes down to that, well, do what you do. I am no reformer, nor am would I suggest that someone who feels the need to defend themselves under duress, should not.

[Th1onein]

4. You know, I LIKE BF Skinner

He is the first psychologist who actually had a theory of behavior that could be TESTED empirically. These guys are not good students of Skinner, if they really believe that this shit can work. Even Skinner knew that the best system to teach was POSITIVE reinforcement, and that the minute you took away the negative reinforcement, or the kid was out of range for it, the negative behavior escalated. These people are doing what THEY want to do; they don't need to justify their behavior by bringing Skinner into it.

[LeftishBrit]

7. Was going to say the same thing.!

Skinner's views were over-simplistic, but far more sensible than these bastards are. Those who really follow Skinner's principles believe mainly in rewarding desired behaviour and ignoring undesired behaviour.

[mogster]

5. Absolutely Pavlovian

Tell me, isn't this the kind of thinking that's behind the 'terror'-scare and the NWO 'democracy'? Citizens turning heady, so they get a jolt of fear. Teach them good from evil.

[bobthedrummer]

9. A lot of this was pioneered in Wisconsin

"Wisconsin and some black operations" (posted 7-28-2007)
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=186x21683#21699

[aikoaiko]

10. Remember that this 'school' is treating kids who rip the flesh off their bodies with their teeth,..

...bash their heads into walls and otherwise injure themselves to the point of great pain and disfigurement.

I'm am pretty close to this (experimental behavior analysis) and every year I get recruited by this center. I agree that most behavioral problems, even severe ones, can be treated with effectively with positive reinforcement, but there are those where the positive reinforcement contingencies can't be determined.

The long-term data are not great with this this treatment, but for some the temporary relief of being controlled by shocks gives people a chance to figure something else out.

[undergroundpanther]

11. I used to bang my head

bite myself and whatnot because I was being re-traumatized in the hospital that thought it was 'helping' me.Once I got away from the bullies and authoritarians I had a dramatic improvement.

[lonestarnot]

13. I still bang my head.

:banghead: :headbang:

[ToeBot]

12. Anthony Burgess, prophet.

Do clockwork oranges have free will?