Psychology Scorned

Basically psychiatric methods of Education—at least as practised in America—are dangerous to any community because they do not teach the moral responsibility of the individual. How will children learn what is right and what is wrong if they are not taught it?—for psychriatic methods are reaching into homes as well as schools and an alarming percentage of children get no religious instruction. If they get taught motivations instead of morals and "socially desirable adjustments" instead of right and wrong, how can we expect them to behave by moral standards.

Psychiatrists themselves cannot even agree on how to teach children. One moment they are screaming their silly heads off about development of the individual child, and the next about group adjustment. Not a word, mind you, about learning anything or becoming decent people. Can we allow this unlimited 'personal development" some psychiatrists are advocating? What if a child develops into a selfish inconsiderate and ignorant person—are we going to defer to the psychiatrists and allow that? Surely it defeats the main purposes of Education. If immature children are allowed to "choose their own lines of development" it is obvious that all but a few will choose the easiest—that is human nature. If they get no discipline, how can they learn self-discipline. Besides, aren't the teachers doing their pupils a terrible injustice if they do not make them attain certain standards? The outside world will come as a terrible shock to pupils who have been taught according to American psychriatic theories of development.

Or if the school stresses "group development and peer norm adjustment" isn't it committing a terrible crime against the individual, mentally and spiritually. If the pupils must conform to the low mental level of the slowest learner won't brighter pupils slowly be converted into ignorant and frustrated people, and the country's talent poured down the drain—which will ultimately mean the destruction of that country. If children are kept from having to face spiritual reality—the existence of God—by the desires of the psychiatrists to prevent "emotional disturbance" doesn't that mean the end of Christianity, the end of 2,000 years of truth and the slow, creeping advent of the materialistic totalitarian state.

If discipline is not maintained in schools because it is "psychologically undesirable" how can any standards of behaviour or learning be kept up—look at the example of the New York School System—and how can those who want to learn do so. If the psychiatrist stands between teacher and pupils and there is no respect for the teacher, why will pupils want to learn from him?

The experience of gaolers in Auckland Gaol has shown that when psychiatrists are allowed access to prisoners, indiscipline doubles. If people are told that they are not morally responsible for their crimes, but that "upbringing, environment and internal motivations" are the criminals—then they are going to resent any punishment.

The job of prison psychiatrists should be to make criminals realise their moral responsibility, not find some convenient peg on which to hang the flame. Similarly, if there was any reason for psychiatrists to be in schools, it should have been to teach the pupils self-discipline—or failing that, the need for discipline—not to sympathise with pupils because they acted like delinquents.

In a word, modern psychology has become a perverted Frankensteinean monster. In its early days it was a courageous scientific analysis of reasons behind human behaviour—sex impulses, jealousy, hatred and the lower emotions. (A view, incidentally, which coincided with true Christian belief or the "natural man"—read any of Saint Paul's Letters—but outraged unchristian smug Victorian complacency). Nowadays it has become a profession devoted to building up the egos of neurotics (for a fee) giving people who have done wrong, excuses to get rid of their moral responsibility and a battering ram against Christian standards of morality and any decent standards of Education—raising in the United States a crop of immoral, semi-illiterate ignorant and selfish people who cannot think for themselves and sneer at what is right. Whose only standards are those of Elvis Presly, the Sex-Orgy Hollywood Crowd and the propaganda of political hate merchants—the standards of the wolf-pack.

No—we must keep these so-called modern psychiatrists from infecting our country with their social cancer before it is too late. Any psychiatrists must be kept out of the school systems and the teachers, ministers and scientists brought in. "Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he reap", says the Bible, and if we allow the psychiatrists to sow the seeds of their unchristian, unscientific and immoral methods in our schools we will indeed reap a bitter harvest.

—D.A.P.