sensitivity training

Sensitivity Training is a form of training that claims to make people more aware of their own prejudices and sensitive to others, such as homosexuality. According to its critics, it involves the use of psychological techniques with groups that its critics claim are often identical to brainwashing tactics. Critics believe these techniques are unethical.

According to his biographer, Alfred J Marrow, Kurt Lewin laid the foundations for sensitivity training in a series of workshops he organised in 1946 to carry out a 'change' experiment, in response to a request from the Director of the Connecticut State Interacial Commission. This led to the founding of the National Training Laboratories in Bethel, Maine in 1947. Kurt Lewin, who met Eric Trist in 1933, influenced the work of the London Tavistock Clinic, both in its work with soldiers during the second world war and in its later work with the Journal Human Relations jointly founded by a partnership of the Tavistock Institute and Lewin's group at MIT.

The National Training Laboratories Institute began in Bethel, ME. They pioneered the use of T-groups (Laboratory Training) in which the learners use here and now experience in the group, feedback among participants and theory on human behavior to explore group process and gain insights into themselves and others. The goal is to offer people options for their behavior in groups. The T-group was a great training innovation which provided the base for what we now know about team building. This was a new method that would help leaders and managers create a more humanistic, people serving system and allow leaders and managers to see how their behavior actually affected others. There was a strong value of concern for people and a desire to create systems that took people's needs and feelings seriously.

A special advisory committee to the State Board of Education in California in May, 1969, concluded, "Sensitivity training is being used by those who are in fact aligned with revolutionary groups acting contrary to public policy; that is, they intend to use the schools to destroy American culture and traditions." Dr. Edward luotz, former special assistant to the board, and professor Harden B. Jones of Berkeley, who made an extensive study of the Nazi use of sensitivity training in Hitler's Germany, were on that board. ' It goes back further to the Russian secret police, and further to the Illuminati. In October, 1945, a leftist Canadian psychiatrist, G. Brock Chisholm, at the invitation of the communist Alger Hiss, gave three lectures in Washington, DC, which laid the foundations for sex education and sensitivity training. He advocated doing away with the ways of the elders, by force if need be; doing away with the concept of right and wrong (in accord with the Jewish Cabala); fumigate "Mom and Dad" psychologically with sensitivity training; and start sex education in the 4th, 5th, and 6th grades. When Chisholm was Director of the World Health Organization, a member of his staff was Dr. Frank Calderone, husband of Mary Calderone of SIECUS (the so-called Sex Information and Education Council of the United States, which was not an official organization, but rather a private enterprise that fooled many).

Barbara Morris, in her booklet entitled Why Are You Losing Your Children? described sensitivity training as a technique whereby a child is gradually made to shed all its parental teaching, its religious beliefs, and its individualist leanings in favor of group or collective values. They probe deeply into the child's hang-ups, repressions and fantasies, doctrinal beliefs, home difficulties, brought out for the morbid inspection of classmates, and it often results in traumas which the facilitator or educator is totally unqualified to control, according to Barbara Morris. This can be judged from their own material. Around the year 1976, in such a handbook used in a city in southern Ireland, the teacher or facilitator is warned, "This technique may create problems initially. It will tend to disrupt the traditional authority-dependency relationship between teacher and pupil... it will be necessary to recognize anxiety, and also to relieve group tension if it arises, at the start the student may be unable to tolerate his newfound independence and some may regress to almost primitive reactions... Early sessions may promote continuation of primitive type behavior." And yet a few pages on, a Catholic CoAdjutor Bishop praises the program, congratulates the producers, and urges them to give this system "a high priority." A system, indeed, as James Gibb Stuart wrote, "has an inbuilt capacity for attacking religion." The Chicago Tribune of January 26, 1969, stated as much, "It (sensitivity training) can easily become, and often does, a form of group pressure and brainwashing, that makes the subjects accept the lowest common denominator in morals, be vulnerable to anti-Church and anti-family beliefs, destroys individuality, could lead to sexual promiscuity, creates neurotics, and reduces people to vegetables, unable to do anything but accept the group orders." The Saturday Evening Post once claimed that about one half of the high schools in the United States had some form of sensitivity training. It shows the power that lies behind it. The late Congressman Usher L. Burdick put it this way, "To bring this country into line to accept world government, many things must be done by the United Nations and her agencies, such as UNESCO. First of all, love of country is found by these conspirators to be very deep and hard to destroy. Here UNESCO comes into play, to teach these children, with specially trained teachers, that love of country interferes with loyalty to a world organization, and that they must transfer their loyalty to a world organization."

The late Dr. Dietrich Von Hildebrand, professor at Fordham University for many years, had this to say of Catholics who would introduce sensitivity training into the Church and its schools, "Of them we must say either that they are so blind that they do not realize how they would thereby undermine the very foundation of Christian faith and true Christian life, or else willingly or unwillingly, they are members of a conspiracy aiming to destroy the Church from within. Let us not be fooled. Sensitivity training is a diabolical attack on man's nature and dignity, and especially on his vocation as a Catholic. It destroys dignity, spiritual freedom, veracity, and moral responsibility, and it thereby undermines our life as Christians, our relation to Christ, and the sanctification to which we are called."

In September, 1990, at the United Nations in New York, the "World Summit on Children" took place, with over 160 countries participating. It concluded with an international treaty, "Charter of the Rights of The Child," which was signed by all the U.N. member countries. Some of the articles of this charter are:

Article 2: Parents are not to punish their child in any way for actions or words contrary to their beliefs or standards.

Article 6: The government is to have the final say in everything concerning the child.

Article 13: Parents are not to place any restrictions on what a child sees, hears, or is taught, or experiences in any way.

Article 14: Parents may not determine medical treatment for their children, nor may they refuse State-mandated treatment.

Article 28: Parents may not educate their children at home.