Some people may have been shocked when they saw a report on "death education" on the television program "20/20" earlier this year. Among other things, the program showed high school students being taken to morgues to touch dead bodies.

Was this just some kooky teacher's idea? Not at all. This is part of a whole nationwide movement. Your local high school may have it - even if the parents don't know about it.

In fact, this is just one of many emotional manipulations of children that go on in public schools across the country - behind the backs of parents.

One mother who visited a classroom in a little town in Colorado found the students seated in a circle (very common in these fad programs) and one little girl crying. It was a discussion group and the question of the day was, "Who died last in your family?"

The little girl's grandfather had died.

Death education starts early in some schools. In one Florida county first-graders were given an assignment to make their own coffins out of shoe boxes. In a Massachusetts school eighth-graders had an assignment to write a suicide note.

A very common practice is to assign students to make choices such as who is to die in a situation where everyone cannot be saved - in an overloaded lifeboat, for example. Some schools require students to decide which members of their own families must die when the whole family cannot be saved.

Some children have emotional reactions to school programs that constantly harp on death. Some cry in class; some have trouble getting to sleep at night or have bad dreams. Others have committed suicide - and though their parents have blamed death education programs, there is no way to prove it in court.

Death education is only the tip of the iceberg. There is a whole spectrum of courses and programs designed to brainwash children into rejecting the values, beliefs, and ways of life taught them by their parents - and to accept the latest fad thinking on subjects ranging from death to sex to social philosophies in general.

Whatever the particular subject matter, these programs follow standard brainwashing techniques of putting the victims under emotional stress, breaking down their inhibitions, and destroying their links to others on the outside.

With school children, the link that must be loosened or broken is the child's link to his or her parents. In innumerable ways, some very subtle, these programs undermine, ridicule, or otherwise sidetrack parents as irrelevant. Sometimes children are explicitly told not to tell anyone - including their parents - what is said in the "magic circle," as these classroom brainwashing sessions are often called.

When the subject is sex rather than death, the underlying technique is the same. Breaking down inhibitions is the first order of business. For example, a parent who visited a fifth-grade class in Oregon reported, "I was present when a plastic model of female genitalia with a tampon insert was passed around to the boys so they might understand how tampons fit."

How important was such information to 11-year-old boys? Not very. But the real question is: How important is it to brainwashers to break down inhibitions? It is crucial.

That is why so-called "sex education" courses go on for years in some schools. It doesn't take that long to convey the facts of life. But it does take that long to relentlessly undermine what the children have been taught at home.

Breaking down inhibitions takes many forms. Movies showing close-ups of birth have been shown in elementary schools (even though one child fainted in a North Carolina classroom). Movies showing sex - all kinds of sex - have been shown in high schools. Questionnaires about the students' own sex lives have been passed out in high schools.

One girl who was reluctant to use the word "penis," was forced to say it loudly - 10 times - in class.

Then there are the "peace studies" or "nuclear education" programs in which the horrors of war are presented so graphically and so relentlessly that many children are reduced to tears. One teacher told her seventh-grade students that "No one in this class will be alive in the year 2000."

What all these programs have in common is that zealots are out to promote their own fads or causes to a captive audience of vulnerable children. The emotional well-being of these children is not their problem.

How do they get away with it? Deception is crucial. These programs are called by such nice-sounding names as "health education," "values clarification," "drug prevention," "decision making," or even "gifted and talented" programs.

What parents would refuse permission for their children to get the benefits of things with such nice names as these?

Back in 1984 the U.S. Department of Education held hearings in various parts of the country on such brainwashing practices. Although the government never published these hearings, Phyllis Schlafly collected much of the testimony in a book called Child Abuse in the Classroom. It should be required reading for every parent.

(This article is taken from New Dimensions May 1991 issue).

Economist Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford, California. His most recent book is Preferential Policies: An International Perspective.

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