The Psychological War for Your Children

To anyone with an ounce of common sense, this is clearly sophisticated and on the face of it deliberate. I can only conclude your childrens’ minds are being programmed! And in a very destructive manner.

The Psychological War for Your Children: Captain Underpants

By Guy Selzer,

May 31, 2007

I was babysitting my nephews recently and out of left field something strange and horrifying transpired. The boys were showing me the books they were reading – they’re very proud of their reading and wanted to show me. One of those books turned out to be “Captain Underpants and the Preposterous Plight of the Purple Potty People”.

So, I starting flipping through it randomly and almost immediately came across a chapter titled “The Incredibly Graphic Violence Chapter, Part 2” (there are three parts). This alone gave me a little start. Graphics violence? In this chapter are two Flip-O-Ramas where if you turn the page back and forth quickly it appears animated.

They wanted to show me, so one of them did a quick demonstration and what I saw was a picture of a giant man in underpants wearing a cape having a cane driven through his brain.

This shocked me! I was thinking what is a 7 year old child doing reading material that openly declares graphic violence and then graphically shows a person having a cane being driven through his brain.

So, I started flipping through the book looking for other obvious signs of violence. Then, I came across this little gem.

In the above pages, we see two teachers forcing one group of children to sit wearing dunce caps with word like Loser, Duh, Dummy, Dunce and my personal favorite “This Will Go On My Permanent Record”. We also see children writing on the board the phrases “My parents only pretend to love me“; “I apologize for being born“; and “I’m so ugly, when I was born, the doctor slapped my mom“. All the while, the evil teachers are eating the children’s lunches. What is this garbage! “My parents only pretend to love me.” This is the most obscene graphic I have ever seen in my life.

In the full context of the story, the children peering in the door had just returned from travelling to another dimension through a malfunctioning time machine and were verifying that they had returned to their own reality. In the text above, we have George saying “Yep…we’re back in our own reality. That’s right, this abuse was being shown as their normal reality. The subtext is clear – expect to be abused by adults, adults cannot be trusted.

In the text at the top of the lefthand page, it says “others were sitting on dunce stools wearing humiliating hats…while still others were writing unbelievably degrading sentences over and over again on the chalkboard”. The author does say it is degrading behaviour, but what 7 year old even knows the meaning of the words humiliating and degrading or is at a stage of cognitive development to understand the situation at all. They don’t. As such, the fact the behaviour they’re seeing should be offensive to them is lost, and all they will be left with is the chalkboard messages sitting in their subconcious like ticking time bombs waiting to go off. The intent of this page is clear to me – to communicate to the children that their parents don’t love them, they should never have been born and there is something wrong with them.

Later, when my sister came back, I showed them to her and she was horrified and had no idea this kind of stuff was in this book. She mentioned it was a very popular series and that some other parents had mentioned it. She also said the book is available through the Scholastic Book Orders that the school puts out (provided by the publishing company no doubt). The teacher’s I’ve known, if they had read this book, would have been outraged and never allow it to be ordered through the school.

I took the book home with me and read the entire book. It turned out the above items were just two examples of the many psychological manipulations being used against our children in this book.

Here is another one, as equally horrific as the two above, as part of the lead in to the Flip-O-Rama section:

“Back in the olden days, incredibly graphic violence was believed to be harmful, dangerous and even immoral.”

“But now its fun for the whole family, thanks to the science of Flip-O-Rama!”

What kind of sick twisted reality does the author of this book live in where incredibly graphic violence is fun for the whole family.

But it gets worse.

Throughout the book there are huge numbers of misspelled words. For example, “principle” instead of principal, “axidentally” instead of accidentally, “excaped” instead of escaped, “atenchen” instead of attention, “publick” instead of public, “tragick” instead of tragic, and the list goes on and on and on. To put the misspelled words in context, they were in the comic books created by the main characters. The main characters are thus shown as boys that can’t spell and that’s OK.

There are even words that don’t exist like “unlikewisely” and “buncha” not in the children’s comic books but in the main text of the book. Mispelled words and words that don’t exist are in a book being used to teach children to read. So, it should come as a surprise when kids grow up unable to spell or write in a coherent manner.

There are attempts to undermine parental authority like “adults are bonkers and should be avoided at all times“. OK, this could be as a jest in fun since children always think adults don’t understand them. But, in the context of the other issues in the book it becomes offensive.

There are billboard slogans designed to affect their belief systems like “Life is Hard Get Used to It“; “Imagination is More Important Than Knowledge“; and “Schools is Educationy” (a triple whammy – misspelled, grammatically incorrect and ridiculing education). Telling a child that life is hard get used to it is horrible – why not just tell them that life is hopeless and not worth living - the message is the same.

Even in the most heroic part of the story, where the kids have created a comic book for their grandparents in which they save the kids from a bunch of evil robots, there are degrading comments on the elderly designed to make the children laugh at and disrespect their grandparents (”faster than a speeding scooter, more powerful than adult diapers and able to leap tall buildings without breaking a hip“). An adults, we can grasp the humor and put it in context but a child cannot. They are left with the message that the elderly are weak, laughable, and should be ridiculed. In reality we know that the elderly are in fact a fountain of knowledge and experience that should be cherished and appreciated. Again, this was likely done for humour’s sake but, when added to the other issues, it too becomes offensive.

The only educational value I found was an attempt on page 66 to show what a pronoun was.

So, let’s take a minute to examine the potential impact/damage of what I can only be describe as a psychological warfare operation on your children. Given the above, what we have is:

• destruction of their developing egos and sense of self worth
• desensitization to violence
• distrust of adults
• mispelled words (this is how these words are spelled and it’s OK if you can’t spell)
• word that don’t exist
• ridicule of the elderly
• manipulation of their belief systems
• indoctrination that abuse by adults is normal
• indoctrination that violence is normal

To anyone with an ounce of common sense, this is clearly sophisticated and on the face of it deliberate. I can only conclude your childrens’ minds are being programmed! And in a very destructive manner.

If we look at the front/back covers and the first couple of pages, we can see the book publishers, Scholastic Inc., state there are more than 38 million copies of this book in print, the author is Dav Pilkey and the book is the eighth in a series. So, we know that millions of children have been exposed to this sophisticated psychological manipulation worldwide.

Now in order to be fair, I went to the bookstore and bought 3 more in the same series - 5, 6, and 7. And while I was there I browsed through the other books in the same series. Books 5-7 all contained misspelled words in the sections where the kids were creating their own comic book, some contained questionable posters in the library (although in context of an evil librarian), book 5 contained a horrible poster stating “Mindless Conformity – It’s Cool – It’s Fun – Be Like Everybody Else – Individuality Causes Pain“, and all contained at least one Graphic Violence section (except 7 which had an Underpants Dance). Other than that were none of the other things going on. And the Graphics violence sections were less violent. This was a puzzler. Did he just go too far in a progressive escalation or was it the plan all along to create a harmless book then proceed to a more destructive pattern? We’ll never know.

I do not know for a fact that the the author or the publisher are aware of the subtle messages being communicated. Like most of you, I want to believe they have been so indocrinated to accept this kind of thing as normal and don’t know about the psychological impact this kind of material can have. I want to believe they are unaware, simply misguided, took things too far (watching too much Simpsons or Family Guy) and slipped into writing for adults instead of children. But when I examine the book itself, my opinion is that it was deliberate. The manipulations are for me too extensive to be accidental. Read the book yourself and draw your own conclusions.

I also looked through a number of the author’s other books and didn’t find any of this offensive manipulation taking place. It’s almost as if a different person wrote the eighth book of the Captain Underpants series.

I still find it hard to believe they would have dozens of misspelled words in a book children use to learn to read and that a Graphic Violence section is acceptable in any form.

After going through these books, I was reminded of a presentation I had seen last year given by a teacher from Pennsylvania named Peg Luksik and put out by the Pennsylvania Parents Commission in 1992 called “Who Controls the Children?” In it she discusses standardized government tests that were actually testing locus of control (whether you are an internally or externally motivated person), whether you stand up against the crowd or go with the flow and scored it. That’s right there was a right answer to these type of questions! The right answer is go with the flow. They tested threshold of behaviour in joining a group – as she explains the goal was collectivism. And they tested for rapid emotional adjustment to change without protest. Of the 415 questions, 30 questions were academic and 385 questions were on attitude and there were right and wrong answers. Very disturbing stuff. You can see why I thought of it – manipulate childrens’ minds then test to see if the manipulations were successful.

Is there a war on for your childrens’ minds? I think so, but ultimately you’ll have to decide for yourself. What can you do about it? Take action, read the book, screen all your children’s books (from what I can tell most are OK), talk to teachers, educate teachers, complain to the company, complain to the school board, write an article for the local newspaper, review all books in the school curriculum, and review all standardized tests given to your children. Be a good parent, do what you know you have to do and do it now!

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According to their own web site, Scholastic Inc. “is the world’s largest publisher and distributor of children’s books and a leader in educational technology”. “The company reaches over 35 million children, 40 million parents and nearly every school in the U.S.” and “with over $2 billion in revenues, Scholastic’s nearly 10,000 employees operate globally in education, media and publishing businesses reaching children, parents and teachers.” They operate in the U.S, Argentina, Australia, Canada, China, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, The Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and the United Kingdom.

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