OBE: Outcome Based Education, Cult of Death of New Age and the Columbine High School massacre

Outcome Based Education (OBE) is under attack both in the U.S. and Europe for promoting illiteracy and other scholastic deficiencies.

William Spady, a sociologist, is the self-proclaimed father of OBE. He is arguably one of the most controversial proponents of school reform. Its proponents have continually hide the name due to the negative implications associated with the program: Performance Based Education, Standards Based Education, High Performance Learning, Transformational Education, Competency-Based Education, and Break-the-Mold Schools, among others. However, all of these titles refer to a similar philosophy and a plan which implements radical and "systemic" change into schools.

OBE dangerously offers a class in "Death, Dying and Suicide" for high-schoolers, which, in the words of one Oregon OBE student, "glamorizes death". OBE (at least in Virginia, since 1986) requires teachers, under the guise of "guidance counseling", to create "cognitive dissonance" in children aged five and up. They are then to withhold adult input, in order to force reliance on "an answer acceptable to the peer group". Its purpose is "to remodel [the] entire political, economic and social structure [as well as individual] identity." (Elementary School Guidance and Counseling Journal, April 1981).

There is a section of OBE testing designed to find out what kind of social pressure is sufficient for the child to conform to group goals and surrender to group consensus, a concept known as "threshold testing". This method of creating an authority vacuum is directly out of Bailey's "Education in the New Age", which directs teachers to reject children's pleas for answers "that rest on the authority of the [teacher]", and "force" them to "an inward search" beginning at age five.

In 1993, parents rebelled against this dumbing-down process and, by a two-to-one vote, elected a "back-to-basics" school board. The teachers union hit back in the following election and retook control of the Littleton schools. The union was supported by People for the American Way, who used the usual negative slurs, accusing those opposed to OBE of being "fundamentalists" and part of the "religious right."

The Columbine High School massacre occurred on Tuesday, April 20, 1999, at Columbine High School. Two students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, carried out a shooting rampage, killing 12 students and a teacher, as well as wounding 24 others, before committing suicide. It remains the deadliest high school shooting.

Nevertheless it was only the 6th in 8 of "unexplained random shootings" within 2 years committed by students aged 11-18. Government and Media claim to be at a loss for a plausible cause in every one of these incidents and uniformly fail to mention an educational curriculum which includes both "death education" and the teaching of "no personal values" for one of the schools which incorporated OBE in its experimental stage was ... Columbine High School.

How can they ignore that since in 1987 Colorado Eagle Forum produced a two-hour video in which student Tara Backer spoke at length about the relentless focus on death, dying and suicide in her sophomore classes at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. She and several of her classmates attempted suicide as a result of this depressing teaching, and it took them many months to recover from the experience.

Tara was subsequently interviewed for an ABC 20/20 program in 1988, where she said, "I had thought about [suicide] as a possible option for a lot of years, but I never would have gonethrough with it, never, because I wasn't brave enough. The things that we learned in the class taught us how to be brave enough to face death." She added, "We talked about what we wanted to look like in our caskets." ABC's Tom Jarriel concluded the segment by asking if these courses "suggest death as an answer to adolescent problems." The 20/20 segment showed morbid visuals of student visits to cemeteries, embalming labs, and crematoriums, and told about picking some bones out of the ashes.

An investigative piece in Atlantic Monthly the same year confirmed that death and dying courses are given in "thousands of schools," often sneaked into health, social studies, literature or home-economics courses without parents' knowledge. The magazine described how these courses include requiring students to write their own obituaries, epitaphs, wills, or suicide notes, and to decide how they would prefer to die, have their body disposed of, and who they want for pallbearers.