Category: #Pathogenic Parenting

Poisonous pedagogy

Poisonous pedagogy is mind control applied to toddlers and infants in the form of coercive “education”.

In 1977 Katharina Rutschky collected 600 pages of documents on child raring from 3 centuries. ^[12] The techniques and beliefs characteristic for poisonous pedagogy were later “rediscovered” to be effective for changing beliefs in adults when Lifton (Brainwashing in China) investigated brainwashing in POWs in Korea and Chinese thought reform.

The authors recommend traumatizing toddlers, because it is effective in breaking down resistance and mental functions and because “educators” need not fear revenge. Adults won’t remember what happened to them at an early age, they argue. ^{[13] [14]}

Making children watch beheadings, secessions, “teaching” them fear of death and illnesses, guilt and shame trips, harsh punishment, withholding love, rewards and affection, forced confessions and humiliations “can lead to a new world in 20 years” (J.B. Schupp, 1667, in^[12])

Teaching submission and breaking the will of a child in the first year of life has been universally recommended in these documents. It was widely believed that children are born with “bad” traits like willfulness, wickedness, egotism, impurity, immorality, “sinfulness”, precociousness, smugness and a host of other projections. ^[12] These traits must be “driven out” by education and force, otherwise these traits will “torment their parents”. Own thinking or judgment is discouraged or even denied.^[12]

A child was seen as starting out at a savage level, uncivilized, and must be shaped, tamed and molded to “fit in” or to develop superior qualities of civilization. In reality the rigorous training served the narcissistic needs of parents and preserved power structures in religion and society. ^[11]

The procedures proposed by pedagogy to remove “weak” traits and train “strength” (which is a way of rationalizing torture and projective identification) were often sadistic and included

• making the toddler wait for food, or starving while seeing others eat
• corporal punishment
• social isolation
• withdrawal of primary attachment figure
• inflicting fear by telling scaring stories
• threats and assaults
• humiliation and degradation generally accepted as “good” methods
• cheating and lying

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