The Third Wave

Israeli Educational Television.

Producer: Fern Field

The Third Wave was the name given by history teacher Ron Jones to an experimental recreation of Nazi Germany which he conducted with high school students.

The experiment took place at Cubberley High School in Palo Alto, California, during one week in 1969[1]. Jones, unable to explain to his students why the German citizens (particularly non-Nazis) allowed the Nazi Party to exterminate millions of Jews and other so-called 'undesirables', decided to show them instead. Jones writes that he started with simple things like classroom discipline, and managed to meld his history class into a group with a supreme sense of purpose and no small amount of cliquishness. Jones named the movement "The Third Wave," after the common wisdom that the third in a series of ocean waves is always the strongest, and claimed its members would revolutionize the world. The experiment allegedly took on a life of its own, with students from all over the school joining in;

https://youtu.be/ICng-KRxXJ8

A Class Divided

FRONTLINE PBS

One of FRONTLINE's most requested programs -- third-grade teacher Jane Elliott's lesson in discrimination.

The day after Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed, Jane Elliott, a teacher in a small, all-white Iowa town, divided her third-grade class into blue-eyed and brown-eyed groups and gave them a daring lesson in discrimination. This is the story of that lesson, its lasting impact on the children, and its enduring power 30 years later.

https://youtu.be/1mcCLm_LwpE




#JaneElliott #ClassDivided #Documentary

A Class Divided

PBS FRONTLINE
18 Jan 2019

One of FRONTLINE's most requested programs -- third-grade teacher Jane Elliott's lesson in discrimination.

"The day after Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed, Jane Elliott, a teacher in a small, all-white Iowa town, divided her third-grade class into blue-eyed and brown-eyed groups and gave them a daring lesson in discrimination. This is the story of that lesson, its lasting impact on the children, and its enduring power 30 years later."

Abused? You Can’t Work at These Churches

Zack Zopplin

Daily Beast

April 15, 2016

 

Church job seekers are being asked if they were sexually abused as children based on the false belief that victims will become abusers. The worst part—this discrimination is legal.

If you want to work for the Twin Cities Bible Church, you will have to disclose whether you were raped as a child.

“Have you ever been physically or sexually abused as a child?” is one of the questions on the Urbana, Illinois, church’s job application. “If yes, when, where, and what were the circumstances?”

The questions are shocking, but not rare for Protestant churches and religious organizations across the United States. These groups want to know the personal histories of prospective employees in an attempt to protect themselves against liability for potential sex-abuse scandals based on the false belief that victims of sex abuse as children are destined to become abusers as adults.

Hundreds of churches, including The National Community Church (PDF) in Washington, D.C., the Shalom Mennonite Fellowship in Arizona, Nazarene Churches (PDF) in Ohio, and Church on the Rock (PDF) in Missouri all ask applicants some variation on: “Were you a victim of abuse or molestation while a minor?”

Even potential janitors at Trinity Preschool in Texas are asked this question (PDF).

The Faith Assembly of God in New York mentions that, “answering yes, or leaving the question unanswered, may not automatically disqualify an applicant for youth or children’s work.”

Ferris Hill Baptist Church of Florida says, “Individuals who have such a history [of sexual abuse as a minor] should discuss their desire to work with preschoolers, children or youth with one of the pastoral staff prior to engaging in any volunteer service” (PDF). Park Row Christian Academy, in Arlington, Texas, asks abuse victims if they are willing to use “church resources to seek healing in this area of your life?”

Some ministries don’t stop at past sexual abuse.

The Ark-La-Tx Crisis Pregnancy Center, an anti-abortion clinic in Bossier, Louisiana, also evaluates applicants on their “submission to authority,” and asks them, “When do you feel sexual intercourse is morally permissible?” (PDF)

Houston megachurch Lakewood asks volunteers: “Have you ever been involved in a cult or the occult (witchcraft, satanism, psychics, horoscopes, etc)?”

The National Black Home Educators organization recommends local chapters vet officers by asking them, “Have you indulged in any form of pornography in the past 2 years? If so, please explain.”

The Trail Life troop, a Christian leadership program for young men at Grace Covenant Church in North Carolina, asks employees: “Have you ever been convicted of, accused of or practiced homosexuality?” (PDF)

While the Catholic Church is known for its scandals (with 3,400 reported to the Vatican between 2004 and 2014), Protestant churches have been struggling with their own sins. The decentralized nature of Protestant churches helps keep individual scandals from going national, unless they involve outsized figures like Josh Duggar (the ex-reality TV star who admitted to molesting his siblings and neighbors) and evangelical minister Bill Gothard, who resigned from his ministry amid accusations he harassed or molested dozens of his followers.

Despite the lack of public attention paid to Protestant sex abuse, church insurance companies took notice.

“It is very significant to observe that a number of church insurance companies are reducing significantly the insurance coverage they provide for child abuse or molestation, and in some cases are excluding it entirely,” Richard Hammar, the senior editor of Christianity Today’s Church Law and Tax Review, wrote in Ministry Magazine, in January 1991.

Hammar put a question about childhood molestation in a sample employment application included in his book, Reducing the Risk of Child Sexual Abuse in Your Church.

“I included this question on the form because of a ruling by the Alaska Supreme Court in 1991 (just months before the kit was published) finding that a church was responsible for the molestation of a young child because it failed to ask the molester (a nursery worker) whether or not she had been molested as a child,” Hammar wrote in a blog post. (He did not respond to a request for comment.)

In Broderick v. King’s Way Assembly of God, justices found the church liable for sexual abuse by employee Shirley Gilman, who had been abused as a child.

“King’s Way did not interview Gilman or conduct a background check,” the court’s decision read. “Nor has it offered any evidence that Gilman’s past sexual abuse did not affect her competency,” meaning that the court believed Gilman’s abuse could have caused her to abuse children. To support that opinion, the court also quoted a 1989 study on sexual abuse, saying, “being sexually victimized as a child is a common experience for adult sex offenders.”

By 1998, Hammar’s questionnaire was included in sample volunteer application forms (PDF) made by Lifeway Christian Stores, a major Baptist bookstore chain. That year, Lifeway’s representative for its Bible studies division told the Baptist Press: “All people who have been abused do not become child abusers, but almost all child abusers have been abused themselves.”

This is not true, though. As a 2001 study in the British Journal of Psychiatry found, “The data supports the notion of a victim-to-victimiser cycle in a minority of male perpetrators, but not among the female victims studied.”

And according to the author of the 1989 study cited by the Alaska Supreme Court, justices and churches are misusing her work.

“That is a very old paper and based upon a clinical sample that came to our program at the University of Michigan and all were intrafamilial sexual-abuse cases,” Professor Kathleen Faller told The Daily Beast. “Therefore, the sample is not relevant to clergy cases.

“Moreover, since most offenders are men and most victims are women, the hypothesis that a major contributing factor to sex offending is a history of sexual abuse does not make sense.”

Again, the sex abuse questions are liability, not science. Anna Bryant, a public affairs officer with State Farm Insurance, told The Daily Beast she could find nothing in their policies that would recommend churches to ask about past sexual abuse. (Bryant also said church insurance is “not a big line of business for us.”)

Insurance agencies that specialize in covering churches were less cooperative. One company, Church Mutual, refused to comment, calling its recommendations “proprietary.” Several other companies, including GuideOne, GuideStone, and Brotherhood Mutual. would not comment. Still, these companies produce publicly available materials on preventing sexual abuse and nothing in these materials suggest that churches should ask whether people had been abused as children.

The sex-abuse questions are likely legal because churches are not totally bound by non-discrimination laws.

“Under the ministerial exemption, religious institutions are allowed to violate employment-discrimination law when hiring and firing their ministers,” said Greg Lipper, a lawyer for Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “Not everyone who works for a church is a minister, but the exception applies to employees with significant religious responsibilities, including clergy and religious-school teachers.” So asking the janitor about their past abuse might be prohibited, but asking the Sunday School teacher is fair game.

Legal or not, it’s wrong to force abuse victims to relive the trauma in job interviews.

Boz Tchividjian, founder of the Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment (GRACE), an organization dedicated educating churches on preventing sexual abuse and investigating allegations of abuse in churches, said it opposes churches asking these “illogical and “triggering” questions.

“Such information has no bearing on whether the person is a danger to children,” he said. “All it does is shame and stigmatize the applicants who are survivors.”

David Clohessy, the president of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, called the question “offensive,” lacking scientific evidence, and a violation of privacy.

“Survivors should be able to decide when, if, and to whom they will share this information,” he said.

The questions aren’t just wrong, they’re simply dumb.

“If a predator is looking for a way to get to kids, he would very likely lie and say he never abused,” Clohessy said. “So all it would really do is screen out people, who through no fault of their own, are victims of horrific crimes.”

Secular child-care providers are not asking their employees if they were sexually abused. There’s a better way to prevent sexual abuse than digging to find out if someone was abused.

In a speech to the Calvary Chapel of Philadelphia, Tchividjian outlined some best practices for churches, including educating parents, working with law enforcement to design policies, getting professional help for people attracted to children rather than “just reading scripture,” and also doing extra digging into public records and old newspaper articles for information on applicants that a background check may have missed.

Tchividjian also suggested educating kids on sex to help them become more comfortable reporting abuse.

“If the sum total of your communication to your kids, or your congregation, about sex is just don’t do it, you’re not doing a good job.”

Churches must recognize that “sexual abuse is prevalent in all facets of society, including their own,” Tchividjian said, recommending that churches embrace a change in culture to seek to protect the abused and seek justice against the abuser.

“If what’s driving you to develop and implement a child protection policy to protect the kids in your own church is to limit your own liability, you’re going down the wrong road,” Tchividjian said.


http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/04/15/churches-ask-job-seekers-were-you-sexually-abused-as-a-child.html

A Class Dividend

The day after Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed, a teacher in a small town in Iowa tried a daring classroom experiment. She decided to treat children with blue eyes as superior to children with brown eyes. FRONTLINE explores what those children learned about discrimination and how it still affects them today.


http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/class-divided/

Cults, Cliques and Common Sense

September 17, 2015

Fr. Dwight Longenecker

Patheos

One of the creepiest things about religion is the tendency for those involved to drift into cult-like behaviors.

That doesn’t mean the devotees are all following the leader like zombie Moonies. Religious groups can drift into cult like behaviors without becoming full blown cults.

How can you tell if a religious group is operating like a cult? It’s difficult because the people in a religious group can behave like a cult without them becoming a full blown, identifiable religious cult.

What groups am I thinking of? It could be a small local group or a large international group. It could be a parish or a school. It could be a study group or an ecclesial community. The difficulty is that cult like behavior is often very similar to authentic and Spirit filled Christian communities. A cult will often look like a good, authentic and dynamic Christian community. In fact, the cult will often out do the authentic Christian community in certain respects. Sometimes the cult will feel more authentic, more dynamic, more spiritual and more “filled with the Spirit.”

How can you tell if a parish, a school, a community or a religious group are becoming cult like? Again, it is very difficult because some groups that have cult-like behaviors remain at a low level of these behaviors.

So what are the danger signs? First of all, if a religious community or a religious leader seem too good to be true–guess what? They’re usually too good to be true. That’s because group cult behavior conspires to cover up and hide away anything that tarnishes the glossy image of that “wonderful community” that all the members want so much to believe in. This is the first sign of a cult: everything is too wonderful and everyone is ready to tell you how wonderful it all it. The cult will invariably have an amazingly good public relations operation. They will present a good and glossy front with 100% participation of all involved. This being the case, if your priest is a man who’s faults are obvious. Maybe you should be grateful. He’s real. He’s not trying to con you.

The second thing to watch out for is the leadership. There will be a clique. The leadership of a cult will invariably be selective and exclusive. There will be a public face of the leadership, and that person will unfailingly present the nice, glossy and polished face of the organization. The public face will be squeaky clean and wonderful. If it is a personality based cult there may be no other leadership. However, if there is a board of directors or trustees, they will remain in the background. You may not know who they are. Their meetings will not be public. They may even have a vow of secrecy about their meetings. They will call this something nice like “a confidentiality agreement.” This means they cannot discuss what goes on behind those closed doors. There may not be a formal leadership group at all. Instead the leader may simply have an inside circle of friends and confidantes who nobody really knows because they never have any meetings as such. The decisions are all taken in private. The leadership will be tightly controlled and it will be by invitation only. If you encounter non-transparent leadership in this way. Don’t be surprised and be suspicious.

A third trait of a cult is that complete loyalty is demanded of the followers.

Dissent and criticism is not permitted. Those who dissent will be marginalized, excluded from decision making and demonized. If the leaders cannot get rid of the dissenters they will be isolated and given a name. They will be “the troublemakers” or “the grumblers”. The dissenters from within will be considered the most dangerous ones and you will find that there are divisions–those who are loyal followers and those who are suspected of being “disloyal” or “rebellious”. The disloyal and rebellious ones will be deemed “unspiritual” or “difficult”. In extreme cases the dissenters will become scapegoats and all the negativities of the group will be projected on to them.

A fourth characteristic of a group that has become a cult or is behaving in a cult like manner is that there will be a persecution complex. A group of outside forces will be identified who are “the enemy”. A little fortress will be built in which all those on the inside are the “faithful ones” while all those on the outside will increasingly be demonized and feared. There will be no real effort to build bridges or get to know those on the outside. There will be no real effort to treat the outsiders as real people. Instead they are the enemy to be kept at arms’ length and against whom the faithful will usually project their fears and suspicions. At worst the enemy will have all the sins and fears and dark negativities projected on them.

The problem is that when a group is becoming cult like it does so innocently. Nobody sets out to establish a cult. Instead, unconsciously certain individuals start to behave in this manner and they support one another. The leadership starts to create an unrealistically wonderful religious atmosphere and those who want and need that sort of religious group will support it and feed the flames. The faithful will set the leader up on a pedestal and declare him to be wonderful and the leader (who needs and likes the adulation) will encourage their hero worship. Those who object or suspect what is happening will be automatically excluded or marginalized by those who wish to perpetuate the super wonderful world they are setting up for themselves.

It all stinks to high heaven, and I know how it works because in over fifty years of working in a range of religious groups I have seen these behaviors develop within parishes, within home prayer and praise groups, within schools, in colleges and in independent churches.

What’s the antidote? One of the antidotes is actually the Catholic parish system. If we all went to our local parish and put up with the priest we didn’t happen to like and the people who were just there because, like us, they lived there–we would be more realistic and we wouldn’t fall into personality cult problems.

Another antidote is common sense. Common sense pops pomposity’s balloon and brings things down to earth. A third antidote is open-ness to criticism and dissent. A real servant leader and a truly service based group will value all members and be strong enough to listen to dissenting voices. They will treat criticism as positive feedback and be open not only to dissent but to outsiders. A fourth antidote is confession. Cult members and cult leaders never admit their mistakes and will never be able to make a true, honest and open confession or apology. If your leader or community members cannot say “sorry” you’ve got problems.

Finally, real religion is just that. It’s real. It’s humble. Remember the word “humility” comes from the word “humus” which means “earth”. Real religion is down to earth. It’s humble and oh yes, “Humus” is also the root for “humor”. Real religion always knows how to have a laugh. If a group or a person can’t laugh at themselves–be suspicious. If they take themselves or their movement or their spirituality with utmost seriousness–beware.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/standingonmyhead/2015/09/cults-cliques-and-common-sense.html

Court questions discriminatory practice in Arab and Druze schools

Patrick Ryan

March 14, 2014
Haaretz.com

Education Ministry rules forbid dismissal of teachers during school year, but not for Arabs and Druze.

By Yarden Skop and Eli Ashkenazi

Education Ministry regulations allowing Arab or Druze teachers to be fired in the middle of the school year have been criticized by the Haifa Labor Court as “raising serious questions, to say the least.”

The court was hearing a suit brought by Rawda Shakour, a Druze teacher who was dismissed during the school year, and the Teachers Union.

Shakour had worked for four years as a teacher for children with special needs at a school in the Kisra-Samia regional council. She argued that her dismissal was the result of a discriminatory practice used only in the Arab and Druze sectors, which allows teachers to be fired during the first month of the school year, based on “placement errors."