The TriA Book, Adult Arrested Adolescence

By W.D. Edmiston

Are you concerned about your child's education?
This book will send a shiver up your spine.

 

Many parents have awakened to the deficiencies of government-run schools, realizing that massive bureaucracies and powerful teachers unions rarely act in the best interests of children.

• In some states, one in four children cannot read this
• sentence.
• Home schooled children's final grades are 87-89% Public Schools 50%
• 60% of high schoolers nationally read below the proficiency level.
• The national 12th grade GPA is 3.1 female, 2.9 male. But perhaps that is the goal?
• Many parents have awakened to the deficiencies of government-run schools, realizing that massive bureaucracies and powerful teachers unions rarely act in the best interests of children.

The future belongs to the A student.

 

Read The TriA Book, you need to know the history of schooling so you can respond to tomorrow's challenges.

• Language: English
• Publisher: W.D. Edmiston
• Release date: Dec 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215187715

Book preview

The TriA Book, Adult Arrested Adolescence

How Bad Policy Fudges Your Child’s Education

W.D. Edmiston

Copyright 2022 by W.D. Edmiston

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means and includes photocopying, recording, or other electronic, mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author. Reviewers, blogs, and podcasts may use quotations for critical review and other non-commercial uses. For other permission requests, write to:

W.D. Edmiston, POB 436, Whitehouse, Texas 75791.

D2D # 983171

Publisher: OGSB Authors, Tyler, TX

Table of Contents

The TriA Book, Adult Arrested Adolescence

Foreword

Chapter One

The History of Why Our Schools Do Not Educate

Chapter Two

What, who, why and how

Taking Advantage of Adolescence

Chapter Three

Real Adolescence Vs. Adult Arrested Adolescence

Chapter Four

Adolescent Characteristics

Magical Thinking

Chapter Five

About Movements

Chapter Six

Schooling Is In, Education is out

A New America

Chapter Seven

Culture

Section Three

School Days

Chapter Eight

American Schools

Section Four

Here to Help you

Chapter Nine

Education From the War for

Independence to the 1800s

Chapter Ten

The Civil War and Reconstruction Jumble

Stranger in a Strange Land

Chapter Eleven

Before the Corporations

Chapter Twelve

The Industrial Revolution

Chapter Thirteen Educators using Nineteenth Century Methods

Chapter Fourteen

The Other Democracies

Section Five

Behavioral Influence

Chapter Fifteen

An Introduction to Behavioral Influence

Chapter Sixteen

Brain Studies

Emotional Reactions

Chapter Seventeen

Then Gatto

Chapter Eighteen

Political Philosophy

Chapter Nineteen

Royalty Undone

Chapter Twenty-One

Summation—Home and Online

~The End~

Dedication

To the Men and Women of Law Enforcement, anywhere, everywhere, who even though they may not know it by that name, deal with Arrested Adult Adolescence every day.

––––––––

And to

My darling wife, Barbara

I would like to add my appreciation for the vision, support and mentorship of Roger L. Middleton who is responsible too for the professional look of this book.

Special Thank you to Lydia Holley, critique group member, willing to provide great insight during final drafts.

To Jodi Milner, Author, whose skill in crafting the cover art and other inscrutable minutiae of publishing saved my sanity.

Thank you, WDE

Foreword

Ihope these things will be takeaways from The TriA Book.

To understand that American schools do not teach well because of complex historical traditions and recent changes in real education that include behavioral and social influences.

To encourage you to read about, and search for ways you can improve the outcome of the adolescent phase of our child.

To understand that school is unkind, and intentionally designed to prolong your child’s adolescence rather than encourage maturity. The worst of them seem to alter how their brains work.

You can do something about it. You know the basics, hopefully the book will encourage you to take action.

The TriA Book, while not its major focus, should help you decide if Home School is the right way to go. Keep in mind, however, some of the same damaging things taught in home schools and online academies are the same social education, and even more leftist progressive than what you see in local schools. Choose wisely.

~WDE~

Chapter One

The History of Why Our Schools Do Not Educate

Can you imagine the excitement of taking a new job, working with tiny tools, on a lifesaving project in a world torn by war? It is World War One (WWI), ironically named, the War to End all Wars , but patriotism in your new country is running high. Our men are fighting under horrible conditions, and you are doing a job that will make them safer.

Many truisms came from the war based on superstition. Black cats painted on airplanes were good luck for pilots. Navy men refused to wash their personal coffee cups, a device against dying at sea. The truism you will focus on is, three men on a match. Your work will save lives in the dark and muddy trenches.

In those trenches, any light will send bullets flying into the middle of the glow. The match’s light of three cigarettes pierces the dampness of trench nights. It gives the enemy time to see, aim, and fire. However, all orders include the time set for an attack. It is very dangerous to turn on a light. You go to work each day, enthused to help the war effort.

Scientists discovered something new every day. And by filling the lines and numbers of military watches with radium the digits glowed in the dark.[1] That is your new job. Authorities made it a policy, and by the end of the war, the military branches were ordering four million watches a year. Radium, however, is a radioactive metallic element that effects cellular growth. During WWI it was new, and people played with it, not knowing it was deadly.

The TriA, or Adult Arrested Adolescent, exists because of comparable school policies employing both traditional and antiquated processes along with new and faddish techniques incompletely tested for cause and effect.

Four thousand, mostly young, immigrant women used small artist’s brushes to paint watch, clock numbers, and instrument cluster faces with a paint containing radium.[2]Their military supervisors knew radium was dangerous but told them to moisten the tip of their brushes with their lips and tongues to put a sharp tip on their brushes. Soon afterward, workers died of throat and stomach cancer. Lawsuits and public sentiment eventually caused the company to devise safety procedures, and radium is no longer used to make clock faces shine.

If you want the full story, read The Radium Girls, The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women. Author–Kate Moore.

Arrested Adolescence is the diagnosis of an adult who still uses the simple, yet highly emotional, thinking of adolescence, resulting in slow personality development. The TriA or Adult Arrested[3]Adolescent is a person who remains in a thinking pattern characterized by adolescence because of behavioral conditioning[4]accidentally or intentionally. It happens because our schools teach political correctness, a re-framed view of history, socialization and class ranking as a directive of school unions. The schools use procedures that are forms of behavioral science, they call secret. Those sciences are useful in advertising, politics, and mass marketing, and the public is scarcely aware of their power. You can guess its power, by the panic with which science and media protest it is not dangerous.[5]Their targets are your children, and if you went to school in the last several decades, you may remember them from your school years.

We often trust scientists, news media and government appointees, like those in WWI who kept the secret that radium was dangerous. It is a tragic story of unintended consequences. It is also plain when examined closely that the TriA phenomena is intentional, and a manipulation of schools which dates back to the mid-1800s. The TriA characteristics come from their policies and similar racist and class fear worry  of that earlier time.

Arrogance using a centralist viewpoint, that the common good was more important than human beings. It shows how authority corrupts good people. The Intellectuals believe what is, is not good enough, and their better educated brains know what ought to work better. A simple paint brush can become as deadly as machine guns.

Few people today know of the 90% literacy rate achieved in the American colonies when only local schools taught children in their communities and  church buildings. It was so well done; the founders did not include education in the Constitution. It took care of itself.

Then an elitist politician named Horace Mann, sought to make his reputation by getting appointed to a state education post, and then created a movement to remove all spirituality and religious inclusion in schools he called normal or common. They all featured centralized planning. Critics pointed out he had little training in teaching. As a result, the first formal schools with centralized planning emphasized obedience and control over learning outcomes. Worse still those schools did not teach the simple Constitutional beliefs in freedom, life, liberty, and happiness as they should; even though Mann claimed that as the goal. Those models matched German views, and not the unique promise of America’s freedoms.

People with a divine mission need little justification to ignore the lower classes. Today’s scientists serve both rich corporations and the power madness of leftist progressives, who want more than anything to win. The word progressive was once meant the good things about America. Socialists now hide behind the older definition. America is wrong and they know how it ought to be, everyone will agree when they win.

Today’s Radium

We know from many news sources that school policies created by teachers’ unions operate our schools. The first problem with those policies is that union states cannot fire teachers who cannot teach. Schools cannot teach well, because of bad teachers protected by collective bargaining. Teacher pay is based on seniority, not whether their students are learning. Studies have shown if schools raised the quality of teaching even a few points, the difference between low income and upper income kids could be closed.

The typical teacher is both hardworking and effective. But if we could replace the bottom 5–10 percent of teachers with an average teacher—not a superstar—we could dramatically improve student achievement. The U.S. could move from below average in international comparisons to near the top. These educational effects, in turn, would generate astounding improvements in the wellbeing of U.S. citizens. The present value of future increments to GDP in the U.S. would amount to $102 trillion.[6]

We are also trusting school policies, including the secret and dangerous methods of behavioral influence, operant conditioning and direct influence. Parents and students do not know they exist. There is no proof they are safe, but they help produce the Adult Arrested Adolescent, TriA. Schools use tools from science to measure the progress of student groups. The test preparation questions even teach fringe beliefs of social justice issues like abortion, sex assignment, and keeping each class of students younger and dumber longer.

Douglas K. Blair, writing for the Heritage Foundation, explains what happens when agendized teachers enforce woke policy. Leftists use schools as a weapon system, not to teach, but to indoctrinate them with anti-American thought.

In his article, he said other teachers at his school criticized his use of patriotic themes as bad, and Biblical stories like the Tower of Babel as attempting to convert students to Christianity. Similar Chinese stories and tales from India were good. Using Churchill as an example of a famous Briton was wrong in their wrongthink world, but wearing BLM pins was okay because it supported human rights. Churchill saved England from the Nazi evil BLM burns down businesses. Blair explains:

First is the propaganda. Teachers will assign work instilling the idea that the pillars of Western civilization were evil, and their memories deserve to be thrown in the trash... But it isn’t just a matter of actively teaching that America and the West are evil. Suppression of wrongthink is equally as important to the brainwashing process. The lessons I was allowed to teach were censored... [by other teachers and administrators]

The young adults who today gleefully tear down statues of the Founding Fathers were incubated in our very own schools, groomed to burst from the education system and burn America down... The left argues the great men and women who built the nation are problematic and must be destroyed. Conservatives must demand an end to the indoctrination of our youth or face a new American public taught since childhood that the country shouldn’t exist.[7]

The teachers use wrongthink but cannot guarantee it will not harm children’s brain development or their lives. They are effectively winging it. Should we use our children’s education to experiment in ideological war? The question becomes more important when we know behavioral influence is a subtle but effective way of influencing your child without your input or knowledge. Students become dumbed down in the areas of classical education yet indoctrinated with mythical events that never happened in America.

The brain shaping ideas could easily become a perfect storm in which the behavioral techniques further retard brain development beyond what we can see in the TriA. In a later chapter, you will read of children who have just heard specific words like gray, bald, and Florida that will influence teens to walk slower, and model behavior of retirees. That shows the power of words on behavior.

Behavioral influencers are not shy about using your children as experimental subjects without your knowledge. The progressives have used marketing and corporate methods to change how Americans think. They are like those people using radium—willing to have acceptable losses. Powerful people, people given authority, have always tried to expand that power. They do not care what happens to the least powerful or the poor. Children of the poor never rank high with them.

Their goals are to change American policy on everything from medicine to high school restroom breaks. The policies shape the TriA and change the character of America. That means by co-opting the TriA, they are co-opting the public policy discussion, or the dialectic—the national conversation. It is hard to understand why progressives chose socialism or Marxism, when those policies in economics and justice fail disastrously.

The dialectic is the culture-wide argument and shared discussions we have on religion, morality, politics, government, education, and even the arts. The dialectic is our national conversation, which creates the national mood. Talking to neighbors at our churches, social media and over the back fence is more than gossip. It mirrors the national will. The best way to understand Americans is to learn from the national mood–again, the dialectic, which represents tens of thousands. There are probably less than a few thousand entrenched, radical leftist progressives, controlling media, politics, and mood–who push the unaware TriA toward a tyrannical government. Liberals, the real progress minded, and the apolitical vote for progressive policies because they think it is popular to ride their coattails.

Americans watching the radical street theater, movements, and demonstrations of leftist progressives are concerned. Resorting to riots criminalizes policy making. Even our law enforcement leadership is engaging in criminal acts without consequence, e.g., snooping on candidates and the President, while groups of leftist politicians make excuses for them. Most of the public may not yet understand the TriA. But they do sense something is wrong. One reason is they never had a good name for it. The TriA mind that seized on defund the police does not know the real goal is to create a national police agency, eliminating the elected Sheriffs and local control. We can judge nothing the leftist does at face value.

What Being TriA Does to Your Child

The TriA persons taught using behavioral science techniques do not notice the obvious contradictions in their mythology. They claim children must have social exposure. Parents assume that means making friends. Behavioral social influences are not that at all; and social messages reduce the quality of basic education.

In modern times, we do not teach the Constitutional values of life, liberty, and happiness. It has always been about obedience and control. Teachers and school administrators have not changed them. Unions, government, and the big-thinkers behind the ivory walls of prestigious institutions create them as diversions from education. You see TriA people in their first jobs, unsure of what to do, difficult to train, and annoyed with work. Many TriA children cannot complete a job application, or just refuse to work, as if it were beneath their dignity.

Approximately 40 percent of us think like adolescents, and I was on that track while in college. Then I read Eric Hoffer’s book, The True Believer, thoughts on the nature of mass movements. That allowed me to understand how manipulated we are by movements and fads.

Learning about the true believer, I saw they not only see themselves as damaged, but they were noticeably childish, or adolescent. Looking closer, you can see your schools are concentrating on everything but basic education, Later events changed the label of true believer, to kool-aid drinker, a reference to the death of several hundred followers of the late Jim Jones.[8]Either description also overlaps with the many fears and much hand wringing of adolescence. It shows why and how persons who feel damaged, or need validation of their worth, join a movement.

The term TriA, for Adult Arrested Adolescent, came later. The three words are unwieldy in conversation, so TriA became the better term. In science, if we give an ailment a name, we can develop research, tools, and cures for that ailment. Therefore: Arrested Adult Adolescence, TriA, allows discussion of this matter.

Hoffer said nothing about the TriA person. Many years of my research following his line of thinking about the true believer led me to coin the term TriA, whose qualities cut across all the Generation X, Millennial, and other media named groups.

You know people who want to be perpetual children, free to be self-expressive. Artistic and theatrical people often claim they do not plan to grow up. This book is not about them. TriA people are not acting immature as a way of free expression; they do not understand being immature. You know them; they behave immaturely. Not the cutups, but those who are self-centered, humorless, and they know better than the boss. Ask yourself if there is something more serious going on when grown people cannot understand simple sentences or complex issues? Were you amused when people went to psychiatrists because their candidate lost the election in 2016; or by those college kids who needed safe spaces?

The Church

Even the head of the Catholic Church recognized adolescence at work in adults. In his daily homily, Pope Francis discussed culture and said many people are prone to what Vatican Radio later called adolescent progressivism. In the Popes speech, he said secular society wants change for the sake of change, saying: we are progressives; lets follow progress like everyone else does. The Pope noted the spirit of adolescent progressivism [in which] any move forward and any choice is better than remaining within the routine of fidelity [faithfulness]. Life just began for our children. Everything is new; they are new.  But each step they take in society is figuratively on the shoulders of a patriot, a soldier, a great teacher, or citizens who lived well. Because of their newness they forget many people worked hard to make society here, in the United States what it is today.

Socialism, progressivism, woke, Environmental, Social and Government (ESG) investing and racial equality are economic or sociological ideologies, with positive and negative parts. Just to say progressive no longer defines one philosophy. Even the definition of progressive is contradictory, with as many as forty-three definitions.[9]

None of them are perfect and neither is capitalism.

Liberalism and Conservatism are not opposites.

Theoretical liberalism rejects authority, power politics and believes mutual benefit will always work better. The liberal viewpoint says humans are perfectible if not born perfect. Evidently, they never experienced a two-year-old.

The opposite of theoretical liberalism is not conservativism, although many use it as a slang meaning (antonym). The real opposite of liberal is fascism—suppressing individuality and debate. It does not seek mutual benefit and is authoritarian up to the point of a gun and police authority. It wants a strongly regulated society. Fascist states have a dictator, often with a more grandiose title like the forty-four-word monstrosity of Idi Amin.[10]The horrors of the Spanish Inquisition and Salem Witch Trials were in effect fascist, even though based on a sort of biblical ideology.

True Conservatives will leave you alone and prefer proven methods. Biblically, it is where somebody gets rest for their souls[11] a meaning we see in the word liberty in the Constitution. Conservatism is based on a loving individuality and faithfulness to family and friends. Conservatives live in the present, and understands wisdom comes from history. But when necessary to ensure justice, even the conservative knows that force against enemies is necessary. But it is not the first choice. The conservative prefers to be left alone.

Conservative philosophies have improved society. But believers in leftist progressivism never use those conservative truths. Their model involves an anxious passion to win, just win.

Today’s leftist progressive is also comfortable deceiving you into trusting they still value progressive concepts of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries centered on American excellence and independent people, of sharp vision. We have believed our schools taught those things since that time.