I've seen that 'Common Ground' magazine and it is New Age fluff much like other media designed to cheer up bright cultural creatives so they don't become the Weather Underground.
Dreams End, if you are reading, I've recently met people ensnared in some of that Stanford Research Institute stuff you wrote about on your blog. Nice tye-dye peaceniks being led right into DARPA memetic engineering cults.
From Jeff's linked article about "views of the Universe" which is too lacking in context but has this key point. Substitute "government" for "universe" and you get the rationale for counterproganda to mitigate the effect of 'hostile information'-
The choice to believe in a friendly or unfriendly universe undoubtedly begins in our early years. It may well be that people who are preternaturally content, seemingly at peace with themselves and the world, were introduced to “a friendly universe” through proper nurturing as infants. Their early experiences became the foundation for their psychic life.
Preventing 'the sixties' from happening again requires conditioning youth to believe the government is good and 'worth dying for.'
During the Cold War studies were (and still are) made on how children form their attitudes.
The USG knows this and applies media stimuli to grow the 'citizens' they want.
Disney does this and other assets do, too.
Here's a 1967 published example using studies from the 1950s- 1960s:
'The Development of Political Attitudes in Children by Robert D. Hess, Judith V. Torney'
This 1973 Vietnam War era statement by some concerned educators summarizes research findings on children's perceptions which are well known at CIA which co-opted all the behavioral sciences during the Cold War.
I'm pasting in a huge chunk of it because it is worth it-
http://www.acei.org/childwar.htm
ACEI POSITION PAPER
Children and War
BY THE ASSOCIATION FOR CHILDHOOD EDUCATION INTERNATIONAL, 1973
>>begin excerpt<<
.....
What Does Research Tell Us?
For more than thirty years investigators have been finding that children have more current information about war than adults assume, and that wide individual differences exist both in interest exhibited and information possessed (see, for example, Bronte and Musgrove, 1943; Geddie and Hildreth, 1944).
Although this paper will not attempt a full comprehensive survey of research and literature related to children and war, references to a few studies may stimulate further search for pertinent materials by interested parents, teachers and students.
In a now classic study, War and Children (1943), Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingame sought to assess the impact of the Second World War, especially the bombing, on English children. They discussed such disorders as enuresis and juvenile delinquency resulting from wartime stress, One major finding was that separation from parents during evacuation appeared to produce more disturbing effects than the sight of military destruction.
It would seem that children’s consciousness of war varies with world events; they are well aware that people die not only by violent means but as well by accident, illness or old age (see 1951 study by Rautman and Brower of war themes in the stories of elementary school children, comparing essays written during World War II and the Korean War).
In the early sixties, with the increasing threat of nuclear war, a cluster of studies raised questions about the relationship of childhood socialization to adult political beliefs.
Peter Cooper (1965), working with approximately 300 English and 100 Japanese children, aged seven through sixteen, sought to study the children’s stages of thought about war and peace from a framework similar to that of Piaget’s developmental levels. Cooper used open-ended questionnaires and interviews. His findings suggested what he called Schema of Conflict—leading him to hypothesize a transition in the children from early ego-centered assumptions that were essentially optimistic about possibilities of peaceful coexistence to a point where “with developing cognitive skills, usually at the teenage level, a war is related to conceptions of human psychology based upon hostile instinctual drives” (quoted in Torney and Morris, 1972, p. 12). But although Cooper concluded that with age the English children increased their acceptance of and justification for war, they did not appear to modify their much less tangible concepts of peace.
Trond Alvik (1968) shared Cooper’s views that preadolescence (ages eleven to thirteen) is a critically important time in the development of attitudes about war. In Alvik’s own study of Norwegian children he also found, as did investigators in Sweden and West Germany, that children tend to have fewer ideas about peace as an active process than they do about war. He stressed again the strong force of television as a source of information about concrete aspects of war.
In 1961 M. Schwebel undertook a major study of adolescents in junior and senior high schools to determine how they felt about the possibility of war and how they viewed the various measures such as fall-out shelters, designed to protect them in case war erupted. A year later, the same questions were asked during the first week of the Cuban crisis of a new group of 300 secondary-school young people. Surprisingly enough, the students were considerably more optimistic about the prospects for peace than their counterparts had been the year before. The later study also showed increased opposition to shelters. These studies, puzzling as some of the findings are, demonstrated convincingly that these children knew and cared deeply about the consequences of nuclear war. Yet most did not clearly visualize the possibility of their own death. Some of the replies showed resignation or helplessness or efforts to deny fear. The children stressed danger shelters could not cope with. Their great optimism about peace may have come with more open discussion about the issues during the Cuban crisis and awareness of peace-keeping machinery at work.
On the other hand, the reports of Sibylle K. Escalona (1965, 1971), enriched by her exceptional understandings of children’s psycho-social development, indicate less encouraging results. With a group of colleagues, she conducted a questionnaire-study in the early sixties, where in children (from the age of four up to adolescence) were asked what they thought the world would be like by the time they grew up; no mention of war or weapons was made by the researchers. Of the total sample, more than 70 percent spontaneously mentioned nuclear weapons and destructive war as a likely possibility. A relatively large proportion (including even first-, second- and third-graders) expressed pessimism about the future; many spoke of a 50-50 chance of survival. Either “the bomb” would drop, bringing devastating war and death – or a wonderful new world of technology would result. Only a small group expressed hope that their dreams for a positive future might materialize.
More significant than the indication of anxiety was the impoverishing, weakening effect on ego- development in the crucial middle childhood years resulting form viewing the adults in their world as passive, hopeless, powerless victims who were unable to supply needed supports and models of impulse-control.
Other significant studies of children’s attitudes toward political authority have been made by Robert Hess (1963, 1967) and Judith Torney (1967) and by Fred Greenstein (1969). Hess found the most important source of children’s conceptions of authority to be the civic instruction that goes on in ways incidental to normal activities in the family, whereby children overhear parental conversations and either sense or are informally told of parents’ stance toward political authority and public questions.
L. S. Wrightman (1964) investigated by questionnaire the fears of seventy-two seventh- and eighth-grade boys about the chances of war. Later their answers were related to the responses of their parents to similar questions as well as to the boys’ own responses to a variety of measures indicating maladjustment in adolescents. The extent of those children’s fears about the possibility of war was found to be related to how much their parents talked about war, whether parents themselves expected war int he next ten years, and how much these adults worried about its occurring. The fears were not related to the boys’ own aggressiveness, however, or to self-ideal discrepancy or negative views of human nature.
Over a ten-year period W. E. Lambert and Otto Klineberg (1967) interviewed six-, ten-, and fourteen-year-olds from ten different countries concerning the children’s views of foreign peoples.
The researchers found that early experiences tend to establish basic predispositions toward one’s own group and foreign peoples, which continue to manifest themselves through out life. Their results demonstrated clearly that the conceptions people develop of their own national group in relation to these may well have long-term consequences. A stereotyping process appears to start very early in the child’s own group and gradually comes to mark certain foreign groups as outstanding examples of people who are different. Children’s attitudes toward foreign peoples were found to vary from one national setting to another, depending upon the techniques used by educators to differentiate their own group from another. Clearly, significant adults in the child’s environment transfer their own emotionally toned views of other peoples to the child at an early age.
In another important cross-national study of childrearing practices, Urie Bronfenbrenner (1970) found current American society segregated by age, race and class.
His findings again stressed that television and the child’s peer group acted as prime socializing agencies, with the family becoming less and less prominent to acculturation. To offset the negative consequences of this shift in childrearing responsibilities, Bronfenbrenner suggests several changes from the classroom and the school as well as for the family, the neighborhood and the larger community. He emphasized the significance of modeling, social reinforcement and group processes through which adults involve themselves more deeply in the lives of children. Whether or not we find his solutions too simplistic, he does challenge teachers to see themselves as guides and citizens with important and sustaining responsibility for children.
>>end excerpt<<