How Does 16000 Hours of Behavior Modification Prepare Children For Participation In A Democratic Society?

Why do young people not vote despite having the eligibility to do so?

I think children deserve more than experiences extrapolated from behavior modification experiments designed by Ivan Pavlov, Edward Thorndike, John Watson and B.F. Skinner.

When the state exerts pressure on educators with evaluations that place a high value on how well children do on standardized tests, teachers will continue teaching to the test and place more pressure on children with classroom experience that mimic test events. 

One of my issues is when administrators believe high stakes testing is a benign process.

Does your administrator wield banal slogans like, "All children can learn," or "We will do what's best for children," while pushing a narrow curriculum driven by Pavlovian behaviorism in order to extract standardized test scores?

Curriculum is a mind altering instrument. You can reinforce and affect children's reactions to participate in high stakes tests with a narrow curriculum structured around radical behaviorism but you will have a difficult time affecting their capacity to think for themselves.

When explaining away low voter-participation rates in states like Indiana where there is opportunity for early voting, simply stating we make it harder for young people to participate in the electoral process doesn't fly. Young people are apathetic about participation in democracy. Why?

You can't prepare young citizens for participation in democratic society in which they are fundamentally outside the decision making processes central to learning experiences they are compelled to participate in. Traditional public education in the U.S. is primarily an exercise in authoritarianism driven by an instructional psychology oriented around radical behaviorism.

Let's be honest here. Parents should ask their school administrators what kind of instructional psychology is used most frequently within their school.

What conception of the human mind can your school administrator provide you with? Does your administrator wield banal slogans like, "All children can learn," or "We will do what's best for children," while pushing a narrow curriculum driven by radical behaviorism in order to extract data-driven standardized test scores from children? If that is the case, I question that administrator's ability to understand there is a difference between high stakes test training and learning experience that is democratic and consensual.