I was browsing my archives tonight and found an essay written in high school by the young lady mentioned here in her younger, saner days.  In fact, this was how we initially made contact since the content of my article here at Rebirth of Reason, originally posted on my personal site, caught her eye and resonated with her own experience.  She was kind enough to contact me and thank me for it, and later shared the following independently written examination she wrote of a similar program she attended in her state.  I am posting it here for discussion.  It was actually quite good.  I still feel sad that her life took darker turns in adulthood.

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The Program in Sheep’s Clothing

In the classic tale of the Gingerbread Man, a clever, animate cookie outwits and evades many characters who try to eat him. Only when he meets a creature who poses as his friend does he lose his caution and get eaten. Governor’s Honors Academies (GHAs), summer camps designed for high-achieving high school juniors, may have a similar effect on attending students. While renowned for their excellent classes and fun activities, these programs may be wasting money as they fail to achieve their intended goal. GHA manuals and courses also show evidence of a political agenda, as well as a drift from traditional views and values. The very concept of an “Honors Academy” sets students up to feel elite and superior. Ironically, students who attend these programs are at greater risk for suicide. Because GHAs do not achieve their intended function, teach radical liberalism and the abandonment of one’s belief system, encourage a sense of elitism, and put students at a higher risk for suicide, these programs should be eliminated.

First and foremost, these camps are a waste of taxpayer’s money. Costing four thousand dollars for each of one hundred eighty students, they total up to seven hundred twenty thousand dollars each year for students alone. This is for a relatively small three week GHA. This money is going purely to less than one percent of the junior-aged children of taxpayers. Nonetheless, if the classes were highly effective, perhaps the high cost would still be worth the end result. However, the classes could be taken as a joke. When I attended last year, we studied poetry of mentally retarded women in order to emulate them and thus improve our writing. We also learned to “crack syntax,” meaning that we threw away our understanding of how a sentence is properly constructed. To “think in the structure subject/verb/object” is proof of humans being “chauvinistic,” and the best way to “get closer to the truth” is by reversing the words in a sentence. For example, one may think, “‘I eat an artichoke,’” while really “the artichoke happens to also be eating you and changing you forever, especially if you dip it in garlic-butter sauce and…let the artichoke leaf taste your tongue.” Many lessons were about learning to respect the earth as a human: to call a plant by anything but its full name would be rude, plants have feelings too, not believing in unicorns hurts their feelings, animals cry just like we do because of war, poverty, and injustice (this, among other things, is scientifically inaccurate, as humans are the only creature that cries due to an emotion), and so on. We were given poetry written in Finnish and told to translate it based on how it made us “feel.” Studying and reflecting upon the garbage in trash cans was another bizarre assignment. Finally, in one lesson we were taught to completely scramble all the words in our sentences and randomly insert punctuation. While some may worry that we as students will not remember much of what we are taught in a mere three weeks, they should be more concerned if we do.

If they fail to teach actual subject matter, GHA courses do succeed in teaching radical liberalism. Instructors presented two videos endorsing Communism and idolizing Che Guevarra. Ironically, the day after Holocaust survivor Moshe Baron begged us not to follow any political extremist group, a Resident Assistant lectured my seminar on why we should all turn to communism (which, in reality, greatly mirrors fascism). One in-depth class taught violent revolution. Our seminar leader played the song “Handlebars,” which calls for a second Holocaust, to encourage us to take part in a major political initiative--if not for Fascism, for the other extreme. The same leader told us of her personal story of triumph in becoming Democrat after a long line of Republican ancestors. Many other liberal messages such as gay rights, studying and appreciating the viewpoints of prison inmates, mortgaging ourselves to rescue other nations, and radical environmentalism were all taught. A famously liberal slam poet who goes by “Piece” also addressed us one evening to help promote socialistic ideas under the name of “economic and social equality.”

In addition, GHA classes and faculty teach a shift from traditional views. Instructors questioned simple truths with questions like, “Are we really human, or something entirely different?” A class called “Who Am I?” was devoted to exploring our identities in abstract ways, dismissing any simple, straightforward belief of our divine existence as human beings. We explored the “ambiguity” of whether the Nazis were in the wrong, or if there truly are rights and wrongs. We even debated the ambiguity of whether a door is truly open or closed or whether they, in fact, even exist.

Similarly, GHA attacks traditional values. Risqué entertainment attacked family values with a Broadway play featuring homosexuals grinding and flashing of female privates, and with movies having rude humor, foul language, and other obscenity. GHA undermined the Bible and Christianity in particular. While we had a class discussion on Wicca (in which we learned one must never tell a Wiccan “God bless you!”), and received some of Buddha’s own lessons, Christianity was generally scoffed at or ignored. When I asked the religions teacher a question about the Old Earth versus New Earth and the Evolution versus Creation controversies, she responded that these issues were merely “Christian hang-ups.” Much writing condemned God and Christianity, such as Matthew Batt’s “The Path of Righteousness” in which Batt describes his former Lutheran membership as the cause of “a lot of unprovoked shame.” Another handout, Ander Monson’s “I Have Been Thinking About Snow,” asserted that God is the reason for feeling isolated, especially the feeling of separation of father and son. One more value GHA disregarded was that of honoring authority. When a program called Invisible Children tried to enlist the students, the speaker told how the movement’s leaders had caused a disturbance so that the United States police force were forced to intervene. The presenter then asked, “Hey, what’s so bad about getting arrested?”--a remark met with laughter and applause. A seminar reading instructed us with the quote, “Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for generations.” A general disrespect for the authority of religious texts, teachers and elders, and family traditions was shone in the light of free and independent thinking.  We were told that our parents, teachers, and leaders owe us an apology for the mistakes they have made. At the end of the program one student’s publication read, “I will…challenge authority. Be open to others, but not naïve. Only a machine obeys orders without question.” Thinking for oneself is an admirable quality, but it was explicitly not what was being endorsed, as only the viewpoints espoused by GHA leaders were encouraged. Traditional beliefs and values were openly ridiculed.

GHAs also inherently encourage a sense of elitism in its attendees. One student referred to our minds as “honors brains” in an argument that we were above subliminal messages in the media and propaganda (how ironic).  Much of the conversation among students upon first meeting sounded more like a memorized résumé, as each told of a long history of GHA-reminiscent camps they had attended. Ivy League schools like Yale came and flattered us in an effort to recruit interest. In one activity in which we were asked to give our input on how the West Virginia legislature should be doing its job, we were repeatedly reminded that we were the top one percent of juniors, the best, the brightest, those headed for success. One leader who had been accepted into multiple Ivy Leagues and would soon be leaving for Yale explained to us, “People are stupid. Parents are not smart enough to teach their kids things, things like sex education.” She continued that since we “know better” than most of the population, more power “should be handed to the schools, like they do in Europe.” The status quo toward the GHA’s close was a reluctance to return home to just “average” or “narrow-minded” friends and families.

Perhaps linked to this feeling of self-importance is, paradoxically, post-GHA attendees’ high suicide rate. Depression gripped the students at the thought of returning home where they would not be understood or appreciated by others, especially by obsolete parents who had not been exposed to the same “mind-opening” experiences. One friend, who seemed content with her family in earlier conversations, confided in me shortly before departure, “I hate my dad. We’ll never see eye to eye. We could never get along.” Students may feel like they are leaving their new and improved family. Not only have they lived with each other for weeks isolated from the outside world, they have been treated like they are in the place where they finally belong. At the beginning of the program the head Resident Assistant told us, “You are probably used to being the brightest where you come from. Look around you. You are now average. You now belong.” I have never been to a place where perfect strangers say “I love you” so often. Even the “You have mail” strips read, “We love you.” GHAs are a place of high emotional intensity--so high that most of the students pair off exclusively by the end of the program. As an almost cultish practice, every one of the faculty had married someone they had met at GHA and were now teaching together. The day of arrival, the dean announced to parents and their children, “We are going to turn your children upside-down”-- the first night, when the terrifying Resident Assistant sat us down and yelled at us like a drill sergeant--“shake them up”--the second night, when they put us in groups and had us talk about deaths in our families, share our deepest secrets and most private dreams, and reflect upon what we would do with six months left to live--“then recreate them”-- the next three weeks, as leaders presented a new values system and family to us. Just as one poet said of his experience at a slam poetry convention, “I thought I was conservative, religious, and reserved, but I discovered that I was liberal, spiritual, and outgoing,” a few weeks can shake and even uproot one’s convictions. This can cause one to feel confused and separated from those whose beliefs he or she once shared upon returning home.

Another reason GHA attendees may feel lost and alone once home is that GHA encourages anger toward one’s family. In many activities we were instructed to delve into our childhood in an effort to resurrect bad childhood memories. These educators do not have the credentials for psychology, yet that was what the classes became. In one seminar we learned that we are owed an apology from our parents, teachers, and leaders for the mistakes they have made. This self-victimization was promoted by the slam poet Piece who argued that if a teacher “fails” a student (grade-wise), then he or she has indeed “failed” that student (as an instructor.) Reading material furthered the idea of being powerless as the world mistreats us, such as Monson’s sad travail of getting kicked out of church for stealing, among other crimes which he calls “skills”: “fire-building,” “vandalism,” “drunkenness,” and being jailed repeatedly. An appropriate coping strategy for those suffering from depression is suggested when Monson shares that he resorts to a masochistic practice to take back control: burying himself beneath snow and “losing whatever heat keeps the meat of the body alive and twitching.”

Several cases of post-GHA suicides have led to controversy and escalated into court hearings, most evidently that of the Indiana Academy in which the suicide rate was three out of three hundred in a six week period, or one hundred times the national average. These are the students who have everything going for them, “the best, the brightest, those heading for success,” and this unnerving rate does not take into account mental breakdowns and depression. A mother of one of the students who committed suicide read from his diary, “We have truly been plucked out of our world. We live in the Governor’s School world. I don’t think I will be able to leave after this is over. Let me warn you that I am changing inside. I hope you will like me as I am, but I am learning a new outlook on life and reality…I feel sorry for people who aren’t here. The outside world is so blind to world events. Governor’s School helped me to separate myself from most of the people around me…My friends and I (can) tell that we have suddenly been transformed into free thinkers.” The mother went on to explain that “there’s a false sense of security in Brandon’s statement because when he completed Governor’s School, he doubted friendships and support he had most of his life. And he questioned values and relationships that in the past had been extremely important to him. But most of all he began to question himself.” While people may feel GHA is empowering them, the tools it hands them may become powerful weapons against themselves.

It would seem that GHA would have caught more negative limelight than it hitherto has, so why is America not more aware of its detriment? So much research, including many powerful testimonies against GHAs, is on the web--it just has not yet reached the right people. At the end of the program the leaders asked us to write legislators about our experience at GHA; however, we were instructed not to include any of our concerns. Not all of the students may have had concerns; I might not have noticed all the problems had I not already researched GHA and been forewarned of them. However, there might be a better reason. When discussing a play we had to watch with pretty blunt, forward messages, I heard one student say, “I don’t believe there are any messages in the media.” As stated previously, during a class on subliminal messages in the media one student asserted that such messages do not affect us because of our “honors brains.” The same students who are skeptical that Hollywood has an agenda, or that it could affect people as bright as themselves, may also believe they are invincible to any potential brainwashing fed them by the hand of GHA. Also, most of the students proclaimed themselves Democrat, and not only this, but first-generation Democrat, so it is possible that out-of-home sources such as schools, society, and the leftist media have already indoctrinated them somewhat.

Whether students notice the detriment of GHAs or not, programs like these must come to an end.  One alternative would be the creation of a new program run by different people and using fresh manuals, carefully monitored to ensure the following: that no political agenda is evident, or at least that the full spectrum of political views is presented; that traditional values and views are respected; and that elitism and separatism are not taught. While this switch would considerably reduce the need for suicide intervention, these programs should nonetheless provide certified counselors for students struggling with the transition into a new environment. Better yet, why not spend the huge sum of money spent on GHAs on areas of education that would really benefit students? Among common complaints of GHA students were that their school did not offer such fundamentals as AP or Dual Enrollment classes, or even the ACT and SAT. These challenging classes and knowledge-assessing tests would assist the students in the building of their futures far more than any three week program could.

Such a change in budgeting would not magically cure all the problems correlating to GHA. While this re-allocation may provide different opportunities to students, prevent teaching of radical liberalism and the upturning of the values system, allow for better programs to be created, and likely reduce the GHA student suicide and depression rates, not all problems would be addressed. Similar programs as well as public school itself may still be teaching leftist doctrine or values different from the student’s. Certainly the media is. Probably most states will continue GHA-like programs despite the controversy, and where GHA is taken down a similar program could very well rise in its wake. Also, negative consequences would result in the loss of GHA, including students missing out on a great socializing experience, fun activities they might have otherwise been unable to afford, some handy information that might be retained, and an introduction into a college-like environment (although the free room and board is not very realistic.) The question is, is it worth the side effects, for a good time.

Thus, GHAs, while on the surface an aid to any passing junior-aged Gingerbread Man, may have some teeth that make the ride not worth the risk. Never mind the cost, the political agenda, coupled with the drift away from traditional views in general, and the inherent elitism with an accompanying risk for suicide make up the jaws of a program that would be better avoided.  During the program I attended a student had been thought to be missing. The leaders were so upset. They locked us in our dorms and stayed up all night looking for him. It was very obvious that the leaders of GHA cared immensely about the welfare of this young man. But I would ask, if so much concern went toward our physical well-being, why was there so much less concern for our emotional state? If our goal were truly to help students to learn and grow while remaining safe, then when it comes to GHA there should be no controversy about it in the first place.