Did a chemical in his brain suddenly decide to zig instead of zag?
The authorities and experts had no trouble with that diagnosis, no matter that it was idiotic. No matter that, at age six, he was bright, with a mind as quick as a mousetrap. He could speak two languages fluently, was curious about animals and nature and had mastered Lego pieces, chess and knock-knock jokes. No matter that his supposed “problem with learning” began with school.
Within two weeks of starting kindergarten, the judgment was passed down: Your son is “learning disabled,” “mentally handicapped” and therefore must be medicated (with Adderall, a powerful drug with side effects including hallucinations, heart attacks and homicidal/suicidal thoughts). These are the unalterable parameters and procedures and modalities. It’s our way or the highway. Sign here, please.
Miami mom Barbie Rivera refused to sign. As she writes in her book, Enough Is Enough! “Why on Earth would I essentially poison my son, potentially ruin his brain function, potentially drive him to suicide on the advice of a teacher because he confused letters and numbers? Makes. No. Sense.”
She was not alone in that view. Home-schooling her son quickly expanded to a learning pod in her home, including other kids in addition to her own, which then grew to a K-12 private school, H.E.L.P. Miami (Hollywood Education and Literacy Project).
The Titanic which is the American education system has long since hit the iceberg, and it’s time for Barbie Rivera’s new ship.
Rivera now has 30-some years under her belt as an educator by necessity. She has experienced and helped hundreds of children who have been “diagnosed” instead of educated, medicated instead of communicated with and then, when the inevitable failure occurs, those responsible throw up their hands—instead of rolling up their sleeves—and let the child graduate anyway despite never learning to read, multiply or divide, with prospects as dim as the world appears through their overmedicated eyes.
“We’re on the Titanic,” she tells Freedom. “We need a new ship. We were once Number One. We can be Number One again.”
America was indeed Number One in the first decades of the 20th century, its education system the envy of the world, Barbie explains in her book, with a 99.9 percent literacy rate as of 1915. Compare that with a 46 percent literacy rate 107 years later. Today, 12 million students drop out of school yearly, and 32 million Americans can’t read.
Truly, the Titanic which is the American education system has long since hit the iceberg, and it’s time for Barbie Rivera’s new ship.
How does the public school system in her home State of Florida deal with these grisly statistics and the precipitous nosedive in literacy? Simple: It redefines literacy.
Most older adults remember the trepidation, the sinking feeling in their gut at having to show their parents that awful 62 percent on their math test or semester grade for reading. But now—no worries! A 62 percent, according to the State of Florida’s new amended guidelines, gives you an A! Congratulations!
It goes downhill from there. Fifty-four percent is B, 41 percent is C, 32 percent D and anything below that is F.
Illiteracy? What illiteracy?
This writer recalls a university art history professor who ended each semester with a volleyball game. The winners got As, the losers Bs and the no-shows Cs. But at least we all needed a decent grade point average to get into college in the first place.
A more effective solution, Rivera explains, is to find out what made us Number One and replicate that. Accordingly, she studied American textbooks pre-1915, amassing quite a collection of these antique, long-since out-of-print books that simply and effectively teach a child so that he or she understands what is being taught and can then use the knowledge in life—rather than memorize just enough for just long enough to get their minimum 32 percent on the test and then promptly forget it.
The other weapon in Barbie’s arsenal is a subject missing in all education. This omitted subject is not reading, writing, arithmetic or science. It’s the most fundamental subject of them all, the one that could spell success or failure in any subject: the subject of how to study. Developed and researched by L. Ron Hubbard, Study Technology is the key to rehabilitating the slow or struggling student, without drugs and without handing out worthless diplomas to failed students.
Barbie Rivera’s school, featured in a Voices for Humanity episode on Scientology Network, is a success in its own right. Still, her goal is to replace the whole broken education system with one that works, to offer children a better solution than a life of prescription drugs and illiteracy. She knows that she is up against the well-financed, ubiquitous cabal of Big Psych and Big Pharma masquerading as American education. “Sometimes I feel I’m trying to empty the Atlantic Ocean into a puddle,” she says. “I could cry. They are so well funded and so overt in their crime. Are they losing any sleep over this? They don’t care. I care. And my teachers care. We are interested. And we get hugs every day.”
But Barbie has a strategy. It begins with her Enough Is Enough! exposé that reveals how a working, highly successful American school system was replaced by something dark that has nothing to do with school and more to do with the systematic destruction of children for the sake of control and profit.
As a young mother agonizing over her son’s diagnosis, Barbie Rivera remembered the story of Helen Keller, the deaf, mute and blind child who was led out of the wilderness and into the beauties of the world by her brilliant, uncompromising and unrelenting “miracle worker” teacher, Anne Sullivan. “Where is my Anne Sullivan?” she prayed, only to realize that she needed to be her own Anne Sullivan, her own miracle worker for her child and, ultimately, for thousands of others.
All she wants now is for us to do the same for each of our children. Be their miracle worker, free them from the entrapment of an education system designed to degrade rather than enhance and into the beauty of a wide, wonderful and welcoming world.
