Children are Sexual

Puberty is not the beginning. The sexual life of the human being begins in the womb. It is expressed, enjoyed, shared, and felt in childhood. It is then repressed by those who fail to regard its existence. It is punished by those who fail to recognize its humanity. Children are instead fed fabrications about what their sexual feelings mean, and even adults begin to believe what they preach. We are told that child sexuality not only doesn't exist, but that any expression of it is deviance, and any discussion about it is the promotion of child rape. This has not always been the case, as any cursory glance will reveal from such academic works as Loving Boys (1986) by Dr. Edward Brongersma, or Paedophilia: A Factual Report (1985), by Dr. Frits Bernard, or The Sexual Life of Children (1994), by Floyd Martinson, or even The Sexual Life of the Child, from 1912, by Albert Moll, among hundreds of others lost to history.

In decades past, discussion about the sexual life of children was alive and well in fact. It was accepted as repeatedly observable in the wide breadth of scientific inquiry into human development, and discussion about it didn't lead anyone to think that by investigating child sexuality anyone was in fact promoting child rape. Times have changed though, and all progress has not only stalled, but reversed itself. The very fact of a child's sexuality has been run over by the preponderance of research dealing with child sex abuse, and now all child sexuality has become subjugated to the adult fear of child sex abuse first and foremost, rather than remain liberated as the legitimate form of inquiry it is.

The inquiry determining the difference between mental and physical sexual maturation for the purpose of procreation, and the preexisting sexual feelings that children are born with and grow up experiencing and acting upon, has been left behind with the sexual revolution of the 20th century. All other aspects of human sexuality have been greeted with toleration and eventual acceptance (and even many of the earlier sexual "perversions"), but children are not extended such courtesy, and it has everything to do with the maintenance of adult illusions. Having no conception of breathing does not stop an infant from breathing as an act of self-preservation, and neither does having no conception of sexuality stop a young child from masturbating, even at the age of seven months, for boys in particular, no matter what we tell ourselves.

But no amount of adult illusion can change the fact that children are sexual, engage in sex play, feel every bit of sexual tension and pleasure that adults do, and that all of it is denied to their understanding. No amount of telling ourselves it isn't true is going to erase the fact that decades of research has repeatedly shown children engaging in genital stimulation, auto-erotica, and even sexual activities with one another at what we in the twenty-first century have concluded are "unnaturally low" ages. On the contrary, they knew something in the 19th and 20th centuries that seems lost to us now: that the "unnaturally high" ages of sexual activity we promote in our modern "progressive" age are indeed what is more abnormal, if anything. For procreative purposes, the older ages are in fact divorced from nature, rather than any representational paradigm of it. The inability for adults to accept aging out of sexual activity in recent decades has caused them to criminalize and pathologize all youth expression of it instead, despite youth sexuality being the natural paradigm.

So we celebrate the birth of a new century where childhood sexual activity is not only stricken from all public discourse, but so is the very fact of its existence. It has been erased from both the academic landscape as well as popular opinion. Demonstrable facts have been lost and replaced by adult illusions--the illusion of the child as a wholy innocent creature devoid of feeling and depth, who is merely here to be a repository of adult services. This is the "predator panic" illusion that our society calls progress.

There is so much lack of understanding on this issue that actual child sexuality, existing as a fact of nature, has been conflated with pedophilia, and pedophilia with child sexual abuse, done through its constant repetition in research and popular culture to scare our sensitivities away from where they naturally would've been. In this way, all discussion of child sexuality as a part of a child's physical being, manifesting a great deal of their humanity, has been equated inextricably with child sexual abuse instead. "If a child is a sexual being," so goes the popular opinion, "whether sexually active or not, the child is beyond help, and more likely to be raped or sexually exploited." But since every child is sexual by nature, expressing it to varying degrees, and child sex abuse is still a relative rarity by comparison, this is hardly an appropriate conclusion.

Adults attempt to eradicate the existence of a child's sexuality so as to protect them from themselves as well as predators, and make deviant a child's natural sexual exploratory behavior all as the price for protection against those who are truly deviant. So the only image we are fed is that of the child as a porcelain doll who feels not, thinks not, and perhaps only breathes so that in life they may give adults something to protect. In this way, a child's humanity has been taken away every time their human drives are equated with deviance. It seems the western world has no problem with stripping the humanity off a child though, just so long as the boy or girl keeps their clothes on for it. 

The Forbidden Toy

In the last post I made the argument about the fallibility of adult cognition in both the extreme (cults) and the everyday, which should not be such a watershed. By the same extension, the same behaviors can be seen in children, but once again reproduced and expressed through "smaller means." Exactly what is meant by "larger" and "smaller" is a relative question pertaining to the existential, psychological, and biological differences we associate (via imperfect "adult-centric" cognitive schema) between childhood and adulthood, but children can be shown to be no more infallible than children in forming their thoughts about the world, relative to their cognitive capacities to do such.

One way the action of cognitive dissonance has been observed in children is characterized by an experiment carried out by Aronson and Carlsmith (1963), where children were asked to rank a selection of toys from the ones they found the most enjoyable to the least. After they were ranked, the experimenter would take a toy the child liked and leave the child alone with it in a room. Half the child subjects were told that they would be severely punished if they played with the toy and the other half were told the punishment would be temperate. Obviously they weren't going to punish the children.

Later the experimenter would remove the punishment, saying that there would be no repercussions from playing with the toy. The children in the moderate punishment condition were then less likely to play with the toy, even though they now understood there'd be no punishment. On the other hand, the severe punishment group were more likely to play with the toy once the punishment was lifted. When asked why, the children in the moderate condition expressed more disinterest in the toy, even though at one time they had ranked it as one of the most enjoyable to them. The children in the severe punishment condition expressed even higher interest in the toy than they had initially.

The conclusion from this study represents a concept called overjustification. The children in the severe condition had what is called a good "external reason" for not playing with the toy, because they believed they'd be punished severely if the did, even though they still found the toy as desirable. When the punishment was lifted they were more likely to play with it. The children in the non-severe condition had an "insufficient external reason" for not playing with the toy, so they had to make up their own justifications against playing with it. They had to convince themselves to find the toy less desirable, and therefore resort to not playing with it. Either way, children's internal feelings towards a toy were influenced based on how their beliefs about what the ramifications would be of playing with it, and once those beliefs turned out to be false, they had to resort to justification in order to suppress the effects of the disconfirmation. The stronger the effects of disconfirmation, the more justification is needed.

This overjustification for the children in the moderate condition when observed in childhood appears to result in a child's forced compliance (usually with an adult), and when observed in adulthood, results in the more extreme forms of social cohesion, shared social schemas, adult compliance (as seen in the Milgram studies), and all sorts of applications in social psychology from hierarchial structures like the military and government, to how adults formulate their laws and regulations or whether they resort to obeying them, and in the most extreme cases, where psychosis is involved, the formation of cults and other shared delusions (Festinger et al. 1956).

All this goes to show how children react in situations when prophesy fails. As is seen in adults, the stronger their personal conviction, the more they'll seek to justify their conviction retroactively when it doesn't pan out the way their beliefs where structured initially. Children behave much the same way. Any attempt to label children as cognitively handicapped in comparison to an adult is ignoring the similar expressions of the very same falibilities adults express.

When Prophecy Fails

Often when adults make conclusions about a child's "fantastical beliefs" it is usually to belittle the child's grasp on "reality" and reaffirm the adult in their ability to "perceive," as if perception was in their nature as adults. Clearly though, with the number of unverifiable beliefs that adults hold at any one time, adults are no better "perceivers" than children, it's just adults have a larger "sphere" in which they can draw resources from when perceiving and practicing meta-cognition. Nowhere was the fallibility of adult perception more dramatic than in the Festinger research into cognitive dissonance.

It's 1956. A story in the local Chicago news reports: "Prophecy from planet Clarion call to city: flee that flood." Apparently a housewife came to the conclusion that she had received a message from the planet "Clarion" about how the world was to end due to a massive flood, and that how on December 21st, all of human civilization would be wiped out.

In the analysis of the apparent similarities between childhood behavior and adult behavior, invariably the subject of "prophecy" comes up, and likewise, what happens to individuals when their beliefs about the world and their activities are incompatible. This tale of the housewife and her message from Clarion became the subject of a landmark study headed by Leon Festinger.

This housewife was successful in amassing a close-knit collection of believers from the community and surrounding areas, and they founded an encampment, where through their various stages of shedding selfishness (giving up jobs, families, all their money and possessions), they would be deemed worthy and be spared the devastation by the interception of a flying saucer. All of this was revealed through the "automatic" writings of the housewife, Mrs. Marion Keech.

More skeptical minds saw this event as an opportunity to gain some anecdotal insight into how human beings adjust when their beliefs and their behaviors come into conflict, for surely the the scientific community assumed the prophecy would fail. The idea, as carried out in Festinger et al. (1956), was for a team of social psychologists to infiltrate the group as prospective members and record the happenings as they observed them, the justifications, rationalizations, and social dynamic of the group. It was known that each member of the group had invested heavily in the belief that they would be saved from a great flood through their actions. Festinger hypothesized that following any disconfirmation of their belief the group would proselytize in order to lessen the negative effects of the disconfirmation.

The research team was so successful in presenting themselves as believers that one of them was thought to be an alien messenger in disguise, and soon the night of December 20th was drawing to a close. When midnight struck and no saucer appeared, the group wasn't devastated, and insisted that it wasn't technically midnight yet because another clock in the room was slow 5 minutes. By 4:00 am, with no visitors yet, another automatic writing session produced a "new response" from Clarion--that the "God of Earth" had spared the planet due to their actions. There was to be no devastation.

"The little group, sitting all night long, had spread so much light that God had saved the world from destruction" (Festinger et al. 1956).

The term "cognitive dissonance" refers to the uncomfortable feeling from having two conflicting thoughts at the same time, or from engaging in behavior that conflicts with one's beliefs, or from experiencing apparently conflicting phenomena. The theory put forth by Festinger based on his observations, as well as other more experimentally designed studies, is that when a human being is placed in a state of cognitive dissonance, they will engage in some thought or behavior that will sooth the discomfort--they'll warp their beliefs to fit their behaviors, ignore information that does not support their beliefs, or create new information that does.

My first comment in regards to this episode is that young children could not have constructed such a belief as elaborate as these individuals did in 1956. This is due to a number of factors: that children normally have little knowledge of extra-terrestrial bodies, extra-terrestrial intelligence, and the phenomenon of automatic writing, and that children don't physically own anything, and therefore "investment" in any one particular belief can not be measured in terms of what the child has "financially invested," (but it can be measured in other ways). Often if children do seem to have inordinate amounts of knowledge about such things, less skeptical adults see them as "Indigos," "Star Children," and other such entities, and more skeptical adults are right to point out the proliferation of children's educational media for the early appearance of such leaps of cognitive reasoning. It takes a lot for a young child to recognize the permanence of the Earth, and once a child is capable of doing that, they will broaden their cognitive sphere to that of the cosmos, as this adult cult was capable of doing.

To be fair though, to both developmental stages (and all those in between), the beliefs described above about the cult represent only a small fraction, a fringe in a larger majority. The majority of individuals do not believe such radical beliefs, but they experience conflicting beliefs nonetheless. One does not need to be a fringe, a cultist, or mentally disturbed to hold beliefs that could be termed "irrational beliefs," and one does not need to be less cognitively mature to experience cognitive dissonance over those beliefs when they fail to be confirmed in reality.

Beliefs lead to the amazing diversity of the human imagination, and to much of human culture, lore, and myth. The human race would not be as socially cohesive without these shared traditions. The point is not to diminish the importance of irrational beliefs but to understand the difference between what is fact and what is fiction, and the larger gray area in between that the human mind, for all it's abilities, has not been able to perceive yet. Most importantly, this notion of adults having the ability to perceive the optimum should be dismissed. It is simple arrogance on the part of one adult over another, and one adult over a child. Instead, human cognitive development should be interpreted as a summation of the resources physically and mentally available to the individual at each stage of development, along the lines of a continuum, the likes of which Piaget only hinted at: that the adult is in fact not a sage of "cognitive competence," but like children, simply displays a "relative degree of functioning."

If this is so then adults couldn't design a test to verify whether or not adults are cognitively competent, because to do so would require knowledge about the universe and higher functions of the mind that human beings have not accessed yet. It would be the equivalent of children testing themselves on knowledge and cognitive functioning that only their respective biological and psychological development has access to, and then declaring that result definitive. If this is true, than it poses a problem scientifically, and must be taken on its own terms.

The Zeitgeist Cult

The Zeitgeist films and the Venus Project have captivated the children of the information age. They have played right into a demographic who has been reared on the internet and knows little else but. They have attempted to claim science without the benefit of hindsight, for every movement that has ever attempted to claim science has led to atrocity. They have toured too long in the foreign land of history without the benefit of a guidebook and have lost themselves to fitting together its disparate themes into neat and orderly conspiracies. They worship the guru they see in Jacques Fresco, rather than apply the principles of evidential argumentation to his bold-faced assertions. They have become drunk on their own propaganda of flying cars and futuristic city plans and have yet to sober up to the oppression inherent in the technocratic, totalitarian globalist, machine-driven superstructure they envision with utopian simplicity.

Given all this, every cult has its kernels of truth. The Zeitgeist films are best described as propaganda vehicles to assert a political agenda that is anti-free market, anti-democracy (as we know it), anti-human nature, and anti-freedom of religion. They fabricate the lore and mythology of human antiquity to fit their schema for the baselessness of religious ideas, and build upon those outright fabrications intricate truths about the state of the planet and humanity. We are lead to believe these various pathways and narratives are somehow related when they are not--the Egyptian god Horus was never considered to be a Christ figure, and even if he were, it would have nothing to do with how consumerism is destroying our global ecology. The shortest distance between two points is always a straight line, and that's the only line the filmmakers wish to present, because it's the only line they want their audience to know about. In Nietzsche's terms, these are but castles built on spider webs.

We are, once again, led against scientific rigor. There is a contempt for science which is all too predictable in movements that stress absolute certainty--perhaps it is because science stresses no such certainty, merely, beliefs based on evidence. It is not as if the claims being made are of the same degree of fabrication as was the case with their historical narratives, it's just that in their presentation of genetics and behavior, of environmental science, of sociology..etc., they present information as if they alone are the ones busting the lid off this information--as if none of what they say hasn't already been the main argument of researchers in the scientific realms for decades. They then use that presentation to make it seem like they alone are telling the truth while suggesting that all of science is make believe consumer-driven hocus-pocus.

When the scientific community is invoked, we see images of outdated 19th century dioramas with the implication that they are still accepted beliefs, and then when they bring up what 21st century science has uncovered, it is always in the context of their movement (once again, as if they are responsible for the progress science has made in the past 50 years). It is effective propaganda for the masses, but unconvincing for those who know how propaganda works. For instance, they would be hard pressed to find a developmental psychologist who disagrees with their supposed "claim" that nature vs. nurture is a simplistic view of development, but that doesn't stop them from touting it as if they've just stumbled onto this discovery for the first time, and that they'd be decried as heretics for even suggesting it. Nothing could be further from the truth.

This is not to say that science is not corrupted, or that corporations are not corrupted, or that governments are not corrupted. They make these points and they are valid points, but what they desire to do is utterly destroy our current civilization and rebuild it along their own half-baked principles (vehemently opposing all perspectives and evidence that is contrary to their assumptions). Just as the Marxists, just as the Bolsheviks, they believe that only after society has been dismantled and reconstituted to match with their ideal, that we might finally see Utopia--that all the disparate people of the earth will somehow unite around their vision and we'll finally all be free from the grip of [whatever we distrust in the present]. These are fantasies, illusions, flights of incomprehensible naïveté  no matter how genuine they may be felt.

It is not freedom, or even the rights of human beings they are after though, for they treat human beings as secondary to their technological and environmental pursuits--and one can only imagine the atrocities that would be rendered if their contempt for human vice were brought to full-scale fruition. One has only look at the history of uncompromising extremism to see where this thinking leads ('extermination' always factors in). There is absolutely nothing new about any claim or statement made in the Zeitgeist films, they are simply dressed up to look as if they are presenting a new ideology. One could even argue that another term for the political ideology being espoused in these films is a technological National Socialism, only on a global scale rather than within a country, where the needs of the individual become secondary to the needs of the "world citizens." It seeks to subjugate human interest and channel those energies toward perpetuating the utopian vision, carried out by machine-driven enforcement. The individual comes second to the centralized global state. The undesirables (those who might disagree to living under this system and lash out at it) would naturally have to be eliminated.

It's a cult because it fails to subject itself to the same standards of critique it reserves for society. Instead of working to create solutions out of the system, it diverts attention towards formulating some grandioise vision for a utopia where no one is allowed to work, no one is allowed to practice faith, no one is allowed to be evil, or good, or even human. This is a sad distraction, but such seems to be the case with the information age--the age of distraction--which is why solutions are so tough to come by to begin with. Progress can only come from that which allows all things, and promises little. The Venus Project and its propaganda is a cult because it allows so little, and promises everything.

Research Limits

The bulk of knowledge attainable from research in general is limited to the kinds of questions that have been asked. In the social sciences, the questions that are being asked are the ones our culture permits us to ask. In this case, culture informs objectivity. If culture assumes that children are being harmed by something, then the questions for research become: "What groups of kids are being harmed the most? Who does the harm affect the most? Who/What is doing the harm? and What can be done to stop the harm from happening?" No one comes forth to pose the question: is the cultural assumption even right to begin with?

If the culture says that X, then research asks, "given X, how does X affect Y?" If it would be culturally inappropriate to question X, then X is not questioned.

However, the social sciences are not uniformly like this. There are numerous examples of research and researchers who have pushed boundaries and ultimately changed cultural perspectives to align more with the reality of the world, but notice it only seems to work that way with questions that, even if controversial, are still within the boundaries of acceptability. The level of attention a particular research question receives is proportional to its level of cultural acceptability. So given this, it's a wonder anyone can regard the social sciences without skepticism at the least. For instance, it seems obvious the increase in interest in questions about homosexuality outside the strict context of "pathological abnormality" has more to do with our culture's growing tolerance of the gay lifestyle than it does the researchers' objective "thirst for knowledge."

One question that seems to be outside the boundaries of our culture, and therefore shut off from objective investigation, is "when are children capable of giving meaningful consent?" This is because culture tells us they are never capable until they are [16, 17, 18, 21...pick a number]. Scientific investigation takes this as a given, and then asks "because we all know kids can not consent, how are they being harmed by X?" Who among us is brave enough to ask "is this man-made, superstitious, legal construct wrong about a child's objective ability to consent?"  Don't hold your breath.

Victimology research feeds off of cultural limitations.

The Sudden Rise of ADHD

It was the first day on a new unit for my abnormal psychology class in the fall of 2007. The topic: childhood psychopathology. My professor, who was also a child psychologist, prefaced with a question: "let's see a show of hands, how many of you think ADHD is a real disorder?" Everyone of course raised their hands. Then he asked, "how many of you think it's over-diagnosed?" Once again, everyone raised their hands, including the child psychologist.

The rise of ADHD has been well documented in the research for decades, (with a 700% increase from a decade ago based psychostimulant use) and most findings seem to pinpoint the cause as being genetic or otherwise outside of any sociological phenomena. So far, our best research has concluded that the child isn't reared this way by an unhealthy culture, but that he or she is born this way. It's no surprise either that the age bracket has grown down toward the cradle. Research has determined that behavioral interventions pose no significant advantage without medicinal treatments, and that different strategies of intervention pose no real conclusive difference in effectiveness after one year of implementation. So while no one in the field openly advocates medication-only treatment plans for children, that is often all the smallest children end up receiving.

It makes sense considering that if such a syndrome were found to be environmentally caused, at least partially, the use of medication wouldn't seem as necessary. No doubt, the blatant capitalism that is procured under the name of scientific rationality--as researchers are desperate for funding and parents are made helpless to its effects--would have no fuel on which to run its engine. After all, if such a supposed generational genetic shift were found to be more environmentally caused, the weight would fall more on parents to govern that child's behavior--the same parents who would otherwise be willing to foot the bill to welcome this medicinal treatment into the house. The word about the industry has always been "don't insult your customers." That is not to say I'm throwing out vague conspiracies here, but just adding a dose of simple skepticism to this nefarious science-practice-commerce connection at the heart of all this lazy diagnosing.

There's no doubt though that the research on ADHD itself is "objective," for the studies that have been done are usually done under skepticism, scrutiny, controversy, and heavy analysis. The problem with this research is not so much the methodology--which is usually procedurally valid--but rather, the questions that are being asked to begin with. They tend to be questions proctored by drug companies about the efficacy of their treatments (at least the great majority of them), with very little into the causes of the symptoms. The designs themselves tend to focus on the genetic links rather than the effects the behavior has on the environmental realities. True objectivity can be called into question when the research that does exist is by in large the result of patronage--even if the findings themselves are valid.

Whatever the case may be, ADHD has been diagnosed to a point where one has to call into question the extent to which a supposed "genetic malignancy" can conceivably inflict a group of people. Disorders, after all, are supposed to be anomalies, not tendencies. One could be easily lead to theorize that the rise of ADHD might be corresponding to a decrease of social behavioral interventions for behavior, as professionals seem to be racing to diagnose younger and younger age groups instead. Also fueling this apparent medical industrial complex is the suspicious discovery of more and more mental diseases to diagnose. For example, certain forms of childhood temperament (a natural genetic variation) have been seemingly upgraded and retermed "[childhood onset] Bipolar Disorder" in recent years, for which children as young as two have been suspect. At least ADHD has the benefit of being proven to exist in childhood. The various lithium experiments of children "diagnosed" with Bipolar Disorder (one not proven to exist in childhood yet) have left developing children scarred for life with tics and other neurological side effects.

In any case, over and over again we see parents rendered arbitrary and helpless to stop the escalation of these disorders. Over and over we see parents, who are obviously not deaf to the salesmen-lingo of the professionals, feeling pressured into action at the behest of desperation. That reasoning does not proceed inevitably to the conclusion that the cure for their child's behavior comes in the form of a morning pill, but what other option is there? Parents don't want to become little but prescription trees for which the child can pick from, but when preyed upon by practitioners at the behest of drug companies and perhaps even scared into action by schools threatening to take the issue to the state, they're caught having to choose the lesser of two evils--much to the industry's unabashed gain.

Often the diagnoses of these otherwise rare disorders are made at such a young age that conventional therapy becomes useless because the child hasn't even reached the developmental milestones to be order to gain from it. Sometimes the child can't even talk yet. That is a prime time for medication-only treatments to be handed out with a built-in justification. Sure children can always be disciplined at any age--to have good behavior rewarded and bad behavior punished--but if they can't sit still to enjoy the rewards, constant punishment is only going to get them so far. And at that young of an age, the benefits of "talk therapy" would be expected negligible at best. What's a parent to do? The answer lies in multi-modal therapy (MMT), the most effective intervention in the long term, and conspicuously the only treatment you never see "advertised."

The incidence of childhood disorders is at such an alarming rate, it has no doubt provoked the scientific community itself to theorize about its possible cause, with everything from diet to technology getting another look, as well as the increased awareness of the disorder and the sensitivity of the measurements now, and even evolutionary reasons for the increase from one generation to another have been suggested. The only question not being asked seriously within the research (though professionals throughout academia have been suggesting it off the record for decades), is if the rapid increase in diagnosis is simply by in large an over-reaction on to part of a paranoid society to naturally occurring and totally manageable behavioral phenomena.

Due to this scientific oversight, much criticism has circulated regarding this trend, to the point where individuals with no industry ties have pointed out these flaws to the external validity of the research. Still, medicinal treatment for behavior concerns is often seen as the only effective way simply because it's the most advertised way and the most effective in the short term. Parents see the sedative effects in their own children, that is, and they convince themselves these treatments are absolutely fundamental or have even "cured" the child. They no longer have to consider other treatment options because relief is in the bag already. In this way, the parent and society become medicated--as divorced from their own reality as the child is from his or her own affective responses. Society becomes medicated when it paints over its social ills with such broad brushstrokes in desperation. Symptoms will come back in the long term, even if they disappear now.

But who can be blamed? Everyone's doing their part in the web to keep this structure supported, even those speaking out against it--and especially those who seem to believe categorically that no child should ever need to take a psychoactive medication. It's no sin to medicinally sedate an unruly child, but doing so without behavioral interventions is. The inclusion of any behavior modifying medicine in the household should call on parents to increase their efforts to reward and punish behavior as necessary, not take a backseat at the first sign of "relief." Luckily, many parents already do this despite what the field routinely lacks insisting, but many also fall into this trap by accident. Research itself has been suggesting that medicine alone can not parent. The only question is, who are the practitioners listening to?

I'll leave you with this quote from such research:

"Multimodal approaches to intervention have been found to be most effective in terms of lasting change...treament with psychostimulants has beneficial effects, provided that it is accompanied by remedial tuition, counselling, and behavior management by parents/teachers as required (van Kraayenoord, Rice, Carroll, Fritz, Dillon, & Hill. 2001, p. 7)."