Monday, November 21, 2016

PCG Bans Smartphones for Students

In 2015 PCG's leader, Gerald Flurry, banned smartphones for students at Imperial Academy and the unaccredited Herbert W. Armstrong College. This was mentioned in a recent article by Stephen Flurry.
A teacher at our K-12 school, Imperial Academy, told me recently that many of his students fail to consistently turn in their daily homework assignments. That is alarming. Early last year, my father, who founded Imperial Academy and Armstrong College, found it necessary to ban smartphones for students at both schools. If you are a parent of an Imperial or Armstrong student, do you diligently enforce this ruling? Do you supervise your child’s Internet usage? (Stephen Flurry, God’s Interest in Our Young People, November 16, 2016.)
PCG has long had a reputation for authoritarian behavior. This ban against smartphones for PCG's students is yet further evidence for this.

4 comments:

  1. Very disturbing, as is much of the news coming out of the Flurry camp. The worst report over the past year involved an individual who was not allowed to take Passover because apparently he admitted to one of the ministers that he had used a little Neosporin on a cut.

    When we imagine all of the uses of smart phones in a free society, it is easy to see why the Flurrys would ban them. They virtually defy censorship. Unauthorized videos and recordings can be made, these making it impossible for the administration to deny or spin the truth of different happenings. I'd just bet that there is an internal debate ongoing as to what constitutes a smart phone!

    I wonder if they allow ipads and tablets. The feasibility of the Armstrong movement has always been based on their unidirectional and unilateral control of information. Having access to very powerful tools of research provides for one a type of artificial intelligence. This simulates a raising of the human IQ, which would present urgent problems in an anti-intellectual setting.

    BB

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  2. It's all about accountability. If people have access to their smart phones and start comparing notes, pretty soon those same people may start asking questions -- questions that the cult leadership do not want answered.

    It has to be nipped in the bud.

    You can't really have total slavery with freedom of information.

    More and more it seems that maybe you can't, as Abraham Lincoln said, fool all the people all the time, but the trick is to make it so it doesn't matter....

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  3. Again, educational organizations that deliberately scuttle "teachable moments". Learning the responsible use of new technology would be so beneficial to young people. Does HWA College have a lot of phonebooths on campus?
    It reminds me of Bob Thiel's recent denouncing the evils of Crowdsourcing.

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  4. A day or so prior to this news coming out, a friend of mine and I were noting the fact that if you don't have a smart phone these days, you are not even taken seriously as a member of the human race! This is another serious attempt at isolation.

    BB

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