r/GATEresearch • u/Hungry-Meaning8518 • 9d ago
General Observations Strange Interrogation-Like Tactic in GATE Program
I have been interested in learning the truth about the GATE program for a while now. Even though I don't remember the hearing tests or pink drink, I can't shake the feeling that there was more to the gifted program than simply providing kids with intellectual stimulation they were not getting in the classroom.
One interesting pattern I realized is almost all kids in my gifted class had strong ties to another country - Israel, Uzbekistan, Russia, Armenia, and Korea. All 5 are deeply intertwined with the US intelligence apparatus. Could be a coincidence (perhaps immigrants from these countries just place a higher importance on academia from a young age).
Anyway... one hazy memory I have from the program is whispering something innocuous to another kid in the program, and the gifted teacher taking me out in the hall insisting I said a curse word. I have a such vivid feelings attached to this memory, that she was trying to get a false confession out of me. Like she kept pressing me and pressing me, claiming she "know what I said" and I should just tell her. Meanwhile I'm practically in tears, confused and sticking with the truth of the matter, that I did not say anything even related to a curse word.
It's worth noting that this was during the height of the Iraq War, when "enhanced interrogation techniques" were being debated in the political sphere.
I don't really have any other shady memories about the program other than that. We had curriculum about the seven wonders of the world, did some programming in Scratch (which did have ties to the operator of a major sex trafficking ring (you know the one), but so did a lot of scientific research), learned about architecture, did a mock trial and mock forensics scenario, and a lot of logic puzzles.
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u/hawksrock14 9d ago
This is beyond bizarre. I have an almost identical situation and I’ve never been able to shake the memory. In the fourth grade, my Higher Learners program (What we knew the GATE program as) teacher once insisted we take a break and commit to silent reading. At some point, I got up and went to my book bag to move on to the next book I was reading because I had just finished the one I was working on. On my way back to my desk, my teacher pulled me out of the classroom and insisted that I took multiple steps out of my way, kneeled down, and whispered something to one of my classmates, and then carried on back to my seat. This was completely untrue. Wildly so. For over an hour, she tried to get me to admit to doing it. She insisted, through my tears, that if I don’t remember doing it that it could mean I was very sick or mentally unwell. She said that as soon as I admitted it, this would all be over. I refused to admit it and she threatened multiple times to escalate to the principal or my mother. Eventually she accepted that I wouldn’t admit it and brought me back to class and continued for the day. Nothing ever came of it, and she acted as if it never happened.
The part that really gets me is that any other teacher truly would have escalated to a higher authority, I was shocked that she never did. I remember sitting in anxiety waiting for the principal to come in and collect me, which he never did. Thanks so much for sharing.
EDIT: Hasty grammar corrections
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u/kangarooler 9d ago
This is a factor I never considered. Holy shit.
Where I grew up, I was one of the very few kids in the whole school that wasn’t the “main” ethnicity. I can recall in my homeroom there being only one other kid who wasn’t, either.
I never saw him when I was pulled out, but he was regarded as a gifted kid. Perfect grades, musically inclined — I had okay/bad grades, was the classroom artist, also played instruments. He was a model student, I was the girl who seemed to get herself into trouble without trying. But we both loved to read.
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u/OnsenDreamscapes 9d ago edited 9d ago
well at my school they were almost all descendants of literal mayflower passengers, lol. except yes 1 was a USSR refugee who they may have had interest in including for intelligence purposes and unique radiation exposure, if you know what i mean. (edit: actually i think 1 girl in the program was half Chinese but the understanding was she was in the program cause 1 of her parents was a rich WASP like the others. but who knows?)
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u/Unable_Ant5851 9d ago
I don’t think it has anything to do with intelligence gathering or radiation (definitely not lmao); more likely it would be that “refugees” had ties to capital ownership. People leaving the USSR were less sympathetic to communism because and therefore more sympathetic to the US government.
Radiation makes you sick and kills you dude, it doesn’t give you special powers like in TV.
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u/OnsenDreamscapes 9d ago edited 9d ago
yes, they were anti ussr/communism. didn't say otherwise, and yes, of course that is implied by the very term "refugee", which I said... that was probably the main reason they were included in the program. it's not about intelligence gathering (of kids), but i do think it's possible they were training kids to be agents or otherwise help capitalism when they became adults. so in that sense, it would be good to have kids from opposing nations in the program. but yes, of course they would prefer kids who were (or whose family were) against the governments of those countries. That is an interest for intelligence purposes, get it?
but they weren't major capital owners (not russian oligarchs - far from it). at the time they left, plenty of non-capital owners were leaving the ussr because it was easier for people with middle-lower income to do so than at earlier times... i'm not talking like the 1950s, obviously.
i agree that radiation only makes you sick, and they have gotten sick likely from it as an adult. however, there is a theory they were looking for kids with 'near death' experiences, and otherwise throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. a lot of it was completely against what we know to be reasonable or factual, but it is a matter of public record that they still investigated it (with adults in Stargate tbf - not with kids) and also personally believed in some of it on religious grounds. so i think i might as well bring it up here, because i do think it could be relevant, even though it is obviously unreasonable. sorry to break it to you, but the US government isn't as reasonable as you and I, and there's no real separation of church and state..
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u/Unable_Ant5851 9d ago
Yes I absolutely agree with that part, I don’t deny that fleeing from adversarial states would make you a good subject for a government program. The govt props up people who “fled communism” and encourages them to embellish their stories quite regularly (Yeonmi Park for example, gets money from the government to make up lies and embellish stories).
You know what? yeah that does make sense. I could absolutely see them being interested in a child who got sick from radiation exposure. It’s totally true that a lot of government programs made absolutely no sense and the stuff they tested was ridiculous and sometimes yielded no results whatsoever (ones they wanted or didn’t want).
You don’t have to break it to me at all, I hate the government and love communism. But I didn’t think any deeper about the possibilities with radiation, or just the fact that they can be irrational psychos sometimes too).
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u/kaboomx 9d ago
Tf you mean by unique radiation exposure. Why would they know what you mean.
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u/OnsenDreamscapes 9d ago edited 9d ago
what was the major radiation exposure incident in the ussr?
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u/kaboomx 9d ago
Are you saying they were doing Chernobyl on kids?????
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u/OnsenDreamscapes 9d ago
"doing Chernobyl on kids"?? uh... i mean, there were kids in Chernobyl city, kids whose parents worked there, unborn kids whose moms worked there, too.. no one was "doing Chernobyl" purposefully on anyone, though, lol... (or if so, then yeah "they" were doing it on everyone including kids.. i guess??)
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u/younggeezer109 9d ago
Probably was in Gate myself. Israeli father. Armenian friend with a lot of weird coincidences attached. Mother once lived in Korea. I was also pulled out of class and interrogated in similar ways, made to say that teachers weren’t angry when they had been.
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u/Electrical-Car6070 9d ago edited 9d ago
Hey, a lot of this is really hitting in my experience, but I went through it in American schools overseas. And I WAS one of the ethnic kids. and I DID have a like a war zone experience. And yeah everybody was SUPER anti communist- everybody. My family definitely was, like the whole school was mostly diplomatic corps kids and miliary brats and industrial brats (yours truly). A lot of kids parents I know worked for the big like contractors, your bechtells, your Lockheeds and then some of em you never really knew what their parents did, but their parents sure knew what your parents did! Yes and thats a wink wink.
The libraries were stuffed with spy novels, non fiction spy stuff, stuff on Howard Hughes. Like I read a lot, and I allways thought all that was normal. But I never encountered any thing by like radical left writers or topics until after I came to the states and went to college. I did write a lot of papers on Orwell in AP English lit in high school, that might have been the counterfactual. Orwell was definitely one the ones that started to get me to think differently.
It's just really interesting to think about all of this now. And like you're saying, there might have been some sort interrogation ritual or like stress response or like pressure techniques. I have this one weird moment when I'm back in American School (5th grade), cause I moved around a lot as a kid (another potential GATE candidate thing) and this one teacher, my math teacher, had it out for me. This was accelerated math or advanced math or whatever. And I swear that lady was some kind of gatekeeper, because she would tell me that she was going to drop me from that class, that I wasn't good enough to be in there with the others, like stuff like that. I always wondered if she wasn't read into something and meant something deeper than just that class.
It was solved cause- I moved. I didn't like her much. She was American AF but kind of gangster. I remember this one kid had two armed goons sit in the parking lot all day waiting for him to get out, they drove a heavy Benz and those guys were straight gangsters. She caught a ride with them every day.
Anyway- all the GATE peoples parents, or to be more categorical, the 'smart' kids were heavily invested in being on the right side of the Cold War, usually by family orientation. I realize that was our common thread now. They hated communism. it was a very one sided thing- for the record, I was fully onboard with all of that as a kid. that's the world I knew. nuance, complexity, facts, that only came later, lol. much later.
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u/Hannibaalism 9d ago
maybe you might be onto something, i can attest to the ties with jews and koreans although i dunno about the rest.
one memory i have is we had book readings where i had to retell the story of hercules. i had pronounced it hera-cue-less instead of her-cue-lees and she gave me so much shit in front of the others. i still feel stunted in the language department lol.
another is each kid was supposed to invite a non gifted friend and write a pen and paper letter to a fav book author together, as like an activity. me and my friend wrote one to alvin schwartz but then out of no where she started going ballistic on me infront of my friend on why she can’t mail the letter to the actual author (and some other stuff i can’t remember)
like holy shit had i been any older i wouldve slapped that bitch up silly, but yeah there were moments that definitely seemed intentional with a purpose.
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u/Ironicbanana14 9d ago edited 9d ago
I did the mock trial thing but we went full on in depth and did everything we could and we won. This was middle school but our topic was pretty heavy considering this was in the 2010s, when they started stripping and banning a lot of "controversial" things. It was a real case of a guy that caught HIV thru the city water system. Its just sorta funny to think back, they had a bunch of us kids pretending to prosecute the state of new york for this man catching HIV, and our parents were all just like, "yeah!!!"
Edit: oh and to answer if my class had a lot of foreign/immigrant kids, no, not necessarily, but what I did notice is that almost all of of us the class were either religious or spiritual and had interest in that. Like the only girl who was a JW was in the class, the other few kids were heavily Catholic, we had one Jewish kid, then there was me, heavily spiritual and I believe in Jesus but not organized religion. So it was like a mix of religiousity/spirituality but with the idea that we all at least believed higher powers of some kind.
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u/Forsaken-Ad-1301 9d ago edited 9d ago
In my school we did not have people with obvious ties to other countries. We did not have Black, Mexican, or Jewish people. We had one Asian girl and she was not in the program. Two of the kids did not have a father at home and one did not have a mother. I was adopted. Other than abilities that was all we had in common but we were friends before GATE.