REVOLUTION IN HOME
SCHOOLING
By
Samuel L. Blumenfeld
May
24, 2002
NewsWithViews.com
The only effective group of
citizens today in open opposition to big government are the home
schoolers. They are the
only Americans willing to take on the public education system that props
up the entire statist enterprise of big, intrusive government.
Forget about conservative politicians.
They are more concerned about conserving their legislative
privileges than rolling back increasingly intrusive government.
Although President Bush has
said nice things about home schoolers, he is doing more to expand
federal control over education than any previous Republican president.
His call for nationwide standardized testing is in reality a call
for a federal curriculum, which will be used by the establishment to
continue dumbing down the nation. Even with the multi-billion dollar literacy initiative
attached to the No Child Left Behind reform bill, it is expected that
the educators who get the money will continue to provide faulty reading
instruction to America’s children.
In the last two months,
I’ve spoken at four home-school conventions in liberal New England,
and there is no doubt that those who attend the conventions are
revolutionaries in the true sense of the word.
They have rejected the tax-supported school system, which is the
chief instrument the totalitarians are using to construct a socially
controlled society. The computers are already in place in Washington, and the data is pouring
in.
Only by reasserting the
need for educational freedom can this nation restore its adherence to
the principles of a free society. Leading
in that fight is the Home School Legal Defense Association, founded by
Michael Farris and other home-schooling attorneys to defend the rights
of American parents to educate their children at home in accordance with
their own values. Two years
ago, Farris founded Patrick Henry College to educate home schoolers in
Constitutional Law and train them to serve as aides to conservative
congressmen who badly need them. Aides
that come out of liberal state universities know little history and not
much about our Constitution.
But the fact that parents
can still legally take their children out of the government schools and
educate them at home is an indication that this revolution can be won
peacefully. What is
important to know is that the home-school movement has reached critical
mass and cannot be destroyed without causing a civil upheaval, and no
politician can afford to let that happen.
After all, there are more parents than teachers, and politicians
know how to count noses as well as dollars.
Why are so many parents
home schooling? Because
they’ve come to the realization that the schools are destroying the
brains of American children. It
all starts in the first grade where teaching methods are used to
deliberately cause dyslexia and reading disability.
The method is popularly known as whole language, or the sight
method, in which children are required to memorize a sight vocabulary.
That is, they are required to memorize English printed words as
whole configurations, like Chinese characters.
Sounds harmless enough, unless you understand that that kind of
memorization results in a conditioned response, or a holistic reflex.
What’s wrong with a
holistic reflex? It becomes
an obstacle to learning to read phonetically.
An alphabet is a phonetic system in which letters represent
language sounds. To become
a fluent reader, you must develop a phonetic reflex, not a holistic one.
With a phonetic reflex, achieved through systematic phonics
drill, the reader can easily see the phonetic structure of the words he
is reading and discern the syllabic units that make up a word. But a reader with a holistic reflex, who has been taught
little or no phonics, cannot see the phonetic structure of the words,
because he has the automatic habit of looking at and seeing words as
whole configurations.
In other words, the
holistic reflex and the phonetic reflex are mutually exclusive.
And it was Ivan Pavlov, in his pysch lab in Moscow in the 1920s,
who proved that when an animal is subjected to two mutually exclusive
reflexes, it has a nervous breakdown.
All of this is known to American psychologists, for the results
of Pavlov’s experiments were published in 1932 in a book, The
Nature of Human Conflicts: Researches in Disorganization and Control of
Human Behavior, by A. R. Luria, professor of psychology, State
Institute of Experimental Psychology in Moscow. It was translated by an
American student of Pavlov’s, W. Horsley Gantt.
And to prove the point, all
we have to do is quote Dr. Walter Dearborn, professor of educational
psychology at Harvard, who wrote in 1940:
The
principle which we have used to explain the acquisition of a sight
vocabulary is, of course, the one suggested by Pavlov's well-known
experiments on the conditioned response.
This is as it should be. The
basic process involved in conditioning and learning to read is the same.
So
there you have it.
And now you can understand why so many American children are
becoming reading disabled.
The other day, a mother called me on a radio talk show.
She complained that her son was having trouble with reading.
It turned out that the school was teaching phonics and also
requiring the child to memorize a sight vocabulary.
I told her that her son was experiencing a collision of two
mutually exclusive reflexes, which was causing his confusion and
difficulty.
I told her to get my Alpha-Phonics program and teach her child to
read at home.
The
literacy scandal is only one reason why parents are now home schooling.
Other reasons?
There are over four million kids on Ritalin and other drugs;
mind-repelling academic chaos in the classroom; a Mickey-Moused
curriculum of excruciating boredom; pornographic sex education; school
massacres; anti-American multiculturalism; depressing death education;
values clarification that leads to family conflicts; teaching techniques
based on Skinnerian operant conditioning (your child is an animal and
being trained like one); drug education that dare children to try it.
In short, if you love your kids, get them out!
©
Samuel L. Blumenfeld - All Rights Reserved
Samuel L. Blumenfeld
is the author of eight books on education, including “Is Public
Education Necessary?” and “The Whole Language/OBE Fraud,” published
by The Paradigm Company, 208-322-4440.
His reading instruction program, “Alpha-Phonics,” is available
by writing The Tutoring Company, P.O. Box 540111, Waltham,
MA 02454-0111.
www.alpha-phonics.com
www.howtotutor.com
