Kelleigh Nelson
The plain, unvarnished truth is that public education is a shoddy, fraudulent piece of goods sold to the public at an astronomical price. It’s time the American consumer knew the extent of the fraud which is victimizing millions of children each year. —Samuel Blumenfeld
Orwell was dealing with communism and his disillusionment with communism in Russia and what he saw the communists do in Spain. His novel, 1984, was a response to those political situations. Whereas I was interested in more things than the political atmosphere. I was considering the whole social atmosphere: the impact of TV and radio and the lack of education. I could see the coming event of schoolteachers not teaching reading anymore. The less they taught, the more you wouldn’t need books. —Ray Bradbury
Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel. —Socrates
Give me just one generation of youth, and I’ll transform the whole world. —Vladimir Lenin
My maternal grandparents graduated from 8th grade in 1911. Their framed diplomas hang on our library wall. Each diploma states, “Having passed a credible examination in Orthography (the spelling system of a language), Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, Geography, English Grammar, Physiology, United States History, and Music, and having sustained a correct deportment is granted this certificate of proficiency.” Oh, to have these subjects in today’s grammar schools.
I highly doubt any of today’s college graduates could pass the tests my grandparents passed to graduate from 8th grade. Most cannot read at a proficient level. Why? Because phonics has been eliminated, and yet it’s so easy to teach. If America’s children can’t read, they cannot gain knowledge, they cannot read their Bibles, and they cannot read America’s Declaration of Independence or Constitution.
The best approach for the majority of children is systematic phonics, the simple concept of teaching the 26 letters of the alphabet, the 44 sounds they make, and the 70 most common ways to spell those sounds. For most children, learning this basic code unlocks 85 percent of the words in the English language by the end of the first grade. Children of all levels of intelligence can learn to read most words simply by learning the correspondence between sounds and letters.
Parents say their toddlers are so bright, but once they are put into the government education system, which totally lacks phonics and academic training, they become bored little socialists who have been thoroughly brainwashed with leftist ideology. They are victims as education expert Samuel Blumenfeld has so rightly stated, and it was the Unitarians at Harvard University who promoted public education, removing it from the family, churches/synagogues and private institutions so long ago.
Countless books have been written regarding the damaging effects of what American education has become along with the Outcome Based Education Skinnerian International Curriculum and how it destroys our children. For a full overview of the continued damage to America’s children, I would suggest purchasing Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians Are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children, by Samuel Blumenfeld and Alex Newman. Pdf Link
Blumenfeld puts the blame squarely on the shoulders of the educational leaders who decided early in the last century to change the purpose of education from its traditional academic function to a radical social one. High literacy was an obstacle to their progressive agenda, so the teaching of reading had to be changed to produce a more socially desirable result. The results for the nation have been disastrous.
Making Americans Illiterate
In 2012, I was privileged to meet Samuel Blumenfeld at a conference in Maine. Sam’s topic was, “Making Americans Illiterate.”
He told of the destruction of our great country and our education system and commented that in the 1920s, he received an excellent education in reading, writing and arithmetic in New York City. The progressive education push had started, but because of the depression, it had not yet been implemented for lack of funds. Now it flourishes and our children are the subjects of this deliberate corruption of academic education.
Twenty-seven years ago, in 1993, Americans were stunned to learn that nearly 90 million Americans have such poor literacy skills that they can scarcely cope with the demands of our high-tech economy. Imagine the lack of literacy today after nearly 11 years of Common Core State Standards implemented in 48 states in 2009.
Sixty-four percent of all eighth-grade students are unable to read proficiently, according to the National Assessment of Education Progress’ (NAEP) latest report. Eighty-two percent of black students and 77 percent of Hispanic students are not reading proficiently. More than 44 million Americans cannot read or write above a third-grade level. Fifty percent of adults cannot read a book at an 8th grade level, and I believe these statistics are low. Link And fifty percent of college grads have low literacy according to Blumenfeld.
Please understand that NAEP is funded by the Educational Testing Service (ETS) of Princeton, New Jersey which was funded with an initial endowment of $750,000 from the Carnegie Corporation in 1946. There are far reaching negative implications of the relationship between ETS and the Carnegie Corporation.
Since 1999, NAEP has been funded by the federal government and is widely used across the country. Individual states pass legislation to use NAEP as a state test. Parents and legislators mistakenly believe these tests or assessments will give them information about the performance of their children in academic subjects, but this is false. NAEP tracks conformity to government generated goals…i.e., government propaganda and brainwashing of our children.
Phonics
In 1958, a gentleman from the Reading Reform Foundation contacted Samuel Blumenfeld and asked him to help them get phonics back in the schools. Sam was shocked. When he read Rudolf Flesch’s 1955 book, Why Johnny Can’t Read, he understood the dilemma because Flesch explained what was happening in the schools, and that only with phonics can children learn how to read.
Once phonics was eliminated, other methods took its place. Sam found the origin of the “look-say” reading method and it was taken from Rev. Thomas H. Gallaudet who in the 1830s had a school for the deaf and dumb. He devised this technique to teach his students to read because they could not hear sounds. Gallaudet persuaded the Boston schools to use his primer and it ended up a disaster for Boston education, so they returned to phonics until America’s Lenin, John Dewey, showed up around the turn of the last century and started using it again to dumb down America’s children.
John Dewey (1859-1952) began a movement that transformed the American educational landscape. Dewey shared the theory behind this movement in an essay he wrote in 1898 entitled, “The Primary Education Fetish.” He stated, “The plea for the predominance of learning to read in early school life because of the great importance attaching to literature seems to me a perversion.” The foundation of his thinking was the theory of evolution, and he exalted this argument to a new loftier level by applying evolution to education.
John Dewey
Dewey’s movement had a new vision for schools. He wanted to use schools as instruments for the reconstruction of society. Dewey didn’t want to educate children to think for themselves: “Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming where everyone is interdependent.” His vision veered dramatically from the traditional Christ-centered approach to education. Link
Samuel Blumenfeld and Alex Newman discuss this quote in their book Crimes of the Educators: “In other words, deception would have to be used in order for this long-range, complex plan to be successfully implemented.” Yes, they lie and lie, and lie.
Blumenfeld and Newman also share, “Dewey stated that the only way to undermine the capitalist system was to get rid of the emphasis primary schools placed on the development of high literacy and independent intelligence.” According to Dewey, “It is one of the great mistakes of education to make reading and writing constitute the bulk of the school work the first two years.”
Dewey’s direction was based on using government schools; minimizing the role of parents (because they might teach things like religion); changing the role of teachers to facilitators; de-emphasizing Latin, the classics, the three Rs (reading, writing, and arithmetic), western history, and history in general (including the study of the Constitution and capitalism); and providing a secular environment. The end product was designed to prepare students to be good citizens in a socialist society (students who don’t read very well or think very well for themselves).
Dumbing Down Americans, Rockefeller’s Included
Yes, making Americans illiterate is a key factor in the dumbing down of the American population. Dewey’s attack on the primary school’s emphasis on teaching children to read had the desired result. Sam Blumenfeld said that back in those days they readily admitted they were socialists, and people ignored them; today many in Congress openly admit their socialism.
The destruction of education began in earnest around 1880. Dewey and his socialist friends found out pretty early, at the expense of four of the richest boys in America, that their new teaching methods would create reading disabilities and dyslexia.
John D. Rockefeller, Sr. had a bunch of girls and one son, John Jr., who was raised by mom and grandma. That one son was dressed in female clothing until age of 8, which wasn’t all that uncommon back then. When Jr. grew up, he had six children; Abby in 1903, John III in 1906, Nelson in 1908, Laurence in 1910, Winthrop in 1912, and David in 1915. Jr. fell in love with the Dewey progressive education system.
One of the great ironies of the Progressive Education Movement is that its leaders were able to convince John D. Rockefeller, Jr. that he ought to give his sons a good progressive education. They convinced him to donate $3 million to the Lincoln School, the new experiment in social education in accordance with Dewey’s radical socialist ideas.
So, Jr. put Nelson, Laurence, Winthrop, and David in the school, which turned them all into dyslexics, proving that progressive reading programs can cause dyslexia. They were all functional illiterates. There wasn’t a one of them who could properly read.
Under Gerald Ford, Nelson Rockefeller became the Vice President, a functional illiterate only a heartbeat away from the presidency. Every time Nelson was to give a speech, he’d take papers to the podium and then set them aside and make some excuse about speaking from his heart. He couldn’t read the speech anyway. Guess who read to him throughout his Vice Presidency? None other than Henry Kissinger!
David Rockefeller, head of the Bilderbergers, wrote in his memoirs that his father was an ardent and generous supporter of Dewey’s educational methods and school reform efforts. Teachers College of Columbia University operated Dewey’s Lincoln school with considerable financial assistance in the early years from the General Education Board as an experimental school designed by the board to put Dewey’s philosophy into practice. Despite the freedom for children to learn and play an active role in their own education, there were drawbacks. He went on to say he had trouble with reading and spelling and found he was dyslexic. His reading ability and proficiency in spelling only improved slightly as he aged. He told that all his siblings except Babs and John had dyslexia to a degree.
It was the progressive look-say reading program that caused the dyslexia. Sam tells in the video that this is the same story with the Bush family. Barbara Bush and several of her sons became dyslexic. She always claimed they were born with this disability; it never occurred to her that the boys were made dyslexic by the progressive socialist Dewey teaching method.
Conclusion
Today’s college snowflakes cannot bear to be offended; they are totally unlike the young men who rushed the beaches of Normandy where many fell to their deaths. Learning disabilities have grown exponentially because of Dewey’s progressive education. Socialism and communitarianism have grown to be acceptable to a majority of young people, especially those who attend colleges or universities.
Dewey surely wouldn’t want students reading the Declaration of Independence as it mentions the Almighty four times, nor would he want the Constitution taught which guarantees our God given freedoms. Both are anathema to Dewey’s socialist society.
In 1979, the high school my daughter attended wanted to remove Latin from the curriculum. We succeeded in keeping two years of Latin, but it wasn’t many years later that it was dropped. Latin is the root of all romantic languages, which makes learning those languages so much easier.
Entrusting your children to government schools guarantees they will not be able to read, do math, write properly, spell, or get an academic education. Sacrificing them sacrifices our future.
Post Script: Samuel Blumenfeld passed on to Glory in 2015. His brilliance is still missed by millions.
