THE
MAKING OF A BLACK UNDERCLASS
By
Samuel L. Blumenfeld
August
26, 2002
NewsWithViews.com
In September 2002, many thousands of black children
will enter first grade in public schools all over America where, inside
of a year, many of them will become full-fledged reading failures and,
thereby, future members of the black underclass. Of course, there is no
reason why anyone with an education should be relegated to the underclass.
But that's the rub. The system will pretend to educate, while systematically
using teaching methods, such as whole language and invented spelling,
that create reading disability and dyslexia, thus putting that child on
the road to academic failure.
Thus, intelligent children who, with proper instruction,
would otherwise become truly literate are relegated to the junk heap of
our society because of a perverse elite that is hell-bent on dumbing down
the nation. Black children suffer the most because their parents, who
themselves have been dumbed down, are least capable of understanding what
is happening to their children in the public schools.
In America we compel children to be subjected to
wholesale educational malpractice with hardly a complaint from our intellectual
establishment. The only people who genuinely care are so-called right-wing
"extremists" who write books critical of the system, which are never reviewed
by the academic community.
Here's what Professor Anthony Oettinger of Harvard
University, a rabid advocate of dumbing down, told an audience of corporate
executives in 1982:
The present "traditional" concept of literacy
has to do with the ability to read and write. But the real question
that confronts us today is: How do we help citizens function well in
their society? How can they acquire the skills necessary to solve their
problems?
Do we, for example, really want to teach people
to do a lot of sums or write in "a fine round hand" when they have a
five-dollar hand-held calculator or a word processor to work with? Or,
do we really have to have everybody literate-writing and reading in
the traditional sense-when we have the means through our technology
to achieve a new flowering of oral communication?
Of course, the original purpose of universal compulsory
education was universal literacy. However, the academic elite is now asking
whether or not everybody ought to be literate. But every parent who puts
a child in a public school expects that school to teach their child to
read in the traditional sense. But now we are dealing with teachers who
ask "do we really want to teach people to do a lot of sums or how to read?"
Since when do we now hire teachers who don't want to teach what parents
expect them to teach? Every child that enters the first grade expects
to be taught to read. What an incredible betrayal of a public trust to
deliberately turn that child into a crippled illiterate!
But make no mistake about it. Even though the educators
have no intention of teaching those children how to do sums, or write
in a fine round hand, or read and write in the traditional sense, they
still want them in the classroom for twelve years. What for? To turn them
into abject failures.
Regardless of whether the child will be going to
a better public school outside his or her neighborhood or to a charter
school, chances are very good that he or she will be trained to read by
one of the whole-language programs that produce reading disability and
dyslexia.
How can this be, you might ask. Hasn't whole language
been thrown out and replaced by intensive, systematic phonics? Unfortunately,
not. The educators may not call their reading program whole language,
but you can be sure that it will be whole language in a new disguise.
The new program is generally referred to as "A Balanced Approach." It
is all part of the dumbing-down agenda, which is the basis of our dumbed-down
curriculum.
The reason why the schools are not teaching reading
by way of intensive, systematic phonics is because there are virtually
no primary teachers capable of doing so. Their training at college emphasized
whole-language instruction. Therefore, even if they wanted to teach intensive,
systematic phonics, they would not know how to do it.
The American public school system has become a sadistic
trap for the unwary. It turns some teachers into sadists, who gain secret
pleasure in watching the students they hate and can't control turn into
failures. And, unfortunately, there is nothing in President Bush's education
reform that will change this. Thus, the only solution for parents is to
get their kids out and either teach them at home or put them in a private
school they can trust.
© 2002
Samuel L. Blumenfeld - All Rights Reserved
Samuel
L. Blumenfeld is the author of eight books on education, many of which
are available through Amazon.com.
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