The Weekly Sam: The Whole-Language Fraud by Samuel L. Blumenfeld
Back in 1955, Rudolf Flesch wrote Why Johnny Can’t Read, which has become a
classic in educational literature. In that book American parents found out for the first
time why their children were having such a difficult time learning to read. Most of the
parents had been taught to read by way of the centuries-old alphabetic phonics
method, and they assumed that the schools were still using the same methods. Thus it
came as somewhat of a shock when they found out that their children were being
taught to read by a new and very different method.
Flesch explained that in the early 1930s, the professors of education changed the
way reading was taught in American schools. They threw out the alphabetic phonics
method, which is the proper way to teach anyone to read an alphabetic writing system,
and they put in a new whole-word, look-say, or sight method that taught children to
read English as if it were Chinese, an ideographic writing system. Flesch explained
that when you impose an ideographic teaching method on an alphabetic writing
system, you get reading disability.
Actually, Flesch was not the first to make this observation. The first man to do so
was Dr. Samuel T. Orton, a neuropathologist who had studied cases of reading
disability in Iowa in the late 1920s. He came to the conclusion that the cause of the
childlren’s problems was the new sight method of teaching reading, and he wrote an
article on the subject which appeared in the Feburary 1929 issue of the Journal of
Educational Psychology, entitled “The ‘Sight Reading ‘ Method of Teaching Reading as
a Source of Reading Disability.” Dr. Orton wrote:
“I wish to emphasize at the beginning that the strictures which I have to offer here do
not apply to the use of the sight method of teaching reading as a whole but only to its
effects on a restricted group of children for whom, as I think we can show, this
technique is not only not adapted but often proves an actual obstacle to reading
progress, and moreover I believe that this group is one of considerable size and
because here faulty teaching methods may not only prevent the acquisition of
academic education by children of average capacity but may also give rise to far
reaching damage to their emotional life.”
Unfortunately. Dr. Orton’s warning fell on deaf ears, and the professors of education
launched their new textbooks on the education market, the most famous of which were
the Dick and Jane basal readers. It didn’t take long for the reading problems to begin
showing up. Parents began to hear of a new reading disorder called dyslexia, which
many children were coming down with. In April of 1944, Life magazine ran a major
article on the subject, reporting :
“Millions of children in the U.S. suffer from dyslexia which is the medical term for
reading difficulties, It is responsible for about 70% of the school failures in 6- to 12
year-age group, and handicaps about 15% of all grade-school children. Dyslexia may
stem from a variety of physical ailments or combination of them — glandular imbalance,
heart disease, eye or ear trouble — or from a deep-seated psychological disturbance
that ‘blocks’ a child’s ability to learn. It has little or nothing to do with intelligence and
is usually curable. ”
The article went on to describe the case of a little girl with an I. Q . of 118 who was
being examined at the Dyslexia Institute of Northwestern University. After her tests, the
doctors concluded that the little girl needed “thyroid treatments, removal of tonsils and
adenoids, exercises to strengthen her eye muscles.” The article concluded:
“Other patients may need dental work, nose, throat or ear treatment, or thorough
airing out of troublesome home situations that throw a sensitive child off the track of
normality. In the experience of the institute these range from alcoholic fathers to
ambitious mothers who try to force their children too fast in schooL”
Strange as it seems, no one at Life seemed to know that Dr. Orton existed or that in
1929 he had identified the cause of dyslexia: the ideographic way of teaching reading.
In fact, Dr. Orton had popularized the term dyslexia.
In any case, by 1954 it was clear to a lot of intelligent people what was causing the
reading problem. Collier’s magazine of Nov. 26, 1954 explained it all in an article
entitled “Why Don’t They Teach My Child to Read?” by Howard Whitman.
He wrote:
“The man next to me in the airport bus entering Pasco, Washington , said “My six-year-old reads words
at school and can ‘t read the same words when I point them out at home in the newspaper. In school today
the children aren’t taught to read — they’re taught to memorize.”
A man in the seat ahead chimed in, “Everything is pictures. My youngest is in the sixth grade. He’ll still
come across a word like pasture and he remembers a picture in his early reader and calls it meadow ”
Neither passenger knew I was making a national study of modern education; they volunteered their
remarks, sharing something they were concerned — and troubled — about. Like them, thousands of other
American parents with first-grade children who are not catching on to reading as taught by the modernists,
and those with upper-grade children handicapped by lack of a solid reading foundation, are concerned
and troubled.
But most of all they are puzzled. Why is reading taught this way? A thousand times one hears the
question, “Why don ‘t they teach my child to read?” How can schools tolerate a method which turns out
many children of eight, nine and older who stare helplessly at a word (not on their memory list) and cannot
make a stab at reading it? What has happened to the method of teaching reading sound by sound ,
syllable by syllable, so that a child can at least make a reasonable attempt at reading any word?
Two basic teaching methods are in conflict here. One is the phonetic approach (known as phonics), the
old-fashioned way in the view of modern educators. They are likely to call it the “spit and spatter” or “grunt
and groan” method, satirizing the way youngsters try to sound out letters and syllables.
The other method, which the modernists have put into vogue, is the word-memory plan — also known as
“sight reading,” “total word configuration” or “word recognition.” It has the more friendly nickname of “look
and say,” since the youngster is supposed simply to look at a word and say it right out. He memorizes the
“shape” of the word, the configuration, and identifies it with pictures in his workbook Often he is taught to
recognize phrases or whole sentences in his picture book, or on flash (poster) cards, before he can
independently sound out and pronounce such simple words as cat or ball.
The fundamental difference in approach in the two methods reaches deep into philosophy and
scientific theory. Thinkers have wrangled for centuriesover which comes first, the whole or its parts (an
argument perhaps as endless as that over the priority of the “chicken or the egg”). The phonics
advocates say the parts come first; the word-memory people say we start with the whole and the parts fall
into place in due course.
The article explained it all quite clearly. The cause of the reading problems crlildren
were having was the teaching method. And what happened to that method after so
much criticism and parental concern? Did the educators change anything? Did they
admit that they had been wrong? On the contrary. They stuck to their guns and
insisted that their new way of teaching was the better way. And if parents didn’t like it
they could lump it. In fact, in 1956, the professors of reading organized the
International Reading Association, which has become the most powerful professional
lobby for the advocacy of the look-say method. In the main, its presidents have been
the authors of the leading reading textbooks used in the schools.
Does that indicate some sort of conflict of interest between professors of reading
who train their students to teach by their methods, who train the directors of reading
who then recommend the books to the school boards, who receive royalties from the
publishers who sell the books to the school districts? These same professors also
control the professional publications that show a distinct bias and hostility toward
phonics. If that isn’t a conflict of interest, then what is?
There is also the issue of deception. Have the educators been deceiving the
parents all these years? They never asked the parents whether or not they wanted
their children to be taught to read English as if it were Chinese. Have they deliberately
foisted on the American people a defective teaching method which has caused
enormous harm to millions of children, many of whom are now adults? Are they not
responsible for our nation’s precipitous decline in literacy?
In the early ’60s, Dr. Jeanne Chall obtained a grant from the Carnegie Corporation
to do an in-depth study of the two reading instruction methods to find out which method
was the more effective. The study was finally published in 1967 under the title,
Learning to Read: The Great Debate. Dr. Chall’s conclusion was that a phonics
approach, that is, decoding, was the more effective teaching method for beginning
reading.
You would have thought that Dr. Chall had settled the issue and that phonics had
won the great debate. But no such thing happened. True, for a time more phonics
was included in whole-word basal reading programs, but the basic ideographic
approach remained unchanged. The professors of reading remained totally
committed to their methodology. In fact, they invented a new term to describe it,
“psycholinguistics. ”
Indeed, it was Professor Kenneth Goodman who formulated the new definition of
reading which he articulated in the May 1967 Journal of the Reading Specialist as
follows :
“Reading is a selective process. It involves partial use of available language cues
selected from perceptual input on the basis of the reader’s expectation. As this partial
information is processed, tentative decisions are made to be confirmed, rejected or
refined as reading progresses.
“More simply stated, reading is a psycholinguistic guessing game.”
That said it all. Moreover, it indicated that the professor made no distinction
between an alphabetic writing system and an ideographic one. And that was the key
to the deception. Some years later Goodman told a reporter from The New York
Times (July 9, 1975) that it was perfectly all right if a child read “pony” for “horse”
because the child had gotten the meaning.
A professor of reading who does not understand the difference between an
alphabetic writing system and an ideographic one is like a mechanic who doesn’t
understand the difference between a horse-and-buggy and an automobile. The
alphabet did for the ancient world what the computer is doing for the modern world. It
made learning to read easy and speeded up the reading process enormously. It was a
far more accurate and precise form of writing. It permitted a tremendous growth in
vocabulary, thereby expanding the use of language and the ability to think. It
enhanced the exchange of information and knowledge. It helped produce better
speech because now language was visible in the form of symbols representing
speech sounds.
And because it permitted man to do so much more with so much less,
It is probably the single most significant invention of man.
To require children to give up all of the advantages of alphabetic writing in favor of
an ideographic theory of reading makes no sense at all. What have we gained by it?
Nothing. What have we lost by it? The literacy of a nation. It is time for the American
people to decide that enough is enough. The experiment has gone on far too long.
The great debate should have been settled a long time ago.
But now, in the ’90s, we are in a new phase of the debate — open warfare. This is
what we were told by Education Week of March 21, 1990 in an article entitled, “From a
‘Great Debate’ to a Full-Scale War: Dispute Over Teaching Reading Heats Up.” The
article states :
In 1967, one of the most prominent researchers in reading instruction, Jeanne S. Chall, analyzed the
controversy that was then raging in the field in an influential book called The Great Oebate.
Today, nearly a quarter of a century later, the Harvard University scholar says the “debate” not only
persists, but has, in fact, escalated to a full-scale war.
The battle lines are drawn between advocates of phonics, who stress the importance of teaching the
relationships betlween letters and sounds, and those of whole-language methodology, who believe
children should be taught reading by reading whole texts.
And so fierce have their arguments become that two recent attempts to find a common ground — a
federally funded study and a proposal for the 1992 national assessment — have not only failed to quell the
debate but may have exacerbated it.
“It’s always been, in reading, that there was restraint with all our fighting,” Ms. Chail says. “Now it’s as if all
restraints are gone.”
And so, we are now in an educational war, dealing with the very same issues
described by Collier’s magazine in 1954 and Rudolf Flesch in 1955. In all this time,
alphabetic phonics has remained alphabetic phoniCS, but look-say has evolved into
psycholinguistics, which has further eVOlved into whole language. Quite an interesting
metamorphosis. What exactly is whole language?
Whole language is an even more extreme form of look-say. It not only does not
recognize any distinction between an alphabetic writing system and an ideographic
one, it doesn’t even recognize that alphabetic writing is a representation of speech. In
a recently published book, Whole Language: What’s the Difference?, the authors write:
“Oral language, written language, sign language — each of these is a system of
linguistic convention for creating meanings. That means none is ‘the basis’ for the
other; none is a secondary representation of the other.” (page 9)
Those statements not only indicate a lack of understanding of what alphabetic
writing is, but a lack of understanding of its benefits.
Whole language is the latest educational fraud being perpetrated on the American
people. In fact, the whole language fraud is nothing less than the usurpation of
primary education by a group of radical, politicized educators whose goal is not the
improvement of reading but the inculcation of children with collectivist, left-wing ideas.
The Weekly Sam: Making Americans Illiterate: A Key Factor in the Deliberate Dumbing Down of America By Samuel Blumenfeld
( The following is a transcript of a speech given by Sam at a homeschool conference in 2009.)
The planned deliberate dumbing-down of America was started in 1898 by socialist John Dewey
with his attack on the primary school’s emphasis on teaching children to read. This emphasis
sustained the capitalist, individualistic system and it produced high literacy whereby the
average American could read anything and think for himself. Dewey wrote in an essay entitled
The Primary School Fetich:
“The plea for the predominance of learning to read in early school life because of the
great importance attaching to literacy seems to me a perversion … .
No one can clearly set before himself the vivacity and persistency of the child’s motor
instincts at this period, and then call to mind the continued grind of reading and writing,
without feeling that the justification of our present curriculum is psychologically
impossible. It is simply superstition: it is a remnant of an outgrown period of history.”
What Dewey deliberately ignored was the tremendous language learning faculty that every
child is born with, and that teaching a child to read at that early age expands the child’s mastery
of language, which is the key to academic success. A different way of teaching reading had to be developed that would lower the literacy level of the American people. Dewey and his socialist colleagues were determined to change
individualistic America into a collectivist society.
Dewey got his egalitarian, utopian ideas from Edward Bellamy’s novel, Looking Backward, a
fantasy of a socialist America in the year 2000. That book is still being read today in American
universities. Dewey’s plan required that a new educational curriculum should be developed and tested in
private “experiment stations.” He wrote:
“After such schools have worked out carefully and definitely the subject matter of a new
curriculum-finding the right place for language-studies and placing them in their right
perspective-the problems of the more general educational reform will be immensely
simplified and facilitated.”
All of this was being carefully planned by a self-appointed group of socialists who called
themselves “progressives.” They knew that what they were doing was subversive and
treasonous. Indeed, Dewey wrote:
“Change must come gradually. To force it unduly would compromise its final success by
favoring a violent reaction.”
If the changes were so beneficial to America’s children and society, why would they favor a
violent reaction? Obviously, the dumbing-down plan would have to be imposed by stealth,
deceit, and lies. And that is why no progressive educator can be trusted. They have been told
to lie in order to bring about their socialist scheme in our schools.
Did they know that their new teaching methods would create reading disability and dyslexia?
They found out pretty early at the expense of four of the richest boys in America. Believe it or
not John D. Rockefeller, Jr., was a great admirer of John Dewey, and he put his four sons,
Nelson, David, Laurence, and Winthrop, in the Lincoln School, one of the experimental schools
called for by Dewey. Rockefeller donated over $3-million (worth $300-million today) to the
school. The result? All four boys became dyslexic! But of course that didn’t stop the
progressives from implementing their plan. Incidentally, when Nelson was Governor of New York, he wrote in the Reading Teacher of
March 1972:
I appreciate the opportunity to make some observations on the importance of reading
for I am a prime example of one who has had to struggle with the handicap of being a
poor reader while serving in public office.
On many occasions, upon confronting an audience, I have elected to announce that I
have thrown away my speech in favor of giving the audience the benefit of my
spontaneous thouphts. And, usually, I have added: “Besides, I went to a progressive
school and don’t read very well anyhow.” This, of course, is a trial to ~y very able speech
writer as well as a libel upon all the devoted teachers and professors who saw me
through the years of my formal education. It is also usually a rather popular device to
communicate with the audience on a much more intimate basis-but the truth is that it
serves primarily to cover the fact that I really wish I could do a better job of reading a
speech or other public statement. And as you know, Nelson Rockefeller was vice president under Ford. In other words, a
functional illiterate was a heartbeat from becoming President.
David Rockefeller writes in his Memoirs:
“It was Lincoln’s experimental curriculum and method of instruction that distinguished it
from all other New York schools of the time. Father was an ardent and generous
supporter of John Dewey’s educational methods and school reform efforts. . . .
Teacher’s College of Columbia University operated Lincoln, with considerable financial
assistance in the early years from the General Education Board, as an experimental
school designed to put Dewey’s philosophy into practice.
Lincoln stressed freedom for children to learn and to play an active role in their own
education… . But there were some drawbacks. In my case, I had trouble with reading
and spelling, which my teachers, drawing upon “progressive” educational theory, did
not consider significant. They believed I was simply a slow reader and that I would
develop at my own pace. In reality I have dyslexia, which was never diagnosed, and I
never received remedial attention. As a result my reading ability, as well as my
proficiency in spelling, improved only marginally as I grew older. All my siblings, except
Babs and John, had dyslexia to a degree.”
Note that David Rockefeller says he couldn’t learn to read because he was dyslexic, when it was
the progressive look-say reading program that caused his dyslexia.
Returning to Dewey, he advised that a statement by psychologists was needed to give the new
reading instruction program the backing of educational authority. A psychologist by the name
of Edmund Burke Huey, who got his Ph.D. at Clark University under G. Stanley Hall, was chosen
to write the needed book. It was published in 1908 under the title The Psychology and
Pedagogy of Reading. In it, Huey reiterated Dewey’s views on the teaching of reading, and he
provided an idea of how the new whole-word, look-say method of teaching worked. He wrote:
‘It is not necessary that the child should be able to pronounce correctly or pronounce at
all, at first, the new words that appear in his reading, any more than that he should spell
or write all the new words that he hears spoken. If he grasps, approximately, the total
meaning of the sentence in which the new word stands, he has read the sentence….
And even if the child substitutes words of his own for some that are on the page,
provided that these express the meaning, it is an encouraging sign that the reading has
been real, and recognition of details will come as it is needed. The shock that such a
statement will give to many a practical teacher of reading is but an accurate measure of
the hold that a false i,deal has taken hold of us, viz., that to read is to say just what is
upon the page, instead of to think each in his own way, the meaning that the page
suggests.”
There you have the whole-language philosophy of reading well described in 1908, and practiced
today as Huey described it. In other words, the progressives knew in 1908 what kind of readers
their teaching methods would produce. Indeed, Huey’s mentor, G. Stanley Hall had this to say
about literacy in 1911:
“Very many men have lived and died and been great, even the leaders of their age,
without any acquaintance with letters. The knowledge which illiterates acquire is
probably on the whole more personal, direct, environmental and probably a much
larger proportion of it practical. Moreover, they escape much eye-strain and mental
excitement, and, other things being equal, are probably more active and less sedentary .
. . . Perhaps we are prone to put too high a value both upon the ability required to attain
this art and the discipline involved in doing so, as well as the culture value that comes to
the citizen with his average of only six grades of schooling by the acquisition of this art.
Fifteen years later, a neuropathologist at Iowa State University, Dr. Samuel T. Orton, made a
survey of students with reading problems, and came to the conclusion that they were being
caused by the new method of teaching reading. Alarmed, he wrote an article, The “Sight Word”
Method of Teaching Reading as a Cause of Reading Disability, which was published in the
Journal of Educational Psychology in February 1929. The Journal was being edited by the very
professors who were about to impose this new teaching method on all the public schools of
America. Orton wrote:
“I wish to emphasize at the beginning that the strictures which I have to offer here do not
apply to the use of the sight method of teaching reading as a whole but only to its
effects on a restricted group of children for whom, as I think we can show, this
technique is not only not adapted but often proves an actual obstacle to reading
progress, and moreover I believe that this group is one of considerable educational
importance both because of its size and because here faulty teaching methods may not
only prevent the acquisition of academic education by children of average capacity but
may also give rise to far reaching damage to their emotional life.”
What Orton had actually done is convince the educators that their new method of teaching
reading would do exactly what they intended it to do: destroy American literacy. In the next
two decades reading programs like Dick and Jane, Tom and Betty, and others were adopted by
the schools of America.
By 1944, Life magazine could publish an article on dyslexia which, when read today, indicates
the incredible lengths to which the educators had gone to find fault with the children who
could not learn to read by the look-say method. The article reads:
“Millions of children in the U.S. suffer from dyslexia which is the medical term for reading
difficulties. It is responsible for about 70% of the school failures in 6- to 12-year-age
group, and handicaps about 15% of all grade-school children. Dyslexia may stem from a
variety of physical ailments or combination of them-glandular imbalance, heart
disease, eye or ear trouble-or from a deep-seated psychological disturbance that
“blocks” a child’s ability to learn.”
Was this ignorance or deliberate deception on the part of Life magazine? It should be
remembered that Henry R. Luce, a Yale graduate, was a member of Skull and Bones.
Meanwhile, in the Soviet Union, some interesting psychological experiments had been
conducted by Dr. Ivan Pavlov, in his Moscow laboratory, on techniques of artificially creating
behavioral disorganization. All of this was well described in a book written by one of Pavlov’s
colleagues, Alexander Luria, The Nature of Human Conflicts, Researches in Disorganization and
Control of Human Behavior, published in 1932. It had been translated from the Russian by W.
Horsley Gantt, an American psychologist who had spent the years 1922 to 1929 working in
Pavlov’s laboratories in the Soviet Union. In his preface to the book, Luria wrote:
“The research described here are the results of the experimental psychological
investigations at the State Institute of Experimental Psychology, Moscow, during the
period 1923-1930. The chief problems ofthe author were an objective and materialistic
description of the mechanisms lying at the basis of the disorganization of human
behavior and an experimental approach to the laws of its regulation …. To accomplish
this it was necessary to create artificially affects and models of experimental neuroses
which made possible an analysis of the laws lying at the basis of the disintegration of
behavior.”
In describing the results of the experiments, Luria wrote:
“Pavlov obtained very definite affective “breaks,” an acute disorganization of behavior,
each time that the conditioned reflexes collided, when the animal was unable to react
to two mutually exclusive tendencies, or was incapable of adequately responding to any
imperative problem.”
One of the reasons why we know so much about Humanistic Psychology today is because of the
defection of one of its major practitioners, Dr. William Coulson, a former colleague of Carl
Rogers and Abraham Maslow. He testified how fraudulent the Encounter Movement was as
science and how destructive it was in practice. The encounter idea was first developed at the National Training Laboratory (NTL) at Bethel, Maine, sponsored by the National Education Association. It was founded in 1948 by Kurt Lewin,
a German social psychologist who invented “sensitivity training” and “group dynamics,” or the
psychology of the collective. Lewin’s work was very much in harmony with John Dewey’s
collectivist educational philosophy.
Lewin’s work in Germany in the 1920s was also in harmony with the experiments taking place in
Moscow on techniques of artificially creating behavioral disorganization. Alexander Luria
wrote:
“K. Lewin, in our opinion, has been one of the most prominent psychologists to elucidate
this question of the artificial production of affect and of experimental disorganization of
behavior. The method of his procedure-the introduction of an emotional setting into
the experience of a human, the interest of the subject in the experiment-helped him to
obtain an artificial disruption of the affect of considerable strength…. Here the
fundamental conception of Lewin is very close to ours.” (pp. 206-7)
Lewin died in 1947 shortly after establishing the National Training Laboratory at Bethel, Maine.
Sensitivity training was considered his most original achievement. Carl Rogers considered
sensitivity training to be “perhaps the most significant social invention of this century.”
B.F. Skinner writes in his autobiography:
“In May 1961, Eve and I were members of a delegation of behavioral scientists who
visited Russia, Czechoslovakia, and Poland under the auspices of the National Academy
of Science and the State Department… . We saw a good deal of Alexander Luria at the
Neurological Institute. … Although Luria was the best known Russian psychologist, he
and his wife, together with his daughter and her husband and an older woman, lived in
three small rooms. He explained that they were near his work and a library. He had a
dacha.”
Skinner discussed the idea of setting up a Walden Two with Luria. Skinner was also well
acquainted with Kurt Lewin. He writes:
“Kurt Lewin was up here a month or two ago [in 1938] … . Have you seen his new book?
He diagrams several lever-pressing situations, and did the same for me for two or three
hours. He is sure we agree, but fundamentally there is the same old ghost of purpose
standing between us.” (p.224)
So it is obvious that Skinner was quite aware of the experiments in artificially creating
behavioral disorganization. The lever-pressing situations relate to Skinner’s animal training
experiments. Indeed, he boasted, “I could make a pigeon a high achiever by reinforcing it on a
proper schedule.” He also wrote in Walden Two:
“We can achieve a sort of control under which the controlled, though they are following
a code much more scrupulously than was ever the case under the old system,
nevertheless feel free. They are doing what they want to do, not what they are forced to
do. That’s the source of the tremendous power of positive reinforcement– there’s no
restraint and no revolt. By careful cultural design, we control not the final behavior, but
the inclination to behave– the motives, desires, the wishes.”
Skinner also wrote:
“Give me a child and I’ll shape him into anything.”
The any things now control our culture. And that is why America is in the mess it is.
Skinners colleague Engelman applied Skinnerian teaching principles to Direct Instruction,
Mastery Learning, and to the OBE-Outcome Based Education-curriculum. The reason they
work so poorly is because of the complete absence of the spiritual component which must be
part of education. Godless, atheist education leads to purposeless education. The computer is
the perfect Skinner box because it connects directly with the student and can change his values.
That is why the computer will prevail in the school because of its ability to control the student’s
learning,
Luria’s book describes how dyslexia is created by the clash between phonics and look-say. The
phonics reader, with a phonetic reflex, automatically sees the phonetic structure of the written
word while the look-say reader (with a whole-word reflex) automatically looks at each word as
a picture and cannot see the phonetic structure of the word. The clash of reflexes causes
dyslexia. Skinner also became a member of the Pavlovian Society at Johns Hopkins founded by Horsley
Gantt, Luria’s translator.
By 1955, the reading problem had become so acute that Rudolf Flesch felt compelled to write
his eye-opening bestseller, Why Johnny Can’t Read. It gave the reason in no uncertain terms:
The teaching of reading-all over the United States, in all the schools, and in all the
textbooks-is totally wrong and flies in the face of all logic and common sense.
And then he explained how the alphabetic phonics method-the proper way to teach children
to read-had been replaced by a look-say, whole word method that was causing untold harm to
the children. What was the reaction of the professors of education? They circled the wagons and created
the International Reading Association which became the citadel of the whole-word method.
And they did everything in their power, through their professional publications, to denounce
and discredit Flesch. In my book, The New Illiterates, http://blumenfeld.campconstitution.net/Books/New%20Illiterates.pdf I quote the professors ad nauseam. Nevertheless, Flesch’s book awakened many parents, which led to a revival of phonics
programs, but the reaction was not strong enough to derail the dumbing down process in the
schooLS.
In 1961, Watson Washburn, a New York attorney, created the Reading Reform Foundation and
he asked me to become a member of his National Advisory Council. At that time, I was an
editor at Grosset & Dunlap and knew nothing about the reading problem. He advised me to
read Flesch’s book and that’s how I became involved in the reading problem.
I attended all of the Foundation’s conferences, which, of course, were totally ignored by the
reading establishment. However, knowing that millions of children were being denied proper
phonics reading instruction, I decided to write a reading program that any parent could use to
teach their child to read at home. The result was Alpha-Phonics, which I consider to be the
most effective, easiest to use and least expensive reading program ever created.
Meanwhile, the most noteworthy event in the mid-sixties was the completion of Jeanne Chall’s
study of reading instruction methods and its publication in 1967 under the title Learning to
Read: The Great Debate. Three years of intensive research confirmed what phonics proponents
had known all along, that a phonics “code-emphasis” method used in the beginning of reading
instruction produced better readers than methods which began with a “meaning emphasis”
(whole words).
Since Chall’s book was written for the teaching profession rather than the general public it did
not have the impact that Flesch’s book had. She was criticized by the reading establishment
and spent the rest of her professional life in constant conflict with them.
In 1981, Flesch wrote another book, Why Johnny Still Can’t Read, bringing the reading problem
up to date. This time the reading establishment completely ignored him. By then the look-say
method had morphed into the “psycholinguistic” method and finally the Whole Language
method. A new generation parents and teachers were as confused as ever when it came to
reading instruction.
Meanwhile, those parents who were informed enough to know what was going on, left the
public schools and began to homeschool. My Alpha-Phonics program helped thousands of
them teach their kids to read. As for the public schools, reading continued to deteriorate.
By 1981, a Harvard professor, Dr. Anthony Oettinger, was bold enough to tell an audience of
Telecon executives:
“The present ‘traditional’ concept of literacy has to do with the ability to read and write..
.. 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?”
“Do we have to have everyone literate?” That’s the attitude of the elite. But then why are we
spending billions on public schools if it is not to make everyone literate?
In 1983, we had the Nation at Risk report, which stated:
“If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre
educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of
war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves.”
Finally, someone was actually identifying the treason of our educators.
Did this alarming report change anything? According to Parents for Choice in Education:
On the 25th anniversary of this sobering report, the American education system remains
in a state of crisis. We are “A Nation Still at Risk'”
In 2008 the U.S. Department of Education released a report entitled, A Nation
Accountable: Twenty-five Years After A Nation at Risk, stating:
“If we were ‘at risk’ in 1983, we are at even greater risk now. The rising demands of our
global economy, together with demographic shifts, require that we educate more
students to higher levels than ever before. Yet, our education system is not keeping
pace with these growing demands.”
A year earlier, in November 2007, the National Endowment for the Arts issued an alarming
report on the present state of literacy in America, Reading at Risk. According to the Report, the
number of 17-year-olds who never read for pleasure increased from 9 percent in 1984 to 19
percent in 2004. About half of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 never read books for
pleasure. Endowment Chairman Dana Gioia stated:
“This is a massive social problem. We are losing the majority of the new generation. They will not achieve anything close to their potential because of poor reading. The survey found that only a third of high-school seniors read at a proficient
level. ”
And proficiency is not a high standard,” said Gioia. “We’re not asking them to be able to
read Proust in the original. We’re talking about reading the daily newspaper.”
What was disappointing about the Report is that it did not state the cause of this decline in
national literacy: the refusal of our educators to use the time-tested, traditional phonies
reading instruction programs that once made Americans the most literate people on earth.
And finally, in 2012 the Council on Foreign Relations has gotten into the act by issuing another
alarming report on American education. The CFR Task Force was chaired by Joe I. Klein, former
head of New York City public schools, and Condoleezza Rice, former U.S. Secretary of State in
the Bush administration, two very prominent members of the elite establishment. Klein had
this to say about the reading problem in an interview conducted by Jon Meacham:
“People ask me, what surprised me most about being chancellor? I used to go to public
schools in this city and walk into a high school and ask a kid to read, and the kid could
not read. I don’t even mean comprehend; I mean read the words on a text. How
the hell can a kid be in a school system for a decade and not read?
I mean, so, you know, this kid — now, it may be that financial literacy will incentivize
them, or entrepreneurism, or some ofthe kind of project-driven work that should
happen. But it’s just not going to win in the 21st century to have kids in high schools
who can’t read.”
When Klein was chancellor, I wrote him a letter with a proposal to help solve the schools’
reading problem by using Alpha-Phonics to turn the worst school in the city to the best school
in the city. Some months later I received a very nice letter from Klein who said he appreciated
my interest. And that was all. My proposal was not even considered. Which told me
something about how constricted members of the establishment are in considering true
solutions to the problems they deal with. The solutions must be within politically correct
parameters. And that is why the reforms offered by the CFR task force will get nowhere.
Their main recommendation was for the schools to adopt Common Core Standards.
Concerning the Common Co·re idea, this is what former Secretary of Education Margaret
Spelling, a member of the Task Force, had to say in the Meacham interview:
“I would target the Common Core effort because I do think that’s the way out of the
wilderness. But I wouldn’t do it with — today let’s go try to do, you know, get to millions of
teachers on how to — how to do it.
‘We got to get, you know, very smart and strategic with places like the College Board and
the big publishers, the big technology companies, to get some research-based tools that
are scalable and systematic. And so this idea that we can expect every single teacher,
master teacher or otherwise, many of whom are not capable of doing this in the first
place, to sort of do the magic in their own classroom is just unreasonable, period,
paragraph. And so, you know, we gotta get smarter about that and THEN deploy it. I
mean, I wouldn’t even talk to the teachers about the Common Core at the moment until
we get our act together about what it is and how it works and, you know, materials around
it and assessments built to it. Otherwise, I fear it’s going to be one of those, “we tried that,
and it did not work.”
Considering the difficulties pointed out by Spelling in implementing the Common Core
throughout the education system, we can foresee that educator resistance will kill it. So there
is no possibility of true education reform as long as the nation tolerates a public system of
education that has literally become a highly organized criminal enterprise.
What are its crimes? Its teaching methods injure children’s brains, which is a form of child
abuse. It contributes to the delinquency of minors by pornographic sex ed and the distribution
of condoms. It destroys a child’s religious beliefs and leads many students into atheism,
nihilism or self-destructive Satanism. It pushes powerful drugs like Ritalin and Adderall on kids
in the schools., which, if done on the streets would put you in jail. And it extorts billions of
dollars of the taxpayer’s money on the false pretext that they are educating the children.
So where do we go from here? If enough Tea Party people are elected to Congress in
November, we may be able to get them to close down the Federal Department of Education.
We should work to get the public schools back under local control. We must shut down the
computerized data collection system on all students in America. In short, we must get the
federal government out of the education business and restore the schools to the people in the
communities who pay for them and send their children to them.
We, at this conference, should form a permanent organization which will ride herd on the
legislators not only in Washington but in all the state legislatures. We may be few in numbers
but our message will appeal to the Tea Party.
The Blumenfeld Archives
American Minute with Bill Federer LABOR DAY: Railroad Strikes, Grover Cleveland, Eugene Debs, Socialist Party of America, Outsourcing
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The Weekly Sam: How to Increase Your Vocabulary By Samuel L. Blumenfeld
Evolutionists love to remind us how close our DNA is to that of the chimpanzee or
gorilla. But there is one very sharp distinction between human beings and every other
species, including the various kinds of monkeys. God gave us the faculty of language,
the faculty of speech.
Why did God so endow the human being with this remarkable ability? If you read the
Bible you will find the answer. We read in Genesis 1:27: “And God created man in his
own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”
We were created to be like God, to have certain attributes of God, but not be God. The
next passage makes that clear: “And God blessed them, and God said unto them, be
fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the
fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and of every living thing that moveth upon
the earth.”
And in order to do all of that God gave man a brain properly endowed with extraordinary
intelligence in order to carry out these huge tasks. The Bible further states in Genesis
2:19: “And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every
fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and
whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.”
In other words, God made Adam into a lexicographer–an inventor of names, a creator of
vocabulary. Indeed, God gave man the power of language in order to serve four
different functions: The first, to know God and be able to communicate with Him. We
do that every day through prayer. We’ve done that by writing the Bible, the history of
man’s relations with God. Second, we use language to know one’s mate with the ability
to communicate at the deepest intimate level. Third, we use language to be able to know
other human beings and thereby create society. And Fourth, we use language to know
oneself. We are constantly speaking inwardly to ourselves in order to understand who
and what we are, and in order to transform our dreams and ideas into reality.
So why should we want to expand our vocabularies? Because knowledge is power, and
every new word represents new knowledge. And how does one increase one’s
vocabulary? A good place to start is by reading Shakespeare’s plays, all 36 of them
which were published in the First Folio in 1623. It is said that Shakespeare invented
more new words than any other writer in English literature. New words are needed
when it is necessary to convey the meaning of something for which no word exists.
Another good way to expand one’s vocabulary is to read 19th century literature, including
Dickens, Carlyle, James Fenimore Cooper, Thackerary, Washington Irving, and other
great masters of the written word, who had extensive, rich vocabularies. Also read the
most literate writers you can find who are not afraid to show off their use of vocabulary.
However, whenever reading such works, keep a blank notebook at your side in which you
can jot down all of the new words you’ve encountered. Then read their definitions in your
dictionary and write your own sentences using these new words. Remember, the more
words you know, the more knowledge you have, for each new word represents new
knowledge.
As we said, new words are needed to express new ideas or actions for which no words
exist. This is particularly true in our hi-tech culture where advances in computer and
internet technology require us to invent new words. Words like “geek” and “nerd” were
invented by students to describe those with a passion for computers and technological
inventions. Such new words are being invented every day.
The fact that God commanded Adam to name every living creature meant that an
important part of being a human was the need to make good use of greatest gift God gave
us, the faculty of language.
.
In other words, man was exalted in a way that no other species was by his Creator.
Thus, increasing and expanding one’s vocabulary is not only necessary for the
advancement of man’s purpose on earth, but also needed to carry out God’s
commandments. Besides having been given the faculty of speech we were also endowed
with a voice-box that could express thoughts and ideas by sounds. An extraordinary
physical phenomenon.
Language, in fact, is the link to the spiritual dimension in our lives. Man is a spiritual as
well as a physical being. We are made of matter by God who is not matter. Indeed, if
you become a physicist, you will find that the deeper you explore the nature of matter,
you will reach virtually no matter at all.
Remember, language is sounds made by the voice box. It has no substance but what it
signals in our heads. But written language has permitted us to make a permanent record
of what is said. That is why we have science, history, and life stories to tell.
It is the exploration of that microcosmic realm that has made it possible for man to
develop computer science in which a million transistors can be put on a microscopic
silicon chip.
So scientists increase our vocabulary every day by making discoveries that have to be
named. Whenever we invent something new, we have to invent words to describe it.
By the way, God put our language faculty in the left hemisphere of our brains. It is our
most valuable piece of brain matter. Without it we would not be human beings. The
right hemisphere deals with space, dimension, art, and perspective. In American schools
teachers force students to use the right brain to perform the functions of the left brain.
The result is dyslexia.
Learning to read must be taught phonetically through intensive phonics so that it
conforms with the functions of the language faculty and expands its power. In fact our
alphabetic reading and writing system is the most successful reading system ever
invented because it conforms with the left brain’s faculty, thus making it easy for anyone
to learn to read.
And so, increase your vocabulary in order to increase the power of your brain and the
power of your mind. Our brains emit dreams, images, and ideas that are not matter, but
are the basis of human power. The more words you know, the more power you will
have to create, grow, and prosper. Indeed, learning the vocabulary of the stock market
may lead you to become a millionaire.
The Blumenfeld Archives: http://blumenfeld.campconstitution.net/Articles-2.htm
The Weekly Sam: America Started with Educational Freedom By Samuel L. Blumenfeld
One of the reasons why the United States of America got off to such a great start is
because we had total educational freedom. When the Constitution was written, there was
already by then a great variety of teaching institutions. The Dames Schools were colonial
preschools in which children were taught the three R’s in preparation for going on to an
academy. The academy was a private school run by an educational entrepreneur. It
prepared students for higher learning or a trade or profession. They were considered the
most appropriate educational institution for a free people. Their responsibility was to the
parents who put their children in the academy.
Home tutoring was also very common in those days. There was no such thing as
“compulsory school attendance.” Parents were free to provide their children with any
fonn of education which met their needs. Children were taught to read and write in the
Dames Schools, which were keenly aware that Biblical literacy was an absolute necessity
in a society based on the teachings of the Bible.
In New England, laws had been passed requiring parents to educate their children. This
spurred the creation of Common Schools throughout the region. Towns hired teachers to
run such schools. Their main function was to prepare the students for future studies in
the colleges. They were owned and operated by the local folks who usually paid the
schoolmasters with commodities rather than money.
The beauty of this high degree of freedom was that education was practical, its
foundation based on reality. Whatever was taught was intended to improve the
knowledge, skills, and aptitudes of the students. The community’s basic purpose in
education was to pass on to the future generation the knowledge, wisdom, religion and
morals of the previous generation. There was no such thing as religious neutrality. The
United States was a Christian nation and all agreed that children should be inculcated in
the tenets of Christianity. And anyone who went into the education profession knew its
spiritual purposes.
But then the question arises: why did Americans give up educational freedom so early in
their history when its benefits were so obvious? Believe it or not, it had nothing to do
with economics or poor teaching. Literacy was very high and education was available to
everyone. There were even excellent charity schools that provided education for the
children of the poor. There was no need for the government to get involved in education.
.
But in Boston, the government did get involved in establishing the Boston Latin School,
an elite school to prepare students for Harvard. It was funded by the city even though the
parents of the students could easily have paid its costs. But the liberals in Boston were
already looking to government to establish an elite institution separated from the church.
What happened to create this state of mind? It was the rise of the Unitarian heresy at
Harvard among the descendants of the Puritans. Intellectual pride became the spearhead
of religious Liberalism.
The Unitarians no longer believed in the Trinity or in the divinity of Christ. If Christ was
divine it was in the sense that we are all divine. But while Christ was considered a great
teacher, he was not considered to be the source of salvation. The Unitarians also rejected
Calvin’s view of man as being innately depraved who needed to be saved by Jesus Christ.
The Unitarians believed that man was basically good, and that all he needed was a good
secular education to achieve moral perfectibility.
And so the Boston Unitarians launched a strong campaign to create government primary
schools in which Calvinist teachings would be eliminated. They were successful because
they learned how to influence the press, control the legislature, and get what they wanted.
As the public school movement grew, the orthodox were in a dilenuna as to whether or
not to support it. In 1849, the orthodox General Association of Massachusetts decided in
favor of support with this very important stipulation. They wrote:
“If after a full and faithful experiment, it should at last be seen that fidelity to the
religious interests of our children forbids a further patronage of the system, we
can unite with the Evangelical Christians in the establishment of private schools,
in which more full doctrinal religious instruction may be possible.”
There is no question that the “full and faithful experiment” has been a colossal failure,
and that millions of Christian children have been spiritually harmed. While many parents
have taken their children out of the public schools, and hundreds if not thousands of
church schools have been founded, the vast majority of Christian parents still put their
children in these anti-Christian public schools. In other words, we have still to learn the
lessons of history.
The Blumenfeld Archives is a free on-line educational resource: http://blumenfeld.campconstitution.net/main.htm
Liberty Counsel and Liberty University Launch Supreme Court and Appellate Clinic
A news release from Liberty Counsel:
Aug 12, 2025
In 2005, Liberty Counsel and Liberty University School of Law launched the Constitutional Litigation Clinic. The clinic has been in operation for 20 years and will continue to be open to up to five students per semester. Previous students in this clinic worked on Shurtleff v. City of Boston, a Liberty Counsel case that begin in 2017 and resulted in a 9-0 win at the U.S. Supreme Court in May 2022.
The Supreme Court and Appellate Clinic will be an advanced clinic focused on specific Supreme Court and Appellate cases. Under supervision and instruction from experienced Liberty Counsel’s Supreme Court practitioners, the students will have weekly class instruction, case rounds, and gain clinical experience with active cases. The clinic is designed to give students valuable practical experience in Supreme Court advocacy through researching and drafting certiorari petitions, merits and opposition briefs, reply briefs, and amicus briefs.
Liberty University School of Law Dean and Professor of Law Dr. Timothy M. Todd said, “We are thankful for the partnership with Liberty Counsel. This clinic will emphasize the development of practical skills while fostering a deep understanding of the substantive law and procedure relevant to practice before the United States Supreme Court and federal appellate courts.”
Liberty University School of Law is also home to a one-of-a-kind replica of the U.S. Supreme Court bench designed by Mat Staver during his tenure as Dean and Professor of Law.
Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver said, “We are excited to partner with Liberty University School of Law to educate and train students to practice at the highest levels of the U.S. Supreme Court and appellate courts. Law students in our previous clinics contributed to our 9-0 victory at the U.S. Supreme Court in Shurtleff v. City of Boston in 2022. The Supreme Court and Appellate Clinic will offer students the invaluable experience of working on high profile cases that will shape legal precedent for decades. Liberty Counsel is resolved to develop the next generation of constitutional law advocates.”
Liberty Counsel provides broadcast-quality TV interviews via Hi-Def Skype and LTN at no cost
John Adams on Government: Christian Virtue Necessary for Liberty – American Minute with Bill Federer
& the Need for Christian Virtue – American Minute with Bill Federer The Wisdom of John Adams: on Liberty Tyranny
Download as PDF …
John Adams was born October 30, 1735. A Harvard graduate, he was admitted to the bar and in 1764, married Abigail Smith, the daughter of a Congregational minister.
In 1765, Britain enacted the Stamp Act, which would be equivalent to a modern-day Internet tax, online censorship or government surveillance of emails.
John Adams wrote:
“It seems very manifest from the Stamp Act itself, that a design is formed to strip us in a great measure of the means of knowledge, by loading the press, the colleges, and even an almanac and a newspaper, with restraints and duties.”
In resisting the Stamp Act, Adams wrote instructions to representatives from town of Braintree being sent to the Massachusetts General Court:
“The late acts of Parliament … divest us of our most essential rights and liberties … The Stamp Act … a very burdensome, and… unconstitutional tax, is to be laid upon us …
We are subjected to … penalties, to be prosecuted, sued for, and recovered, at the option of an informer, in a court of admiralty, without a jury …
Business … would be totally impossible … That Act … would drain the country of its cash, strip multitudes of all their property, and reduce them to absolute beggary …
No freeman should be subject to any tax to which he has not given his own consent.”
John Adams explained in A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, 1765, that it was Christian principles, brought to America by the Puritans, that resisted tyranny:
“The desire of dominion … when … restraints are taken off … becomes an encroaching, grasping, restless, and ungovernable power … contrived by the great for the gratification of this passion …
Originally formed … for the necessary defense … against … invasions … yet … tyranny, cruelty, and lust … was soon adopted by almost all the princes of Europe …
The people were held in ignorance … till God in his benign providence raised up the champions who began and conducted the Reformation.
From the time of the Reformation to the first settlement of America, knowledge gradually spread in Europe, but especially in England; and in proportion as that increased and spread among the people … tyranny … lost … strength.”
He continued:
“It was this great struggle that peopled America … by a sensible people … the Puritans …
This people had been so vexed and tortured by the powers of those days, for no other crime than their knowledge and their freedom of inquiry … they at last resolved to fly to the wilderness for refuge …
After their arrival here, they … formed their plan, both of ecclesiastical and civil government, in direct opposition to the canon and the feudal systems …
I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in Providence for the illumination of the ignorant, and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth …”
Adams added:
“Tyranny in every form, shape, and appearance was their disdain …
They saw clearly, that popular powers must be placed as … a control, a balance, to the powers of the monarch … or else it would soon become the man of sin, the whore of Babylon, the mystery of iniquity, a great and detestable system of fraud, violence, and usurpation.
Their greatest concern seems to have been to establish a government of the church more consistent with the Scriptures, and a government of the state more agreeable to the dignity of human nature, than any they had seen in Europe …
To render the popular power in their new government as great and wise … as human nature and the Christian religion require it should be, they … had an utter contempt … of hereditary, indefeasible right … of passive obedience and nonresistance …
They thought all such slavish subordinations were … inconsistent with … that religious liberty with which Jesus had made them free …”
Adams explained further:“Original … government was … despotic … arbitrary, lawless power …
But knowledge diffused generally through the whole body of the people … their civil and religious principles …
For this purpose they laid very early the foundations of colleges, and … seminaries … They made it a crime for such a town to be destitute of a grammar schoolmaster …
Education of all ranks of people was made the care and expense of the public, in a manner that I believe has been unknown to any other people ancient or modern …
A native of America who cannot read and write is as rare … as a comet or an earthquake …
Liberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker …”
Adams continued:
“Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right … to knowledge, as their great Creator, who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings, and a desire to know …
Rulers are no more than … trustees for the people; and if the … trust is insidiously betrayed, or wantonly trifled away, the people have a right to revoke the authority … and to constitute abler and better … trustees …
The jaws of power are always opened to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing …
Be not intimidated, therefore, by any terrors, from publishing with the utmost freedom, whatever can be warranted by the laws of your country …
I hope in God the time is near at hand when they will be fully convinced of your understanding, integrity and courage …
Let us not suppose that all are become luxurious, effeminate, and unreasonable, on the other side the water, as many designing persons would insinuate.
Let us presume, what is in fact true, that the spirit of liberty is as ardent as ever among the body of the nation …
Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write.”
Adams stated in A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law:
“Let us study … the great examples of Greece and Rome … the conduct of our own British ancestors, who have defended for us the inherent rights of mankind against foreign and domestic tyrants and usurpers, against arbitrary kings and cruel priests, in short, against the gates of earth and hell …
Let the pulpit resound with the doctrines and sentiments of religious liberty …
Let us hear the dignity of his nature, and the noble rank he holds among the works of God,
– that consenting to slavery is a sacrilegious breach of trust, as offensive in the sight of God as it is derogatory from our own honor or interest or happiness,
– and that God Almighty has promulgated from heaven, liberty, peace, and goodwill to man!”
When the Revolution started, John Adams recommended that George Washington be the Commander-in-Chief and that Thomas Jefferson pen the Declaration.
In Novanglus: A History of the Dispute with America, from its Origin, in 1754, to the Present Time, published February 6, 1775, John Adams wrote:
“It is the duty of the clergy to accommodate their discourses to the times, to preach against such sins as are most prevalent, and recommend such virtues as are most wanted …
If exorbitant ambition and venality are predominant, ought they not to warn their hearers against those vices?
If public spirit is much wanted, should they not inculcate this great virtue?
If the rights and duties of Christian magistrates and subjects are disputed, should they not explain them, show their nature, ends, limitations, and restrictions, how much soever it may move the gall of Massachusetts.”
John Adams authored the Massachusetts Constitution, 1780, described as the world’s oldest functioning written constitution, a model for the United States Constitution. It stated:
“The happiness of a people and the good order and preservation of civil government, essentially depend upon piety, religion and morality;
and as these cannot be generally diffused through a community, but by the institution of the Public worship of God …
the people of this commonwealth … authorize … the public worship of God, and for the support and maintenance of public Protestant teachers of piety, religion and morality …
And every denomination of Christians, demeaning themselves peaceably, and as good subjects of the commonwealth, shall be equally under the protection of the law …
The Governor shall be chosen annually; and no person shall be eligible to this office, unless … he shall declare himself to be of the Christian religion …
Any person chosen governor, lieutenant governor, counselor, senator or representative, and accepting the trust, shall … make … the following declaration, viz.-
“I, A. B., do declare, that I believe the Christian religion, and have a firm persuasion of its truth.”
John Adams was U.S. Minister to France, where, together with Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, and David Hartley, he signed the Treaty of Paris, September 3, 1783, officially ending the Revolutionary War:
“In the name of the Most Holy and Undivided Trinity.
It having pleased the Divine Providence to dispose the hearts of the most serene and most potent Prince George the Third, by the Grace of God, King of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith …
and of the United States of America, to forget all past misunderstandings and differences …
Done at Paris, this third day of September, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-three.”
While U.S. Minister to Britain, John Adams met with his former king, George the Third.
Adams helped ratify the U.S. Constitution by writing Defense of the Constitution of the Government of the United States, 1787-1788.
Initially, Presidential elections designated the President as the one who received the most votes, and the Vice-President was the one who received the second most votes.
John Adams was so popular that he was elected Vice-President twice, serving under George Washington.
When George Washington insisted on only serving two terms, John Adams was elected the 2nd U.S. President in 1796.
He established the Library of Congress and the Department of Navy.
His son, John Quincy Adams, became 6th President.
After Abigail Adams died in 1818, Adams wrote to Jefferson:
“I do not know how to prove physically, that we shall meet and know each other in a future state; nor does Revelation, as I can find, give us any positive assurance of such a felicity.
My reasons for believing it, as I do most undoubtedly, are that I cannot conceive such a Being could make such a species as the human, merely to live and die on this earth.
If I did not believe in a future state, I should believe in no God.
This Universe, this all would appear, with all of its swelling pomp, a boyish firework.
And if there be a future state, why should the Almighty dissolve forever all the tender ties which unite us so delightfully in this world, and forbid us to see each other in the next?”
In 1819, John Adams wrote to Jefferson:
“Have you ever found in history, one single example of a nation thoroughly corrupted that was afterwards restored to virtue? …
And without virtue, there can be no political liberty …
Will you tell me how to prevent luxury from producing effeminacy, intoxication, extravagance, vice and folly? …
No effort in favor of virtue is lost.”
In Paris, John Adams wrote in his diary, June 2, 1778:
“In vain are schools, academies, and universities instituted, if loose principles and licentious habits are impressed upon children in their earliest years …
The vices and examples of the parents cannot be concealed from the children.
How is it possible that children can have any just sense of the sacred obligations of Morality or Religion if, from their earliest infancy … their fathers (are) in as constant infidelity to their mothers?”
On June 21, 1776, John Adams wrote:
“Statesmen, my dear Sir, may plan and speculate for liberty, but it is Religion and Morality alone, which can establish the principles upon which freedom can securely stand.
The only foundation of a free Constitution is pure virtue,
and if this cannot be inspired into our people in a greater measure, than they have it now, they may change their rulers and the forms of government, but they will not obtain a lasting liberty.”
—
American Minute is a registered trademark of William J. Federer. Permission granted to forward, reprint, or duplicate.
The Weekly Sam: Colonial Education: Superior to Today’s Public Schools By Samuel Blumenfeld
When the Puritans arrived in the wilderness of New England, they set a high standard of
education for the colonists, and the rest of the English colonies followed suit so that
literacy was virtually universal. The need for biblical literacy was the driving force
behind education since it was religious freedom they sought in coming to the New World.
Their vision was of creating a truly Christian civilization in the wilderness.
With thoughts always of the future, the aim of the Puritan leadership was to establish and
sustain the religious foundations of the Commonwealth, which included the highly
democratic, Calvinistic form of church governance, Congregationalism. Thus, in
Massachusetts education was based more on a religious foundation than a secular one.
Because of the emphasis on education, Massachusetts gained a reputation for having the
best schools in the colonies.
The Puritans founded Harvard College as a Calvinist
institution in 1636. But the other colonies were not far behind. All of the Protestant sects,
most of which were Calvinist in theology, placed high value on learning the languages of
theology: Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, as well as the secular subjects that were taught at
Oxford and Cambridge and at the Law schools.
Colleges were also founded in Virginia (1693), Connecticut (1701), New Jersey (1746
and 1766), New York (1754), Pennsylvania (1755), Rhode Island (1764), and New
Hampshire (1770). All were private colleges, and there were usually private academies in
the towns to prepare students for higher education.
We can get a good picture of the various forms of education available during the colonial
period by surveying the education that formed the mindset of the 89 men who signed the
Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. According to
author Lawrence Cremin:
“Of the 56 signers of the Declaration, 22 were products of the provincial colleges, two
had attended the academy conducted by Francis Alison at New London, Pennsylvania,
and the others represented every conceivable combination of parental, church,
apprenticeship, school, tutorial, and self education, including some who studied abroad.
Of the 33 signers of the Constitution, who had not also signed the Declaration, 14 were
products of the provincial colleges, one was a product of the Newark Academy, and the
remainder spanned the same wide range of alternatives.”
The fact is that the men who founded the United States were educated under the freest
conditions possible, with colonial governments offering little more than moral
encouragement. George Washington was educated at home by his father and half-brother.
Benjamin Franklin was taught to read by his father and attended a private school for
writing and arithmetic. Thomas Jefferson studied Latin and Greek under a tutor. Of the
117 men who signed the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and
the Constitution, one out of three had had only a few months of formal schooling, and
only one in four had gone to college.
And that is probably why the Constitution made no mention of education. It was
considered a parental, religious, and private matter beyond the jurisdiction of
government. There were some statesmen, like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams who
advocated free, state-supported education on a modest scale to insure universal literacy.
But they were clearly in the minority. Thus, at the beginning of the American nation,
except for some town-supported common schools in New England, education was on a
completely laissez-faire, free-market basis.
Contrast the highly effective educational freedom and high literacy that existed then to
what we have in America today: completely centralized and regulated education by the
government-supported education establishment, plus compulsory school attendance laws,
plus highly unionized teachers with enormous political clout that keeps taxes as high as
possible.
And what are the American people getting for their money? The drugging of over four
million children by their educators to cure Attention Deficit Disorder, a steep decline in
literacy, and an anti-Christian philosophy of education. Indeed, what we have are
government schools that do not truly educate. If it were not for the growth of the
home-school movement and the restoration of educational freedom by this dedicated
remnant, this country would in time become a totalitarian society, controlled by
behavioral psychologists and corrupt politicians. In fact, with the election of socialist
Barack Obama, the nation has reached that brink where ending our Constitutional
Republic of limited powers and replacing it with atheistic Social Democracy with
unlimited powers is about to take place unless stopped by an alarmed and activated
American people.
That is why it is so important for Americans to know the history of education in this
country so that they can see our current trends in their proper foreboding context. Our
nation was founded by Christian men and women who believed in educational freedom
because it produced the young men and women capable of maintaining a free society.
Our freedom depends on our nation’s willingness to adhere to biblical morality and high
literacy. Because without them, we shall continue to founder in a sea of ignorance,
barbarism, and moral depravity.
The Blumenfeld Archives https://campconstitution.net/sam-blumenfeld-archive/
Christian Camp Freed From Colorado’s Dangerous Gender Policy
Good news from our friends at Liberty Counsel:
Camp IdRaHaJe, which derives its name from the song “I’d Rather Have Jesus,” challenged a policy from Colorado’s Department of Early Childhood that requires licensed camps to allow campers to use the bathrooms, bathing areas, and sleeping quarters of the opposite sex. The camp had requested a religious exemption, but state regulators denied it leaving the camp facing a potential shut it down as it stated it would not comply with the policy.
Rather than have the policy scrutinized in court, state officials agreed, as part of the settlement, not to enforce the policy against Camp IdRaHaJe. The state also clarified that “churches, synagogues, mosques, or any other place that is principally used for religious purposes” are also exempt from the requirements.
As a result of the settlement, approximately 2,400 to 3,000 kids will be able to attend the camp this summer in a safe, Christian environment.
Camp IdRaHaJe has hosted children since 1948 and has had a resident camp license since 1995. The camp’s doctrinal statement declares that “God has immutably created each person as either male or female in His image” and “the differentiation of the sexes, male and female, is part of the divine image in the human race.”
Camp IdRaHaJe hosts and serves children from ages six to 17 and offers off-site backpacking, camping trips and many other on-site activities. The camp hosts thousands of students each summer with the mission to “win souls to Jesus Christ through the spreading of the Gospel.” The camp is open to children of all backgrounds and beliefs.
Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver stated, “Colorado’s gender policy is a violation of the camp’s Christian mission as well as a threat to child safety. Camp IdRaHaJe’s settlement is a victory for religious liberty in the state where religious organizations no longer have to choose between their sincerely held religious beliefs on human sexuality and their state licenses. The government also has no place forcing the false, corrosive gender ideology upon its citizens. Colorado needs to remove this policy altogether and protect children.”
Liberty Counsel provides broadcast quality TV interviews via Hi-Def Skype and LTN at no cost.
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The Weekly Sam: How to Dumb Down a Nation By Samuel L. Blumenfeld
It’s easy. Destroy its literacy, and you’ve dumbed it down. And once dumbed down, it
becomes the potential victim of any power that wants to dominate it.
If you look at the most illiterate nations on the planet, you find that they are ruled by
despots, their people live in abject poverty and have no hope for a better future. That
doesn’t mean that literate nations, like Germany, can’t produce monsters. But when they
do, we know that satanic influences are behind it.
America, from its beginning, was the most literate nation on earth, and the result was
positive in every respect. Why was it so literate? Because the people and their leaders
were governed by the precepts of the Bible, and biblical literacy was paramount in the
education of the country’s children.
But once we got a government schooling system, which was taken over by atheist
progressive educators, the God of the Bible was removed from the schools. It then
became possible to introduce a new socialist curriculum with teaching methods
calculated to reduce American literacy. The Bible was now relegated to an hour of study
in church on Sundays. And because it was no longer part of the curriculum, children no
longer considered it important to life.
A blatant, anti-biblical morality was introduced in the schools through such programs as
values clarification, sensitivity training, transcendental meditation, sex education, death
education, drug education, multiculturalism, psychotherapy, evolution, secular
humanism, and other such programs. Moral degeneration has been the inevitable result.
The result is that America has been greatly dumbed-down.
The Blumenfeld Archives: http://blumenfeld.campconstitution.net/main.htm