How Behavioral Psychologists Have Destroyed
American Education Or Many Students Left Behind

By Samuel L. Blumenfeld

On September 11, 2001, Americans discovered how physically vulnerable we are to the
attacks of our enemies. In just a matter of a few hours the Islamic terrorists destroyed the
two magnificent towers of the World Trade Center in New York, killing almost 3,000
people, destroyed a large section of the Pentagon and its personnel, and destroyed four
airliners with their passengers. Never before had America suffered such a devastating
attack on its own soil at the hands of a fanatic enemy.
However, there is an area of vulnerability, which our enemies are using to destroy our
most important cultural and scientific asset, the American brain. This enemy is so well
disguised that most Americans don’t even know it exists. But we can see the results of
this internal attack all around us: epidemics of drug addiction, learning disabilities,
attention deficit disorders, reading failures, dyslexia.

Over four million children—some say six million—are required to ingest the powerful
drug Ritalin and other similar drugs in order to able to sit in their classrooms and undergo
the process of having their brains crippled by a non-surgical pre-frontal lobotomy. And
this process has been going on for over fifty years. In fact, the public first learned about
it back in 1955 when Rudolf Flesch wrote Why Johnny Can’t Read. In that book, Dr.
Flesch wrote:

“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.”

He then explained how in the 1930s the educators got rid of the alphabetic phonics
method of teaching reading and replaced it with a new ideographic method, in which
children are taught to look at each word as a whole configuration, like a Chinese
character. He said that when you impose an ideographic teaching method on a phonetic
writing system, you get reading disability and dyslexia.

Back in the 1970s, when I was trying to find out who the idiots were who dreamed up
this new method, I discovered that it was conceived at the turn of the last century by
educators known as the Progressives. The Progressives were members of the Protestant
academic elite who no longer believed in the religion of their fathers. They now put their
faith in science, evolution, and psychology. Science permitted them to know the material
world, evolution explained the origin of living matter, and psychology permitted them to
study human nature and control human behavior. They were also socialists, because they
believed that individualism and capitalism were the cause of all social evil, and that only
by eliminating them could social utopia be achieved.

It was their philosophical leader, John Dewey, who first argued the need to get rid of high
literacy in order to prepare the children of tomorrow for a socialist society. He wrote, in
an essay published in 1898:

“My proposition is, that conditions—social, industrial, and intellectual—have
undergone such a radical change, that the time has come for a thoroughgoing
examination of the emphasis put upon linguistic work in elementary
instruction…. 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.”

He then outlined a plan whereby primary education would be completely revamped to
conform with the Progressives’ agenda for a socialist America. He wrote:

“Change must come gradually. To force it unduly would compromise its final
success by favoring a violent reaction.”

And that is why the process has been going on for so long with most Americans being
totally unaware of it taking place right under their noses. Even four to six million
children on Ritalin are not enough to wake up America. Yet we know that Ritalin has
caused violent behavior and sudden death among some children. It also causes shrinkage
of the brain.

How was Dewey’s plan implemented? It was carried out by the behavioral
psychologists, notably Edward L. Thorndike and his protégé Arthur I. Gates at Teachers
College, Columbia University. They devised the new whole-word teaching method.
It was one of Thorndike’s students, William Scott Gray, who conceived the Dick and
Jane reading program at the University of Chicago, first published by Scott, Foresman in
1930. Gates’s whole-word reading program was published at the same time by
Macmillan.

Thorndike, by the way, was a strong believer in eugenics and advocated a non-intellectual curriculum for black children because of their racial inferiority. Thorndike’s claim to fame is his discovery that you could train children like animals. He
wrote in 1928:

“Our experiments on learning in the lower animals have probably contributed more
to knowledge of education per hour or per unit of intellect spent, than experiments
on children….The best way with children may often be, in the pompous words of
an animal trainer, to arrange everything in connection with the trick so that the
animal will be compelled by the laws of his own nature to perform it.”

But it was John B. Watson, the most arrogant behaviorist of them all, who revealed the
true contempt that he and his fellow behaviorists had toward their fellow human beings.
In his book, Behaviorism, a textbook for his students, he wrote:

Human beings do not want to class themselves with other animals. They are
willing to admit that they are animals but ‘something else in addition.’ It is this
‘something else’ that causes the trouble. In this ‘something else’ is bound up
everything that is classed as religion, the life hereafter, morals, love of children,
parents, country, and the like. The raw fact that you, as a psychologist, if you are
to remain scientific, must describe the behavior of man in no other terms than
those you would use in describing the behavior of the ox you slaughter, drove and
still drives many timid souls away from behaviorism.”

Watson meant to be shocking, because he had to convince his students that they had to
treat human beings coldly and callously as animals. He wrote further:

“The interest of the behaviorist in man’s doings is more than the interest of the
spectator—he wants to control man’s reactions, as physical scientists want to
control and manipulate other natural phenomena. It is the business of
behavioristic psychology to be able to predict and control human activity.”

In the 1920s, behavioral psychologists in the Soviet Union were also conducting
experiments on predicting and controlling human activity. Ivan Pavlov was
experimenting on dogs to produce conditioned reflexes. He and his helpers were also
experimenting on ways to artificially create behavioral disorganization.
Incidentally, there are two kinds of reflexes: unconditioned and conditioned. An
unconditioned reflex is a natural immediate response to stimuli. For example, when you
are driving a car in daylight and enter a tunnel, your eyes automatically adjust to the
darkness of the tunnel. A conditioned reflex is simply a learned habit. For example,
when the traffic light ahead turns red, your foot automatically steps on the brake while
your mind is on other things. When you learn to drive on the right, you develop all kinds
of learned habits or conditioned reflexes. But when you rent a car in England where they
drive on the left, your right-driving reflexes may kill you. So now you have to think
about every move you make. If you live in England long enough, you may develop a left drive reflex.
Now, getting back to Pavlov and his experiments on artificially creating behavioral
disorganization, why would anyone want to do that? Well, the communists were out to
conquer the world and the power to create behavioral disorganization among your
enemies could be quite helpful.

In 1932, a book was published describing those experiments in great detail. Entitled The
Nature of Human Conflicts, it was authored by Alexander Luria, one of Pavlov’s
colleagues, and translated into English by an American, W. Horsley Gantt, who had spent
six years working in Pavlov’s laboratory in Russia, after which he joined the staff of the
Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at Johns Hopkins University. Luria wrote:

“We are not the first of those who have artificially created disorganizations of
human behaviour….”

I. P. Pavlov was the first investigator who, with the help of exceedingly bold
workers, succeeded experimentally in creating neuroses with experimental
animals. Working with conditioned reflexes in dogs, Pavlov came to the
conclusion that every time an elaborated reflex came into conflict with the
unconditioned reflex, the behaviour of the dog markedly changed…. Although, in
the experiments with the collision of the conditioned reflexes in animals, it is
fairly easy to obtain acute forms of artificial affect, it is much more difficult to get
these results in human experiments.  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 the
experimental disorganisation of behaviour….Here the fundamental conception of
Lewin is very close to ours.

Now, who is this K. Lewin praised so highly by Luria at being a master at creating
behavioral disorganization? He is none other than the Kurt Lewin who came to America
in 1933 and set up the Research Center for Group Dynamics at M.I.T. and invented
“sensitivity training.” Shortly before his death in 1947, Lewin founded the National
Training Lab at Bethel, Maine, under the sponsorship of the National Education
Association. Think of it. Here you have a communist behavioral psychologist who is an
expert at artificially creating behavioral disorganization—that is, driving people crazy—
being sponsored by the National Education Association.

The importance of Lewin in this story is that he represented the collectivist or communist
mentality in the psychological community, which had its own socio-political agenda.
Lewin’s biographer, Alfred J. Marrow, writes:

“Students of progressive education also saw the need for studies of group behavior.
This was stimulated by the educational philosophy of John Dewey….This called
for the development of leadership skills and collective setting of group goals.”

And, of course, that is what we have in today’s classrooms: group learning, group-think,
outcome-based education. So we have destroyed the ability of children to learn to read
and forced them to be indoctrinated by collectivist means. That’s not education. That’s a
program to destroy the individual independent mind. We know that one of the reasons why children become frustrated in the classroom and act up is because of the way they are being taught. They enter school at age six feeling very
confident that they are intelligent enough to be able to learn to read. After all, they taught
themselves to speak their own language on their own without the help of a certified
teacher. So their confidence in their learning ability is quite justified.

But once in school they discover that they can’t learn to read in the manner they are being
taught. So they become angry and frustrated, doubting their own intelligence. And soon
they join the ranks of the reading disabled, the dyslexic, the ADD or ADHD, and are
given a drug to solve their learning and behavioral problems and make the teacher happy.
It should not surprise you to learn that one of Kurt Lewin’s most significant experiments
was aimed at determining the behavioral affects of frustration on children and how these
affects are produced. Marrow writes:

“The experiment indicated that in frustration the children tended to regress to a
surprising degree. They tended to become babyish. Intellectually, children of
four and a half years tended toward the behavior of a three-year-old. The degree
of intellectual regression varied directly with the strength of the
frustration….Aggressiveness also increased and some children went so far as to
hit, kick, and break objects.”

So what do you do with kids like that? You drug them! And what does this do to the
American brain? It kills it. We see the ramifications of this in our daily lives. For example, have you ever corrected
a teenager on a bit of factual information, or a misspelling, or an incorrect usage of
language, and gotten the response, “Whatever”?
Where does this casual, dumb response come from? It comes from the public schools,
and probably some private schools, where accuracy is no longer an academic value. In
fact, public schools are permeated with a philosophy summed up in the phrase,
“Accuracy is not the name of the game.”
Those are the actual words of Julia Palmer, president of the American Reading Council,
an advocate of the whole-language approach to reading. Palmer said that it was okay if a
child read the word “house” for “home,” or substituted the word “pony” for “horse.”
“It’s not very serious,” she said, “ because she understands the meaning. Accuracy is not
the name of the game.” (Washington Post, Nov. 29, 1986)

But accuracy IS the name of the game if you believe that education is the serious business
of providing the citizens of tomorrow with a basic foundation in knowledge and
academic skills. It was Sir Francis Bacon who wrote: “Reading maketh a full man…and
writing an exact man.” In other words, an accurate reader becomes an accurate thinker,
an accurate speller, and an accurate user of language. An inaccurate reader becomes an
inaccurate thinker, an inaccurate speller, and an inaccurate user of language. (By the way
there are a lot of people who think that spelling is unimportant. Tell that to Dan Quayle,
whose political career was ruined because he misspelled potato by adding an e. He’s
been the butt of comedians ever since.)

A brain that thinks inaccurately is a disabled brain. And we are turning out of our
schools millions of disabled brains, unable to think logically, virtually crippled as
defenders of our civilization. A crippled brain is unable to deal with reality in a logical,
objective way. It relies on emotion, sensual urges, and superstition as its primary way of
knowing and learning. It deprecates accuracy as a threat to its diminished ego.
The cult of inaccuracy is promulgated at the highest levels of our education system. Let
me read to you a definition of whole-language philosophy written by three whole language professors in a book entitled Whole Language: What’s the Difference, published
in 1991:

“From a whole-language perspective, reading (and language use in general) is a
process of generating hypotheses in a meaning-making transaction in a
sociohistorical context. [I’m sure you got that.] As a transactional
process…reading is not a matter of ‘getting the meaning’ from the text, as if that
meaning were in the text waiting to be decoded by the reader.
Rather, reading is a matter of readers using the cues print provides and the
knowledge they bring with them (of language subsystems, of the world) to
construct a unique interpretation.”

Moreover, that interpretation is situated: readers’ creations (not retrievals) of
meaning with text vary, depending on their purposes of reading and the
expectations of others in the reading event. This view of reading implies that
there is no single “correct” meaning for a given text, only plausible meanings.
And what have these psycho-educators done to the American brain? In 1972, the number
of students who scored highest on the SAT verbal test, between 750 and 800, was 2,817.
In 1994, that number was down to 1,438—about half! At the lowest end, the number of
students who scored between 200 and 290 in 1972 was 71,084. In 1994, it was up to
136,841. What more proof do you need that America is losing its brains?
Next September, several million children will enter the primary schools of our nation
with healthy brains. In a year their brains will be disabled.

And this has been done to us not by foreign terrorists, but by behavioral psychologists:
Dewey, Thorndike, Gates, Gray, Watson, Pavlov, Luria, and their loyal disciples. And
there is no escaping them. They own the schools and they have the money. And so,
parents are forced to use their own resources to make sure that their children are educated
as human beings with souls, not as animals. The difference is important. Animals can be
trained but they can’t be educated. Children can be trained, but their training means
nothing unless they are educated.

Which brings us to the question: what is education? The Bible in Deuteronomy 6 spells it
out. In modern terms it means that it is the duty of the older generation to pass on to the
younger generation its knowledge, wisdom, and religious values. And until our public
education system returns to those basic principles, it will be a useless financial burden to
all of us and a terrible abuser of our children.

There is indeed a Ministry of Education in America, and it is called the National Society
for the Study of Education. It was founded in 1901 by John Dewey and colleagues who
were interested in psycho-education and the application of science to educational issues.
The Society publishes an annual two-volume Yearbook filled with discussions of
educational interests. By the way, you won’t find the yearbooks in your local library.
You’ll have to go to a university library to find them.

The NSSE describes itself as “an organization of education scholars, professional
educators, and policy makers dedicated to the improvement of education research, policy
and practice.” On its board of directors is a former president of the NEA, Mary Hatwood
Futrell. The membership list in the 1969 Yeabook is 94 pages long, and you’ve probably
never heard of the organization. The subject for their 2008 Yearbook is “Why Do We
Educate?” It’s a question the educators seem to be totally confused about.
But some of them are not confused at all. One of them is Professor Anthony G. Oettinger
of Harvard University, Professor of Information Resources Policy, and a member of the
Council on Foreign Relations. He said the following at a conference of communications
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?
What is speech recognition and speech synthesis all about if it does not lead to
ways of reducing the burden on the individual of the imposed notions of literacy
that were a product of nineteenth century economics and technology? …
It is the traditional idea that says certain forms of communication, such as comic
books, are bad. But in the modern context of functionalism, they may not be all
that bad.”

Pease visit Sam’s archive:  https://campconstitution.net/sam-blumenfeld-archive/