The Weekly Sam: John Dewey’s Plan to Dumb Down America by Sam Blumenfeld

in 2013, Camp Constitution Press, at the recommendation of Sam Blumenfeld, reprinted John Dewey’s article from May of 1898 titled “The Primary-Education Fetich” (sic) in which the life-long socialist and enemy of Christianity how he and his fellow socialists would dumb-down America.  Sam wrote the preface and we include a link to the a PDF version of the entire reprint:

Preface to John Dewey’s Plan
to Dumb-Down America
By Samuel Blumenfeld
The dumbing-down of America is no accident. It is not the result
of uncontrollable natural forces floating in the air we breathe or the
water we drink. It is the result of a planned scheme launched in 1898
by Progressive-in-Chief John Dewey outlined in an article titled “The
Primary-Education Fetich” (sic). Dewey was a diehard socialist with
a deep hatred of capitalism, individualism, and orthodox Christianity.
He, and his small army of academic followers, were determined to
turn America into a humanist collectivist society and he figured out
that the best way to separate Americans from their constitutional
freedoms and individualism was to dumb them down.

And the easiest way to do this was to change the way children were
taught to read in their primary schools. Get rid of intensive phonics,
the foundation oflanguage mastery and independent intelligence, and
put in its place a “sight” or “look-say” method that teaches children
to read English as if it were Chinese. Have them memorize a sight
vocabulary so that they develop a whole-word reflex and cannot see
the phonetic structure of our alphabetic words. Thus, they will become
reading disabled, dyslexic, or simply low-level readers.

Need proof? Look no further than what happened to the four
Rockefeller boys back in the 1920s when John D. Rockefeller Jr.
put his four sons-Nelson, Laurence, Winthrop, and David-in the
Progressive Lincoln School in New York. As a misguided admirer of
John Dewey, Rockefeller donated three million dollars to the school
which then turned his four sons into dyslexics. Mr. Rockefeller’s
ignorance condemned his sons to lives ofliterary frustration. Yes, they
had plenty of money, but their life-long reading handicap deprived
them of the great pleasures of reading.

Dewey’s vision of an egalitarian, socialist America was based on
a novel written by Unitarian journalist Edward Bellamy, Looking
Backward. The novel is a fantasy of America becoming a socialist
paradise in the year 2000. Economic planning replaced free-market
competition, and Americans became members of a regimented
industrial army, all paid by the government.

Of course, Dewey knew that Americans would not voluntarily give
up their economic and individual freedoms, so he told his colleagues:
“Change must come gradually. To force it unduly would compromise
its final success by favoring a violent reaction:’ And so, wholesale
deception became the modus operandi of the progressive movement.

We are reprinting Dewey’s article because it is important for
Americans to understand how they’ve been deceived by their so-called educators. The plan to deliberately dumb down the nation
has been hidden from the public for almost 100 years. Reading it
today is to become finally aware of the deceit and treachery behind
this treasonous conspiracy to destroy the intellect of millions of
Americans behind the benign fa<;:ade of Progressive education.
When you consider the misery, frustration, despair and humiliation
these teaching methods have caused in millions ofAmerican children,
it becomes clear that the professional educators behind all ofthis were
diabolically inspired.
Can we repair the damage done by Dewey’s plan? Only if the will
is there and Americans are willing to face the fact that they have been
betrayed by their educators.
Dewey, of course, is long dead, but his disciples control American
public education, and whether they know it or not they are continuing
to implement Dewey’s plan. And we see the results every day. In
2007, the National Endowment for the Arts released its report on the
decline of American literacy. Its 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 only way to reverse this situation is to make sure that every child
in every American school is taught to read with intensive, systematic
phonics. We know how to restore high literacy to America. But is
there the will to do it? Many parents are doing it by homeschooling
their own children. But will it be done in the schools? It will be
done only if there is enough of an outcry from concerned parents and
citizens. That is why we urge readers ofthis article to distribute copies
of it to as many people as possible. If this article is read by millions of
Americans, it will have an impact that the educators and politicians
will not be able to ignore.

A link to a PDF version of our 2013 reprint:  https://campconstitution.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/The-John-Dewey-Plan-to-Dumb-Down-America.pdf