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.