How to dumb down a nation

By Dr. Samuel L. Blumenfeld

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, 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 arguably the most literate nation on earth, and the result was positive in every respect. Why was it so literate? Because the people were governed by the precepts of the Bible, and biblical literacy was paramount in the education of the nation's children.

But once we got a government schooling system, from which the God of the Bible was removed, it became possible to introduce teaching methods that would destroy literacy. The Bible was now relegated to an hour of study in church on Sundays. And because it was no longer a part of the curriculum, children no longer considered it important to life.

Also, an 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.

How do the schools create illiteracy? By using teaching methods that make it impossible for millions of children to learn to read effectively.

We've known of these methods as far back as 1929, when Dr. Samuel T. Orton, a neurologist, investigated reading failure in Iowa in the 1920s and discovered that it was being caused by a new "sight method" of teaching that had been introduced in the schools. He wrote an article on the subject entitled "The 'Sight Method' of Teaching Reading as a Source of Reading Disability."

He said, in a very cautious manner, so as not to tread on sensitive toes:

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 I 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.

That article was published in the February 1929 issue of the Journal of Educational Psychology, edited by the very psycho-educators in the process of devising the means to dumb down the country. Dr. Orton's findings merely confirmed to them that the sight method was having the effect it was intended to have – spread illiteracy by pretending to teach children to read.

Dr. Orton's article was read only by the professionals. It took Rudolf Flesch in 1955 to bring all of this to the attention of the public in his famous book, "Why Johnny Can't Read." By 1955, dyslexia and reading disability had already become epidemic.

"The teaching of reading – all over the United States, in all the schools, in all the textbooks – is totally wrong and flies in the face of all logic and common sense," wrote Flesch.

He then explained how in the early 1930s, the professors of education threw out the alphabetic-phonics method of teaching and replaced it with a new sight or whole-word method. Flesch pointed out that when you impose an ideographic teaching method on a phonetic system, you get dyslexia – the inability to see the phonetic structure of our written words. What he meant was that our children were being taught to read English as if it were Chinese.

And so, here we are, 73 years after Orton, and 47 years after Flesch, and nothing has been done to derail the dumbing-down agenda. But George Bush is giving it a try. Under the new Reading First Initiative, the federal government will spend $900 million in 2002 to restore phonics to the schools. Will it succeed? Who knows? And if it succeeds, will it stop the rest of the dumbing-down agenda? I doubt it.