By Alan
Caruba
I used the verb “stupefying” to
describe a long process in our nation’s schools that has produced several
generations of Americans, dumbed down and resulting in more than half who are
functionally illiterate, nor can do math, and, as a recent headline reported
“Student’s Results in Social Studies Stagnate.”
“U.S. middle-school students’
performance on social studies didn’t improve much between 2010 and 2014, federal
test scores released Wednesday (April 29) show, underscoring concerns about the
uniformed citizenry and workforce.” When
it comes to U.S. history, the share of students scoring at or above proficiency
last year was 18%, up one percentage point from 2010. In other words, over 80%
failed to have a grasp on the subject, critical to every citizen’s understanding
of U.S. history, its Constitution, and governance.
An
extraordinary new book by Samuel Blumenfeld and Alex Newman, “Crimes of the
Educators: How Utopians are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s
Children” ($26.95, WND Books) should be the center of conversation for a
nation’s media, but I suspect this may be among the few places you would learn
about it. Blumenfeld has written ten books on education and Newman is an
international journalist, educator and consultant.
What history does teach us is that
progressives, also known as communists, have slaughtered millions in their quest
to create the perfect society where everybody earns the same amount, thus
abandoning them to equal poverty. To achieve this, it was necessary to exercise
complete control over what the children learned and what the media shared as
news.
Blumenfeld notes that “In the United
States the socialist utopians adopted a new and unique method of conquering a
nation; by dumbing down its people, by destroying the brainpower of millions of
its citizens.”
This was launched in 1898 by John
Dewey, a socialist, and outlined in his essay titled ‘The Primary-Education
Fetich.’ “In it he showed his fellow
progressives how to transform America into a collectivist utopia by taking over
the public schools and destroying the literacy of millions of
Americans.”
“The plan has been so successfully
implemented that it is now a fact that half of America’s adult population are
functionally illiterate. They can’t read their nation’s Constitution or its
Declaration of Independence. They can’t even read their high school
diploma.”
This was achieved by changing how
children are taught to read in our government schools. Previously the method was
phonetics in which children learned the alphabet, the sounds the letters
represented, and how in combination they composed words. The present method is
called “whole word” in which the child must recognize the whole word without
identifying its alphabetical elements. “That forces children to read English as
if it were Chinese,” says Blumenfeld.
He notes that most teachers are
unaware of what they are doing and most parents trust the public schools that
are supposed to represent the cherished values of our democratic republic. “But
the unhappy truth is that today’s public schools have rejected the values of the
Founding Fathers and adopted values from nineteenth-century European social
utopian plans that completely contradict our own concepts of individual
freedom.”
Blumenfeld also identifies a fact that
is hidden in the growing numbers of people who having passed through our schools
or attending experience dyslexia and learning disabilities. Brain scans have demonstrated this. Our
schools are places where the answer to the normal child’s energy and curiosity
is deemed being “over-active” and our schools “push various psychiatric drugs on
millions of children by requiring them to take such powerful, mid-altering
stimulants as Ritalin or Adderal to alleviate such school-induced disorders as
attention deficit disorder (ADD) and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder
(ADHD). These drugs are as potent as cocaine and have even caused sudden death
among teen athletes.”
“The long-term utopian plan required destroying America’s political, social, and moral culture of religious freedom, individual rights, unobtrusive government, and high literacy for all.”
That is a virtual definition of what
has occurred in America today. We see it in the attack on religion, particularly
Christianity, in America. We see it in the attack on traditional marriage in the
name of the homosexual objective of “same-sex marriage.” We see individual
businesses attacked for not wanting to give up their spiritual values and
beliefs when challenged by homosexuals. We see it in the vast growth in the
numbers of single mothers, often never married. And, of late, we see it in the
obscene hatred being directed against our nation’s police
forces.
The statistics cited in “Crimes of the
Educators” have been published by Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in
Education and they include:
Eighty-one percent of American 18 year
olds are unprepared for college coursework.
More than 25 percent of students fail
to graduate from high school in four years; for African-American and Hispanic
students, this number is approaching 40 percent.
Seventy percent of those in prison and
70 percent of those on welfare read at the lowest literacy levels according to
the 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey.
According to tests in 2012 given to
15-year-olds by the Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development,
U.S. students were at 17th
place in the world on reading, 29th in math, and 20th in
science.
“These failures,” says Blumenfeld, “
are not the result of an accident. They are the result of programs created by
the best-organized and best-paid educators on the planet. All of these programs
that create failure were conceived to produce precisely the results we are
getting.”
This explains, too, why many concerned
parents have decided to teach their children at home while others spend their
money to have their children tutored to overcome the damage of our public
schools.
If you have looked around and thought
to yourself that too many of the people who see, hear, work with, and who vote
are dumb, you now know why.
© Alan Caruba, 2015
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