Ladies and gentlemen, after decades of so-called progressive education, academic achievement levels have dropped so sharply in our nation that we graduate over a million functional illiterates every year from our high schools. The situation is so bad that a national commission reported in 1983 that if an unfriendly foreign power attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. What has happened to American education? Who is behind it? And what must be done about it? Our speaker tonight has some startling answers. His name is Mr. Samuel L. Bloomingfell, and none is better qualified than he to discuss these matters. He graduated in 1950 from City College in his native New York. After two more years of study in France, he served ten years as an editor in the New York publishing industry. An educator who has taught in both public and private schools, including one for learning and behavioral problems, Mr. Bloomingfield has written extensively on educational matters. One of the six books he authored was described by Fortune magazine as brilliant revisionist history. His latest on the NEA quickly became so popular that it went into a third printing in a matter of weeks. Our speaker's writings have appeared in many diverse publications including Esquire, Reason, Education Digest, Child and Family, American Opinion, and others. He has participated in several important educational conferences on a national level. and has frequently appeared on radio and TV programs. Tonight he will discuss the NEA and American education. Ladies and gentlemen, I am pleased to present Mr. Blumenfeld. Thank you very much, Mr. Denton. I'm delighted to be here in Chattanooga. You really have a beautiful city. And my visit to the Chattanooga choo-choo this evening is It made me feel very good, I must say. But I suppose the subject at hand is a rather serious one and hopefully I can lend some enlightenment to it. This morning I had the distinct pleasure of being on television in your early morning show with Mr. Cannon, who is the president-elect of the Tennessee Education Association. And he made a remark which is so true. He said that the reason why the NEA has gotten involved in politics is because public education is a political thing. I mean that's what's wrong with education in America today. It has been so thoroughly politicized that they've lost sight that it has something to do with education. So now it's all politics and it's all the use of force and coercion and of course that doesn't speak well for education. But he simply confirmed everything I say in my book, so I don't know why the NEA complains. I'm simply telling the truth about it. Well, let me begin tonight by reading a news item which appeared in Education Week of October 24th, 1984. The headline reads, Texas District Enlists Anti-Suicide Team Following Six Deaths. The story is as follows, quote, a Texas school district has hired a team of anti-suicide counselors to work with high school students following the suicides of six local teenagers within two and a half months. The psychologists were hired this month to talk to students at Clear Lake High School, according to Bird Menard, principal of the 3,000 student high school in League City, an affluent suburb of Houston. The latest victim of what officials have termed a cluster of suicides was Darren Thibodeau, a 14-year-old ninth grader at Clear Creek High School, who died of carbon monoxide poisoning on October 4th. According to news reports, it was originally thought that as many as 30 students had entered into a pact in which each swore to commit suicide in a six-week period. But school officials discovered that the story of the pact had been generated by one student as a lark, and that such an arrangement does not exist." The first question one asks is why are these youngsters killing themselves? They live in the most affluent society in all of human history. They have cars, television sets, stereos, Big Macs, French fries and milkshakes, trips to Disney World, designer jeans and Nike sneakers. They attend a big modern high school with all the facilities that money can buy. What has made their young lives so unbearable that self-extinction is the preferred alternative? Perhaps we can get a clue from the second news item, which appeared in the February 6th, 1985 issue of Education Week. The headline reads, Texas teenager commits suicide on school stage. The story is as follows, quote, an Arlington, Texas high school senior who was scheduled to play the lead part in the school play walked onto a classroom stage and shot himself with a sawed-off shotgun. The student's dramatic death follows a cluster of six youth suicides in the past year in the nearby city of Plano. Plano is a as a suburb of Dallas, the suicides in the other town were in a suburb of Houston. James Staley, 17, remembered as a good student with normal adolescent problems, climbed up on the stage on January 18th and began asking heavy philosophical questions about the meaning of life, said James Ouellette, an Arlington police spokesman. There were only five or six students in the class and a teacher, Mr. Ouellette said. No one took him seriously, and they gave him half-hearted and somewhat whimsical answers. The boy then sat down on a bar stool on the stage, opened a briefcase, and shot himself once in the head with the shotgun. He died instantly. Police said there were no signs of drug or alcohol use. No suicide note was found." What a tragedy. This youngster was literally dying to know the meaning of life and no one took him seriously. No fellow student, no teacher. In public school you are taught that you are a product of evolution. That you are an animal. And that the meaning of life for a human being is no different than what it is for an animal. The satisfaction of appetites. Of course the humanists say that the purpose of life is self-actualization. Whatever that means. If Jim Staley had asked me what the purpose of his life was, I would have told him very simply, to glorify God. And perhaps at that point he would have moved back from the brink of self-annihilation and decided to live in order to seek out God for himself. Jesus could have saved Jim Staley. He died for Jim Staley. But apparently Jim Staley didn't know it. The message, for some reason, did not get through. After all, there is an invisible sign on the door of every public school in America that tells Jesus Christ to keep out. You are not wanted here, the sign says. And so Jim Staley asked a life or death question in a place where he was guaranteed to get no answer. He was attending a school that not only denies the existence of God, but denies the existence of both mind and soul as well. For public education today is completely dominated by the philosophy of the behavioral psychologists. A philosophy so sterile and barren in matters of the spirit, so inhuman and anti-life in its reduction of man to the status of animal, that it's a miracle we don't have more suicides. How can a team of anti-suicide counselors help high school students when it is forbidden to deal with spiritual matters in the public school. Actually, we know very little about what the contributing causes of these suicides are. For example, were any of these students who committed suicide subjected to death education? Maybe you've never heard of death education. At a junior high school in Shakopee, Minnesota, a death education questionnaire was given out to the students. They were asked such questions as, how often do you think about your own death? Has there been a time in your life when you wanted to die? If you had a choice, what kind of death would you prefer? Based on your present feelings, what is the probability of your taking your own life in the near future? How often have you seriously contemplated committing suicide? Suppose you were to commit suicide, what method would you be most likely to use? The methods listed in the questionnaire were arbitraries or pills, gunshot, hanging, drowning, jumping, cutting or stabbing, carbon monoxide or other specified. Suppose you were ever to commit suicide, would you leave a suicide note? So far in all of the reports of teenage suicide, I've seen no mention of death education courses, or no call for an investigation in the teaching of such courses. Why not? They've been around now quite a while, and if they were any good, why are more youngsters committing suicide? Incidentally, what adult would answer a questionnaire like that? I mean, if any of you were given such a questionnaire, what would you do with it? You'd probably tear it up. You'd tell these people it's none of your business. What adult would want to dwell on such morbid subjects? It's really ridiculous, yet youngsters in junior high school are forced to think about these things because their teachers make them do it. And they're thoroughly disarmed, they don't know that they don't have to do this, but they're given such questionnaires and they're expected to then dwell on this morbid subject. Going through my files, I found an article from the Boston Herald American of November 4th, 1977, that's a good eight years ago, describing a death education course given to fifth graders in a Boston suburban school. As part of the course, the children were taken to a nearby cemetery. The article states, quote, nine-year-old Alan Offenberg, Robert Jost, and Chris Reva grabbed everyone's attention as they jumped up and down on the 200-year-old grave of Peter Salem one of Framingham's founding fathers. Hey, they shouted. Hey, you can hear the coffin vibrating underground. Listen, it's rattling, unquote. Nice way to spend the school day, jumping on graves. Maybe it will replace volleyball. The article goes on. The fifth grade lessons in death at Framingham's Roosevelt School are a small part in a growing movement in death education. As a result, in the past five years, the Massachusetts Department of Education has introduced a correspondence course on death. The University of Massachusetts in Boston has initiated a course called Death and Dying. Brookline High School has inserted units on coping with loss and grief in its psychology curriculum. And the Bigelow Junior High School in Newton has included a session on dying in English courses, to name a few. In the elementary school, the children are asked to define death and draw a picture of it. As the course progresses, the children also will learn what their teachers call the basics of writing their own wills, epitaphs, and eulogies and enacting a death scene. They'll see a film about a girl their own age who dies. At the last class, they'll visit a funeral home. where they'll learn how a body is prepared and dressed for a wake, how a coffin is lowered into the ground, and how long it takes for a body to disintegrate." I've been told that during these visits to funeral homes, some of the children try out coffins to see what it's like to lie in a coffin. This article was written in 1977. By now such courses are probably taught in every school district in America. The public schools are forbidden from teaching about the living God through whom eternal life is attainable, but they can teach the secular humanist view on death. Who is pushing all of this death education? The answer can be found in the Boston Herald American of July 23rd, 1978, in an article about Professor Richard O. Ulan of the University of Massachusetts and author of Death and Dying Education. The book includes an 18-week syllabus, 18-week syllabus, for the death education teacher. The article states, quote, at the time Professor Ulan began doing reading and research, the National Education Association, the publisher of the book, was looking for someone to write about death education. A friend who had heard about the NEA's quest matched the author with the publisher. So there it is, the NEA Went out, got a professor, solicited a professor to write a textbook on death education to be then circulated throughout the schools of America. What business is it of a teacher's union to create a curriculum on death education and to see that every school in America starts teaching death education? Who gave them the right to do that? Did they ask the parents whether the parents want their children to be taught death education? How many parents here would take their children to a funeral home for a learning experience? I doubt it. It's interesting, this morning when I was with Annette, who took me to the library here, I asked her if there were any recent cases of suicide in Chattanooga, and she said, well, yes there were, and there were some articles. in the newspapers recently here on suicide in Chattanooga and so we went to the library to the desk on local history and I was able to get hold of the clippings and to make xeroxes of it and it turns out that the Chattanooga school system has hired a counselor on suicide. And it says, Counselor says Chattanooga may be the U.S. suicide capital. Well, I suppose what I'm saying tonight is very appropriate since it says, since January, three young Chattanoogans have killed themselves. Overwhelmed by conflicts with family and peers, burdened by the demands of school and the drive to succeed, they saw death as the only way out, etc., etc. But it's interesting that in discussing the causes of the symptoms of the suicide, psuedo-suicidal individual, it said, one major sign, it says, some teens give out warning signs that they are depressed. Slazak, I guess it's the doctor, adolescent clinical psychology at Valley Psychiatric Hospital, Slazak says it is up to the family and friends to be sensitive to the teen and notice the signs. One major sign is when a teenager starts talking about death and suicide a lot." Slezak said. Well, where do they get these ideas of death and suicide? They've been talking about it in their classes. They've had to fill out questionnaires about it. They've had to discuss it in death education. No wonder the youngsters have it in their heads. They don't get it out of thin air. When I was a youngster in school, I never thought of death and suicide. I don't even believe I knew that there was such a thing as suicide until I was probably in high school. But here are children being educated, being, you know, given all of this stuff in their heads at this early age and then they wonder where they get these ideas. And yet in all of these pages, all of these articles on suicide, not a single mention of death education. Not a single inkling. that the children are getting all of this morbid information through their public schools. And of course... So, death education has been around since the mid-1970s, just at about the time that teenage suicides began to increase. In 1958, the U.S. Bureau of Vital Statistics listed three childhood suicides by 1973 that number was up to 75 so in 58 only three in the country by 73 it was 75 and today it is the second leading cause of death among teenagers automobile accidents being the first so death education isn't preventing suicide it is making it more acceptable like abortion, premarital sex, functional illiteracy, hallucinogenic drugs. The absence of religion in the public schools creates a spiritual vacuum in which Satan can enter and thrive. If children are not given moral armament with which to defend themselves against evil, the worst can happen. Here's an illustration from the New York Times of July 8, 1984. Quote, a teenage youth charged with slaying and mutilating a 17-year-old Long Island boy in what authorities said was a ritual carried out before followers of a satanic cult was found hanged early yesterday in his cell at the Suffolk County Jail. The sheriff ordered that a second youth charged in the case be placed under a 24-hour suicide watch. The suspect's death was the latest development in the murder of Gary Lawors of East Northport, who vanished June 15th. According to what the authorities said were confessions by the two suspects, Mr. Lawors was stabbed repeatedly and had his eyes gouged out in a four-hour ritual in the light of a campfire in a wooded area near Northport on the night of June 16th. Incidentally, Northport is one of these beautiful affluent suburbs on the north shore of Long Island. The cult is known as the Knights of the Black Circle. It sounds an awful lot like something from Dungeons and Dragons. I don't know how many of you are familiar with that, but it certainly sounds like they got their name from that. It has about 20 teenage members and has held gatherings for several years in the North Port area involving the sacrifice of animals, the burning and torturing of animals in satanic rituals. The other week when I was in Ohio speaking there, I was told that there's been a rash of animal torturings, of mutilated animals being killed in that area. And that's a sure sign that there are satanic cults there. I don't know what you've had in this area. I was surprised to find that Chattanooga is the capital of suicide. Maybe you also might become the capital of satanic cults. You'd better keep your eyes and ears open. Mayor Peter J. After all, if suicide is here, can satanic cults be far behind? Mayor Peter J. Nolan, like many North Port residents, said yesterday that he found the murder and the suicide hard to believe. He said the village of neat homes on tree-lined streets had many recreation and aid programs for young people, including a drug rehabilitation center supported by the local school district. Of course, the drug rehabilitation center has become a standard feature of every American city and town now. You see, because our youths are now on drugs, on alcohol, you name it, and so now we've got to deal with that problem. We have everything a kid wants, he said. When arrested Thursday, Mr. Casso, the suspect who committed suicide, was wearing a shirt bearing a devil's picture and the logo of ACDC, a popular heavy metal rock group with a satanic image whose rendition of Hell's Bells on an album entitled Back in Black proclaims Satan will get you and you're only young but you're going to die. At least four teenagers witnessed the slaying in which Mr. Casso plunged a knife 17 times into the head, neck, and chest of the victim. During the ritual some of the victim's clothing was burned as the cult members chanted and the dying victim was forced to say, I love Satan. Casso then dragged the victim about 15 yards, thinking he was dead. When Casso began to leave the site, Law was sat up and according to Casso said, I love you mom. At this point, Casso returned to where Law was sat and inflicted further stab wounds into the facial area, cutting out his eyes. Simultaneously, Casso reportedly told the police he heard a crow screech, and this was indication to him as a Satan worshipper that the devil had ordered him to kill. Law was unquote. Now this is taking place in the most technologically advanced civilization in all of history, in the most affluent of towns. These children have everything they want. This is not taking place somewhere in the jungles of South America where they shrink heads. This is being done in the U.S. of A. by youngsters who have attended our public schools. Educated by our wonderful educators. That's what's happening in some of our beautiful suburbs. Mr. Casso's father, by the way, is a high school football coach. You can play ACDC satanic music in public schools, but hymns to Jesus Christ are strictly forbidden. You know, in some public school cafeterias now they have the jukebox to make sure that the kids won't miss their satanic music during the day. They don't want to deprive them of that great pleasure. But of course, they dare not say grace to their God for the meals they're eating. Perhaps if they said a prayer, At mealtime, more food would wind up in their stomachs than flying across the cafeteria. But of course, that's a no-no because of the separation between church and state. It's very interesting also that there was a program on 2020, I don't know how many of you saw it, on Satanism. The rash of satanic cults throughout the United States, the discovery that cannibalism is now being practiced in the United States. cannibalism by Americans in these satanic cults. There were also intimations that some of the children who have disappeared are winding up as sacrificial victims in these satanic rituals. The police have played it all down. The police just term it, well, you know, homicide, murder. But that particular... I was told about it by Dr. Rush Dooney at a meeting in Seattle. He said this was a tremendous breakthrough in the media. For the media finally to admit that there is such a thing as Satanism. And it is thriving throughout the United States. It is rising. It is sweeping over this country. Satanism. Well, why is it happening? Because America's public schools are owned by Satan. They are his parochial schools. And he loves death education because he wants the souls of our youth. What with drugs, rock music, pornography, sensitivity training, values clarification, blasphemy, foul language, sexual promiscuity, globalism, socialism, witchcraft, astrology, yoga, transcendental meditation. You name it, they've got it. Our public schools have become a moral cesspool leading our youth to degeneracy and degradation. Is that what we're paying our taxes for? Is that what you want? Is that what you're paying your money for? The impact of satanic education on the youth of our inner cities is even more frightful than in the suburbs. In the inner cities there is less suicide but more murder. The Detroit Free Press of November 11, 1984 devoted two full pages to the shootings in Detroit among young blacks from July 1, 1984 through November 10. And I saw, I was in Detroit at the time, I had been lecturing and it was a nice Sunday and I was sitting there looking through the Sunday paper, the Detroit Free Press, and there was this huge two-page spread giving the pictures, the photographs of all the youngsters who had been shot and killed and descriptions of each little incident. And it was really, you know, it was horrendous. In those four and a half months, just a period of four and a half months, 118 children under 17 were shot in Detroit. Two of them twice. Eight died. 100 of them were male, and all but four were black. Among black youth today, unemployment is as high as 75%. The situation has become explosive. These youths have all gone to our wonderful public schools, which somehow failed to teach them any employable skills. The sexual revolution, which is also part of the humanist drive for moral relativism and a sinless world, has also taken its toll in the black community. In 1982, more than half of all black children born in the United States were illegitimate. More than half. and half of those had teenage mothers. Most of them are destined to grow up in grinding poverty and on the welfare rolls. The New York Times Magazine of September 16th, 1984 carried a truly ominous article on black youth entitled, Man Child in Harlem, written by black journalist Claude Brown. Mr. Brown writes, quote, today's man child is a teenager between the ages of 13 and 18 living with his unskilled and laboring mother and three or four sisters and brothers in a dilapidated tenement or low-income project. And of course, this poor mother has had the great benefits of an American public education. Today's man-child is persistently violent, obsessed with a desperate need for pocket money, They possess an uncompromising need to be able to wear a different pair of designer jeans twice a week. Manchild 1984 is the product of a society so rife with violence that killing a mugging or robbery victim is now fashionable. You take their stuff and you pop them. Pop is the new word for murder. To kill somebody, you pop them. Of course, you go bang, bang, pop, pop. They're dead. Bang, bang, you're dead. Murder is in style now. The new man-child is so deadly and so cynically rational that he is terrifying. It is disturbing to consider that murder is in style among young muggers and that the style among the New York political establishment is anti-capital punishment liberalism and how well the two styles complement each other. You see, the liberals are very concerned about keeping all these killers alive. They don't want capital punishment because they want to keep these killers alive. They don't want them dead. Why? Why do we want to keep all these killers alive? Today's man-child obtains the biggest gun he can find, usually a sawed-off shotgun or a .45, sticks it in the face of some poor working person and takes all of five or ten dollars and his life. A maniacal act, unquote. In the old days, they used to rob you and then they'd let you go and then they figured two weeks later you'd have another paycheck and they'd rob you again. Now they don't even bother to wait for that. They just take your $5 and they kill you. Just for the heck of it. So do you wonder why Mr. Bernard Goetz shot those four black youths in the New York subway when they tried to rob him? After all, it was four against one. What was he supposed to do, stop and interview them? Do you wonder why he bought a gun to defend himself against these homicidal maniacs who roam freely through the subways of New York looking for victims? I'm sure that Americans in other cities can repeat the same stories. Now the interesting thing about this is that there are other ominous signs within the black community that are very disturbing. For example, the number of blacks entering college is declining. The number of blacks on college faculties is declining. The number of blacks obtaining higher degrees is declining. Something terrible is happening within the black community. As a matter of fact, there was one report which stated categorically that the black male is going down the tubes. What an incredible statement to make. And the American people don't even know it's happening. But you know what's happening to the black community in this country? They are being primed to be the violent factor in the coming revolution. Because you know, every communist revolution must have its violence. They've got to go out and kill the anti-communists. And who is going to do the killing? Well, they've created killers. There they are. At the moment they're killing each other, but if they're willing to kill each other for five and ten dollars, certainly they'll kill others if they're directed by the right leaders. And you can see how the black community is being primed and manipulated by leaders to espouse the program of the radical left. If you read communist publications, And if you read some of the publications that are being published in Harlem or in Boston, you will see that the black community is being softened up to accept the kind of thing that they have in Central America. So there's method to this madness. And the important thing to remember is that these youths are the products of American public education. We have compulsory school attendance laws in every state in the union. And these views are exactly what the schools have programmed them to be. In the first place, they are functionally illiterate. And it is our schools that have made them that way. A true illiterate is someone who has never gone to school. A functional illiterate is a youngster who has spent from 8 to 12 years in school and comes out reading at a level that cannot be used in the world. And we are deliberately creating functional illiterates. And it's interesting that all of this should be happening to the blacks now after, what was it, 10 years of civil rights agitation, 10 years of affirmative action, 10 years of gaining for the blacks equal educational opportunity. So something is happening. and we're not being told, the American public is not being told about. As a matter of fact, in the article on this that I read in Education Week, it was said that the educators are reluctant to gather statistics on this very issue. They don't want to alarm the American people. They want to spring it on us all of a sudden. All of a sudden we're going to see these eruptions occurring, and everybody's going to answer, what happened? What's been going on? It's part of the American educator's usual deception of the American people. But ever since John Dewey and his progressive colleagues took control of public education in the early part of this century, the goal of public education has been to create a socialist society in America. To get rid of free enterprise, individualism, and religion, and replace them with socialism, collectivism, and atheism. John Dewey considered high literacy to be an obstacle to socialism. And that is why the progressives shifted the emphasis away from basic intellectual skills to the development of social skills. High literacy produced this individualistic intelligence which was not conducive to socialist control. Incidentally, speaking of literacy, the illiteracy rate of urban blacks in 1930 was 9.2%. 1930, before civil rights, in segregated schools, etc. The illiteracy rate was 9.2%. Today, after all the civil rights and all the money that's been poured into the schools by the federal government, the illiteracy rate among blacks is now 50%. 50, from 9.2% to 50%. Despite all of the benefits that have been won and achieved. They did an awful lot of marching, but what have they got to show for it now? It's really a pitiful tragedy. The progressives wanted to dumb down the masses so that they could be controlled by a new scientific technological elite from the universities and psych labs you see in a socialist society you have the elite on top and you have the masses on the bottom and so you've got to dumb down the masses so that they will you know in a bovine way do whatever the leaders tell them to do and you've heard of these gifted courses for gifted students in the schools they're to be part of the elite you see they want to make sure that these smart kids fill the ranks of the humanists and become the leaders of tomorrow. That's why they have these so-called gifted programs. The blacks have been shifted off into vocational training. They don't want the blacks to learn to read or to become literate. So they shunt them off into vocational education. And I was speaking to a a black television anchor person in Boston the other day and he was telling me how that's how he was educated when he went to high school he wasn't taught the literacy skills that he wanted he was made to take vocational training and it was after he got out of the schools that he was able to learn something on his own but that's what's being done deliberately by our educational system So now how were the educators to lower the literacy level of the United States and convince the American people that the public schools were educating their children? Well, these men were the cleverest psychologists the world has ever known. What they did was they changed the way Americans were taught to read. They threw out the alphabetic phonics method of teaching reading and substituted a new sight word method based on reflex conditioning that would produce a much lower level of illiteracy. And all of this occurred in the early 1930s. Now, in case you don't know the difference between alphabetic phonics and Luxe, let me explain it to you. Our writing system is an alphabetic writing system. And it is based on the use of the alphabet. Now, what is the alphabet? It's a set of symbols that stand for the irreducible speech sounds of a language. How was it developed? Well, the earliest form of writing was picture writing. If you look in the caves of the primitive, of early man, you will see picture drawings. Now, you didn't have to go to school to read pictures. A tree stood for a tree, an animal stood for an animal. Well then when civilization got a little more complex, they had to find symbols to represent things which could not be pictured. For example, how would you draw a symbol for love or for attitude, wanting? You take any abstract verb and try to think of a symbol for it. It's easy to think up symbols to create symbols for objects, for nouns but for all the other ideas it's impossible to concoct symbols that represent that picture what they represent and so they developed thousands and thousands of symbols that did not look like the ideas they were representing and so in order to learn to read you had to study and learn thousands and thousands of different symbols and that's the system that was used in ancient Egypt They called it hieroglyphics. And it's the system that they use in China today. If you want to learn Chinese, you've got to learn to recognize thousands and thousands of these little ideographs. And I can tell you that it's not easy for the Chinese. And it's one of the reasons why the Chinese have been so far behind in the development of civilization, because they are handicapped by their own writing system. Well, somewhere along the line, somebody thought, why not invent a system of writing that could reproduce the words, the spoken word? You see, because they had discovered, someone had discovered, that all of spoken language is composed of a small number of irreducible speech sounds. In other words, all of our thousands and thousands of words are simply combinations of these small number of sounds. Now in the English language, there are only 44 sounds. So everything that's written and spoken in English is simply 44 sounds put into different endless combinations. So that discovery the man who made that discovery also said well why not have a set of symbols to stand for that small number of sounds and then all you had to remember were those small number of symbols the sounds they stood for and then you could read and of course that's what he did he invented the alphabet it was invented about 2,000 years before Christ and immediately it swept the world hieroglyphics was discarded and alphabetic writing came into being Now it is very interesting, it's crucial to understand, that when the alphabet was invented, when alphabetic writing was invented, the scripture came into being. The written scripture. Prior to that, with hieroglyphics, you could not put the word of God down on paper. Because remember, what does it say in the Bible? In the beginning was the word. and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. God is the Word, the spoken Word. In other words, our connection to our Creator is through the spoken Word. Our prayers are spoken. We don't use images. We don't use idols. We use language as our means of communication with the Lord. The Lord communicates with us through language, through words. And the alphabet permitted an accurate transcription of the spoken word of God onto paper. So that's a very significant development in man's spiritual history. Very significant. And there are many people who believe that the alphabet is of divine origin. Because nobody really knows who invented it, how it was invented, suddenly there it was. Suddenly the alphabet appears and suddenly the scripture comes into being. It's a miraculous development. Now what is, and so alphabetic writing of course swept the western world, it advanced learning, it increased the speed of the transmission of knowledge, and it was used of course in ancient Greece, in Rome, And when the Romans conquered England, the Latin alphabet was imposed on the English language, and that's why we have the Latin alphabet and not an alphabet of our own. And we have an alphabet of 26 letters to stand for 44 sounds. It may be a bit difficult to master, but it's not impossible. It's produced the greatest literature in all of history. And virtually anyone who's ever learned to read by it has learned to read very well. It has been the simplest way to learn to read. Thousands of children, millions of children over the centuries learned to read via the alphabetic method. And so what these psychologists decided to do was, well, if they wanted to lower the literacy level of the United States, and if they wanted to make it impossible for the young to read the Bible and the Word of God, They would concoct a new method of teaching reading. They would teach children to read English as if it were Chinese, composed of pictures. And so they made children learn to read English as if each little written word was a little picture, a word picture. They didn't tell the child that this word has certain, that the letters stand for sounds. The child was made to learn a sight vocabulary. I'm sure that virtually everyone in this room under 40 was taught a sight vocabulary in school. And a sight vocabulary, by definition, is learning to read words without knowing what the letters stand for. Now, fortunately, in this country, so many children come to school with some knowledge of phonics from their parents, etc., that they were able to learn to read despite the Luxembourg method. But at least one-third of the children who have gone to school and been taught to read by the Look-Say Method have become functional illiterates, learning disabled. This method was created by the top psychologists in America. By Edward L. Thorndike, Arthur Gates, William Scott Gray, and of course the theoretician behind it was John Dewey, James McKean Cattell. All of our great behavioral psychologists And to prove to you that it is based on Pavlovian conditioning, the technique, let me read you the words of Professor Walter Dearborn of Harvard University. He was head of the clinical psychology department in the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University for many years. And in an article written by him in 1940, he wrote, The principle which we have used to explain the acquisition of a site vocabulary is, of course, to one suggested by Pavlov's well-known experiments on the conditioned response. This is as it should be. The basic process involved in conditioning and in learning to read is the same.