Before I introduce Samuel Blumenfeld, I'd like to speak briefly about a very remarkable addition of the Bible, one of the most important in the history of the world, the Geneva Bible. It was a translation of the Bible into English which profoundly influenced English history. The Puritan movement was born out of this addition. And in every respect, its power was so great that when King James came to the throne, he insisted that there be another Bible to replace this, which was at that time the Bible used in all the churches. And so the so-called King James Version or the Authorized Version resulted, which is really the Geneva Bible without the notes, and a few minor corrections here and there. With regard to the notes, a scholar has written, Michael Brown, in the 16th century the Bible was not just a spiritual guide, it was a legal document. The word argument used before the chapters is even used today by attorneys on motions and briefs. In other words, the Bible is regarded from cover to cover as a legal document, as law binding on all believers. Now this Bible is important to me in a great many ways. For its historical reasons, for the preparatory materials, and also for one further reason. Now, we sometimes know people who make it into distinguished lists, like who's who in America, or who's who in literature, and who's who in medicine, and so on. But it's very rare that anybody ever makes it into the Bible. Well, I have an announcement to make. There is a bibliography of works related to the time of the Geneva Bible and King James and his work trying to undo the Geneva Bible. And in that bibliography, there's a name that stands out. Otto James J. Scott. So we all know somebody who made it into the Bible. And I think maybe Anna will permit you to touch him after the service is over. So it takes me, uh, It gives me a great deal of pleasure to present Otto with a copy of the Geneva Bible. That means you've got to live up to everything now that your name's in this book. And Anna, I appoint you as the person to make sure that he stays totally in line. It is a privilege and a pleasure to have one of our staff members who resides on the East Coast in Boston with us this week, Samuel Blumenfeld. Samuel Blumenfeld is our great authority today on homeschools. He has been profoundly influential both in courtrooms and out of courtrooms. Very few people have done as much lecturing from coast to coast probably as Sam has. He also works in the field. Right now he is training some black mothers in Boston in homeschooling. So he's not only there on the lecture platform but on the ground level working with people to enable them to educate their children. Sam's role here is so important that the National Education Association listed him as their public enemy number one. That is quite an honor because they were testifying to the very, very powerful impact he is having from coast to coast. Not only in the sphere of homeschooling, but also in the area of phonics. Rudolf Flesch wrote an important book in the 50s, Why Johnny Can't Read. And much of the work that Rudolf Flesch did, Samuel Blumenfeld has built upon and developed and his alphaphonics is a very important contribution in this area and is very helpful now in leading a great many children into literacy and abolishing the invented disease of dyslexia, which is another name for bad teaching. So we're very proud and happy to have Sam Blumenfeld as one of the Cal Seton scholars and especially happy that he is here to speak to us tonight. Sam? Thank you, Rush, for that very kind introduction. I'm not in the Bible, but I am in Who's Who in the East. I made that, you know, which is, I suppose, something these days. Being in this area, I had an opportunity to visit Stanford University in Palo Alto, and of course, you know, it's a great institution and they have a great school of education. And I'm always curious about their libraries. As a matter of fact, I was in the very library where Rush did his research for his great book, The Messianic Character of American Education. And the reason why I haunt these libraries is because that's where you find out what the educators are up to. If you want to find out what the educators are doing, you won't find it out by reading the National Enquirer or USA Today or even Time Magazine. If you want to find out what the educators are doing you have to read the journals of education. And the only place that will have the journals of education are the university libraries that can afford them and have the space for them. And of course very few people ever read them. But they represent the repository of the thinking of the educators and so I spend a good deal of time and them going through their writings as dull as they are, as boring as they are. They have to be read if you're going to find out what is going on. So I can say without, with, with, with complete confidence that the system, the public school system of this country is going to get much worse than it is today. If you think things are bad now, just wait. It is going to really get horrible. But I'd like to bring to your attention a very interesting article that I found in one of the publications I went through at the library, the Covelly Library. They have the various educational periodicals on a long shelf or ledge going around the entire library and there are over a hundred of them so you have your choice. But I picked up one that was entitled Education Canada. published by the Canadian Education Association. And this is the spring 1989 issue. Comes out of Toronto. And they had an article entitled, Johnny Came Back to School but Still Can't Read. By Rolf Pritchard and Helen Lee. And I got this interesting information from that article. Quote, It is currently estimated that one million Canadians are almost totally illiterate and another four million are termed functionally illiterate. In the United States, these figures are estimated respectively at 26 million and 60 million. 60 million functional illiterates. Debate over the origins and causes of illiteracy in adults has continued vigorously since the work of Bernstein in the 1960s. Overwhelmingly, the data available from our own student files endorsed the view that a socio-economically deprived environment rife with sociological problems and lacking any creative positive literacy and linguistic stimulants is almost the invariable feature of the early years of more than 90% of the students in our program. The phenomenon of adult illiteracy is in almost all cases the ultimate and visible indicator of broad problems which result from socioeconomic deprivation during the early stages of cognitive development. Now, if you believe that, you'll believe almost anything. We know why we have an illiteracy problem. It's because of the way they teach reading. In the early 1930s, the professors of education changed the way reading is taught. They threw out the alphabetic phonics method and they put in this look-say-whole-word-or-sight method. That's the cause of the problem. Rudolf Flesch identified it in 1951. Jean Schall confirmed what Rudolf Fleischer wrote. She confirmed that in her book that was published in the 60s. I confirmed it further in my book, The New Illiterates, published in the 70s. So there's no lack of evidence as to the cause of the problem, but yet the educators, of course, will tell you that the problem is sociological, etc. In that same library, I found a very interesting book that I had been looking for for years. and I found that they're right in the stacks. It's entitled, National Education in the United States by Dupont de Nemours, written in 1812. Now, Dupont de Nemours was the founder of the Dupont chemical firm. Of course, he came from France. He was a physiocrat who emigrated to the United States during the Revolution to save his head and settled here. And he and Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson, exchanged some letters concerning education in the United States. And this is what he had to say about the state of education in the United States at that time he wrote this. This was 1812 and earlier. He said, the United States are more advanced in their educational facilities than most countries. They have a large number of primary schools and as their paternal affection protects children from working in the fields, is possible to send them to the schoolmaster, a condition which does not prevail in Europe. Most young Americans, therefore, can read, write, and cipher. Not more than four in a thousand are unable to write legibly, even neatly. How do you like that? Four in a thousand. England, Holland, the Protestant cantons of Switzerland more nearly approach the standard of the United States because of those countries because In those countries, the Bible is read. It is considered a duty to read it to children. And in that form of religion, the sermons and liturgy in the language of the people tend to increase and formulate ideas of responsibility. Controversy also has developed argumentation and has thus given room for the exercise of logic. In America, a great number of people read the Bible and all the people read a newspaper. The fathers read aloud to their children while breakfast is being prepared, a task which occupies the mothers for three quarters of an hour every morning. And as the newspapers of the United States are filled with all sorts of narratives, they disseminate an enormous amount of information. So as you can see, people were much better educated back in 1812 at a much lower cost, obviously. than what we have today with these gigantic monopolistic school systems in Canada and the United States. And incidentally, what happens here happens in Canada. The educators in Canada take all of their cues from the United States, from an American educator. So if they have an illiteracy problem up there, it's because they're using the same, let's say, textbooks. And we think of Canada as the population of Canada. I don't know what the latest figure is. Is it 20 million or 25 million? to consider that 4 million are functionally illiterate is an incredibly high number of people and in this country 60 million functional illiterates. It's staggering. What's interesting here is that we are beginning now to come full circle. In the homeschool movement they are getting back to the family, they are beginning to educate in the family, they are leaving the public school system, they are departing from the these great state institutions, and they are doing the educating at home, and the children are learning to read at home. And what is actually happening is something that Dr. Rashtuni and I were discussing earlier today, is this transition that we are going through at this moment, from one age into another. The age that we are leaving is the age of humanistic statism, where the state is in charge of everything. And of course, as we know, that age began in 1660. And it is coming to an end. It is coming to an end because people are realizing now, finally, that the state will destroy them if they continue to try to live with it. And we know the kind of mess that it has made of education in this country. And that is why you have this exodus from the public schools into the private schools, into the Christian schools, into homeschooling because what we are going to get now is decentralization. The great entities are breaking up. The computer helps a great deal. Nowadays a homeschool with a computer is as powerful as any institution. You have the world, you have access to a world of knowledge through modems and all kinds of facilities with fax machines and copying machines and videos and tapes. You can do more at home now than you can ever do in a state school. So we're seeing this gradual change. This movement is changing. And people are waking up. And we're moving into a new era. A new age. Hopefully it'll be an age in which Christianity will dominate. And there's a very good chance that it will. Because something else is happening at this very same time. There's a plague that's spreading over the world. And it's called AIDS. And according to one analyst, Dr. Browning, he says that by the year 2040, 50% of the world's population will have died of AIDS. 50% of the world's population. So we're headed into some rather rough times. But the Christians have a good chance of surviving because they are not the high-risk group. They're not in the high-risk group, you see. And their morality, their lifestyle, their worldview is going to save them from this plague. It won't save everyone because some people will go to hospitals to get transfusions and they may get a, you know, a bad batch of blood. But the chances are very good that the Christians will survive this period and will come out healthy, strong, prosperous, and learned, educated, because the education will have taken place at home. So these are the things that are happening. But as the system is falling apart, the people who run the system, the educators, and you have to read their publications to understand this, they are getting crazier and crazier. The system is getting insaner and insaner. And all I have to do is point out to you one of the aspects of that curriculum, which is destroying thousands of teenagers in this country. and it's called the affective domain. Now, what is the affective domain? Well, you see, the current curriculum in the public schools is divided into two parts. They have the cognitive domain and the affective domain. In the cognitive domain, they're supposed to be concerned with reading, writing, and arithmetic. Now, how do they teach reading? Well, now they're using whole language. As a matter of fact, whole language has been mandated for the state of California by Dr. Honig. He's mandated whole language. What is whole language? It's look, say. In a dressed up form, that's all it is. So Dr. Honig is condemning to functional illiteracy millions of people in this state, particularly the Hispanics and the blacks, who are so far down now, who have been so crushed by this system. And incidentally, public education was created supposedly to help the poor. But the poor are the ones who are being destroyed in this country. They are being rendered into an underclass. What is an underclass? These are people who come out of 12 years of schooling or 10 years with no employable skills. They can't read, they can't write, they can't think, they can't add, they can't even speak English anymore. Can you imagine spending 12 years in school coming out knowing nothing? It's not easy for the schools to do that. It takes a lot of work producing people who don't know anything. How do you keep people from learning? Well, they've perfected it. They know how to do it so beautifully that it works like magic, you see. So that's what's happened. And they don't know how to teach reading. Mathematics, forget about arithmetic. Arithmetic, of course, was wiped out. There is no such thing as arithmetic anymore. Everything is math. And so arithmetic, you have to hunt and find it somewhere. And now they're working on a new, new math. The old new math, of course, didn't work. And now they're thinking of a new, new math. And they're going to give the kids calculators and computers. They won't know how to do it in their heads, but they're expected to be able to use calculators and computers. They'll never know when they made an error, you see. How are they going to know they've made a mistake? Because they won't be up there. They won't know. They don't teach them to write anymore, they teach them to print. And spelling is very iffy, if you can't read you're not going to become much of a speller. So as far as the cognitive domain is concerned, don't expect much there, it's going to get much worse. If you think we have illiterates now, give it another couple of generations and of course California is going to have a problem like you won't believe. Now the affective domain is really where the educators are all excited about. That's where they deal with the children's emotions and values and beliefs. That's where they get into their heads and their hearts and their souls, you see. Through values clarification, sensitivity training, situational ethics, multiculturalism, globalism, transcendental meditation, sex education, AIDS education, drug education, and death education. Now, death education is about the weirdest thing to get into the curriculum, and it's there to stay. What is death education? Well, now they've got to teach the kids all about death and dying. And it's interesting with the rise of the introduction of death education in the schools, we've had this tremendous teenage suicide holocaust. Over 50,000 American teenagers have committed suicide since the introduction of death education in America's schools in the early 1970s. According to Education Week of October 31st, 1984, there are 18 teenage suicides a day in the United States, or about 6,570 per year. So that comes to roughly over 50,000 by now. In 1985, a half million teenagers tried to kill themselves. There is no reason to believe that this widespread death wish among teenagers has abated. Teen suicide is now so common that only the most spectacular tragedies get national attention. One such tragedy occurred last spring in Sheridan, Arkansas, where three high school students committed suicide within 24 hours of each other. The town with a population of 3,200 is about 40 miles south of Little Rock. According to facts on file of May 18, 1990, the suicides began April 30th, when a 17-year-old student, Thomas Smith, walked in front of his American history class at Sheridan High School, told one of the girls in class he loved her, and then shot himself in the head with a .22 caliber pistol as his classmates watched. Later that evening, a friend of Smith's, Thomas H. Chidester, 19, was found shot to death at his home with a .45 caliber pistol, leaving a note that read, I can't go on any longer. The next day, another Sheridan High student, Jerry Paul McCool, 17, was found shot to death at his home with a .22 caliber pistol. Police labeled the death a suicide, although McCool's parents insisted it had been an accident. The three deaths occurred in the wake of another suicide in Sheridan by 17-year-old Raymond Dale Wilkinson who had shot himself to death on March 28th. Police said there appeared to be no link among the killings other than the friendship between Smith and Chittister and that none of the youth had been in trouble with the police. We are now all too familiar with these bizarre cluster suicides that have shocked and baffled communities all across America. Jefferson County, Colorado, at least 14, possibly 17 teenagers committed suicide between January 85 and April 86. A study showed that few of the victims had taken drugs or alcohol before killing themselves. Some had problems at school or with the law, but others were model students who participated in sports and had high grades. Fairfax County, Virginia, three Annandale High School seniors committed suicide between September 17th on October 26, 1987. According to the Fairfax Journal, Annandale students are a very ordinary bunch of kids. Nobody really knows what specific troubles the Annandale youths who killed themselves may have been facing. Omaha, Nebraska. Three teenagers attending Bryan High School committed suicide and two attempted suicide within a two-week period in February 1986. According to Education Week, the students were normal kids. not really involved with drugs or anything. Lemonster, Massachusetts. On March 27th, 86, George Henderson, 14, a Lemonston High School honor student, shot himself to death with a 12-gauge shotgun in his bedroom. He was the 16th suicide in Lemonster in two years, the third in that school year. According to the Worcester Telegram, here was a boy not identified as being a child at risk There was no indication something was wrong. He was a good student and athlete from a relatively normal family. School officials and parents expressed bafflement when trying to figure out why these youngsters are killing themselves. Some psychologists have suggested that it may have something to do with low self-esteem. But many of these suicide victims are good students, good athletes, well-loved by their families. So why are they committing suicide? Is it possible that death education is the cause? Most people, including parents, haven't the faintest idea what death education is. A graphic description of death education was given in the Winslow Sentinel of April 9, 1990. Winslow, a town of about 5,500 inhabitants, is in central Maine where people assume that weird subject-like subjects like death and dying are not part of the curriculum. You'll assume differently after hearing this. This is what that article said. Death, dying, funerals, wills, and organ donations. Pretty morbid stuff, but not for a group of Winslow High School students. They wrote their own obituaries and epitaphs, filled out organ donation cards, visited a funeral home, and talked about such issues as mercy killing. They wrote instructions for their own funerals. As part of a week-long seminar on death and dying, the 60 seniors learned to feel more comfortable about the issue of death. What to do if someone dies, what to say to family members of a deceased loved one, how to prepare for the inevitable. It's the first time I've ever been exposed to anything like this. Families don't talk about death, said Jennifer Erickson, who took the seminar as part of her psychology class. Because of this course, I'll talk to my own kids about death, she said. Jeffrey Sharland attended the seminar as part of his sociology elective. A lot of people don't have experience with going to funerals, he said. It helped us to feel more comfortable about being around someone who has lost someone. Guidance counselor Kathleen Clement taught the seminar. She came up with the idea for the course when she was in graduate school, looking at different areas in which students need exposure. See what they teach in graduate school, these ideas that get into the heads of these crazy teachers. I wanted to conduct the seminar in a positive, upbeat way, even though the topic is morbid, she said. Activities for the course included role-playing in which students pretended someone had died. They went through the motions of dialing 911, making funeral arrangements, and either going through stages of grieving themselves or helping another person through those stages. In the process, they learned about the cost of being embalmed and buried in a coffin, as opposed to being cremated, and about the clothes, about the choices they have. We got a price list on everything, and it's expensive to die, said Erickson. Charlon said that while taking the course, he has made the decision to be cremated when he passes on. Isn't that a helpful learning experience, to decide you're going to be cremated when you're 17? I want to be cremated because of environmental reasons. It saves land and is a lot cheaper. She's going to sacrifice himself now to the environmentalists, you know. Scatter his ashes over the, you know, maybe the lobster ponds in Maine. The trip to Gallant Funeral Home in Waterville was neat, according to Charlotte. Although the students did not see any bodies there, they did see the equipment and tools used for preparing them for burial. The students saw the makeup and learned that a hair stylist comes to fix the corpse's hair. Clemens said the students never stopped asking questions at the funeral home. Erickson said she wants to teach, probably high school sociology, and Charlin wants to work in the field of psychology. Clemens said some students initially felt uncomfortable with the seminar but eventually became less afraid. So that's what deaf education is and that's going on all over the United States. What is it doing to the youngsters? Kids are killing themselves but the educators don't seem to be able to put two and two together. There is no indication in the article that parents were consulted about the seminar or asked for their approval. Your child can be asked to write his own obituary and you won't even know that he's doing it. He'll come home very strange, acting very strangely. And he may or may not tell you what he was asked to do in class. Not all students react to deaf education as calmly as the two interviewed by the reporter. Some get quite upset. Deaf educator Nina Reback-Rosenthal in an article entitled, Death Education, Help or Hurt? in the Clearing House. Now that's where you find these articles in journals of education. She wrote, Death arouses emotion. Some students may get depressed, others may get angry. Many will ask questions or make statements that can cause concern for the instructor. Students may discuss the fact that they are having nightmares or that the course is making them depressed or feeling morbid. Others may have no reactions or feel a great sense of relief that someone finally is talking about the things they often felt they could not say. Others may become frightened. In fact, Bayless and Kennedy report that secondary students increased their fear of death and dying as a result of participating in a death education program. Depression, fear, anger, nightmares, morbidity. These are the negative emotions and reactions stirred up in students by death education. Is this what parents want their children to experience? Is this what they send their children to school for? However, according to Ms. Rosenthal, simply because deaf education can cause such emotional turmoil and anxiety is no reason not to teach it. She says, since deaf has been such a taboo topic, open and honest communication is essential. Such communication, she writes, helps to desensitize students to anxiety-arousing items." See how they like to get into taboo areas? You see? And how they want to desensitize the students? This is what's going on in the schools. Wouldn't you say that this is sort of crazy, that this is sort of insane? Is this a healthy development of public education? And yet now it's a permanent part of the curriculum. Thus, the purpose of death education is to desensitize children to death, to remove or reduce that reasonable, rational, and useful antipathy to death that helps us preserve our lives. It is when children begin to see death as friendly and unthreatening that they begin to be drawn into death's orbit and lured to self-destruction. It's a phenomenon that might be called death seduction, in which an individual is drawn irresistibly into a fascination and then obsession with death, the individual begins to hate life and love death. Death educators are quite aware that they are dealing with a highly charged, taboo subject that many children cannot handle. But that hasn't stopped some teachers from introducing the subject in kindergarten. The January 1989 issue of Young Children, published by the National Association for the Education of Young Children, carried an article by kindergarten teacher Sue Spate Riley about her class's trips to a cemetery. After a discussion about burials and cremation, one little girl said, If I die, I don't know whether I want to be put under the ground or not. I want to think about that some more. A little boy says, when I die, I'm not going to be buried. I'm going to be flamed. The cemetery visits deeply impress the children, as can be seen by the bizarre games they invent back at school. Miss Riley writes, dramatic play after the trip deepens and extends the experience. On the playground the morning after this year's pilgrimage, I watched as several children in the sandbox improvised three gravestones. by propping plastic frying pans vertically in the sand. The children then lay down in front of their headstones. When another child walked by, one of those in the sandbox called out, Hey, this is a graveyard. You want to be dead? Another gravestone was erected and child began sprinkling sand on the others. There ensued much arranging and rearranging of children and markers. Another youngster built a large rectangular block building, a child's version of a mausoleum. with enough room for a child hunched up to get inside. Miss Riley writes, this box-like structure was solid on all sides except the front where a baby blanket supported by a long block on top served as a door. When a child huddled inside, the blanket was lowered. When the boy called me to the block room to see his creation, Greg explained, this is a place for dead people. Observing from the sidelines, I watched the dead game progress. One child at a time would be dead. She or he would enter, Greg would lower the curtain. Greg then announced that they were going to put some dead babies in the box. He placed several dolls in a large wooden crate, then put another small box on top with two more dolls laid side by side. He attempted to put the whole package in the place for dead people. Too big, it doesn't fit, he said. He then transferred the dolls into two shallower boxes. Obviously, Ms. Riley and the National Association for the Education of Children are convinced that these morbid experiences are of benefit to the children. However, the high incidence of teenage, and now even pre-teen, suicide seems to indicate otherwise. Children are extremely suggestive. Recently in Canton, Michigan, an eight-year-old boy was shown a suicide film in school in which a child who is depressed tries to hang himself. Less than 24 hours later, the 8-year-old boy, mimicking the boy in the movie, hanged himself in his own bedroom. This was not the first such suicide. In 1985, a 14-year-old high school freshman, an honor student with great promise as an athlete, hanged himself after watching a television movie about teenage suicide, entitled Silence of the Heart. As a result of these copycat suicides, the press has noticeably reduced its reportage of teen suicide. You don't see any reports any longer in the press about teen suicide. They are being suppressed. Nevertheless, the schools are increasing their programs on death and dying, making it virtually impossible for any child to escape the influences and effects of this dangerous, morbid subject. And parents, kept largely in the dark, don't even know what is going on. They send their children to school, smiling and happy, only to have them return home depressed and suicidal. So that is what's going on in today's schools, public schools. You can see how insane the whole system has become. I guess as the system cracks up, the worst sort of insanity will be manifested in this system. And so this September, I shudder to think what is going to happen to those millions of children who are entering public school this year. It's a tragedy, an absolute tragedy. One third of them will be crippled permanently, they will be turned into dyslexics in six months. First six months. Then they will turn on the deaf education, the values clarification, the sex education. Incidentally, they're now going to teach about AIDS in kindergarten. Sex education now starts in kindergarten. Drug education, as we know, leads to drug use. Because it turns the children into little pharmacists. because they tell the kids all about different drugs and how they work. And then they tell the child, it's your decision. You know, they're teaching decision making. So the child says, okay, I'll decide. I'll take one from column A and one from column B. And when it comes to premarital sex, again, well, it's your decision, children. And as far as this AIDS business goes, well, there are these condoms and there's safe sex, you see. You see, they're lying to the children. They're trapping them. These children are going to be playing Russian roulette with their lives. That's what's happening. So we have very little to hope for that the schools will reform themselves. The biggest idea now among the educators is restructuring education. They are going to restructure the system. See, they have no intention of going back to phonics or cursive writing or arithmetic. So they want to divert attention, they're going to restructure the schools and restructuring is really another way or it's the new way to destroy every last vestige of tradition that still remains in the schools. To destroy every last vestige of education as we've known it without destroying the schools. And the schools will become much more expensive as a result because restructuring naturally will cost lots of money. Well I'm going to end my remarks here because I've been told that the tape is has reached its end and I will open the floor as the tape is turned and I will open the floor up for discussion and you can ask questions to give some thoughts to what you might want to know about or discuss afterwards. All right, now I'll open the floor to discussion. Yes. I take it that from what you've been saying that this is actually a pleasantary comment while you were keeping quiet. Did this problem occur in being taught by this society? Well, you see, this is the way they teach. First of all, back in the days when they taught children to read by phonics, they taught in a very simple way. You would teach anyone to read an alphabetic system in this way. First you teach the child to recognize the letters of the alphabet. Then you teach the child the sounds that the letters stand for. And once the child, and you usually do that, the way it was done back in those days was done through drill. They would drill the child in the consonant-vowel combination such as baby, bi, bo, bu, ab, eb, eb, ab, bub. And once the child developed that automatic association between letters and sounds, then the child could sound out words. Then he read words and stories and little sentences. And of course then they went through these spelling books in which the words were introduced in their spelling families, and eventually by the time you got through with the book, you could read multi-syllabic words quite easily. Now when they went to look and say, they taught reading in an entirely different way. They would, generally they would sometimes teach the children to recognize the letters of the alphabet, not always. But then they would skip step two. They would not drill the child in the sounds of the letters. They would go directly to whole words and teach the child what is known as a sight vocabulary. Now, a sight vocabulary, by definition, is teaching children to read English words without their knowing that the letters stand for anything. As far as the child is concerned, those letters are a bunch of arbitrary squiggles with no meaning whatever. They have no idea why they are in that particular sequence, and they're told to look at each word as a little picture, like a Chinese ideograph, you see. Take, for example, the word horse. The teacher will draw a little picture around the word, And she calls that the configuration clue. It'll be a little frame. And she'll tell the children, see the picture of the horse? Now you and I know that H-O-R-S-E doesn't look like a horse. So how does a child see a horse in that frame? You know how? Any way he can. Maybe the H will remind him of a horse, maybe the O, maybe the R, maybe the S, maybe the E, who knows? You see, they have to find some way to remember it. Of course then they also have lots of picture clues. When they introduce the word horse, they have so many pictures of horses on the page that the child concludes, gee, that word must say horse. Now, of course, you can't always have pictures of horses every time you use the word horse. You've got other things to illustrate. So they also provide what they call context clues. They'll use the word in an obvious context, such as the man put the saddle on the and the child will think, well, it could be a camel. It could be a donkey, but it's probably a horse. And to reduce the ridiculousness of the guessing, the teachers will also teach phonetic clues. Now here's where things get a little confusing because if you go to any school in America and ask the teachers if they teach phonics, they all say yes. I don't care what kind of program they have, they all say they teach phonics. But they don't teach the intensive systematic phonics, that is, teaching the letter sounds, drilling the children in the letter... consonant-vowel combination so that they develop this automatic association. They don't teach that. What they teach are phonetic clues. Now what is a phonetic clue? It's telling a child that if the word starts with the letter H it could possibly be banana or baloney but it could be house, hotel, hovel, hearse or horse. So it reduces, it narrows the parameters of the guessing. Now the leading professor of reading in the United States, Dr. Kenneth Goodman of Arizona University, he calls reading a psycholinguistic guessing game. And he told a reporter from the New York Times that if the child sees the word horse and says pony, that's correct. Because he's seeing the picture. If the child sees the word father and says dad, that's correct. Because he's seeing a picture, you see, because that's what the word is supposed to conjure up, an image, a picture, an idea. In other words, the letters don't stand for sounds. That word is an ideograph, or an ideogram, that stands for the idea, you see. Now, how do you develop, why do you develop the symptoms of dyslexia? Well, what are the symptoms of dyslexia? They are reading words in reverse, was, the saw, Top, pop, reading words backwards, reversing letters. Now, if you teach a child to look at a word as a picture, now how do you look at a picture? Do you always look at it from left to right? No, you look at it, when you're looking at a picture, you're attracted to something in that picture first. It may be in the middle of the picture, it may be up in the right-hand corner. But you see that first and then you're drawn to the picture and then you look around and see the rest of it. Well, that child looks at a word, he's trying to find something in it that will suggest its meaning to him. He may find it at the end of the word, the middle of the word, the front of the word. So naturally, he has not been trained to look at a word from left to right. Because as far as he's concerned, he sees no need to do that. He's looking for something in the picture that will suggest its meaning to him. So therefore, he does not read from left to right. Now, a phonetic reader must read from left to right. Why? Because if he knows the letters, are in the same sequence in which the sounds are uttered. So he has to read from left to right in order to read the words. But not so with a look-say reader who is trying to see the picture. So they will naturally sometimes read words backwards, particularly if they are ambidextrous or left-handed. Then, of course, I'll tell you how the typical look-say reader reads, because I have worked with many of them, and I've listened to them read. And this is how they read. Sometimes they'll read at a rather... snappy pace, but you find that as they are reading, they leave out words that are there. There's some words they just don't see for some strange reason. Then they put in words that aren't there. Then they of course guess at words that they're not sure of. They mutilate words. They'll see a word like telephone and they just say phone. It says telephone, but they say phone. Or a word like newspaper. They'll say paper. They don't see the news. They see the paper part. Or maybe they do see newspaper, but it suggests paper to them. Also, they take a word like Jerusalem. They'll read it as journalism. It starts with a J, you see, and it looks the same. The configuration is somewhat the same. And it's the same with Solomon and Salami, you see. So they are, and the interesting thing about these so-called dyslexics is they're not aware of the errors they make because they have been told by their teachers that accuracy is not important. As a matter of fact, one teacher of reading made the headline, well, in an article in the Washington Post, she said that accuracy is not the name of the game. Now how do we expect to have a highly technological civilization in which accuracy is not the name of the game? It's ridiculous, but they're teaching children to become sloppy readers, sloppy writers, sloppy thinkers, sloppy speakers. Does that answer your question, or would you like more? Yes, Adam. When did that begin? And is it true that we're now dealing with the adult results in terms of profession? Well, it began quite some time ago, but it really got underway in the 1930s when the Dick and Jane program and the Macmillan readers were introduced in the schools of America. Prior to that, look-say was taught in private schools here and there because I have, in my perusals of old textbooks, I have found look-say textbooks that go back to the early days of the century. They were already creating look-say textbooks. But the really big basal reading programs did not come out until the early 30s when William Scott Gray at the University of Chicago came up with the Dick and Jane books, and who was the man over at Columbia University, I forget his name, who came up with the Macmillan Readers. And there the big change took place. Now I went to school, first grade in New York City in 1931, and they were still using phonics. And the reason why that they probably used phonics for a couple of more years was because of the Depression, and they could not afford the new Luce textbook. So I was saved, my literacy was saved by the Depression. Probably a whole generation was saved by the Depression. But you see, World War I gave the school a bunch of money, you see, prosperity was revived, and then of course by then the phonics books were worn out, and you couldn't get phonics books, they weren't even publishing them anymore. You had no choice but to purchase Luxe, and of course it was the trend of the times, and so that has happened. The result is that we have many adults who are poor readers, Many executives who rely on their secretaries, on their wives to do the reading for them, to help them in these matters. And there's rampant functional literacy throughout our society but most people hide it. Most people don't want to be embarrassed by it and so they manage to get by. As a matter of fact, there's the case of a teacher, a high school teacher in Oceanside, California. who spent 18 years as a teacher and was illiterate. Could not read. And he used all kinds of clever devices to cover it up. Like, for example, he would overhear his friends talking about different books. And then he would talk about these books as if he himself had read them. He managed to get a master's degree without taking a test. Convincing the professor that he could do it orally, you see. So, that was an astonishing situation and he confessed. There was a big article in the Los Angeles Times about it but that sort of thing has been going on and there are lots of people in this country who have been permanently handicapped by their reading disability. As a matter of fact, I got a letter from a gentleman in England the other day, an accomplished CEO of a company that he himself started who happened to have read the newsletter I did on dyslexia and he said, I believe that I am a victim of the teaching method that you were speaking of. How can I, you know, cure myself? How can I cure it? And so I'm devoting this coming newsletter to how to cure dyslexia because there are a lot of people like that around who would like to help themselves and can do it. You can retrain yourself to become a phonetic reader instead of a sight reader, you see. Well, we've been running into this question of one-sided arguments coming from very high quarters on educational levels, on all sorts of professional levels where they literally drop out of their source material anything that disagrees with the point they want to make. Oh, absolutely. And that is presented and accepted in their professions. And I'll give you an example of that. In 1929, Dr. Samuel Orton, a neuropathologist in Iowa, who was dealing with a lot of these dyslexic cases, wrote an article to the effect that the sight reading method of teaching reading caused reading disability. That was in the title. It was published in the Journal of Educational Psychology in February of 1929. In that article he said this new method of teaching does cause reading disability. And he said a large number of children will be affected by this. Now that was in 1929, the year before the Dick and Jane books were put in the schools. I found that article simply by accident, by going through the index of articles on dyslexia. When I was writing my books on the new illiterates, I just combed the indices of periodicals, you know, the review of periodicals, and I found that article. I have never seen it mentioned in any article concerning illiteracy, even though Dr. Orton was the world's leading authority on the brain. He got into quite a battle with the Luxe people, and he couldn't get anywhere with them. But that goes on. He is not even mentioned in the literature. Well, that's a form of illiteracy. Yes. It's turned us into... You ignore a salient detail in an important subject. You are committing an illiteracy. Oh, I see what you mean. Yes. Your mind jumps past it. Right. Like the Luxay people jump past the letters. Right. Because they have a vision. Yes. Another very interesting business here is that when the Russian Revolution took place and Lenin was in power and Krupskaya, Lenin's wife, was in charge of education, American progressives were able to convince Krupskaya to adopt progressive education for the new schools in Russia. So they put progressive education in all of the schools in the Soviet Union, in Communist Russia. By the 1930s, there was so much illiteracy. They were having such problems that the Communist Party in 1932 issued a decree throwing out progressive education and restoring traditional educational practice. They went back to phonics. This was in 1932 and 1933 when this took place. Our educators knew about it. They wrote about it in the publications. They were dismayed by the fact that this change had taken place. They knew it didn't work, they knew what it was doing to the Soviet Union, and yet they put it in American schools. You see, the experiment had taken place, a full-scale experiment in a dictatorship where the dictators could do anything they wanted. They imposed progressive education, they saw that it did not produce engineers, scientists, to build the biggest war machine in the world, you know, you're not going to do that with a bunch of functional illiterates who can't tell a pony from a horse. So the Russians, the communists threw it out, went back to traditional phonics and the traditional subject matter and of course they produced these scientists and engineers and a highly literate population which used its literacy to undo the very system. that gave them their education. Why do you think the whole communist bloc has fallen apart the way it has? Because I must say the communists taught children to read very well. Everybody is very literate in Poland, in Hungary, in the Soviet Union. They can all read. And now that they have access to the world's literature, or some of it, you see, you can't control what they're going to read. In this country, we control what people read by turning them into illiterates, you see. So our form of censorship is a much more effective one than the Soviet form of censorship. They had no choice, they wanted engineers, they wanted scientists, they had to teach their people to read. Apparently we don't want scientists or engineers, we want a bunch of milk sops. Reading is held in low esteem. Oh yes, now the educators are redefining literacy. That's the way they get around these things. Well, let's redefine literacy. Let's change the way the tests are made so now you won't be able to even detect who can read and who can't because they're now changing the tests. They know that the whole language method does not produce high literacy. And they don't want the public to become aware of this. So what they're doing is changing the tests. You're going to get new tests that will not test the ability to read. It'll test other things. But they're using our portfolios. you will bring your portfolio to your teacher and they're going to evaluate you on the basis of your portfolio. So if you have nice pictures in it and if you cut out nice things from the newspaper that'll be your, I guess, your ticket to a high grade. But you know who are the ones who know better than anyone else the reading abilities of Americans? The business world. They have to hire these people. And they've got to retrain them. The private sector in this country spends $25 billion a year training young adults in basic subjects. Isn't that amazing? Every large corporation I know. Oh yes, they all do now. And the army also. And the army also. And these poor guys who are now over there in the sands of Saudi Arabia, many of them can't read. What are they going to do with their time? in the desert. Yes, sir? Could you give us an estimate of how many people are in the United States involved in homeschooling? The estimate now of the number of people in homeschooling in the United States ranges anywhere from several hundreds of thousands to a million or more. No one really knows. All I know is from my own observations that every year homeschool conventions are larger. They usually double every year. In California alone, I believe there are about 100,000, I think, is the estimate here in this state. As of 1980, 110,000. Well, then now it must be perhaps close to a million perhaps in this state. I know they have a very large convention down in Santa Ana or in Disneyland down there every summer. We've, in New England for example, in Massachusetts for the first time we've had our first homeschool convention and 600 people showed up. This is a first, you see, for Massachusetts and we're a little behind the rest of the country. That's New England for you. I remember I once asked Dr. Rush Dooney about what he thought of the the situation in New England as far as orthodox Christianity was concerned and he called it a wasteland. So we're not doing too badly for the first time. And also we're having conventions in New Hampshire, Connecticut has had its first convention. So there is an awakening. It's happening all over the country. It's unstoppable. And the educators are going to have to deal with it. The authorities are going to have to deal with it, you see. And of course they're going to try to use every device that they can in the courts. And then the laws restrict homeschooling, as for example in Iowa where they require homeschoolers to be certified, that sort of thing, and to teach an equivalent curriculum. So what you're having throughout the nation is a great deal of civil disobedience, a very quiet, A lot of homeschoolers are underground. They keep a low profile. Some of them are turned in by their neighbors. That sort of thing. But in general, the homeschooling movement is now so strong and developing so rapidly because they all see what's going on in the public schools. They know there's no hope of reform. They know that it's going to get worse. And another very important thing about the homeschool movement, it's largely Christian. And I believe that the Christian revival is taking place in the homeschools, not in the churches. Because you are finding in the homeschool a radical departure from the state institutions. For example, many of these homeschoolers, they have prayer at home, they say grace before meals, the children are being brought up on the Bible, they don't even watch television. They really are undergoing quite a change. They are really breaking ties with this culture. And that's quite an interesting phenomenon. You're going to get an entirely different group of young people. Incidentally, these homeschool kids are just amazing. Talk about socialization. They are the most sociable youngsters you can imagine because they can converse with people in any age group. They not only converse with children their own age, but because they have this constant rapport with their parents, their vocabularies improve, their ability to deal with adults, and they are much more adult themselves. They don't remain babies for as long as the average American does. You know, in the United States here, we retard growth. I remember when I was going to public school in the 1930s, the schoolrooms were pretty serious. I mean, you had pictures of George Washington and you had the ABCs up there. Today, you go into a public school and, you know, from the floor to the ceiling, you see nothing but cartoons and animals and Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse. I mean, they treat these young people like babies. Everybody's wearing, you know, and they're wearing these crazy clothes. No sense of maturity. No sense of adulthood. That's destroying millions of Americans. Any other questions? Yes? You touched slightly on the whole language. Could you be more specific than what it is? Well, whole language, I'll tell you what they're doing now. You see, the promoters of progressive education realize that they want to destroy the last vestiges of literacy in this country. They know that the American people want to get back to basics. They want to change. They know that there's a rebellion against the basal reading programs, which are very dull and have these inane stories and are dreary and have endless workbooks and just keep busy work. So they said, OK, what we're going to do is we're going to get rid of the basal readers and we are going to immerse the children in literature. And somewhere along the line they'll pick up phonics. But our initial thrust will be to get the kids involved in literature and have them write immediately before they can spell. So along this whole language you have invented spelling. Have you heard of invented spelling? Where the kids are encouraged to write any way they want in any form. Now this invented spelling can have some repercussions. You know, if you're spelling the word the wrong way for a good number of years and then finally you find out that you've been making a fool of yourself, you're not too happy. I know the story of one youngster, a little boy, who was in school in the first grade and he has a little sister at home who was a budding artist. And so he wanted to make a sign for his sister saying, artist at work. And he wanted to put the sign up in front of his little sister's desk. And so at school he worked on the sign and they said, artist at work, and he spelled work, W-E-R-C-K. And he showed his teacher the sign and she said, oh, how nice. And she asked him, what does that word say, W-E-R-C-K? And he said, work. And she said, oh, that's beautiful. So he took the sign home and He showed his older sister, see the sign I've made for little Emily? She's going to love it. And his older sister looked up and signs it. Artist at work? That's not how you spell work. They said, yes it is. My teacher said it was okay. She said, that's not the way you spell work. And of course she showed him the dictionary and there was W-O-R-K. Well, he was absolutely furious to think that his teacher let him bring home this poorly spelled, misspelled word. He was humiliated. Now do you think that youngster is going to trust his teacher from then on? Children want to do things the correct way. They want to be taught to do it correctly the first time. They don't want to be permitted to invent it, you see. But that's what they're doing now. They're teaching invented spelling because they want the kids to get into literature and creative writing, you know, on the first day of school. So they're writing their books now. Well, we'll see what happens. We know that you cannot learn to read an alphabetic writing system without knowing the letters and the sounds of the letters. It's impossible to develop any true literacy there. Now, a very interesting thing here is that with whole language, you see, now that they've gotten rid of the basal reading program, and they're going to give the children real literature, who is going to choose the real literature? Well, there you have an open field that teachers can introduce anything they want. Books about witchcraft. Books of horror stories. As a matter of fact, we've had complaints from parents whose children have been given these stories to read that have given them nightmares. So, it's going to be pretty awful. That's what whole language is. Immersion. Immersion in Literature. Yes, sir? When you travel around the country, are you finding any public schools that are teaching phonics? Are there any public schools teaching phonics? Well, here and there. As a matter of fact, there is one school here in California, believe it or not. There's this tiny school district called Selma, right down in the San Joaquin Valley. I think it's south of Fresno. Right. And a friend of mine, Sue Dixon, wrote a reading program entitled Sing, Spell, Read, and Write. It's been advertised and promoted on the 700 Club. And I asked Sue one day, I said, Sue, are they using your program? It's a very good phonics program, which she created when she was working as a teacher in schools in New Jersey. And what she did was she used music to teach the letter sounds because she found that these little children were able to practically memorize every commercial they heard on television. So she said, Why don't I use the same techniques to get them to remember the letters? So she wrote a delightful reading program around the idea of sing, spell, read, and write. And I asked her, I said, are they using this anywhere in the United States? And she said, yes. There's Peggy Adams, who is the principal of the Washington Elementary School in Selma, California, is using that method. I happened to be speaking in California and I was driving right by Selma and I told my companion who was driving me around, I said, why don't we stop off and see if we can meet Peggy Adams and find out how it's working. So we drove to the school and sure enough Peggy Adams was there and she was delighted to see us and I brought her greetings from Sue Dixon and I asked her, well how is it working? She said, it's working beautifully. They're using the phonics program and In this school, everybody is now learning to read. And the kids in that school are the kids from migrant worker families. These are not, you know, brilliant little kids out of professional families. They're migrant worker families. They're all learning to read. And she told me how when she began teaching... Well, this is what happened. When she went to teacher's college, I think it was Fresno State, one of those teacher's colleges, she was told by her professor of reading that one-third of the students will never learn to read. She was told that that's the way it is. One-third just don't learn to read. There's something wrong with children. One-third of them don't learn to read. Well, she was told that by her professor. She assumed that he was telling her the truth. And he was, if you're teaching Luxe. That's true, if you're teaching Luxe, one-third will not learn to read. But he didn't say that it was another way to teach. He just said, expect that one-third will not learn to read, so don't worry about it. That's the way things are. He said, one-third will not learn to read, one-third will become mediocre readers, passable readers, and only one-third will become proficient readers. So she started teaching that way, and she thought to herself, there must be... She was so frustrated by all this failure, she said, there must be a better way to do this. And in some catalog, she ran across Sue Dixon's program, and she decided, listen, I can try anything by now. I want some success. She got Sue Dixon's program. and she used it in the schools and lo and behold they all learned to read. So she realized that she had been lied to by her professor, you see. Now here's a small school district in Selma, California where they're using phonics and it's successful and there is Dr. Honig in Sacramento who couldn't care less. You see. Marva Collins teaches phonics in Chicago in her school. It works there. There's a beautiful school in Salt Lake City, the... I forget the name of the school, but it's a beautiful private school where they teach phonics. There are lots of private schools in the country that teach phonics, and here and there a public school. But the authorities don't like it, and they... Take, for example, Chicago, which has the worst teaching record of any school district. I mean, it's not one-third who aren't learning to read, it's something like two-thirds. And there is Marva Collins, right in Chicago, demonstrating that these very same kids who couldn't learn in the public schools are becoming literate human beings. I've known Marva for many years. She's been in the Reading Reform Foundation. I visited her school in Chicago when I was there. Very unpretentious building. It looks like a refurbished, abandoned supermarket. But you go through those doors, and you're in a little west point of the mind. These kids are learning like gangbusters. It's incredible how well they learn. And it's because she knows how to teach reading so she begins these children with a strong language literacy program. Incidentally, she doesn't believe in black English. She tells these kids, you know, do you have any intention of becoming white? Any expectation that you're going to become white? And she impresses upon them the need to speak English correctly. And they learn. Now here's Chicago which has this dismal record. Do they come to her for guidance? For advice? No, they have nothing to do with her. They've quarantined her. They pretend she doesn't exist. They want nothing to do with her. So it gives you an idea of what the educators want. They have their own agenda. They are dumbing down this country because the only way that they can lead this nation into this into this world pagan order is by making sure that Americans can't read their constitutions, can't read their Declaration of Independence, and don't know freedom from slavery, and can be led by the nose into this glorious millennium of humanistic paganism. And that's why they are continuing to dumb down Americans to the point where most Americans will have the intellectual ability of a hillbilly. That'll be it. And, you know, people think, well, you know, we've inherited all of this from our past generations. It only takes one generation to wipe out the entire past. You can do it very easily by simply divorcing these children from their past. They can't read the Bible. They can't read the great books. They can't read their own history. And so they're up for grabs. You can do anything you want with these youngsters. And when they become adults, you know, they're lost. Any other questions? Yes. It seems to me that a lot of other languages are more logical than English as far as spelling. And if we were to get rid of some archaic ways of spelling, wouldn't science be easier to teach? Well, you know, that question always comes up. You know, even Noah West thought that we could simplify English spelling. But he had very few takers. He did simplify some spellings, like taking out the, in honor, he took out the U. So we spell honor, H-O-N-O-R, but the British use the O-U-R. And the point is this, it's true. Our spelling could be improved. However, there's a tremendous amount of history in our spelling. Our spelling is a repository of of the origins of the words. You see, English is made up of not only Anglo and Saxon, but of German and Danish and French and Hebrew and Spanish. All of these words are in English. Latin, Greek. And the point is that when the Romans conquered the British islands, they imposed the Latin alphabet on the people who lived there. And the people who lived there adapted a 26-letter alphabet to a language that has 44 sounds. We should really have an alphabet with 44 letters, but we don't. So we've got to make do with 26 letters. That's why it's so important to teach our alphabetic system in a systematic, logical, step-by-step way because it does have these difficulties. Some of our letters stand for more than one sound. For example, the letter A stands for long A as in April. Apron stands for the short A, the A as in cat or bat. It stands for the R sound as in father or car. And it stands for the R sound as in all or tall. So how does a child learn which sound to say when he sees the letter A? Well, if you teach the letter sounds in their spelling families, the children learn to the appropriate sound. And then, of course, some of our Sounds are represented by more than one letter. For example, the typically English s is represented by th, the sh, by sh, the ch, by ch. So we've made do. As a matter of fact, our alphabetic system works so beautifully that we've managed to create some of the world's greatest literature, including the King James Version of the Bible, and the plays of Shakespeare, and the poems of Milton. So it is a marvelous instrument. It's a magnificent instrument which anyone can be taught. It takes a little more effort than would a totally phonetic alphabet. I understand, for example, that Armenian is a very phonetic letter for sound alphabet. Well, they're lucky. They can learn to read much more easily. Yes, yes, Otto. There is a simplification campaign underway and it's created great damage. Well, yes, they've always wanted to... I think Hearst in his newspapers decided to spell through, T-H-R-U, things like that, or though, T-H-O. But our spellings tell us the origins of these words. You see, the pronunciations have changed over the years, but not the spellings. And the beauty of English is that you can read English wherever it is written, whether it's in Australia, South Africa, Nigeria, the United States, North and South, regardless of the accent. We can all read the same language because of the standard spelling. If we all wrote the way we pronounce the words, God help us. I mean, you wouldn't be able to read anything written in Scotland, would you? Or Ireland. So, there's something to be said for the standard English. As a matter of fact, English is now becoming the most widespread language used throughout the world. In Hong Kong, Japan, they're all learning English. Well, we only have about two more minutes if anyone wants to ask a last question. I'd be very glad to. Yes? Dictionaries. It seems that dictionaries in the past couple of decades, perhaps 30 years, have been deteriorating. The meaning of the word has changed very rapidly and there is no yardstick anymore for people who learn by the look-say method, how are they going to look up a word in the dictionary if they can't spell it phonetically? They can't. That's the problem, you see. That's why so many of these people have problems with dictionaries. They don't know the spellings. But you know what's happening, the word processor. Now you have built-in dictionaries in typewriters so that a lot of, as a matter of fact, this particular gentleman who wrote to me said that thank God for the word processor because they correct his spellings, you see. So there's... technology is, to some extent, will alleviate the problem, you see. In any case, I want to leave you with the notion that the solution is really in the hands of the people. Parents have power to take their children out of the public schools, educate them at home, or in a decent Christian school. And this breakup of the central power is the most important phenomenon of our time. And I think that in this room here we have more people willing to take advantage of that than probably anywhere else in the United States. So, God be with you in your endeavors to educate your children. Thank you very much.