It's always a pleasure to be at these conferences here in England. One gets a chance to reflect, and at this conference we've heard many very interesting things. I was particularly interested in what was said about economics at this conference, and particularly what David Chilton had to say about capitalism. Prior to that, I had summed up capitalism in four famous word, capitalism. The definition of capitalism is buy low, sell high. Very English. Or buy cheap, sell dear. But in any case, I thought, on reflection, I thought, well, that's not really how wealth is created. The new definition of capitalism should be Mickey Mouse. Mickey Mouse. symbolizes capitalism. Why? Because a man took an idea, a mouse, and built a billion-dollar empire on the basis of an idea, a mouse. Now why is Mickey Mouse so popular? Why do we love Mickey Mouse? Well, because Mickey Mouse is always escaping the cat. And who is the cat? The cat is the state, you see. The cat is that authority. The cat is the state. And of course, Mickey is always loyal to Minnie Mouse. So there are marvelous ideas there that really captivate what capitalism is all about. You couldn't have a Mickey Mouse come out of the communist world, could you? Could never happen. And yet there we have Disney World and Disneyland and millions of people have been made happy. by that creation. So that's some of the things I've learned at this conference. Now, of course in education, today's education, we don't teach children about capitalism anymore. We teach them basically about socialism. And through my travels in Australia and England and the United States, I have come to the conclusion that all of the education systems in the English-speaking world are now controlled by the Fabian Socialists. No question about it. Fabian Socialists control British education, American education. Of course, Zui-ism is Fabian Socialism. It's nothing but that. And of course, in Australia, where they're very open about it, make no bones about the Fabian control. As a matter of fact, Bob Hawke, their prime minister, spoke at the centenary dinner of the Fabian Society in Melbourne and waxed eloquent over the wonderful concepts of Fabianism. But you know, Bob Hawke was also, he grew up in a Christian family. His father was a congregational minister. And Hawke was very active as a youth leader, Christian youth leader, believe it or not. And it was during a conference in India that Hawke lost his faith because he saw these wonderful Christians, Indian Christians in Kerala, doing very well, eating wonderful food while on the outside all these people were starving. And I suppose You could call that the equivalent of the rich Christians in a world of hunger, you see. So the idea of envy, you see. Now, why were the Christians rich? Because they were living in obedience to the Bible. They knew how to create wealth. While the Indians were living according to Hinduism, where yesterday and tomorrow mean nothing. I mean, they mean the same thing. And of course, they can't create wealth living in a system of envy. And that's what the Fabian Socialists want to create, a system of envy. As a matter of fact, Fabian Socialism is based on the notion of envy. And Mrs. Joan Kerner, who is now Prime Minister of Victoria in Australia, she was the former minister, or she was the Minister for Education in Victoria, and in 1984, She said, quote, she's a Fabian socialist, an admitted Fabian socialist. She said, if we are egalitarian in our intention, we have to reshape education so that it is part of the socialist struggle for equality, participation, and social change rather than an instrument of the capitalist system. A vital weapon in the transition to more equal outcomes for disadvantaged groups and classes rather than a ladder to equal educational opportunity for individuals. A catalyst for system change rather than the legitimization of system maintenance." That very well sums up, very beautifully sums up what the Fabian program has been, and the Fabian program is the program of the American school system, British, the Australians, the Canadians, the New Zealand, etc. To what extent it's been applied on the continent, where they have their own socialists, of course. I don't know, I'm not as familiar with their programs, but one thing we know is that certainly in the English-speaking world, Fabian socialism now dominates education. Now, as Dr. Rastuni has said in one of his books, as a matter of fact, a very good book, The Philosophy of the Christian Curriculum, that, he said that, until we recognize that schools are establishments of religion, and that all education is inescapably a religious activity, we cannot come to grips with our cultural crisis. And referring to the public schools, he says that they teach and propagate a philosophy of life which does more than omit Christianity. It is radically at war with biblical religion. Education is at present the central theater of war. And of course, why is it the central theater of war? Because, well, if you can control the children, if you control their education, you can control the future of a culture, the future of society. And that's why education is so important to Reconstructionists. And that is why Reconstructionists probably have more homeschoolers among their ranks than any other group in the world. Because they understand that education should be controlled by those who wish to have their values perpetuated by the next generation. Now, as I say, Education is the key to culture. It's the key to the future. And the Fabian takeover has been very profound and very well organized. And of course, it's been going on now for quite some time. And the Dewey program, the John Dewey program, was very astute in that it understood exactly how it could pervert education so that it could become socialistically oriented. And that was to attack the very center of what was Christian education, and that was the reliance and the emphasis on the learning of language, on the centrality of the Word, you see. So after all, what does the Bible tell us? That in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Now, if the Word is God, and you can attack the Word, and separate people from the Word, then you've just about accomplished the most important task you have when you're trying to create this kind of Pagan society. In the beginning was the Word. Well now, what does that mean to us? Of course, why is there the Word? Well, we are created in God's image. And what does that mean? Do we look like God? No, that doesn't mean we look like God. But we have an attribute of God. If God is the Word and God gave us the Word, why do we have the Word? Well, because God wanted to communicate with us. And God communicates to us through the Word, through the Bible, through his prophets, and we communicate back through prayer. And that is why we have the power of language. No other species has the power of language. Of course, the behavioral psychologists believe that the reason that language just sort of evolved. That we were animals, and of course, what is human language? Well, it's a more sophisticated development of the bow-wow, or the meow, or the chirp. It's just a more interesting form of animal talk. And when you read books by linguistics, professors of linguistics, or scholars on language, they always get to that point of, where did language come from? What is the origin of language? And they try very hard to show us how animal talk develops into human talk. They're never quite convincing. And of course, they aren't because it just doesn't work that way. As a matter of fact, the behaviorists believe that the only reason why monkeys don't speak is because they've been culturally deprived. So they've actually experimented with monkeys by having them live among human families. You know, and they'd have breakfast with everyone else, little monkeys at the table. And they thought if the monkeys would hear human language and be brought up with language that they would learn to speak English. But you know what happened? The monkeys just stayed monkeys, remained monkeys. They just could not become humans. They could not speak as humans. And yet, of course, that's all part of the theory of evolution. that we are animals. As a matter of fact, the biologists now believe that I would like to change our designation. We are no longer homo sapiens. But we are now gorilla sapiens. They say that we are part of the gorilla family. And we're just slightly different from the gorilla. And of course, that makes a great distinction for them. We are all gorillas. Now, of course, it was B.F. Skinner who said that there was not much of a difference between human beings and rats. Now, there may not be much of a difference between B.F. Skinner and a rat, but I think there's considerable difference between human beings and rats. So their key was to attack language. to attack the word and the way children are taught the word. And if you go back to Dewey's writings, you find out what his theories were about that and how he was able to get the education system to shift its emphasis away from the teaching of the word, away from language development. As you know, throughout the ages, education consisted of reading, of learning Latin and Greek and Hebrew the languages of the theological literature, of the Bible. The purpose of the learning to read was basically biblical, for biblical literacy. And Dewey knew this. Dewey was brought up in a Christian family. He taught Sunday school. He knew the importance of the Bible. He knew the importance of language to Christians, of language teaching and development. But he wrote in 1898, An essay. The Primary Education Fetish. That's the title of the essay. He wrote, quote, There is a false educational god whose idolaters are legion and whose cult influences the entire educational system. This is a language study. A study not of foreign language, but of English. Not in higher, but in primary education. It is almost an unquestioned assumption of educational theory and practice both. that the first three years of a child's school life shall be mainly taken up with learning to read and write his own language. If we add to this the learning of a certain amount of numerical combinations, we have the pivot about which primary education swings. It does not follow, however, that because this course was once wise, it is so any longer. My proposition is that conditions, social, industrial, and intellectual, have undergone such a radical change that the time has come for a foregoing examination of the emphasis put upon linguistic work in elementary education. The plea for the predominance of learning to read in early school life because of the great importance attaching to literature seems to me a perversion." Unquote. A perversion. That was the centrality of the attack that the socialists would make, but beyond the teaching and development of language. Of course, this couldn't be done overnight, and so he wrote, quote, Every respectable authority insists that the period of childhood, lying between the years of four and eight or nine, is the plastic period in sense and emotional life. What are we doing to shape these capacities? What are we doing to feed this hunger? If one compared the powers and needs of the child in these directions with what is actually supplied in the regimen of the three R's, the contrast is pitiful and tragic. No one can clearly set before himself the vivacity and persistency of the child's motor instinct at this period and then call to mind the continued grind of reading and writing. without feeling that the justification of our present curriculum is psychologically impossible. It is simply superstition. It is a remnant of an outgrown period of history." There you have it. Teaching, reading, and writing. Concentration on the PRs is superstition. Part of an outmoded, a remnant of an outmoded period of history. And so he set forth his strategy. He said, quote, Change must come gradually. To force it unduly would compromise its final success by savoring a violent reaction. What is needed in the first place is that there should be a full and frank statement of conviction with regard to the matter from physiologists and psychologists and from those school administrators who are conscious of the evils of the present regime. There are already in existence a considerable number of educational experimental stations which represent the outposts of educational progress. If these schools can be adequately supported for a number of years, they will perform a great vicarious service. After such schools have worked out carefully and definitely the subject matter of a new curriculum, finding the right place for language studies and placing them in their right perspective, the problem of the more general educational reform will be immensely simplified and facilitated." Well, here we are, 70, 90 years after all of this. And of course, that program was completely implemented. The books were written. The curriculum was changed. And what did they do with the teaching of reading? They changed the way reading is taught in American schools and, of course, schools throughout the English-speaking world. They got rid of the alphabetic phonics method, which is the proper way to teach children to read an alphabetic writing system. devise this new method, this look-say-whole-word-or-sight method that teaches children to read English as if it were Chinese. An ideographic method. And of course, Rudolph Flesch in his book in 1955, Why Johnny Can't Read, said that when you impose an ideographic teaching method on an alphabetic writing system, you get reading disability. So now we have reading disability in all of the English-speaking countries. Widespread functional illiteracy. Millions of people who can barely read, although they've all been to school. And it's all being done by the school. All being done by the methods that are used in teaching reading. Why have they produced so much functional illiteracy? Well, if these people can't read, then they're reduced to the level of being victims. They're being reduced to the point where they can be manipulated by the socialists, by the pagans. And as a matter of fact, now, all of Western education, in all of Western education, the emphasis is put on the so-called affective domain. What is the affective domain? It is that part of the curriculum devoted to emotion, deluge, healing, value, socialization. Activities why because they want they want our people the future generations to rely on their emotions Not on their intellect On their emotions and when you have people who rely on their emotions, then you're reducing them down to the primitive status You're turning them into a bunch of savages because then you can arouse them by arousing their emotions and you could use them in riots demonstrations, in rebellion. So that's what our schools have been doing. And we've known this now for years. As a matter of fact, the method's being used presently throughout the English-speaking world. The prevalent method of teaching reading is called whole language. And whole language is simply an adaptation of this look-safe method. It's being used in Australia, in the United States. It's sweeping the schools. At a time when everyone is protesting against the rise of illiteracy, And of the school's failure to teach children to read, what are they coming up with? What are the educators coming up with even a more ineffective method? A method that is guaranteed to produce more literacy. That's what the educators have come up with. Of course, the American people have been bamboozled. They've been sold the Bill of Goods. And the organized educators tell us, well, if you want improvement, just give us more money. And so the budgets go up. The school budgets go up and the scores go down. This year, in 1991, the SAT verbal score in the United States, the SAT is a scholastic aptitude test, was the lowest in its history. It reached the all-time low. And this is, in 1983, we had the A Nation at Risk report issued. It sounded the alarm. That was the beginning of the reform movement. And here it is, eight years later, and what do we have to show for it? The lowest verbal SAT score in American history, and of course we spend billions and billions of dollars to reach this point. That's what we have to show for all of our efforts. And what are the educators telling us now? Well, just give us more money. You didn't give us enough. That's their response to all of these things. Well, of course, Reconstructionists are not taken in by that nonsense. We've known what was going on for quite some time. Millions of parents have removed their children from the public school. Dr. Rastuni has told me that he estimates that 40% of American children are no longer being educated in government schools. That's a very high percentage, 40%. I know that in Australia already, 27% of the children are out of the government schools. I don't know how many, what percentage you have here in the UK, but certainly private education and home education is growing, particularly in the United States. The home education movement is probably the brightest sign on the horizon that things are really changing. Why? because home education represents a very radical, dramatic break with statism and with the statist institutions. And that's why they're regarded with a great deal of concern by the educational establishment, because they see that these children are escaping their control, and that these families are becoming very different from other families. The homeschooling family has become a very different kind of family. It's a family that has now taken full responsibility for the education of its children. It's a family in which suddenly the parents discover that they are teachers of their children and that their values are important, that they wish to pass on to the next generation the knowledge and wisdom and values of the previous generation. And of course, that is something that the public schools, the government schools have been trying to destroy. They don't want to pass on the knowledge and wisdom of the previous generations. What they want to do is they want a clean slate. They want to produce youngsters who know nothing. We've often heard in the United States that, you know, people spend 12 years in school and come out knowing nothing. That's no accident. That's no accident. They've been brainwashed or brain-emptied. Reminds me of the little thing on... I don't know how many of you have ever used a Macintosh computer, but they have a little icon for trash, where you can move a program into the trash. Well, what they're doing with the kids is removing whatever has been put in there by their parents. You know, in the early years from from birth to six, when their parents have told them about God and religion, well, they've got to get that out of the youngsters' heads. That's not very difficult to do these days. And then they fill it with nothing. Absolute nothing. So the youngsters come out of the schools knowing nothing. They can't read, they can't write. We have now an underclass in the United States of people who can't read, can't write, can't add, can't spell, they can't even Well, they don't think, and of course they can't speak English anymore. It's got a new patois that's being developed among the underclass, and they've developed their own language, and so now we have greater segregation. As a result of our education system, the underclass is being totally left out of our economy. They can't get any jobs because they don't have any skills, and yet they've all been to school. Many of them have diplomas. You see, you now have to go to school to become a functional illiterate. It's not a natural state. And it's very expensive to produce functional illiterates. You need special programs, special books, special training for teachers. Very expensive to produce. It's very inexpensive to teach a child to read. As a matter of fact, I have a book over there. If you buy that, that's all you need to teach a child to read. or an adult functional illiterate. So this is the habit that they've reached on the English-speaking world, the Fabian Socialists. And of course, more and more people are waking up, particularly Christians are waking up. And one of the beautiful things about the homeschooled family is that they're getting larger and larger. Somehow when parents start teaching their children, they tend to like them more. They tend to enjoy them more. And so I've visited homeschooling families where they have five children, six children, eight children. It's no longer rare to find these large families. And I think that there is a demographic message here. That as the humanists are killing themselves with safe sex and abortion, Christians are having lots of children. And those who are being educated at home are going to be an entirely different kind of human being than what we have now. It's a little early to tell because many of these children are still young, but we do have some who have graduated from sort of high school grade in universities, and they're doing extremely well. There's a family in California, the Colfax family, which is greatly celebrated. They homeschool their youngsters. None of them have ever been in a public school. And one of them built his own telescope. Two of them won full scholarships to Harvard University. And we hear such tales of these homeschoolers doing beautifully when they get into university. Because they're independent. They're not peer-dependent. They have something in their head. Because less of their own devices, you'd be surprised how much young people can learn. People think that if you let a young person, leave a young person to his own devices, that he's going to sit around twiddling his thumbs. No. They get bored very quickly. They start reading. They start doing things. They start thinking. They start inventing. And so we're creating an entirely different kind of individual to this society, and they're going to find this status behemoth very uncomfortable. So we're planting the seeds of a great Christian revolution through the homeschool movement and through the Christian school movement. And we're creating marvelous families. The kind of family where I don't think these children who come out of these homeschools are going to put their parents in old age homes and relegate them to, you know, that kind of death. You see, one of the horrible things that government education has done is that it has separated the youth from society. It corrals them, and all they do is know whatever wisdom they get is from one another, which, of course, is no wisdom. And so they're separated from the real world. They're not permitted to work because of all of these restrictions. And so what do they do? They can't work, but they're with one another, and they're constantly told all about sex in their school, sex education, so they get sexually active. And what else are they going to do? They can't work. They don't know anything. They're together all the time. They're not a part of the society. They form gangs. They become antisocial, delinquent. They get into violence. They steal cars. And that's one of the great problems we have in Western society, particularly in English-speaking countries. In Australia, for example, auto theft now is prevalent. When I was in Sydney and took a train into town and I looked at the cars parked near the railway station, almost every one of them had a, you know, a device, anti-theft device. This is in Sydney. All of the people I visited told me about the increase in burglary, house theft. By whom? Young people. Young people brought up under the philosophy of envy. Because in Mrs. Turner's schools, they don't teach capitalism. They don't teach how to create wealth. They only teach you how to take from somebody who's got something. That's what they're doing. And it's the same in the United States. I understand that there's a wonderful homeschool movement here in Britain, and it is growing. And I want to encourage all of you to do whatever you can to help the homeschool movement grow in this country. Of course, we're going to have to fight the state. We're going to have to fight the authorities in this area. But that's what this is all about, you see. We're so deeply into this. It's been so long since the other side has had control of things that, of course, this is almost at the last moment that we have this movement suddenly arising, people suddenly realizing that education is a religious activity. And that we've got to do something about it. We've got to take our children back, you see. We've got to take the children away from the state. And this is going to cause problems. We've got to look at ourselves as being like the Christians in Rome, in ancient Rome. There's going to be persecution as the homeschool movement grows. In the United States, the homeschoolers are constantly harassed in different states, more harassed than in others. Now, these homeschoolers are productive families. They're saving the taxpayers millions of dollars by educating their children at home. They're not producing drug addicts, they're not producing juvenile delinquents, they're producing productive members of society. And those are the families that are being harassed and persecuted by the state. Not the ones on welfare, not the ones who are doing the damage, not the ones who are getting into drugs, because if you want to get onto drugs, go to a public school. If you want to become a functional illiterate, go to a public school. If you want to become sexually active, go to a public school. That's where all of these things are. That's where all of that is created. So for us, for Reconstructionists, of course, homeschooling and Christian schooling is the answer. Movement is growing. I want to encourage you to help it grow in this country. And I think perhaps with more of that, we'll become stronger. And we'll be able to face the future with families and with children who will be saved from the surges that are going to, that are being inflicted on mankind. Because our children are being scared from the drug trade, getting involved with delinquency, sexual activity, and even, and such the horrible thing of AIDS. Since we teach abstinence, our children will not have to worry. Don't wind up in a hospital getting a transfusion of infected blood, contaminated blood. That's the one way in which even a totally accident person can get AIDS is by winding up in a hospital where you get a transfusion of contaminated blood. And for that, what Christians should do is create their own blood bank. Either create their own blood bank or one for their families. Because as more and more people come down with AIDS, it's going to be impossible to make sure that the blood banks are totally safe. There will always be, for example, the Red Cross report that there's one chance in a hundred thousand that you will get AIDS through a transfusion. Well, who wants to be that one? in the 100,000. One chance in 100,000 is one chance too many. If you lead a life of abstinence, when it comes to premarital sex, there's no reason why you should be subjected to that kind of a risk. But we live in an increasingly diseased society. And as a matter of fact, when the Israelites were told by God to What were the tribes that they had to wipe out when they got into Canaan? They were not to touch them. They were not to go near them. Why? Because they were diseased. Totally diseased pagans who had been living in the lifestyle that so many of our present people are living. And the Israelites were told, there's nothing you can do about that. You've just got to wipe them out. Can't have any communion with them. They're diseased. They're dirty. But we're not going to be able to do that in our society. Because there's such a thing now as age rights, you know. People with age are going to have more rights than people who don't have age. So you've got to protect yourself and your family. And that's going to be a problem in the future. Because this disease is not going to go away. This disease is still on the rise in the United States. And our schools are preaching safe sex. There is no such animal, but they're preaching it. And so our children are going to be in danger. We've got to protect them and teach them right from wrong. And you can't do that by putting them in a government school, of course. So that's what we have to do. That's the Reconstructionist view in education. Education is a religious activity. Children have to be taught to love God, to know God. Matter of fact, the reason why God gave us language is for three reasons. One, to know God. That's the first purpose of language is to know God. Cows don't have to know God. Dogs and cats don't have to know God. But we have to know God because he made us in his image. He gave us the power of language. The second purpose of language is to know one another. And the third purpose of language is to know ourselves. It's a process of introspection and thought. And that's why we have language, and that's why it's so important. Well, if you remove that, that, if you remove that purpose, to know God from the purpose of language, then of course that changes things. And that's what our schools do. They remove that. They say the purpose, there is no God. You know, language is just animal talk. So we have all of these things we can teach our children at home, the Bible, teach them to love God, teach them to know God, and they will be able to lead healthy, happy, productive lives while everything around us falls into chaos. We will be islands of order, godly order, oceans of chaos. Doesn't sound like a very happy prospect, but it's better than none. But what can one say at this period in human history? We don't know what's going to come with this, of course, with your economic community, your new world order, with the Greens and the environmentalists, but we have a great deal of work to do. I will end on that point and wish you well. Wish you God's blessings and hopefully we'll meet again at next year's conference. Thank you very much.