[News with Views] The plain, unvarnished truth is that public education is a shoddy, fraudulent piece of goods sold to the public at an astronomical price. It’s time the American consumer knew the extent of the fraud which is victimizing millions of children each year. ‐Samuel BlumenfeldOrwell was dealing with communism and his disillusionment with communism in Russia and what he saw the communists do in Spain. His novel, 1984, was a response to those political situations. Whereas I was interested in more things than the political atmosphere. I was considering the whole social atmosphere: the impact of TV and radio and the lack of education. I could see the coming event of schoolteachers not teaching reading anymore. The less they taught, the more you wouldn’t need books. ‐Ray Bradbury
Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel. ‐Socrates
Give me just one generation of youth, and I’ll transform the whole world. ‐Vladimir Lenin
My maternal grandparents graduated from 8th grade in 1911. Their framed diplomas hang on our library wall. Each diploma states, "Having passed a credible examination in Orthography (the spelling system of a language), Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, Geography, English Grammar, Physiology, United States History, and Music, and having sustained a correct deportment is granted this certificate of proficiency." Oh, to have these subjects in today’s grammar schools.
I highly doubt any of today’s college graduates could pass the tests my grandparents passed to graduate from 8th grade. Most cannot read at a proficient level. Why? Because phonics has been eliminated, and yet it’s so easy to teach. If America’s children can’t read, they cannot gain knowledge, they cannot read their Bibles, and they cannot read America’s Declaration of Independence or Constitution.
The best approach for the majority of children is systematic phonics, the simple concept of teaching the 26 letters of the alphabet, the 44 sounds they make, and the 70 most common ways to spell those sounds. For most children, learning this basic code unlocks 85 percent of the words in the English language by the end of the first grade. Children of all levels of intelligence can learn to read most words simply by learning the correspondence between sounds and letters.
Parents say their toddlers are so bright, but once they are put into the government education system, which totally lacks phonics and academic training, they become bored little socialists who have been thoroughly brainwashed with leftist ideology. They are victims as education expert Samuel Blumenfeld has so rightly stated, and it was the Unitarians at Harvard University who promoted public education, removing it from the family, churches/synagogues and private institutions so long ago.
Countless books have been written regarding the damaging effects of what American education has become along with the Outcome Based Education Skinnerian International Curriculum and how it destroys our children. For a full overview of the continued damage to America’s children, I would suggest purchasing Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians Are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children, by Samuel Blumenfeld and Alex Newman. Pdf Link
Blumenfeld puts the blame squarely on the shoulders of the educational leaders who decided early in the last century to change the purpose of education from its traditional academic function to a radical social one. High literacy was an obstacle to their progressive agenda, so the teaching of reading had to be changed to produce a more socially desirable result. The results for the nation have been disastrous.