From the Easy Chair

Education I

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 73-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161BL117

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161BL117, Education I from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[Rushdoony] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 225, August the 24th, 1990.

This evening Otto Scott and I have the pleasure of the company of Samuel Blumenfeld. We have enjoyed him all week long, had some very rewarding discussions and meetings with Sam who is one of our staff members and is residing in Boston. Tonight we are going to discuss education with Sam.

First of all, Sam, perhaps a good way to start is to deal with one of your most recent projects, dealing with a black church and furthering home schooling among blacks in Boston.

[Blumenfeld] Yes. Well, I... I have spent a year trying to make contact and with the... with the black community, a conservative black church and I offered to set up a tutoring program and a workshop so that these blacks could teach children to read. That is the biggest problem, you know, in the black communities today is widespread illiteracy. These youngsters go to school and come out as functional illiterates. I was invited to attend this black church and at a... at a meeting this is... the group is called the Exodus Group and it was founded by a conservative minister by the name of Jackson. And at the meeting a mother got up and expressed her great concern because her daughter, age 14, wanted to quit high school and she asked her daughter, “Well, why do you want to quit high school?” And she said, “Mother, I can’t read. So there is no sense my remaining in school.”

And so I sort of felt as if I had been brought to the right place at the right time, because, of course, that is my specialty is in literacy and so I offered to the mother and to the others there to teach them how to teach their own children to read, because if that was the problem, they certainly could solve it themselves. The government certainly wasn’t going to solve it for them.

So it took about a year for them to finally plan something and so several weeks ago on a Saturday morning I was able to instruct about a dozen black women and... in... in reading, how to teach reading with my alpha phonics book. And it was very gratifying, very gratifying, so something has been started. And hopefully we will expand from there.

It is not easy to make contact with the black community because, you know, regardless of all the so-called integration and bussing that has taken place, I believe that the ... there is more racial segregation in America today than ever, that the context between whites and blacks is ... is very ... is very superficial and so I was very gratified to make this start. Let’s hope that something comes out of it.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Most people don’t realize that functional illiteracy is a relatively new thing in the black community.

[Blumenfeld] Yes.

[Rushdoony] When segregated education was ended—and there were good reasons for ending and bad reasons of ending it—one of the bad reasons was that the black child was no longer under a black teacher. And the black teacher put up with no nonsense from black students.

[Blumenfeld] That is right.

[Rushdoony] A black teacher made sure the child learned how to read, got a good education so that while in some instances but by no means all, black schools were not on a par with the white schools, the more backward black schools of the area of segregation were ahead of the integrated schools now in many of the urban areas. They still had a content centered curriculum. The black teacher was more likely than the white teacher to be very strongly conservative and old fashioned in her educational standards.

As a result, the black students in some areas were getting a better schooling than their wealthier white students of their age. All that has been destroyed.

[Blumenfeld] Yes.

[Rushdoony] What white teacher feels like disciplining a black student, especially now that spanking and any kind of punishment is no longer permissible? The black teachers were very strict.

I recall seeing black schools of the pre-integration era. The teachers were a superior group.

[Blumenfeld] Oh, yes. And they were well respected in their communities.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Blumenfeld] And as a community they, for example, the... the schools have their teams, their bands and there are... there were tears when these schools were broken up and these bands were broken up and these teams were broken up and they ... and now these black children were put in schools that were run predominantly by white teachers, white principles. They really lost something. It was assumed that they would gain something. But I believe—and this is ... it has nothing to do with racism—but simply from an ethnic point of view, I believe they did lose a great deal by destroying these black institutions. Of course they now have that problem with the colleges, with the black colleges that still want to remain black, but they are sort of ambivalent about it. And ... and now, of course, we see what integration has done, but, of course, the decline in... in education had very little to do with integration. It was basically that the change in the educational philosophy, which hit the entire system.

Probably the only reason why the blacks were behind was because all of the new fangled methods weren’t getting into the black schools...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Blumenfeld] ... as... as quickly as they were being put into the white schools.

[Rushdoony] Their backwardness was an asset.

[Blumenfeld] Absolutely, just as the Depression made sure that a lot of children learned to read because the ... the schools could not afford all of the new stupid text books, particularly the look say text books and so I consider myself to be a very fortunate ... not a victim of the Depression, but I was saved by it. As far as literacy is concerned, I was saved by the ... by the Depression.

But it is interesting to me... from my point of view, I was a youngster during the Depression in New York City and I know that many people suffered in the country, but I didn’t feel it as a youngster. We always had food on the table and life was orderly. The cities were safe. You could walk anywhere in New York City whether it was a black neighborhood or a white neighborhood any time of day or night and have no fear.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Blumenfeld] You could ride the subways at any time of day and night and have no fear. And all that is changed, you see.

[Rushdoony] I was in one trial in the South and the cause of the trial was the insistence of a black teacher in an integrated school on starting a class with prayer and bringing the name of the Lord into the classroom.

Now she was not trying aggressively to promote Christianity. But what she said... when I went there I talked with her briefly and in order to understand something of the trial. And she said there has to be a premise for authority in the classroom.

[Blumenfeld] Absolutely.

[Rushdoony] And for me the Lord is the premise of all authority and by bringing him into the classroom, I brought authority into the lives of the students. And I think she was right.

[Blumenfeld] Absolutely. I ... I have... I ... I have came to the conclusion quite some time ago that an education with... without God is ... is no education.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Blumenfeld] It is a disaster. It is a tragedy because it deprives children of ... of someone they really need to know and that is that they are ... that there is a creator and that they have souls and that they are not just blobs of protoplasm, the result of accident and evolution. And by removing God from the schools that has really caused the disaster in this country. And, of course all the other social things, integration has only compounded the problem.

[Rushdoony] Then you believe that the child knows if he is in terms of the school’s perspective an animal rather than a being created by God.

[Blumenfeld] Yes. As a matter of fact, I did a newsletter entitled “Is Your Child Attending a Zoo?” And how to ... how to evaluate you local public school for parents, because most ... most high schools in America are zoos and if you treat children like animals and tell them they are animals, they will act like animals and they can’t understand why people complain when they act like animals. So ... and... and youngsters themselves understand that. They know that there is something missing. They know that they have been deprived of something very important and that is why they rebel against the schools and that is why so many schools are burnt down or vandalized, the windows are broken, because the basically the youngsters don’t love those buildings. They develop a hatred for an institution that has taken their souls away, that has dehumanized them, that has turned them into little barbarians. And society is going to pay for that.

[Rushdoony] It already is.

[Blumenfeld] Oh, it is paying for it now, but it is going to pay even a higher price in the years ahead, because people don't like to be robbed of their essence. Youngsters don’t like to be robbed of their essence. And there is going to be a great price to pay for what we are doing in the schools of America, the public schools.

[Scott] Well, what you are talking about is really the spirit of the age. And I picked this up just before we came together. What are the children getting in terms of entertainment? Robert England, the actor who plays the mass murderer Freddy Kruger in Nightmare on Elm Street says he drew his inspiration from Ted Bendy... Ted Bundy. And he is going to host a TV special later this year called The Horror Hall of Fame on Halloween honoring his and other homicidal characters.

[Blumenfeld] Honoring them.

[Scott] Yes. And here we have the author of this particular article says, “In several Christian elementary schools that I visited list the nightmare films among their favorites. In fact, more children recognize Freddy Kruger than they do Abraham Lincoln.”

[Rushdoony] Oh, my.

[Scott] And here we go on. Madonna and some of the lyrics in some of her songs, the infamous two live crew recording, as nasty as they want to be, which contains 87 graphic references to oral sex, 226 uses of the F word, 117 descriptions of male and female genitalia. The album has sold more than 1.7 million copies. Now we go on here... he goes on and I won’t bother you with the rest of it, but this incidentally is a Christian publication talking about Christian schools and what the Christian children are exposed to. And he brings up Proverbs 3:21. “My son, preserve sound judgment and discernment. Do not let them out of your sight.”

In the book of Ezekiel, which he quotes where God declares in Ezekiel 22:26, “Her priests have done violence to my law, have profaned my holy things. They have made no distinction between the holy and the profane. They have not taught the difference between the unclean and the clean.”

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now here is a tremendous problem, because it is a total societal problem. The schools are a reflection of society just as an army is a reflection of the people.

[Blumenfeld] Yes.

[Scott] And we have a tremendous problem, probably not even in its declining days Paganism did not do this to its children.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] I don't think the American people have any idea of how degraded an atmosphere has been created in this country.

[Blumenfeld] Yes.

[Rushdoony] Well, last week in Las Vegas I read a column in the Las Vegas Review Journal in which the writer expressed his disgust with the good law abiding people of the United States because, he said, a couple of nights ago Madonna was on cable from coast to coast using the filthiest language imaginable, writing on the ground simulating masturbation and so on and on. And the writer said, “I checked with the networks. How many complaints did they receive about that?” It had a high listening audience from coast to coast. Very, very few, just a handful of people in the United States complained about that program. And he said appalling as what Mapplethorpe photographed, appalling as Madonna’s performance was, more appalling is the moral callousness and indifference of the so-called good people of America.

[Blumenfeld] Yes. I would agree with you. This is my... my... I don’t know if you would agree, though, that I believe that all of this is... is a result of the abdication of the fathers of America to assert control over the families and their children that there has been a... this incredible total abdication on the part of the American father. Where is the American father?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] He is missing.

[Blumenfeld] Yes. I ... I ... I am ... I am... I am amazed at how permissive or how... what kind of a non entity the American father has become in all of this, that he has no authority at all. He doesn't know what he wants. Of course, he is ... he has been totally indoctrinated in the playboy philosophy. He has been reading Playboy and Penthouse magazines like that for years. And now he is going to have to suffer the results of it. I believe that a society that the tone of a society is established by the fathers of that society. Am I right or wrong?

[Rushdoony] Yes. Let me add this. When Christianity became Antinomian the father was the loser because very commonly in the law and throughout the Scriptures the authority of the father is stressed, an authority under God and in terms of God’s law.

I had a situation once a good many years ago in which a family contacted me. Their daughter had gone out with someone and had been seduced and was pregnant and he ... the young man said he was ready to marry the girl and, in fact, it would have been a real asset for him to marry her, to look at it in a rather cold, calculating way. So they brought me into the situation. I had only the slightest acquaintance with the family so I don’t even know why I was called in.

And I turned at once to the Bible and I pointed out that in a situation like this whether they married or not first he had to pay a dowry and, second, the decision rested in the hands not of the young man or of the girl, but the father. So I said neither you, the young couple, nor the mother have the say so here. It is the father. And if you have an argument to make, you present it to him.

Well, he made the decision and it did something to that entire family or complex of families and the interesting thing is that to this day that man’s {?} Chalcedon.

[Scott] Well you... you reminded him of his proper role. I can see why he does support you. The whole question of masculinity in the United States has been totally blurred. There is no masculine profile. My dad, as you know, was oriented toward the Latin. And they used to call Venezuela the barracks, a very rough country. He was fairly clear about it. He also would say, “Don’t pull out a gun in the living room.”

[Rushdoony] That would be a new proverb for me.

[Scott] There is no point...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...in stressing the harsher aspects of masculinity and the social context. If there is no fight...

[Rushdoony] Sure.

[Scott] ...why... why bother? But pressed a man should be able to stand. And I have found time and time again that American men have a great deal of difficulty standing up, standing up to authority in a proper sense. I don’t mean by flouting authority, but by expressing rights, by drawing a line. I did an article once on psychological testing and it was an assigned article. I am.... I took a number of tests in a number of companies and I answered the questions honestly and one series ended with a psychologist interview.

And he said, “You did so well in the test.”

I said, “How could I have done so well? I didn’t answer all the questions. Some of he questions I mocked.”

He said, “Well, some of those questions only a {?} would answer and we are not in the business of hiring {?}.”

So it was a trick. But when I turned the article in the editor said, “Well...” I said, “Anyone has the right to be impertinent to ask you things that you shouldn’t be asked, but you certainly don’t have to answer them. It is up to you to protect your rights.”

They said, “Well, that is al right for you, because you didn’t need the job. But the average man would have to answer the question.”

And I said, “That is the whole point. If he is a man, he wouldn’t.”

And the whole question of man... they... their eyes ... they actually didn't know what I was talking about.

[Rushdoony] Yes, well, in my student days I recall something by an Arab student. He said that American women were the most beautiful women in the world and the most submissive. He said, “I have been in a number of parts of the world.” He had a background of money. “And nowhere are the women more submissive and more eager to please the men. They do everything in the way of cooking and dressing and taking care of themselves to please their husbands, whereas elsewhere when the woman is married, she lets herself go. She has got a lifetime security.” And he said, “The failure here is on the part of men, American men. All they do is to day dream about the bliss or supposed bliss of polygamy and they don't know what a hell it is.”

[Blumenfeld] Right.

[Scott] It doesn’t take him too much imagination.

[Blumenfeld] But you are right, you know, and... but where does that... why is the American father what he is today? It can’t all be just Playboy that... there must have been something... Is it because he does not accept God’s law...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Blumenfeld] ... God’s authority over his life and that is why he has no authority at all?

[Rushdoony] That is right. He is not under authority and he doesn't know any thing about the nature of authority therefore.

[Scott] Well, you know that I am a consultant and I am a consultant for really only one reason and that is that I will tell the truth.

[Blumenfeld] Yes.

[Scott] They ask me what I think about what they are doing and I will tell them the truth and they will say, “Well, that is nice to hear that. When are you going back?”

But at any rate, they do pay me to tell them the truth. This, by and large, and I am not saying this is true of the people that I advise, by and large it is very hard inside a large corporation to get the truth if you are the boss, because people don’t want to run into trouble.

[Blumenfeld] That is right.

[Scott] And this is a failure of nerve. And if you fail consistently you get to the point where you can’t fight.

Now we have reached the point in the United States where if I differ with a man he thinks I am his enemy. And this is insane. I means that you can’t have an honest conversation.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Blumenfeld] But, you know, one of the... one of the ... the good things about the home school movement is that the fathers are beginning to assert themselves a little more.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Blumenfeld] They are beginning to play a role in their families, a more biblical role, that is in the Christian home schools.

[Scott] Well, they can bring a certain knowledge of the world to a situation, can’t they?

[Blumenfeld] Yes. Yes. There is a renaissance of... of fatherhood in the... in the Christian home school which is, of course, to some rejoicing, although it is still kind of a small movement compared to the nation as a whole. But you have got to start somewhere, you know? And ... and it is... it is quite thrilling when you go to a homeschool convention or conference and see these fathers with their children and reading the Bible and singing the hymns and ... and learning about teaching and... and...and participating with their children. It is... it is... it is the most important development in this country as far as parents and... and parenthood is concerned.

[Scott] Well, it is a very important thing. There used to be a psychological test for executives. They had a photo... they had a... a drawing of a woman in a doorway and a boy who was either entering or leaving. You couldn’t quite tell. And they would show this to the men candidates for entry level and management jobs and if he said the boy was going home he lost. If he said the boy was leaving, they took that as a good thing. And it is true. There is a point in a boy’s development, I believe, certainly there was in mine, I think around 12 or so where my attention began to swing toward my father, very definitely. And from then on remained more concentrated on my father than my mother. Didn’t lesson my affection, but I began to look to my father for advice and counsel and also for an example.

[Blumenfeld] Which is... which is what it should be. And, Rush, I imagine in your own life your father had a very strong influence.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Blumenfeld] On... on... on the way your life turned out. And I think that that is why some of the youngsters today are in... are just floundering and being lost to the world of... of degradation because there are no fathers there. And particularly in the Negro community where you have more single parent families and unwed mothers than in any other community, any other, you know...

[Scott] Well, this was a great...

[Blumenfeld] ...community, no matter...

[Scott] ...failure of the Negro man.

[Blumenfeld] Yes.

[Scott] He has abandoned his responsibilities and, in fact, across the board there are very few black orphanages, black institutions and you were talking about that early on. You started out by talking about the dark side of the break up of the black community. When they all lived together, black physicians and black lawyers and so forth, they had a pattern then for their young boys which they no longer have because the professionals had moved out.

[Blumenfeld] Yes. So it is a... it is a very sad situation, but, as I say, there are... here and there... there are ... there are reasons to be hopeful.

[Scott] Unexpected results.

[Blumenfeld] Yes, yes.

[Scott] Unplanned for.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, I think it is significant that at least this was true a couple of decades or so ago that the highest percentage of sons following in their father’s footsteps into the same vocation was the clergy, the reason being the fact of faith. This does something to a father’s authority and therefore it does something to establish a pattern of authority and a pattern of continuity.

[Scott] That is interesting.

[Rushdoony] One of the problems when the authority of the father breaks down, it means also that his faith has very often failed him.

[Blumenfeld] Yes.

[Rushdoony] He has abandoned his faith. Well, then the authority he exercises over his family is really a lawless authority. He doesn’t have a religious foundation for it.

Then there is a rebellion a rebellion against this authority because there is no religious faith commanding it. The child does not have a biblical faith that says that obedience and honor of parents is a religious duty. So I have seen over the years many young men whose aptitude is exactly that of their fathers. They have already a given situation where all they have to do is to step in to a good income, a good future and it is the only one they are trained for, the only think they can do well, but they refuse to have anything to do with what their father is doing. They are going to go off onto something that they have no aptitude for. And it is because the faith authority link is broken in such families and there is a mindless rebellion and most of the rebellion is mindless that we have seen in our day.

There was a book written after World War II, a very devastating analysis by Lindner. I would not agree with his psychological theories, but the title was Rebels Without a Cause.

[Blumenfeld] Yes. I remember that.

[Scott] Very famous.

[Blumenfeld] Robert Lindner.

[Rushdoony] And that has marked our age, rebels without a cause.

[Scott] Well, if there is no structure to eh authority, then, of course, it is arbitrary.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And the... I think a number of men attempt to exercise arbitrary authority. It doesn’t make sense to the kids.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] It is simply arbitrary.

[Blumenfeld] Oh, yes.

[Scott] They are not going to obey that, or else if they do they will with resentment. But here we are again we are talking about something that isn’t confined to the family. It is not confined to the home or the school. There has been a total shift in the American attitude toward authority. Authority is bad. They really think that it is a terrible thing to exercise authority, to ... to say to the waitress or the waiter, “I am very glad to know your name, but I didn't come here to meet you. I just as soon you gave the menu and left me alone,” is almost unthinkable.

[Blumenfeld] Well, you don’t want to hurt people’s...

[multiple voices]

[Scott] Of course not. You wouldn’t say that, but you would feel that.

[Blumenfeld] Yeah.

[Scott] And that is a trivial example, but we could go up and down the ladder. The schools, of course, are, as you say, zoos.

[Blumenfeld] But more than that, the schools deliberately inculcate rebellion, because the purpose of the school in America today is to change American society from a Christian society to a Humanist, Atheist society. And so they have had to create rebellion among the students.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Blumenfeld] They have had to ... they have had to promote rebellion so that the children would overthrow the beliefs and values of their parents. So the schools have played a very important role in creating this ... this... this rebellion. But the father’s guilt is in sending his child to a school that inculcates rebellion.

[Scott] Well...

[Blumenfeld] And not being aware of it, not being, how is it, concerned enough to look into it and say, “Why am I putting my child in a school that is teaching that child to rebel against me?”

[Scott] Well, a... see, a 30 year old or the 10 year old child has come out of that same school. You make it sound as though it is a deliberate pattern, as though it is a conscious pattern to create this particular habit. And I tend more to think that most of these people are involved in a movement, a social movement if you want to call it that for good reasons because they have been told by the authority figures they respect, the professionals, social scientists and so forth, that this is all good. And although they can see the disorder and the chaos that it is creating, they can’t believe it. Most people believe what they hear and what they listen to and what they read more than what they see.

[Blumenfeld] Well, yeah. And I suppose that is true. But I think that... I don’t think the ... the education system any longer knows what is good or even believes in what is good. I think the public just...

[Scott] Just...

[Blumenfeld] They are sort of on... on automatic.

[Scott] They are just jobs. They get paid and whatever is going on, they go along.

[Blumenfeld] Well, but there is something else. There is a diabolical force, there is no question about I, behind human action of that kind, human action that denies the existence of God, that deliberately leads youngsters into degeneracy, into perversion. There has got to be something more than just a job. There is that evil component. There is... There is such a thing as original sin. There is such a thing as innate depravity.

[Scott] Yes.

[Blumenfeld] And I think we are seeing more of it today than ever before, because it is unleashed.

[Scott] It is unleashed. There is no control.

[Blumenfeld] There is no control over it and...

[Scott] And there is no purpose any longer.

[Blumenfeld] And it is even glamorized.

[Scott] All right.

[Blumenfeld] Degradation perversion is glamorized...

[Scott] {?}

[Blumenfeld] You can make a lot of money...

[Scott] This is what I started with on this entertainment.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Blumenfeld] Take for example, Mapplethorpe. Who would have ever gone to see his pictures? Who would have stood around, you know, waiting two hours to get into an exhibition to see pictures of flowers you know, if it hadn't been for the blasphemy.

[Scott] Yes.

[Blumenfeld] ... that he was presenting at his... at his exhibition.

[Scott] You are right.

[Blumenfeld] That is... and now that is money making, you see.

[Scott] Right.

[Rushdoony] Well, over the years I have seen this pattern. A lot of men want to exercise authority without any justification. They do not want the school to touch their child. I am the one who is in charge here. And you can’t do this to my child. Or a church. You cannot bring my wife up on charges for her sin, because I am the one who says whether or not she is to be forgiven or not. And I am dealing with some very specific examples here that I know about more than one. Whereas an authority that is godly is very different. I routinely have told fathers what do you want to know? Well, this is the Scripture that applies to this or that. Well, if this is not a case where it is a matter of a violation of faithfulness to a law, you are the father. You make the decision. And it routinely surprises a fair percentage of them, because our culture does not let even the Christian man think. I am the father. This is my decision. Everything in our culture militates against that.

[Blumenfeld] You are right.

[Rushdoony] And what the routine response, which I have heard at least 500 times is, “Of course. That is exactly the truth.”

[Scott] Well, the courts don’t recognize.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] ...the father.

[Rushdoony] They are hostile to it.

[Scott] The courts only recognize the father’s responsibility. They don’t recognize any authority whatever.

[Blumenfeld] Well, even in the case of abortion the Father has no say in it.

[Scott] He is not even supposed to be told.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Blumenfeld] And... and to my mind that is shocking.

[Scott] Of course it is. You have two people.

[Blumenfeld] Right.

[multiple voices]

[Scott] Who have...

[Blumenfeld] ...conceived a child.

[Scott] Yes.

[Blumenfeld] Right.

[Scott] And one is told this is none of your business.

[Blumenfeld] The... the... the society is so contradictory, you know. And then we say, “Well, the society... the father ought to provide support, you know.”

[Scott] Well, he has to. It is mandated.

[Blumenfeld] Yes, yes. He should support a child, but he should also fight for the life of that child when it is threatened.

[Scott] Well, then they don’t defend the family.

[Blumenfeld] Yeah.

[Scott] Because they have no authority, no means by which to defend the family. If they go to court, the court denies that they had a say.

[Blumenfeld] But, of course, when you are trying to destroy a civilization, the family is... you are going to aim at the family, because the family is the social unit.

[Scott] Well, I am struggling on that point, this juncture.

[Blumenfeld] Yes.

[Scott] If you really started out to destroy a society, of course, you would take most of these steps.

[Blumenfeld] Yes.

[Scott] But to move from the result to the intention, you know, to say somebody planned this, my... my experience has been that most people cannot even execute the plans that they plan.

[Blumenfeld] Oh, sure, sure.

[Scott] And this is very true in the governing class as well as anywhere else.

[Blumenfeld] Yes.

[Scott] These are errors that they have fallen into once. They broke the faith.

[Blumenfeld] Yes, but the... you see that is what happens, you see. You don’t need a conspiracy.

[Scott] Yeah.

[Blumenfeld] In other words these things happen when you... when you throw off the constraints of... of biblical law and when you live according to your own passions, to your own desires, you inevitably wind up in that kind of a situation.

[Scott] Exactly. When a society loses its faith...

[Blumenfeld] Yes.

[Scott] It loses its direction.

[Blumenfeld] And that is why ... and that is why you see an American society can evolve in the same way that a Soviet society has jumped into...

[Scott] Very similar.

[Blumenfeld] Sure. Eventually we are going the same... you know, we are going to wind up in the same place.

[Scott] On the... on an idea of getting up in the morning and getting dressed and going to work and the problems that you have, this society and the Soviet society is not as far apart as they are supposed to be.

[Blumenfeld] And you will see it in every society. You have the same problems in Argentina.

[Scott] Yes.

[Blumenfeld] Or in Britain.

[Scott] Right.

[Blumenfeld] Or wherever human beings act in this way, wherever they lose their sense of... of... of their ...

[Scott] What holds them together in the first place.

[Blumenfeld] Right.

[Scott] ...is the faith.

[Blumenfeld] And what is... the... the hope we have in this society is that we see a return to the family in the Christian home school family where you would have a sudden rediscover... a rediscovery, a reassertion...

[Scott] All right.

[Blumenfeld] ...of the family in a... in a sea of troubles. In other words the family becomes the island of safety, the safe haven for the children and the one place where you can start building, you see.

[Rushdoony] Well, if I may redirect our very interesting conversation more back to education. A book I finished recently and I mentioned to you Tharp’s book on...

[Blumenfeld] Oh, yes. Horace...

[Rushdoony] Horace Mann and his Wife. And one thing that came through loud and clear was that for Horace Mann the essence of progress in every sphere was to follow what was the latest in the scientific theory. And one of the ways he applied this when he was a college president was to try to bring in a pastor whom he felt was the finest imaginable, not because in a sermon he was biblical, but he brought in the latest scientific advancement, the latest scientific thought which was phrenology.

The main thrust of the sermon, apparently, was phrenology.

[Scott] Sure.

[Rushdoony] Well, that was the same approach he had in education. Let’s bring in the most recent kind of thinking in education . And one premise that he felt was very important was to discard the unscientific and exploded doctrine of original sin.

[Scott] Oh, sure. Yeah.

[Rushdoony] The one time he had himself to do with children he confessed he was almost tempted to believe in original sin.

[Blumenfeld] Yes, his own children gave him quite a hard time. They were very unruly, you know. But the... but it is interesting how the Unitarians rebelled against original sin.

[Rushdoony] Oh, yes.

[Blumenfeld] That was their great... and they felt that, you know that Calvinism libeled human nature.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Blumenfeld] ... that human beings were basically good...

[Scott] And basically rational.

[Blumenfeld] And perfectible you see.

[Scott] And perfectible. But fundamentally rational and they gave no... in the idea that man is rational there is no room whatever for emotion and for the spiritual, because by rational they mean earth bound.

[Blumenfeld] Yes. Yes.

[Scott] And earthbound reasons are what got us into this.

[Rushdoony] And educators since Horace Mann have gone in for the last word on educational theory and scientific theory.

[Blumenfeld] Oh, yes.

[Rushdoony] And this is why they have sacrificed a few generations of children on the altar of educational theory and scientific hypotheses rather than going in terms of God’s truth.

[Blumenfeld] You know, it is interesting. I was at Stanford University the other day at... in the {?}

[multiple voices]

[Blumenfeld] ...you know, your favorite haunt. And they had all of the educational publications there, but the latest findings. And the... and I love the titles of some of the articles. There was one journal... the Journal of Genetic Psychology. And they had this ... these two articles. Listen to the title. “Gender as a Moderator Variable in the Relationship Between an Intrinsic Motivation Scale and Short Term Novelty in Children.” Can you figure that one out?

[Scott] Sounds slightly nasty.

[Blumenfeld] Here is another one. “Complexity Discrimination as a Determinant of Children’s Preferences in Collative Motivation.” Can you figure that one out? But that is the sort of things are educators are now... these are the kinds of articles they write and... and the... these journals are full of this sort of thing.

[Rushdoony] And it is translated into action as educational garbage.

[Blumenfeld] It is.

[Rushdoony] And it is destructive of learning.

[Scott] I think before we go off that, that one of the great mistakes was to put children in grades by age. Some kids learn faster than others. Some learn slower. They may all come to the pretty much the same IQ over a period of time, but not at the same pace.

[Blumenfeld] Oh, yes. I agree.

[Scott] So to segregate them by age and to force them to stay there... when I was a boy we used to be able to jump.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] I skipped a couple of years in elementary school and now they don't do that, I understand. So...

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] You are in lock step, learning by lock step.

[Rushdoony] Now they pass you no matter what you do. They never skip you.

[Blumenfeld] The social promotion.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Blumenfeld] You see?

[Scott] But always with the same age group.

[Blumenfeld] Oh, yes, you know, it is very interesting having talked to a lot of parents who have been using alpha phonics, my... my reading book. I met a mother in Portland whose three and a half year old little girl who was learning to read with alpha phonics. And by the time she was four she had completed the book.

I got a letter from a mother who was ... whose five year old son covered the subject in one month. So there is no telling, you see? It is a matter of... of individuals.

[Rushdoony] I think, perhaps, if you can bear with me, because I told you this story the other day about the airline pilot and...

[Blumenfeld] Oh, yes.

[Rushdoony] ... and {?}. This would be a good one to tell here. Some years back I think it was in the late 60s, about 69 or thereabouts I spoke in Bakersfield and was interviewed on a call in talk show, a radio talk show. And the host was a commercial airline pilot who had dropped out for a year or two. His wife was having a baby and needed him at home. And his first child was a girl that... about three. So when he wasn’t conducting the talk show he would go out to the airstrip and fly his little plane and take his three year old daughter up.

By the time she started kindergarten she had learned everything on the panel and with her father sitting beside her and never touching anything she could take it up, fly around and land it, five years old.

[Blumenfeld] Isn’t that incredible?

[Rushdoony] Well, he also taught her to read in that time, because he was home a great deal. And she became a good reader. She started kindergarten and made the mistake of showing off and read some things on the bulletin board in the hall and the teacher spotted her reading that to other children and reported her. And the father had an urgent notice waiting him when he got off the air that the school wanted to see him. It was a critical matter with regard to his daughter. And he was very distressed. What in the world had happened to her? Was it an accident or had she done some unspeakable thing? It was such a grave emergency.

He rushed down there and was confronted with the fact that his daughter could read. And they proceeded to ... to vent their rage at him for having taught her, what irreparable damage he had done to her, because a child of five, a kindergartener was not prepared mentally for such a thing and he was forcing this on to her and damaging her.

When they got through with all their ranting at him, the kindergarten teacher and the principle with the vice principle in the background, he said, “Well, that is interesting that my daughter is not ready to read and I have done her harm.” He said, “You know, it is a strange fact. As a pilot I have been taking my daughter up in the air with me four two years and she has learned everything on the panel. That is what got me started teaching her to read some time ago. And she can now take that plane up, fly it around and land it with me never touching anything. I just sit there.” And he said, “A child who can fly a plane is immature, can’t learn to read and should not be taught? You explain that to me.”

And they were furious with him. Absolutely furious.

[Scott] Exactly the point. Only the point goes worse. You segregate the child by age. You set up a difference between the grades by age and you set up a difference between all children and adults and I look at young kids today. There are, of course, exceptions and it depends on where you are, but I look at the adolescent, the high school crowd. Their faces are dead.

[Blumenfeld] Oh, yes.

[Scott] There is no joy and I compare them mentally with my own childhood and what a wonderful period it was, how much joy we had, how idealistic we were. Our greatest goal was to be mature, was to grow up and to join the grown ups, at least mine was. And here we have set up a social structure against itself based on age. And it affects everybody, the elderly, the middle aged, they young. When I tell people my age they act as though I have suddenly growth horns in the middle of my forehead. They are surprised that I am able to ambulate. It is astonishing.

[Rushdoony] Well, social security has led to early retirement and they look at anyone of our age as over the hill and we should be doddering around with a cane.

[Scott] Anachronisms.

[Blumenfeld] Yes.

[Scott] But this is... it has destroyed the ... now I was over in England at a time when they were writing here about the generation gap and people took me out and asked me who I wanted to meet and I said I would like to meet some young people. So they took me to the local pub and they knew some young couples, three couples, as a matter of fact, who took us to a great big mansion that the three couples were sharing and they were men and women in their 20s. I think the oldest was maybe 30. And there was no generation gap. The conversation was on an equal level and it was fascinating. One wanted to know if he should come to school here in the States. And I said, “Well, if you intend to live here, yes. But otherwise you better get an education in the country in which you are a citizen, because education is a cultural... a cultural thing.”

[Blumenfeld] Yes. Well, of course, what they have created is such an incredible gap between generation gap in this country simply because they don’t provide the basic cultural knowledge to today’s generations that we have. In other words, we can discuss things which the younger generation have no understand of. And so {?} for example even in the field of music, for example, the 7-11 stores have wanted to get rid of all the kids loitering around the stores so they decided to play easy listening music, you know, the songs of the 30s and 40s...

[Scott] Easy listening for us.

[Blumenfeld] Yes. And the kids were driven away. They could not stand the violins. They could not stand these wonderful songs.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Blumenfeld] And so the 7-11 found a wonderful way of getting rid of these kids from loitering. Now they are going to somewhere else where they can play their boom boxes. But you can see what has happened to the children’s minds that the tremendous psychological pressures...

[Scott] Well, don’t forget the...

[Blumenfeld] ...and instruments of ... of ... of learning... of... of how would you say? Instruments of... of unlearning or miseducation which has been a flagstaff, particularly in the field of... of reading. The methods used to teach reading do damage to the brain. I... I consider them to be non surgical forms of pre frontal lobotomies.

[Scott] Really?

[Blumenfeld] Yes. Because these kids, their brains are... are practically removed. And that is why we have these so-called air heads roaming the malls of America, because their brains have been removed and they cannot think anymore. You see, when you destroy their ability to use language you have really incapacitated their brain because language is the tool of thought.

[Scott] Now I never realized that.

[Blumenfeld] It it’s the tool of intellect.

[Scott] I thought that they might have been mistaught and couldn’t read properly, but you could retrain them.

[Blumenfeld] Well, it is very difficult. I have worked with some of them and I can tell you that the methods are so effective that in six months time they can turn a youngster into a learning disabled individual. Now all these youngsters come to school having taught themselves to speak their own language.

[Scott] Yes.

[Blumenfeld] So from the language point of view they re very able.

[Scott] Yes.

[Blumenfeld] They are very learning able.

[Scott] I have noticed that.

[Blumenfeld] And within six months time they are learning disabled, because these methods are extremely effective and they were developed by the world’s leading behavioral psychologists. The people who have created these teaching methods are not little old ladies living in ...

[Scott] Do you think that he knew what he was doing?

[Blumenfeld] They all know what they are doing.

[Rushdoony] They know.

[Blumenfeld] Of course they do.

[Rushdoony] They stated well before this functional illiteracy began that in ... and their thinking was in terms of Plato’s Republic that at least one third of the population was not literate and there was no need to teach them reading. It was unnecessary learning. One third would be marginal. Only one third would have any intellectual content to their lives.

Now those figures have become established since this was first propounded in the 50s.

[Blumenfeld] Yes.

[Scott] Well, this is a crime against the nation.

[Blumenfeld] Absolutely.

[Rushdoony] It is. And it was deliberate. It was their determination that most people were not of a caliber to be on the level of the literate and the intellectual type.

[Scott] Why has nobody prepared a legal case based upon this information and brought these people to trial?

[Rushdoony] Well, our time is just about up, Otto. And in the next tape I will say something about that, because that has been a concern of mine for some time and of some lawyers as well.

[Scott] Good.

[Rushdoony] Well, thank you all for listening and we are going to continue for another hour with Sam Blumenfeld and we will get a little more deeply into some of these educational questions.

[Voice] Authorized by the Chalcedon Foundation. Archived by the Mount Olive Tape Library. Digitized by ChristRules.com.