From the Easy Chair
Education II
Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony
Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons
Lesson: 74-214
Genre: Speech
Track:
Dictation Name: RR161BL118
Year: 1980s and 1990s
Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161BL118, Education II from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.
[Rushdoony] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 226, August 24, 1990.
Otto Scott and I are discussing education and related matters with Samuel Blumenfeld. I would like to start off by continuing on a vein that we were discussing at the end of the previous tape. About 10 years ago there were two or three lawyers in the country who were very much interested in finding parents whose children were functional illiterates. Their idea was it is time to challenge the public school system by having a series of malpractice trials from coast to coast, parents charging the teachers and the school and any responsible agency including the states for their children’s illiteracy.
Now their feeling was that these trials would result in defeat in most cases, but that if they continued them in one state after another, they would finally find the judge whose grandchildren or children were functional illiterates and who was ready to recognize that there was a liability here. And once such a case stood up in court then it would be hard with that precedent set to rule against it. It would be dangerous of a judge to do so. The ideal case would be of a minority family’s child, perhaps black. The trouble was they didn’t find anyone interested. But the situation is still a valid one.
[Scott] Oh, absolutely.
[Rushdoony] And it would be a good thing to talk to some black pastors in the course of your travels to call this fact to their attention that there is a great potential here that will revolutionize the situation because it will be a precedent of far reaching consequences.
[Scott] Well, it is a... a Pandora’s box. What we have where, what has developed and you recall that I once wrote about it, new crimes, I called it. We have a professional class in various professions who, in effect, are doing to people what as once considered criminal acts. They are luring them into situations. For instance psychologists can lie as an experimental matter just to se what the in... how the individual reacts. And this is, of course a form of fraud. They put people into a great emotional state and then, well, ha, ha, it is just to provide a paper or a survey or a study.
We have educators that do not educate. We have, for that matter, judges who do not judge. We have a whole governing class that is betraying the people and the trust that the people have in it. And if ... and if, as you say, Sam, if these methods are actually creating brain damage, the question wouldn’t be the bringing in a minority particularly, in my point of view, it would be to bring in somebody from the best of circumstances who had been brain damaged as a test case. And this is not because... it is should not be a sympathetic matter. It shouldn’t be a racial matter. It should be here is a fellow who has an excellent heredity, whose IQ as an infant was extraordinarily well and here he is a functional illiterate after paying a great deal of money for a bad education.
[Rushdoony] Yes. Sam, in talking to the Chalcedon Christian School teachers Wednesdays morning you pointed out how bad it is to teach the child to print rather than to...
[Scott] Learn to.
[Rushdoony] ... learn the cursive writing. And it establishes wrong muscular patterns. What is not commonly recognized is that those patterns are set very early and endure.
[Scott] Yes.
[Rushdoony] That if they do not learn how to write early they never do. One of the classic examples of that was of a man who was quite learned, but is often described by some historians as illiterate, because he could not sign his name.
[Scott] Who was that?
[Rushdoony] Charlemagne.
[Blumenfeld] Ah, ha.
[Rushdoony] Charlemagne was quite literate. But he had never learned to write. So it was with difficulty he could sign anything.
[Blumenfeld] Yes.
[Rushdoony] Or make a mark in a hurry.
Now this has been used, the fact of his difficulty in writing, in fact, his virtual inability, to say that here as an illiterate man, but he was a man who brought a scholar to the court, a man who read works in Latin, a man who would take things with him on trips in order to study them, but he could not write.
Certain patterns, if they re not set in the brain as a child are never properly set.
[Blumenfeld] Yes.
[Rushdoony] That is why to learn a language at 60 is difficult. At six...
[Scott] No problem.
[Rushdoony] No problem.
[Scott] No problem.
[Blumenfeld] Exactly and... and our primary schools in this country do such a poor job that millions come out... come out of our schools unable to read and write, to cipher, or, you know, even to speak English correctly or even think. And incidentally, Rush, there have been several cases, you know, concerning functional illiteracy. There was one in San Francisco in the 70s and the judge ruled that the schools had no responsibility to teach a child to read, that their sole responsibility was custodial.
[Scott] Really?
[Blumenfeld] Yes.
[Scott] This is a judge.
[Blumenfeld] This was a judge and that was the ruling in the San Francisco case.
[Scott] That should follow him everywhere he goes.
[Blumenfeld] Then there was another case in New York State where the judge again ruled against the... the parents, because they said, well, the parents had recourse to the school administration and they should have complained to the school administration. And they also said that the court is not in a position to be able to judge what is educational malpractice.
[Scott] Only educators can do that.
[Blumenfeld] I suppose. But ... but as ... as Rush has suggested, certainly one must keep trying.
[Scott] You could get... you could get physiologists and you could get educators. There are outlaw educators.
[Blumenfeld] Yes.
[Scott] Who are well aware of what is going on.
[Blumenfeld] Yes.
[Rushdoony] Well, I talked with the attorney once who was responsible for the defense of the flag burning student rebels of the 60s who subsequently became a Christian, a very remarkable man, a professor of law. And they lost case after case of flag burning. But finally they found a judge who was ready to agree with them that this was a matter of civil liberty. Now to undo the damage some have proposed a constitutional amendment, because it is a matter of case law now.
[Scott] It would be simpler to change the judiciary.
[Blumenfeld] Yes. It is going to take... it has been very difficult. I have spoken all over the country and I occasionally meet somebody who was seriously damaged, disabled by the system and they become interested in a law suit, but it then it never... there is never any follow up because it is hard to find a lawyer...
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Blumenfeld] ...who understands what all of this is about. And ... and a lawyers also want money up front for these cases, because they are very problematical. I... I have proposed that instead of... of suing the schools or the ... the administration or the... or the teachers ,that they sue the publishers of the works. In other words, if the publishers are producing a product that is...
[Rushdoony] Good idea.
[Blumenfeld] ...damaging, hurting these...
[Scott] Well...
[Blumenfeld] ...hurting these youngsters and then the... then as free enterprises, as profit makers they have deeper pockets, in a sense, as far as the court is concerned. In other words, there is less sympathy...
[Scott] Well, there is certainly...
[Blumenfeld] ...there is less sympathy for a profit making publisher who has made a lot of money on this. For example, there is the company that produced Dick and Jane has made millions even though they have managed to also destroy a couple of million lives in... in the process.
[Scott] That is true. But, in fact, the publishers merely relay what the educators...
[Blumenfeld] Oh, yeah.
[Scott] Have produced.
[Blumenfeld] Yeah.
[Scott] And that is...
[Blumenfeld] But remember agent orange that Monsanto was held ...
[Scott] Yes.
[Blumenfeld] ... was considered.
[Scott] Yes, the...
[Blumenfeld] ...not the government who used it.
[Scott] Yes, deep pockets in that case.
[Blumenfeld] Right.
[Scott] And we have all these erring politicians who preside over these terrible situations and give wonderful speeches and are never held responsible. The whole business of not holding people responsible is become an American ingrained habit. Practically no one is held responsible. You... you mentioned earlier that the kids are passed on without passing an examination. They can’t even fail. They only thing is that they come out as morons. But I can’t forget that the early days of the Reformation really in England the downfall of the monarchy, culminating in the execution of Charles I began when man began to talk, stand up and talk to the court of high commission and to the court of common pleas about mal administration...
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] ... and malpractice by government. And it is... somebody has to start it, because before it is over it becomes an avalanche.
[Blumenfeld] Well, it... it certainly should be done in our society.
[Scott] Very definitely.
[Blumenfeld] ... which is, supposedly, you know, a democratic society.
[Scott] Yes.
[Blumenfeld] ... of which is growth with mal administration...
[Scott] Across the board.
[Blumenfeld] ...and... and malpractice, but...
[Rushdoony] Well, speaking of malpractice, why not tell our listeners some of the kinds of malpractice with the starting student...
[Blumenfeld] Well...
[Rushdoony] The child going to school for the first time. What are some of the things that are done to that child that are wrong?
[Blumenfeld] Well the first thing they do is ... is when they teach the child supposedly to read is that they ... well, they will sometimes.... they will teach the alphabet. But then they do not teach the alphabet sounds. They want to teach the sound the letters stand for and they teach the child a sight vocabulary. Well, a sight vocabulary by definition is teaching children to look at each English word as if it were a Chinese ideograph, a little picture, you see. So the child gets the impression that written language is a series of little pictures. In other words, that the letters have no meaning at all. And so this idea is being put in his head to begin with. Then, of course, he has to look at each word and try to see something in the word that will convey its meaning to him. And therefore he will look at the word from left to right, right to left, center outward. Usually the teacher will start by teaching a configuration clue. She will put a little thing around the word, say, for example, the word horse. She will put a frame around the word horse and she will tell the child, “See the little horse?”
No you and I know that H O R S E doesn't look like a horse.
[Scott] It doesn’t even sound like one.
[Blumenfeld] So how... so how does a child see a horse in that frame? Do you know how? Anyway he can, you see. It could be the O. It could be the R. It could be the H. Who knows?
Well, then, they realized that that is not quite enough. So they also provide picture clues. That is why these books have lavish color pictures. They have lots of pictures of horses so the child will conclude that the word must be horse, you know.
Now, you can’t always have pictures of horses every time you... you use the word horse. They have got other things to illustrate. So they provide what they call context clues. They will give a child a sentence such as, “The man put the saddle on the...” And the child will figure, well, it could be a donkey, it could be a camel, but it is probably horse, you see.
[Scott] So you are going back to the Egyptian...
[Blumenfeld] Yes. Chinese. Chinese ideographs. Now they realize now to reduce the ridiculousness of the guessing, because kids can make some tremendous... terrific crazy guesses, they also teach what they call phonetic clues. Now here is where things get sticky, because if you go to any primary school in America and ask them... ask the teachers: Do you teach phonics? They will all say yes. But they are not teaching intensive systematic phonics. They are not teaching the letters before they read the words. What they are doing is simply telling the child that if you see the letter H, you know, at the beginning of the word, you know it couldn’t possibly be banana or baloney, but it could be house, hotel, hobble, hearse or horse. So that reduces the... the parameters of the ... of the guessing.
Now the leading professor of reading in the United States Dr. Kenneth Goodman calls reading a psycho linguistic guessing game. And he told a reporter from the New York Times that if the child sees the word horse and says pony, that is correct.
[Scott] That is correct.
[Rushdoony] And...
[Blumenfeld] If the child sees the word father and says dad that is correct...
[Scott] And if he calls him Smith it would be correct.
[Blumenfeld] But you can see that that produces inaccurate, highly incompetent readers. You had better not put that person in charge of a contract.
[Scott] Well, that switches them into graphics, doesn’t it?
[Blumenfeld] Yes, of course. And John Dewey said that he chief method of learning is through the image, not through the word.
[Scott] Graphics again.
[Blumenfeld] So there you are. You are... you... you destroyed this child’s ability to learn to read because once you have ... you have put... made him a guesser, a word guesser and for the next two years he is reading and guessing as he goes along and reading words backwards or upside down and reversing letters. Do you know how difficult it is to undo that damage? Do you know how difficult? I have tried trained young people. It takes years, years because most of them are not even aware of the errors they make. You know how the typical look say reader reads? He will read along rather quickly. He will leave out a word that is there. He will put in a word that isn’t there. He will truncate words. He sees a word like telephone and he says phone. The word says newspaper, he says paper. He sees a multisyllabic word the doesn’t... can’t figure out, he will just skip it. He will guess at words that he has never seen before. He makes all sorts of errors that he is not aware of and then he doesn’t understand what he has read.
Now is there any wonder that he has poor comprehension, you see? And finds that the written word has nothing of interest for him? So why should he learn to read?
And... and I will tell you. This method of teaching creates such psychic pain that I was the... a man told me this was a millionaire, a highly successful restaurateur in Boston who I was tutoring who told me that he would rather be beaten than have to read, that it was that psychically painful. And that struck home to me. I realized them what damage this method does to people. And yet he was a very successful man. It didn’t ... it didn't interfere with his self esteem. His wife did the reading for him, or a good secretary or a word processor. But he knew that he couldn’t read.
[Rushdoony] Yes. Some years ago I, not too many years ago, I think in the 70s, the latter part, perhaps, I gave a series of lectures at the request of the army, the country’s largest army base in North... in South Carolina. And I learned that one of the greatest expenses that the army incurs is from equipment that is destroyed by soldiers who cannot read directions. Now they may at the Pentagon sometimes pay 1000 dollars for a hammer or some such foolish thing, all of which is wrong, but the big waste that comes in from seriously damaged equipment, multi million dollar equipment by men who cannot read properly is never reported to us.
Now the army does educate when it finds out a student or a recruit cannot read. All the recruits and tries to teach those who fail to pass any minimal standard how to read. But even then so many get by and it is a constant cause of serious trouble because today the equipment the army has in the hands of all men is high priced equipment, very costly and easily destroyed by a person who cannot read directions or follow directions when given to him.
[Scott] Yes. Well, I know a great many men who do not read and outside of business. They read memorandums, they read reports. They are very poor at letters. It was our fathers’ generation that lived by letters. Telephone calls and letters. They would make a deal over the phone and they would write letter and it would be very specific and loaded with detail. But I don’t get any letters anymore. I get telephone calls.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] I don’t know hardly anyone in business who sends a letter excepting, of course, at the culmination where you get a contract that a lawyer has drawn up which neither of the principles can understand.
[Blumenfeld] Yes.
[Scott] But man of the men that I know consider reading off the job a waste of time.
[Blumenfeld] Yes. They don’t enjoy it, you see. A ... a look say reader does not enjoy reading because it is much too difficult for him. So they don't read for pleasure. If you want to ... it is so easy to spot a look say reader by just knowing if they don’t read for pleasure then they... they have been taught by look say.
I recently got a letter from a... from a very well appointed individual in England, the owner of his own company who had read something that I had written on dyslexia, on how it is... how it is induced by... by miseducation. And he counted himself as one of the victims and he explained that all of the symptoms that he exhibited were exactly the symptoms that I had written about in my article. And he asked if there was a cure, you see. So I decided to devote my next newsletter to answering his letter and sharing how he could cure his own dyslexia. The most important... there were two important elements. One, he had to be motivated. He had to want to do something about it, you see, because that is more important than anything and it could be a terribly traumatic business of learning how to read all over again, starting from grade one if it is a matter of self esteem. The second point I made that he had to have patience, because he had to become aware of all of the errors he made.
See, the problem with most of these readers is that they not... they are not aware of the errors they make and the only way that they can become aware of them is to first learn the phonetics of the language. He has to become a phonetic reader. So I told him he had to go through the entire alpha phonics system, learn the letters, all of their sounds and then apply his new phonetic knowledge to his reading. And he had to be able to stop and whenever he felt that he did not understand what he was reading, to realize that he was making an error in reading and to go back and reread it and to do it slowly enough, word for word so that he would not make the same error twice. I have noticed that a lot of these look say youngsters do the same. They will make the same error twice. You ask them to reread it. They leave out the same word or they put in the word that isn’t there.
So these are ingrained habits that have to be undone and that is why it is so important in the primary grade, in the primary grades, those first two grades, to make sure that everything you teach the child is correct and things that they will use for the rest of their lives. And... and that is... and when you are dealing with a mind that is five and six years old and developing mentality and those developing skills, you have got to make sure you do it right the first time.
[Scott] Well, you know, reading is the only way that you can enlarge your personal information beyond experience. Everyone’s experience is necessarily limited.
[Blumenfeld] Yes.
[Scott] So if all you know is what you have experienced...
[Blumenfeld] Right.
[Scott] You don’t know very much.
[Rushdoony] One of the marks of a barbarian—and there are a number—is someone who has no sense of history. The world began with him.
[Scott] Yes.
[Rushdoony] And now with the growing functional illiteracy, plus the ... the poor teaching and lack of knowledge of history. In fact, you have social studies instead of history. Most of our population and most of the population of the western world is made up of barbarians, people who have no sense of the past, no awareness of the world before their lifetime. And this is a very, very dangerous fact, because especially with all the modern things like television, people can have an idealized version of how things should be. They have no sense of history, of struggle, of growth, of the difficulty of attaining things.
[Blumenfeld] Yes.
[Rushdoony] And you create a revolutionary population, a people who believe that if you destroy things that good automatically should come to the fore.
[Blumenfeld] But isn’t this what happened in Rome? The barbarians destroyed Rome. And we are creating our own barbarians. We don’t have to import them.
[Scott] Well, that is what Ortega y Gassett said. He said the ... the ancients had to worry about the barbarian outside the gates. We have developed our own, what he called, vertical barbarians who rise up in our midst. Of course, what you are saying about the barbarians, Rush, and ... and Sam, is really more horrendous than it sounds as long as you confine it to students and children it seems remote. But the fact is we are talking about some of the people who run the country.
[Blumenfeld] Yes.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] We are talking about professionals who studied history and who turn up exquisite little monographs and who confine themselves to one ten year period and or men with a doctor’s degree who will spend their entire life on the career of one individual. He is an expert in Henry James.
[Blumenfeld] Yes.
[Scott] And an expert in somebody else. So they spend their whole lives digging in the grave of one individual from the past.
Now these people are not called in on policy discussions because that... those are held by practical businessmen and practical politicians. The awful point here is that these are ignorant men.
[multiple voices]
[Scott] Outside... outside their specialty.
[Blumenfeld] Yes. Incidentally, some of... you know, of the investment bankers go to psychics and astrologers for their information. And I believe that one of the reasons why the American economy is in the state of... that it is, is so few of them known economics.
[Scott] Well, they don’t...
[Blumenfeld] So few bankers. I’ll bet they are... there aren’t maybe one banker out of 100 who has ever heard of Ludwig Von Mieses and who knows something about free market economics.
[Rushdoony] Well, you are being optimistic if you think one out of 100 has heard of Ludwig Von Mieses. Most bankers are really bookkeepers. I spoke about 1970 to an organization of businessmen in one area of Los Angeles and there were, perhaps, six to 10 bankers in the audience. And I mentioned the... the disappearance of silver from our coinage and they were startled, these bankers. They pulled the change out of their pocket and said, “What is this?” And I said, “Look at it on the sides. You will see its copper nature.”
And what some started to laugh at them one of them said, “We sit in the office. We don’t deal with the money and we are basically bookkeepers.”
Now that is the kind of thing that happens and is, in fact, common place.
[Scott] Well, we have excellent skills. But they are limited.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] And Hannah Arendt was the one who said the United States has many intelligent people, but it lacks conceptual thinkers.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] A very good point. We have... we have tactics, but no strategy. We are in the Middle East wondering what our strategy is.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Blumenfeld] Well, I think we do have some conceptual thinkers, but they are not in positions of... of authority or power.
[Rushdoony] They are sitting around this table.
[Blumenfeld] Yes. That is right. {?} You get the idea. Exactly.
[Scott] Well, of course, there is also the idea that education ennobles the character and that education is confined to schools.
[Blumenfeld] Yes.
[Scott] And that if you are educated you have a piece of paper that somebody has written on it to prove ...
[Blumenfeld] Yes, yes, that is your credential.
[Scott] That is right.
[Blumenfeld] And that is what we have been doing is ... as ... as simply providing credentials.
[Scott] And we will ... And it has been an inflation in credentials.
[Blumenfeld] Yes.
[Scott] So therefore they are individually no longer accepted at face value.
[Blumenfeld] Yes, and, of course, you can get them by mail order, you know... You can...
[Scott] I know. I got one. I have a doctorate in humane letters, very elaborate which cost me 20 dollars. I sent away for it as a joke.
[Rushdoony] Sam, why don’t you define dyslexia for us.
[Blumenfeld] Well, dyslexia is a sort of fancy word for a reading problem. I am sure, Rush, you know Greek. That comes from the Greek.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Blumenfeld] ... the dys means not.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Blumenfeld] ...or no. And lexia means word. So that is ... it is just a very nice word of saying the guy can’t read when they say he is dyslexic.
[Rushdoony] It is a scientific excuse...
[Blumenfeld] Right.
[Rushdoony] ...for being unable to read.
[Blumenfeld] Right. Now ... now usually what happens if you are of the lower class and if you can’t read, if you are functional illiterate, they believe you are stupid or if you are in the upper class or ... or children of a professional family then you have dyslexia, you see. And that is a very fancy kind of way of... of...
[Scott] Well, every... every disability has become an illness.
[Blumenfeld] Yeah.
[Scott] Alcoholism is an illness. Gluttony is an illness. The seven deadly sins are all illnesses.
[Blumenfeld] Yes. But the point I want to make is that it is ...
[multiple voices]
[Blumenfeld] The point I want to make is that it is school induced. There is very little natural dys... dyslexia. I mean a person with half his brain blown out in a war might be dyslexic because of that. But the so-called dyslexics today are all made in the schools. And that goes not only for people in the lower classes, but, you know, the Rockefeller boys, three of the Rockefeller, of Johnny Rockefeller’s sons became dyslexic because they all went to the Lincoln school...
[Scott] They went to a very progressive school, didn’t they?
[Blumenfeld] The most progressive school.
[Scott] Yes.
[Blumenfeld] All the experiments were taking place, the Lincoln school at Columbia University teachers college. John D. Rockefeller, junior gave them four million dollars and naturally wanted to take advantage of the school. He put four of his sons in that school. Three of them came out dyslexic. Nelson was... couldn’t read at all. He had real problems even though he went through Dartmouth University.
[Scott] Yes.
[Blumenfeld] Winthrop was so bad he had to drop out of Yale University. Of course, he went on to become governor of Arkansas which only proves that even a dyslexic can become governor.
[Scott] Well, if you buy it.
[Blumenfeld] Yes.
[Rushdoony] And is reputed to have one of the biggest collections of pornography in the United States.
[Blumenfeld] Really?
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Blumenfeld] And, of course, and Lawrence Rockefeller also was dyslexic and he bemoans the fact that reading is very, very difficult for him. Now David went to the same school, but I don’t know why he is not among the dyslexics unless he was taught privately. He might have been taught to read privately, because the was the youngest and perhaps they began to catch on that there was something wrong with the Lincoln school.
[Scott] Nelson had a low level accent.
[Blumenfeld] Yes.
[Scott] And low level behavior.
[Blumenfeld] Yes. As we know from his marital life and his...
[Rushdoony] Well...
[Blumenfeld] ...and his extra, extra marital life.
[Rushdoony] The most recent dyslexic of prominence is Neil Bush, the president’s son. Here is someone who is only a functional... is a functional illiterate who is made the chairman of a bank and whose services are so valuable that people hand him loans of 100,000 or a million dollars, depending on the case, for his invaluable services.
[Blumenfeld] I don't think he was chairman...
[Rushdoony] A non...
[Blumenfeld] I think he was just a director.
[Rushdoony] I mean a director, a member of the board of...
[Blumenfeld] Yeah...
[Rushdoony] ... of directors. So we are increasingly in one sphere after another being ruled by functional illiterates. It is no wonder the country is in trouble.
[Blumenfeld] Yeah. These are the people who don’t read. In other words, books are...
[Scott] Well, they don’t read and I know that for a fact. I have never seen a country club library. And I have been in lots of country clubs.
[Rushdoony] I...
[Scott] I have yet to see a country club library.
[Blumenfeld] Yes. You will find that young people today go to the homes of young people, college graduates, very few books.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Yes.
[Blumenfeld] Our generation collected libraries.
[Scott] Oh, yes.
[Blumenfeld] You know with... every one had a library.
[Scott] Oh, you had to have.
[Blumenfeld] Today there is... they have got a very small little shelf with a couple of books that they brought out from the university and plus a couple of other books, but they are not book readers. And, as you know, newspaper readership has declined in this country.
[Scott] Yes and the...
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] And the... and the caliber of the reportage...
[Blumenfeld] Yeah. I was told by a student of journalism that they are told or... or trained to write at a sixth grade level.
[Scott] Sixth grade.
[Blumenfeld] That... that your editor will exclude any words that are...
[Scott] ...that he doesn’t know.
[Blumenfeld] Yeah.
[Scott] On the assumption that nobody else would know it.
[Blumenfeld] Right. Actually there are very few publications in America that are highly literate. I think, for example, The New Republic still is highly literate. Commentary is highly literate. The New Yorker. But these are very small publications compared to the... {?} like Time and Newsweek and do you know...
[Scott] And yet they are very significant. They... they... the Spectator from London which you now like to read is a good book, has a circulation of 44,000. And London, England has what, 60,000 people, 60 million people. But that is a very significant 44,000 who read it and they direct the others. The same thing is true of Commentary.
[Blumenfeld] Yes.
[Scott] It only has about 45,000 circulation.
[Blumenfeld] Oh, yeah, yeah.
[Scott] But it... a fellow who said to me one day, “Who reads?”
I said, “People who give orders to people like you.”
And it is true.
[Blumenfeld] I don’t know. I don't know that an awful lot of functional illiterates...
[off mic voice]
[Scott] ...in high places.
[Blumenfeld] In high places. They are even teachers.
[Scott] It become difficult.
[Blumenfeld] There was the case of the teacher in Oceanside, California, John Corcoran who spent 18 years teaching in high school and he was functionally illiterate and he was able to hide it. No one knew except his wife. Even his children did not know that he couldn’t read and he as able to get a master’s degree.
[Scott] I don’t see how a person of normal intelligence looking at all the signs and the graphics that we have today could keep from teaching himself how to read.
[Blumenfeld] Well, you would be surprised how difficult it is when you have been ... you know, when you have this idea that words are pictures.
[Scott] So you feel that it was putting them in the wrong path in the first place.
[Blumenfeld] Yes. You see... and, you know, people assume that everybody knows what the alphabet is.
[Scott] Yes.
[Blumenfeld] That it is common knowledge that the alphabet... that the letters stand for sounds. That... that is a false assumption.
[Rushdoony] Have you been in a fast food store like McDonalds of late?
[Scott] No. I, as, you know, take
[multiple voices]
[Rushdoony] That was a rhetorical question.
[Scott] I am foreign to places like that.
[Rushdoony] Well, I have been once or twice on a speaking tour sometimes that is the risk you are taking.
[Blumenfeld] Yes.
[Rushdoony] Look at the cash register.
[Scott] He has to take care of it for the clerk, don’t they?
[Rushdoony] Yes, the cash register...
[Scott] ... {?} for thinking.
[Rushdoony] ...list the various types of hamburgers, everything.
[Scott] Right.
[Rushdoony] And you push the button for a shake, this type of hamburger, this type of so and so...
[Blumenfeld] Fries.
[Rushdoony] From pictures.
[Scott] From pictures.
[Rushdoony] Yes there are pictures.
[Scott] Oh, I didn’t know that.
[Rushdoony] Yes. The button will have a picture of these things.
[Scott] Holy smokes.
[Rushdoony] So they are pushing these buttons of pictures and then tell you the total.’
[Scott] They can’t... they can’t make change. They... they will give you the bill first and then dump the change on top of the bill which is... gives you awkward handling right there.
[Blumenfeld] Yes. Yeah.
[Scott] And they will tell you how much your change is. They won’t tell you how much you have paid.
[Blumenfeld] But... but, Rush, you mentioned that is how ... how important it is to develop these good habits, teaching habits. So in reading we know that they can destroy a child’s ability to learn in six months time. Writing they do the same thing by teaching them printing, which, of course, they spend two years holding the pen straight up and down and writing straight up and down with lots of pressure. And then they are told to switch to cursive which is a totally different more relaxed way of writing. And most children never make the transition very well and so they develop awful handwritings in America, whereas lots of people just print. They don’t even bother to learn to write.
Then when it comes to arithmetic they don’t even know how to teach the basic functions in arithmetic. All they do is have the kids keep counting in ones.
[Scott] What do you mean in ones?
[Blumenfeld] Well, all they do is, you know, count a little objects, you know, concretes. They don't drill them in the facts, you know, in the arithmetic facts, the multiplication facts, the addition facts, because that is known as rote memory.
[Scott] They don't teach them multiplication anymore?
[Blumenfeld] No, no. They give them calculators. They give them little, you see, because rote is a no no in American schools. You see rote learning is for the Japanese, but not for us, you see. And the progressive educators simply will not tolerate rote.
[Scott] It doesn’t believe in memory.
[Blumenfeld] Well, that is it.
[Scott] You have to make up the world all new every day.
[Blumenfeld] All new every day. But arithmetic is a memory system.
[Scott] Of course.
[Blumenfeld] For ... for proficient use it requires total memorization.
[Scott] Absolutely. You memorize the multiplication tables and you go from there.
[Blumenfeld] Right. Yes.
[Rushdoony] Are more students on the university level have to sit down and memorize the alphabet because otherwise they cannot use the card catalog.
[Scott] Yes, of course.
[Blumenfeld] So the... the... the damage that is done in the primary schools of America is... is just incalculable and ... and what the tragedy is that here we are approaching September and another four million youngsters are entering that system.
[Scott] Now...
[Blumenfeld] And in one year’s time one third of those youngsters will be permanently damaged.
[Scott] If you had... if you became dictator of the United States or if you had a magic wand as the psychologists say, what would you do with this system today?
[Blumenfeld] I would send all the kids to the Chalcedon school.
[Scott] Well, beyond that.
[Blumenfeld] They wouldn’t be able to fit in there. Well, what I would do is simply mandate just as... do you know what happened in the Soviet Union when {?} took over Lenin’s wife...’
[Scott] Yes.
[Blumenfeld] ...took over education after the Russian Revolution.
[Scott] Right.
[Blumenfeld] She was so impressed by John Dewey’s ideas that they adopted progressive education in the Soviet Union, look say method of teaching reading, all of those wonderful activities that were going on in these little progressive schools.
[Scott] Yeah, reading is fun.
[Blumenfeld] That is right. Reading is fun. Learning is fun. Well, by 1932 the situation was so disastrous that the Communist party handed down an edict threw out progressive education and reinstalled the traditional methods of teaching and ... and the subject matter and the curriculum was put back into its traditional subject matter.
Now that was done in 1932 by edict, because the Communists wanted to build a great gigantic military machine that required engineers and scientists and they didn’t want namby pamby...
[Scott] All right.
[Blumenfeld] ... {?} progressive little kids ...
[Scott] The needs of the nation finally got back in...
[Blumenfeld] All right. Well, in a dictatorship they could do that.
[Scott] Yes.
[Blumenfeld] You see. So over night they went back it intensive systematic phonics. Everybody learned to read who went to school in the Soviet Union and, of course, they have turned out engineers and scientists by the ... by the thousands.
Now, of course, they were restricted in what they could read up to a point.
[multiple voices]
[Scott] ...have an educated elite.
[Blumenfeld] But you can’t hermetically seal a country as large as the Soviet Union. So because these people could read they eventually overturned the slave system.
[Scott] All right...
[Blumenfeld] But... but in our country...
[Scott] We haven’t overturned it.
[Blumenfeld] We are not overturning. As a matter of fact, the greatest form of censorship is illiteracy, isn’t it?
[Scott] Yes.
[Blumenfeld] Because our people can’t read. They can’t read the constitution. They can’t read the Declaration of Independence. How are they going to defend American freedom?
[Scott] Well, this is how the newspapers are censoring. They are censoring by omission. They report... what they report is factual, but what they don’t report is significant.
[Blumenfeld] Yes.
[Scott] And we are exposed to this from one end of the country to the other. By the way, going back to the Soviet thing. Gotay’s book on the revolution, his diary on the revolutionary period, the only diary in existence. They got every other one. He was a professor at the University of Moscow and he taught history. And history was eliminated as a subject by the Bolsheviks when they took over. Now I believe they restored it since.
[Blumenfeld] Yes.
[Scott] But for a good long period history was a forbidden subject. It was considered unnecessary and thy used social sciences instead.
[Blumenfeld] Your know, the interesting thing about the Soviet Union, about the Communists they believe in absolutes. And if you read their encyclopedia they criticize John Dewey for being a pragmatist and for not believing in absolutes.
[multiple voices]
[Scott] ...history, end quote.
[Blumenfeld] Because they believe that, you know, yeah, Communism was.... Marxism was...
[multiple voices]
But yet they believed in absolutes and so that... and... and were very critical of Dewey, of John Dewey.
Rush, do you have anything to add to this?
[Rushdoony] No, but I think you should write an article on a point you just made which is one of the most important on the subject that I have heard. And if you would, when you go home and send it to us.
[Blumenfeld] All right.
[Rushdoony] ...fort the report. You said, and I quote, “The greatest censorship is illiteracy.”
[Blumenfeld] Sure.
[Rushdoony] And I think we need to say that the great enemies of free speech are the public schools. They are the great censors, because they are with their functional illiterates exercising the greatest censorship that we have had in our history.
[multiple voices]
[Scott] Well, look at the school administrators that wouldn’t allow a teacher to have a Bible in his office.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Blumenfeld] On his desk.
[Scott] ...on his desk. Now you talk about censorship.
[Rushdoony] Yes. Include that on...
[Scott] They are censoring Christianity out of education.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Blumenfeld] Yes. And... and because of this the interesting thing is in eastern Europe is very prepared, is well prepared to take advantage of their freedom because they are very literate. They all learn to read in Hungary, in... in.... East Germany, in the Soviet Union itself. They can read.
Take, for example, in Romania where the reformers, the reformists, Christian reformists are... have been ... were so instrumental in carrying out that revolution even though it has been stolen from them by {?}. Yet there is an opportunity where a vast population can be instructed in a... reformed Christianity simply because they can read whereby our people who can’t read they are going to get {?} on television.
[Scott] Well, of course. Calvinism restored liberty to Europe. And nobody, hardly anybody seems to know that outside of the reformed community.
[Blumenfeld] Well, that is... that is true. As a matter of fact, you know, that the... that it was Calvinism which required biblical literacy.
[Scott] Yes.
[Blumenfeld] ...which then also required total literacy.
[Scott] Well, they brought up the rights of man.
[Blumenfeld] Well, you know, it is interesting. When I was at the library, the Coverly Library in ... at Stanford University I went... went through some of the books and I came across DuPont DeNumours book.
[Rushdoony] Ah yes.
[Blumenfeld] Written in 1812.
[Rushdoony] Very interesting.
[Blumenfeld] On national education in the United States. And he said in that book he said, “The United States are more advanced than 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, it is possible to send them to the school master, a condition which does not prevail in Europe. Most young Americans, therefore, can read, write and cipher. Not more than four in 1000 are unable to write legibly even neatly.” Four in a thousand back in 1812. And he said, “England, Holland, the Protestant cantons of Switzerland more nearly approach the standard of the United States 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 mother 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.”
That was education in 1812 and the family was responsible for it. When we had decentralized government, when we didn’t have a central education agency or bureaucracy telling people what to learn. You see, it was done so beautifully then. Now we come down to the present and in 1989 Education Canada had an article entitled “Johnny Came Back to School, but Still Can’t Read.” And that article says, “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.”
[multiple voices]
Look at the contrast. Look at the contrast.
[Scott] We are in the third world condition culturally speaking.
[Blumenfeld] Well, absolutely. We are producing barbarians.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Blumenfeld] And where it is going to lead to, well, is anyone’s guess. What is going to happen is that the Christians who are learning to read and are teaching their families, they are going to survive. They are going to come out ahead, I believe.
[Scott] Well, it is a new reformation. It is the only thing... with the only possible survival because the only people in the country who have a larger factor in their lives are the Christians.
[Blumenfeld] Yes.
[Scott] ...in that sense. You know, you never hear even the word American anymore. We ... I have some fellow told me some years back at least 40 years ago, he said, “I am Irish.”
Oh, I said, “When did you get here?”
Oh, he said, “I have never been there.”
I said, “Then what do you mean you are Irish? You are born and raised in this country.” I said, “Have you made a lot of trips there?”
He said, “No, I have never been there.”
I said, “Well, why do you call yourself Irish?”
Well, he said, “I read all the literature.”
I said, “That is not the same.”
[Blumenfeld] Well, that is what is known as multi culturalism, you see.
[Scott] Yes.
[Blumenfeld] Now in America the schools are playing down such a thing as an American model. You are a hyphenated person, you see.
[Scott] Yes, yes.
[Blumenfeld] You are an ethnic. You belong to an ethnic group.
[Scott] Yes.
[Blumenfeld] And what they are doing is fractioning America.
[Scott] Of course.
[Blumenfeld] Or fracturing it. They are doing both.
[Scott] Ethnic enclaves.
[Blumenfeld] Yes.
[Rushdoony] Well, as against what you told the Irishman, let me quote you what one Scott who was born in Canada told me. He said everyone tells me because I am born in Canada I am Canadian, But he said if I were born in a garage would that make me a car? He said, “I am a Scott.”
[Scott] No he isn’t. He is a Canadian. He is a Canadian. He is just dreaming that he is a Scott.
[Blumenfeld] Well, tell it to the {?}. They know who they are...
[Scott] They are French. They are French Canadians.
[Blumenfeld] Yes, yes. But that is what is happening in our country is this break up, that there was no longer an American model. And part of it also has to do with the decline of the white Anglo Saxon Protestant.
[Scott] Well...
[Blumenfeld] They have become the new minority and the new subject... you can make all sorts of jokes.
[Scott] I know...
[Blumenfeld] ...about the WASP that you can’t make about any other group.
[Scott] That is right....
[Blumenfeld] ... in the United States.
[Scott] They... they... they are the target.
[Blumenfeld] Yes.
[Scott] And Paul Gottfried said to me, he was very surprised at how easily the WASP was pushed off the stage. And I didn’t think of it at the moment, but I thought of it later. He was pushed off the stage because he didn’t know there was a war on.
[Blumenfeld] That is it.
[Scott] He really took it for granted that everybody that came here would join the American ethos. He was really not prepared for a network opposition.
[Blumenfeld] Well, you know, that the... the WASP under... undermined himself. They were in mainly behind this genetic movement, the eugenics movement.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Blumenfeld] And they thought hat they could preserve American through eugenics. And they were the ones who were going to keep out all of the immigrants, the undesirables.
[Scott] But they {?}
[Blumenfeld] No. They didn’t. And that... and, of course they are the... the interesting thing about American religious life, for example, is that had it remained completely WASP this nation would be Unitarian, totally Unitarian.
[multiple voices]
[Scott] Well, the...
[Blumenfeld] There was a constant influx of immigrants coming into this country with orthodox religion that kept providing numbers...
[Rushdoony] Or who were converted to it.
[Blumenfeld] {?}
[Rushdoony] The interesting thing is the greater majority of Irish in the United States are Presbyterian.
[Scott] Well, they came from Ulster originally.
[Rushdoony] No.
[Scott] No?
[Rushdoony] They came over and the immigrant societies that met them at the docks helped them with housing, helped them with jobs, were various Presbyterian missionary organizations. And they converted them. And one Catholic sociologist who called attention to that fact some years ago said the Catholics were not interested in their own kind.
[Scott] Not in that sense.
[Rushdoony] No.
[Scott] Well, I will have to come to the defense of the WASP, because by and large they did set up this country.
[Blumenfeld] Oh, yes.
[Scott] They did ...
[Blumenfeld] Oh, yes.
[Scott] ... open the gates of this country.
[Blumenfeld] To my mind they are the model. George Washington...
[multiple voices]
[Scott] .... no other group of people open their gates and none has since.
[multiple voices]
[Rushdoony] Once they lost their faith, they no longer were able to turn the immigrants into WASPS.
[Scott] Well, that is true. That is true.
[Rushdoony] And {?}
[Scott] They should get credit. They shouldn’t get what they are getting.
[multiple voices]
[Scott] They shouldn’t get what they are getting.
[Rushdoony] No.
[Scott] The descendants of people who came here as refugees have no right to denigrate those who let them in.
[multiple voices]
[Rushdoony] The... I read an analysis once of a WASP club that was savagely denounced a few years ago as a highly restrictive group. And the ironic fact was that some of the leading members were of such backgrounds as Greek and Jewish. The simple fact was that they had succeeded. They now had become thoroughly Americanized. And the point made was that the term WASP had, over the generations absorbed every immigrant. Italians were now WASPS when they were successful and thoroughly Americanized.
[Scott] Oh, sure, sure.
[Rushdoony] Greeks, Jews, Armenians. All of them. So the term, this writer said, was just the term of abuse.
[Scott] It has become that. Norbert Winer actually, not Winer, but I have forgotten now the... the fellow who wrote the book that coined the acronym WASP. The Lonely Crowd, Riceman.
[Rushdoony] Riceman, yes.
[multiple voices]
[Scott] Yeah, David Reissman. It has become a term of abuse and this, of course...
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] ...is part of the alienation of people from one another.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] You were talking about before... instead of Americans.
[Blumenfeld] That is right. Now when I went to school as... as a youngster from an immigrant family and I saw that picture of George Washington, I aspired, you know, to...
[Scott] I consider the core population, everybody who accepts the tradition and history of the country.
[Blumenfeld] Yes and there is nothing more precious to me than ... than the history of this country, the revolutionary war, the founding fathers. I mean, that is the glory of America And for the American education system to deny that, I mean, Patrick Henry isn’t even taught anymore in American schools.
[Scott] Well, they... the... I understand school that administrators will not apply the same rules to all the students. Some rules apply and some rules don’t apply to everybody.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] I mean, that is the ... that is the beginning of all kinds of {?}
[Blumenfeld] Yes.
[Rushdoony] Well, our time is about up. It has been a wonderful week, Sam. You have got to come back again soon.
[Blumenfeld] Thank you very much, Rush.
[Rushdoony] Thank you all for listening.
[Voice] Authorized by the Chalcedon Foundation. Archived by the Mount Olive Tape Library. Digitized by ChristRules.com.