From the Easy Chair

Deconstruction 2

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 120-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161CK162

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161CK162, Deconstruction 2, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 272, August the seventh, 1992.

We have with us one of our staff members, Sam Blumenfeld, who is outstanding in the field of home schooling and education generally; also Douglas Murray, Mark Rushdoony, Karen Grassbook and Darlene Rushdoony.

Now I think it is apparent from our previous hour of discussion that modern education being deconstructionist, has as its goal the destruction of everything that constitutes Christian civilization, its total destruction, its total elimination. I believe, moreover, as Christians we can say that Deconstruction is a consistent application of the tempter’s program to Adam and Eve, that if they followed him, he promised ye shall be as God, every man his own God knowing, determining for yourself what is good and evil. So what Deconstruction says is that every man creates his own reality, his own law, his own values. It is the logical conclusion of the tempter’s program. That is why it is so deadly. That is why it is such a monstrous evil that church people send their children to state schools to be subjected to that principle which is the essence of original sin.

So with that in mind now, Douglas, did you have some more questions that you wanted to ask?

[ Murray ] Well, the ... I was just wondering what the... Sam, what posture do you think that the ... the Christian school movement should take in regards to federal money and whether or not they should go promotional or stay low key.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes. But before I answer that, let me simply say that the antidote to Deconstruction is Reconstruction, Christian reconstruction.

Well now about the Christian schools. Should they take money from the federal government? Obviously not. The voucher program, the voucher initiative—as a matter of fact there is one in California right now—is a Trojan horse. It is a trap for the private schools or the Christian schools because once you accept government money you are going to have to accept government regulation. And obviously what will happen is that the government will simply take over the private schools and in a very short period of time they will become just as bad as the public schools because, first of all, you are not going to get a voucher program without the consent of the establishment, without the consent of the NEA, without their input in other words, because they will never permit it. They will fight it tooth and nail. But if they decide to, you know, rather than to fight it to join it, then, of course, what they will do is take it over because they have got the power to do that in the state legislatures of America. The result will be the eventual destruction of private... of private education, of educational freedom. So I have been trying to awaken Christians to this danger. And, unfortunately, the major Christian leadership is gung ho of these voucher systems. I mean, you just name the particular Christian leader on a... who has a wide television audience or ... or who has a ... .a great direct mail operation and you will see they are all for ... for vouchers.

[ Rushdoony ] The... we often hear that there is a fine solution to the church state problem in Europe in that the churches are commonly established churches and they receive state funds so that everybody’s tax money goes up to a point, in some countries a full tithe to the church. But there is a trap there. Once you are getting that money you are not going to raise any objections to what the state does. So what the state does in one country, for example, I know and there are forms of this elsewhere. You are given a tax break for what is taken from you to go to he church. However, if you are a member of the church you lose the tax break or most of it. So if you are a practicing Lutheran or a practicing Catholic or a practicing whatever, you are going to pay a price which means a lot of the people won’t function as members and they drop out.

In another European country since everyone has to pay through their taxes for the support of the church, everyone has a vote in calling the priest or pastor or naming any church board that controls the building or the premises. In one country in particular most of the officials elected to govern the local church are Marxists. So the church is in the hand of the Marxists.

I have been told that in some communities no one goes to the church service except the family of the rector or the priest’s mother or someone like that, but the Marxists will use the facility all week long for their meetings. So whenever you take state funds, you are going to have to take state controls.

[ Murray ] Would you say that the ... because of the Christian Reconstruction movement that the counter revolution has begun as a result of Christian Reconstruction?

[ Blumenfeld ] Well, it has begun to some extent. In other words, particularly among the home schoolers. You have to realize that the home schooler represents a... a ... a dramatic and radical break with the statist norms, with the humanist statist norms of our society with those institutions. And it did take a considerable amount of courage to make that break, because it does entail some harassment, you know. The home schoolers are not being left entirely alone by the state. There are all sorts of squabbles going on, all sorts of parents being dragged into court. As a matter of fact, Rush and I have been witnesses at some of these trials where home schoolers have had to bear tremendous expenses, court expenses in trying to just defend their freedom to educate their children as they see fit.

I believe that the struggle should be for educational freedom, not for government money. You see that is what I am trying to teach these people is that what we should be after is getting the government out of the education system, totally out of the education system and making it a totally private system. There is no reason why the government should be in the education system at all.

[ Rushdoony ] I think this would be a good time for Mark and Darlene to talk about their trip last weekend, because they were involved in the visit to and speaking at a revolutionary movement under the influence of a strong and able Reconstructionist, Dr. Ellsworth Mc Intire in Naples, Florida. Do you want to tell us what he is doing?

[ M Rushdoony ] Well, Dr. Mc Intire has in his past he has run Christian schools and he approaches it as a business and he is a good businessman. And he saw an... an opening in the preschool movement and he ... and he saw a window of opportunity there. So he approached the preschool on a business like basis and he charges 10 dollars less a week than other preschools. He takes children as low as the age two and he teaches two to five year olds phonics and he teaches them to read. And he studied the regulations which he says are pretty common. Some of them are enacted into law and some of them aren’t, but they are fairly common from state to state. And he studies these regulations and he has designed his... his building and his facilities to make this... for instance, this student to adult ratio as ... as less of a problem as possible.

Some schools assuming they are not going to make a profit go into the preschool cooperative where parents are required to come in and, of course, as anybody who has been in a private school knows, having parents come into the classroom can be as disturbing as any child can be, because they don’t know the routine and so they don’t always fit in too well. You have to really train somebody on what they have to be. And a part time individual in the classroom doesn't always work.

But he makes a profit at this and he is creating a ... a body of children, probably five to 600 students and ... that this suburban area who can be fed into Christian schools. And he is doing a remarkable thing there and his schools are making progress. He wouldn’t need to think about vouchers. One of the problems with vouchers is so many schools are losing money, especially and even in metropolitan areas. Many of them are losing money, because they... people who are in Christian work always think, well, we are doing Christian work. And if it is Christian, therefore, that is the only important thing. And they are not trained in business. They have gone to a Bible college or something, but they know nothing about business so they don’t know how to operate from a business like perspective. So the schools always lose money.

And that is one of the reasons I think a lot of Christian educators are just tired of fighting with budgets and they are just willing to say, you know, I want the voucher. Let’s take the money. Of course, well, once you ... if you take state money you are a public school no matter what the name is on the sign out front. You are going to become a public school shortly. And that is going to force schools that don’t take the vouchers may get forced out of business unless they can turn a profit without it, but it is going to be very hard to tell parents, well, we don’t take those vouchers. They are going to take them somewhere else.

So this is an insidious way of destroying anyone who will not accept government funds in the eventual government regulations. If that this not enough to put them out of business all the news schools that pop up with guaranteed enrollment... if you offer something 2600 dollars, I believe a year is a good tuition. So they are building the tuition costs around public education costs and inflated costs and people are looking at that and says they will.... they will.... they will start their own schools. They will start schools to get the... to get the state vouchers. So it is going to completely revolutionize who goes to these schools, who wants to go to a so-called private school, people who had no interest out of their own pocket will now say yes. They will come knocking on your door.

And after a few months, once you get all these parents with vouchers, you can’t say no. You start saying no, there is too many regulations, no more vouchers. You know, you will face insolvency over night. Your whole budget will be based upon these parents who will only go there if you accept their vouchers. So it is a very insidious way. And it is all based upon the idea that Christians really don’t know how to run things on business like operations because they approach it, well, if we are Christian and we are teaching them the right things, then we are doing our job.

[ Murray ] Has Dr. Mc Intire considered franchising his operation so that he can give people a blue print so that they can operate successfully?

[ M Rushdoony ] He has. He got a little discouraged, because he found that he couldn’t find Christian Reconstructionists who were really interested. And a lot of them were interested in learning about what he was doing, he said, but they all wanted to be taught something, wanted to learn, but none of them were interested in actually getting in and investing money in it and actually doing it.

And he didn’t want... doesn’t want to just go give it to these, you know, wishy washy Christian groups, because he doesn't really want them on a profit making basis. He doesn't really approve of the way they do things or what they are teaching the children from a religious perspective. So he really as of now he is really not interested in franchising the idea.

[ Murray ] Has he given...

[ M Rushdoony ] But he is willing to encourage others to go into it.

[ Murray ] Ok, but has he given any thought to writing a book or providing some kind of a game plan...

[ M Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] ...for people who want to get into it.

[ M Rushdoony ] Yes. I asked him about that and he is talking about running an operations manual.

[ Rushdoony ] He is also planning to start a school beginning with fourth grade, because his children are ready for the fourth grade when they finish and then subsequently a high school.

[ Voice ] It was very exciting to see this preschool, two to five year olds. Everything is organized and very structured and they say when people first come they sometimes get comments that it is too structured for such young children. But the children are obviously excited about this program. It is very... it was very interesting because I work with kindergarteners. It was very interesting to see these young children.

[ M Rushdoony ] You could see 50 pre schoolers in a group with two adults in the room, one was doing the teacher, the other was going around, you know, encouraging the children. But 50... about 50 children, two adults. They were all in their chairs. They were all involved in some activity, everything structured, even the play time is organized.

[ Rushdoony ] The children ...

[ M Rushdoony ] So I think would be exactly the opposite of the Deconstruction. They were... they were being taught constantly and they were constantly being given input. This is how you do things. This is what we are doing and this is what we are going to do now. And they found that when they did have free play time, for instance, at the beginning of the day, they had toys and they came and they could play, then the children were arguing and fighting over the toys.

[ Blumenfeld ] Oh, yes.

[ M Rushdoony ] So they changed it so everything is structured and everything is organized.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes, there was a program the other night on 20/20 about the day care. I... I assume that you saw that, Douglas, in which they showed incredible confusion, kids just pummeling one another> it was just a madhouse, chaos and the idea that they really need structure in order to have a sense of order in that.

[ M Rushdoony ] Sometimes we will get... we will get parents who will call us and say, “Well, you know, I am interested in putting my child in... in your kindergarten. I think they are ready for it. They have been in preschool of two years.” I think, oh no. I think to myself that is really not much of a recommendation that they might be ready for kindergarten because our kindergartners sit still and they sit in a chair and they learn. And when you send a child to what they call school, pre school and they play and all day, that doesn’t train them for school. It doesn’t really train them for anything.

[ Rushdoony ] For me it is really exciting to think about Dr. Mc Intire’s schools when I think of the eagerness that the children display to learn, the eagerness to learn, their excitement at learning. It also delights me that these children go home and they are so used to a Christian context, even though many of them are from non Christian homes, that they insist on prayer at meal times. They learn the 10 Commandments with some interesting repercussions, because they recite them proudly and it has shamed three or four couples that ... into getting married.

So it is a remarkable work he is doing. And ...

[ M Rushdoony ] And the parents don’t come there because it is Christian. I mean they...

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ M Rushdoony ] ... they have read.... they have read their parents’ names in the newspapers as being arrested in... in the drug trade, which is very big in Florida because of the coast line and the such. But they are cheaper than the other preschools...

[ Rushdoony ] And they teach...

[ M Rushdoony ] And they teach them to read. They teach them how to read music which they find is more valuable and the parents appreciate it more than trying to teach them a second language, for instance. And so the parents come there for what they offer.

[ Rushdoony ] 7 AM to 6 PM.

[ Blumenfeld ] Sounds like a remarkable achievement.

[ Rushdoony ] It is.

[ Murray ] They save money. They don’t have to buy the kids a bullet proof vest like if they were at the public school.

[ M Rushdoony ] But when you think about it that is ... it tells you something about, you know, where the church has gone wrong, because if we are going to have Christian Reconstruction, we can’t always be welfare recipients.

[ Murray ] Yeah.

[ M Rushdoony ] Christian Reconstruction ideas and movements have to try to pay their own way.

[ Blumenfeld ] Absolutely.

[ M Rushdoony ] If they pay their own way and they are in the black, so to speak, they can expand their realm of influence. They can expand their operations. If they are always begging for money to meet expenses, which is what they are use to doing, then they often assume that is how we have to operate, then they are always just struggling along to maintain.

[ Murray ] Well, it is a good point. It is a bad object lesson to take money from the government. It teaches the kid the wrong thing.

[ M Rushdoony ] So Christians need to understand business better than they do and that is... that is a real fault.

[ Blumenfeld ] Well, aren’t there... aren’t there courses for Christians on economics, on sound business practices, that sort of thing?

[ Rushdoony ] No. No seminary has any course which even remotely touches on economics. And yet economics is really the godly use of resources.

[ Murray ] You don’t get that from an MBA at Harvard.

[ Rushdoony ] No, they don’t. No, they don’t.

[ Blumenfeld ] Well, that is unfortunate because if they knew economics and if they knew business practice, many of them could probably begin to make a profit.

[ Rushdoony ] That is why I would like to see Ian Hodge of Australia here because he has a superb economist.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yeah.

[ Rushdoony ] And he would be very, very effective in teaching the clergy common sense economics.

[ Murray ] Well, that... that was going to be my next question, Sam, was, how should parents evaluate a Christian school prior to enrolling their children? And I think Mark answer the question. Ask for a copy of their balance sheet and find out if they are making money.

[ Blumenfeld ] Well, that is ... certainly that is one thing they should do. Another thing they might do is read Rush’s book on the Christian curriculum, the curriculum in the Christian school, the philosophy of the Christian curriculum and to see what the school actually offers. You know, there are all sorts of Christian schools. Some are better than others. Some try to pander to the current trends and some have dress codes. Others let the kids dress the way their friends do. So you have got to really be careful. You have got to know what you are buying when you go to a Christian school.

[ Murray ] Is that book still in print? Is it still available?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yeah, The Philosophy of the Christian Curriculum. And it is very useful in giving you guidelines on as to what to look for in a Christian school. \

Does that answer your question?

[ Murray ] Yes. The book is available from Chalcedon, I think.

[ Rushdoony ] Ross House Books.

[ Rushdoony ] Ross House Books.

[ Blumenfeld ] Incidentally, what is the price of that book?

[ Rushdoony ] I don’t know.

[ Blumenfeld ] You are one heck of a salesman. Now it is an extremely useful book. If you are going to ... if you are going to put your child in a Christian school you want to know what they are doing whether it is right or wrong, then I would certainly first read that book and get an idea of what to look for.

[ Murray ] You know and I was just thinking we had breakfast and you were telling us about the ... the routine that Dr. Mc Intire’s school and then I ... Sam and I saw this thing on 20/20 the other night with this day school. It just looked like a zoo. It was out of control.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Murray ] It would be... it would be fun to have a video tape of what goes on at the Christian school in Florida alongside what goes on... I mean, people would get the message very quickly.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, if somebody would subsidize us, we would like to turn John Upton loose to go around the country to make half hour documentaries of a variety of things such as Dr. Mc Intire’s school, the Mexico mission and a good deal more that is being done by Reconstructionists. It would be an ideal way of getting people to see these things.

One of the things, if somebody would provide the subsidy, we would like to have John do this, to produce on documentary a month. We have over 80 television stations that are eager to show them.

[ Blumenfeld ] Well, incidentally, speaking of videos, when I was in Australia, I gave a ... a six hour seminar on how to teach reading, writing and arithmetic in Adelaide and they made a video of it and boiled it down to an... to an hour video which my publisher will make available pretty soon and so ... and it think it is a very good one. So I have seen it myself, very professionally done in Australia. And my publisher will have it ready pretty soon.

[ Rushdoony ] That was done at the...

[ M Rushdoony ] I have a question...

[ Blumenfeld ] Sure.

[ M Rushdoony ] Every... every once in a while we hear a ... a new term crops up and ... and you kind of get what is popular amongst educators by parents coming to you and... and saying what the technical term for the child’s problem is.” And a few years ago it was dyslexia as everything...

[ Blumenfeld ] Yeah.

[ M Rushdoony ] The latest thing is attention deficit disorder.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ M Rushdoony ] And... which basically means my child doesn’t pay attention in class. But could you comment on this? Because very often I have a parent who will come to me and they will say, “Well, my child is having a little bit of a problem. I am think I am going to take him down to the public school or to someone. I am going to have him tested.” And if they are going to the public school. I always tell them they are going to find something.

[ Blumenfeld ] Oh, of course.

[ M Rushdoony ] It is going to have ea fancy name to it.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ M Rushdoony ] And they are going to tell you that they have a program.

[ Murray ] You need to tell those parents that anybody who talks like that is a phony.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ M Rushdoony ] Could you comment on attention deficit disorder?

[ Blumenfeld ] Yeah.

[ M Rushdoony ] And some of these other terms that they like to throw at parents.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ M Rushdoony ] On... in a way to impress them with the fact that they have identified the problem and as though they have the solution.

[ Blumenfeld ] Well, the attention deficit disorder is... is caused by subjecting children to things that they don’t want to pay attention to. You see, the current methods of teaching reading are comparable to a non surgical pre frontal lobotomy. Now nobody... nobody is going to sit still while their brain is being destroyed and so kids act up naturally. I mean, you wouldn’t sit in school if you knew that something terrible was being done to your intelligence. And the children know this, because they are very keen. They came to school feeling very intelligent. They taught themselves to speak their own language and suddenly they are in school and find out that they are not as intelligent as they thought they were. They are dumb. They are not learning. They can’t learn to read. The know something is being done to them and so they act up and it is called attention deficit disorder.

Now however these schools deal with it? They simply drug the kids. Nowadays Ritalin is used throughout America and, you know, every school system in the United States now has kids on Ritalin. They just drug the kids, turn them into little zombies so that they will sit there in their seats and take whatever is dished out to them.

If they were teaching the children to read in the... in a sane way, you would not have attention deficit disorder.

[ Murray ] You mean, they are spiking the milk and graham crackers?

[ Blumenfeld ] No, these are pills. You know, they... Ritalin is just... just pills and they are very powerful pills, incidentally. And so they are turning these kids into drug addicts.

[ Murray ] Do parents know about this?

[ Blumenfeld ] Of course they do. They have to sign a paper to get these kids on this medication. So that is the solution of the behavioral psychologists, you know, drugs. It has always been their ... their ... their, you know their solution for behavioral problems is to use a drug, you know.

[ Rushdoony ] When I started school in the 20s the classroom of 40 and 45 was routine in the public schools. And no teacher had a problem in handling them. If you looked in at Catholic parochial schools, 60 was common place and none of the children every looked even cross eyed at anyone else for fear of the nun teacher.

Now they have them down to 18 and they cannot handle them and they have to drug them. And, of course, it is because of a failure to have a sound philosophy of education. It is a failure of parenting. It is a failure on every level. And the child is growing up to be a monster.

I think it should be obvious by this town... time how critical the crisis is that has come to focus in education. Children are the future of any society, of any civilization. This is why the children of our time are the target of Deconstruction. It is a philosophical concept. You get it only on the upper division level at universities and the graduate level, but in practice it comes down to the kindergarten. It deals with the child on every level, because it means control of the future. How else are you going to destroy Christian civilization if you do not begin with the child who is the future?

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes, yes. Let me read to you a description of how they teach reading by professor Kenneth Goodman who is the professor of language, reading and culture at Arizona University and is considered probably the most prominent advocate of whole language. He writes, quote, “Whole language classrooms liberate pupils to try new things, to invent spellings, to experiment with a new genre, to guess at meanings ... at meanings in their reading or to read and write imperfectly. Our research on reading and writing has strongly supported the importance of error in language development. Miscues represent the tension between invention and convention in reading. In whole language classrooms risk taking is not simply tolerated, it is celebrated. Learners have always been free to fail,” unquote.

So, in other words, they... they... they encourage mistakes, inaccurate reading, what they call risk taking. Risk taking is simply guessing. So they are encouraging the kids to guess, you see.

[ Murray ] My father would have described that as somebody who is trying to cover up when he doesn’t know what he is doing.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yeah, well...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] ... these people know what they are doing, you see. They know what they are doing. And they know what the results are, because he said... Kenneth Goodman writes... he was the one, incidentally, who defined reading as a psycholinguistic guessing game and he writes, quote, “In my research I found readers anticipating what was coming> they predicted grammatical patterns. They reworded the text. They inserted, omitted, substituted and changed the word sequence. Sometimes they lost themselves in the process, but often the produced sensible texts, readings that differed in remarkable ways from an expected reading,” unquote.

Now what the is describing is a disabled reader, somebody we call dyslexic. But to him that is wonderful. This is the way you are supposed to read. You are supposed to read like a dyslexic, you see?

But they don’t... they no longer call those kids dyslexics. They just call them normal readers. They are Deconstructionist readers, but that is ok. And so we are getting people who are... who really believe in this stuff and ... and preach it and, for example, one of the ... one of the whole language teachers writes, “A focus on decoding and pronunciation may lead to the idea that correct oral performance is the goal of reading rather than understanding the text and minimize the amount of risk taking attempted.”

So they discourage us, you know, decoding and sounding out because that is going to lead to correct oral performance.

[ Murray ] God forbid.

[ Blumenfeld ] That this what we are dealing with. And isn’t this insanity? Isn’t this truly insane? And yet they are getting away with it.

[ Murray ] Well, from our perspective, it is, but, you know, if you go into an insane asylum they are sane. You know...

[ Blumenfeld ] That is true. But the... you know, they are... well...

[ Murray ] They have got the inmates...

[ Blumenfeld ] Running the...

[ Murray ] Running the...

[ Blumenfeld ] Running the asylum. But to give you an idea of what they know what they are doing here is another of ... a quote from an article in a book called The Whole Language Catalog. It is a big book with articles of all sorts written by whole language teachers and two of the teachers, Bess {?} and Barbara Flores write in an article entitled, “The Politics of Whole Language,” “The politics of whole language...” it is... Do the A B C s have politics if they are the politics of the A B C s? Well, anyway they write, quote, “Whole language puts powerful learning, decision making and problem solving back into the hands of teachers and students. It creates active learners. It empowers all of us to act upon and transform our environments and society in general. We are not just asking for a change in the teaching of reading, but a radical change in the social and political structure of schooling and society,” unquote.

Well how much clearer can they be? I mean, you know, this is... they are telling you exactly what they are doing.

[ Murray ] That is their agenda.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yeah, you know. They want to change the social and political structure of schooling in society and what the kind of change they want is Socialism, because if you read the whole language catalog you will see it is totally skewed to the left, totally skewed left. And you know, but... and that is our education system. And it is now they are complete captive of the radical left in this country. So if you think that Marxism is dead, you are mistaken.

Well, they don’t call it Marxism anymore. Socialism is a lot of other things, too. It is Environmentalism. It is... as a matter of fact, the environmental movement is now the, you might say, is the new vehicle. But it is still Socialism. It is still the destruction. And particularly the destruction of Christianity.

[ Murray ] Universities were started by religious orders. Where did they go wrong? Where did they lose control?

[ Blumenfeld ] Well, you know, Harvard lost control because it went Unitarian. It rejected Calvinism and then went into Liberalism and then finally wound up Unitarian and then they kicked out the... the ... the Calvinists. So Harvard really set the... the stage of the whole Humanist revolution. As a matter of fact, if you want to trace the humanist revolution to its roots, it goes back to Unitarianism. In fact, it was Unitarian ministers who wrote the first humanist manifesto. Young humanist ministers. And so Humanism was considered a religion by them in complete harmony with Unitarian principles.

Now the second humanist manifesto is more atheistic. In other words, a ... a schism or a conflict developed among Humanists between the Atheists who want nothing to do with anything that suggests religion at all and those Humanists who believe that Humanism is a religion. Now it is firmly in they hands of the Atheists of Paul Kurtz and that whole group who consider themselves total secularists, scientifically oriented, you know, pure Humanists. And what has happened, though, of course, is that man is a spiritual being. He must have some... some relationship to some higher power and so you have got a lot of people now going in for the new age religions, you see. They don't want Christianity because that will interfere with their wonderful lifestyles, you see.

Sin is now considered an alternate lifestyle, you know. You don't call it sin anymore. You call it an alternate lifestyle. And so alternate lifestyles are ... are... are now being enjoyed with the benefit of... of ... of Paganism.

As a matter of fact, Paganism is a kind, you might say, of designer religion. You know, you can design your own religion now, just as you have designer jeans and designer cuisine. Now you have got a designer religion. It is a suit your lifestyle, you see.

[ Murray ] We have become maters at rationalization.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yeah, yeah. But that is where we are going. That this where we are headed.

[ Rushdoony ] It is designer everything now. I ... oh, it has been 25 to 30 years ago that I was at a dinner on Saint Patrick’s Day and everything including the pasta had been dyed green. It was ... so why not designer religion, designer food and everything, designer morality...

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes. Designer morality. Make it up as you go.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] That is part of the Deconstructionist movement.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] ... you see. But if they put it in terms that fit with today’s trends and today’s fashions, you see, what is fashionable in religion, you see. Shirley Mac Lain is fashionable right now. And ... and there is even designer Christianity now, you know, with... with Christian rock music and .... and all sorts of things to try to make Christianity more acceptable to the... to the culture, to the ... to the young, you see, rather than accept it as it really is.

[ Murray ] {?} is like {?}

[ Blumenfeld ] That is it. The packaging is so important these days.

[ Rushdoony ] I was a speaker at a conference once here in California at a large church which was more like a college campus it was such an immense thing. They had umpteen choirs and the full time choir director they had, the minister of music told me the only kind of music he permitted the choir to use was throw away music. That was his term. It had to be written to catch the mood of the day so that he said that if it is still good six months from now it is no good. It has to be something that is so contemporary that it will catch the attention of the young people. And I tried to reason with him, but he found me very rude because I felt that why not throw away religion in the pulpit? It is the logic of his position.

[ Murray ] Well, they call television chewing gum for the mind. And he is has got chewing gum for the soul.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yeah. Along with junk food.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] Well I had another question for Sam. You know, over the past year we have heard alarm coming from business leaders. We have heard alarm coming from political leaders about the U S competiveness looking at the global market because of functional illiteracy in the work place. Do you think that those forces will have a positive effect on ... on education somewhere down the road or are we in a gridlock situation? Because all that happens in the public school is that they draw their wagons in a circle and say, “Give me more money.” And neither side seems to be getting anywhere.

[ Blumenfeld ] Oh, you are absolutely right and... and the ... the tragedy is that the business people really ... when they want the answers to the problems of education where do they go to? You see, the typical CEO thinks that if he goes to the top in the educational establishment then we will find out what the real problem is and they will tell him and they will solve the problem. And so he goes to the head of the NEA or he goes to the heads of the educational establishment and what do they do? They give him a song and dance and tell him, well, we need more money. Just give us more money and that will... oh, we can get... we have to restructure the schools. Oh, we need smaller class size or teachers need more salary. Oh, we need a longer school day. Oh, we need a whole year school program, because the Japanese are so many days in school and we are 10 days less and that sort of thing.

So these business people are simply given the run around. You know? And what happens is that... so the business people will go along with what the educators say. They will... they will raise more money for the schools. And, of course, 10 years from now the situation will be even worse. But by then the ones who are running business then will have retired and a new group will be in and then the recycle the same excuses, the same that just say... you know, over again and you would be surprised at how you can keep fooling these people over and over and over again. And when that doesn’t work then they blame the family. They say, “Well, it is the breakdown of the family or it is the Vietnam War or it is nuclear fall out or it is...” You know and they will always find excuses. But they will never talk about how they teach reading in the school.

[ Murray ] Yeah, but in the meantime they are going bankrupt. You know, at some point they have got to say, “This is not working.” I mean, they can’t wait 10 years. Profits in corporations are dropping like an anvil.

[ Blumenfeld ] Well, that is because, you see, the business people are really prepared for the future. Let me quote from a speech that was given in 1981 before 52 executives of the Northern Telecom Company by a Harvard professor, Anthony Ottinger. He said, quote, “The present traditional concept of literacy has to do with the ability to read and write. But the real question that confronts us today is: How do we help citizens function well in their society? How can they acquire the skills necessary to solve their problems? Do we really want to teach people to do a lot of sums or writing with a fine round hand when they have a five dollar hand held calculator or a word processer to work with? Or do we really have to have everybody literate, writing and reading in the traditional sense? When we have the means through our technology to achieve a new flowering of oral communication. It is the traditional idea that says that certain forms of communication such as comic books are bad, but in the modern context of Functionalism, they may not be all that bad,” unquote.

So here the professors are going to the business people and are saying, “Hey, you really... these people don’t really have to learn to read and write. You know, we have got all these machines. We have got the little calculators and all of that. And all they have to do is learn enough to be functional in your firm, you see?”

Now I don’t know to what extent they are swallowing this, this business of a new flowering of oral communication, which, of course, is rap music, you see. And comic books. I don’t know of any parents who send their kids to school to learn to read comic books. You notice it says nothing about what parents want their children to learn. It is what do you as businessmen need for these kids to learn? Because we professors don’t think it is necessary anymore. You see how skewed the whole situation is?

Here is another quote. Two well known reading researchers, Harmon and Sticks said in 1987, quote, “Many companies have moved operations to places with cheap relatively poorly educated labor. What may be crucial, they say, is the dependability of a labor force and how well it can be managed and trained, not as general educational level. Although a small cadre of highly educated creative people is essential to innovation and growth, ending discrimination and changing values are probably more important than reading and moving low income families into the middle class,” unquote.

That is the thinking of the elite. All we have to do is educate a small elite that will do the innovating and the creative stuff and you can keep the rest of the people down in the dumps. They don’t have to move into the middle class, you see? Just change their values.

[ Rushdoony ] One of the reasons for the so-called Japanese miracle is the fact that the Japanese education is more along traditional lines, a heavy emphasis on content. The same is true in Korea and Taiwan. And very definitely in Singapore which is rapidly forging to the front as the industrial center of the world. The Chinese have a good educational approach, but no freedom for the students to apply it. And the same weakness has existed in the Soviet Union where they have stressed content with no freedom for the child.

I recall my uncle by marriage, his niece coming over from Soviet Armenia and expressing shock at the backwardness of the sciences in American high schools. And this was 20 years ago. And she felt that the Stanford program in physics, her field, was like a high school program. So that was a difference between the Soviet education and ours. Their failure was that once they graduated them, they had no freedom to work and to develop what they had learned, but they did have the content.

[ Murray ] Well, I remember I was shocked when I went overseas. I had just graduated from high school maybe a year or so and went into my first post. I was stationed in Austria and I met a young fellow there who was a ham radio operator, one of my avocational interests. And in the process of getting to know him, he told me that he had just completed high school and wanted to know how I liked calculus. And I had to tell him we don’t get calculus in high school. We have to go to universities and undergraduate course that is taught as an undergraduate course in the university.

And he says, “Oh, every kid that, you know, takes mathematics has to know calculus by the time they get out of high school.”

And this is in Austria which is, you know, at that time it was considered, you know, fairly backward as far as educational opportunity in Europe was concerned.

[ Blumenfeld ] Well...

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I went to a small town high school, Kingsford, which was not accredited by UC because it didn’t have a certain courses which were really fluff. The farmers insisted on the fundamentals. And calculus, trigonometry, everything like that was taught at that time.

[ Blumenfeld ] Well, and, Douglas, here is another item that for this question of yours, what the business leaders are thinking. The Nestle corporation recently launched a campaign in the coupon clipping section of the Sunday newspaper with an ad which read, quote, “700,000 graduating seniors can’t read this, but you should.” Now it goes on to say this. “Today’s students are tomorrow’s leaders. The quality of their education will affect every aspect of our nation’s future. We want our children to be the best and brightest in the world, but schools can’t always afford the equipment and enhancements that are necessary for quality education. Nestle thinks it is time to get involved. Here is where we are starting and how you can help. Nestle is contributing one million five hundred thousand dollars to the betterment of public education. On the next eight pages you will find many of your favorites from the Nestle family. We will donate a nickel for every coupon redeemed up to 500,000 dollars to a number of schools across the country. Concerned parents and caring teachers are not enough. Quality education deserves everyone’s support. Please join us. The future depends upon it,” unquote.

That is business’, you know, contribution. Give them more money, you see.

[ Murray ] Well, it is... it is a token, really, a token gesture.

[ Blumenfeld ] And this is seven hundred thousand graduating seniors, not drop outs can’t read.

[ Murray ] I wanted to ask you, you know, regarding the Japanese longer school day. In your opinion is it more valuable to work smart or shorter hours or this long day thing that they are... they claim success for?

And I have always felt that all the long day did was make more teacher openings for...

[ Blumenfeld ] Yeah. I think in the case of the Japanese, first of all, the Japanese language is more difficult to learn to read than ours. I know in the...in the chase of Chinese I was told by one Chinese individual that it takes six years for a Chinese to accomplish in literacy what ... what an English speaking person can do in one year with a phonetic system if they are taught phonetically.

Of course, now our children are not taught phonetically so they are not even reading as well as the Chinese who read an idiographic writing system. But the Japanese system is a combination of ideographs and sound symbols. They use a syllabery type of system. And it is a... it takes much longer for them to master their writing system than it does for us. So they need more time. And on top of that, of course, they are going in for much more difficult matter in... in mathematics and the sciences.

But we can do as much... there is so much time now wasted in American public schools that they say that only about 45 minutes of... out of the entire day is even spent learning anything. And even there you will find high school is telling you the they don’t learn anything.

[ Rushdoony ] In the colonial and early American eras, the common school held sessions annually for as little as six weeks to no more than three months and the teacher would rotate in a given area and within horseback distance of his home holding school at different places different times of the year.

Now they learned enough to be literate, as literate as Abraham Lincoln was with three years of schooling, I believe, because it was a highly disciplined curriculum. The children learned or else the hickory stick was really, literally used. So what happened when Horace Mann socialized education was that the school here was lengthened and the curriculum over the generations progressively watered down so that even in my lifetime I have seen the switch from an eighth grade education being sufficient for any man to be successful in the business world and to be as well educated as a college trained man today if not better. Then with the Depression they raised the mandatory school age to keep a lot of young people off the job market and further to water down the curriculum.

I remember how when I was a student in high school a tremendous number of students coming back who were older than most but because of the new requirement they were back in school. And the watering down since World War II has been especially dramatic.

[ Murray ] Well, and also created a lot of more teaching positions, too.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] Every... every move they made, it seems to me, ...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] ...created more teaching positions and bigger bureaucracy.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] Well...

[ Murray ] As well as...

[ Blumenfeld ] Go ahead. ... I just wanted to say that they have also created a whole community college system.

[ Rushdoony ] I was going to add that. Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] And the purpose of the community college is to simply do what the high schools used to do and they don't even do that very well. I don’t...

[ Rushdoony ] It used to be that on a graduate school level, 20 years ago, there was still a higher order of content. But now with the demand that minority group students be allowed to get their doctorates if they want them, the graduate school program has been so watered down that it is on a very low level. It has been turned into a shambles.

[ Murray ] It is a very expensive diploma mill that we can’t afford anymore.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes. It is a... Well, go ahead.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Our time is just about up. Do you want to sum things up in a minute or two, Sam?

[ Blumenfeld ] Well, American education is a royal mess. And the only way that... that things can be improved is for parents to take matters into their own hands. If they want their children to get a decent education they have got to either home school them or put them in... in ... into Christian schools that they can rely on, that they have confidence in.

[ Rushdoony ] Thank you very much, Sam. And we will look forward to your return and we are very proud to have you as a Chalcedon scholar and we appreciate the tremendous work you do and the travels you subject yourself to. You are all over the United States. There are very few people on our mailing list who have not encountered you in their neighborhood and have been delighted with hearing you speak.

[ Blumenfeld ] Well, thank you very much, Rush.

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