From the Easy Chair

Outcome Based Ed. & Other Education Anomalies

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 145-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161CY187

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161CY187, Outcome Based Ed. & Other Education Anomalies, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 297, August 26, 1993.

Tonight we have one of our staff with us, Samuel L. Blumenfeld, but we have two of our number absent from us. Douglas Murray is in bay area. His mother is quite ill. Mark Rushdoony is in Sacramento at the state fair where his son Isaac, age 14, won the grand prize and a sum of money for his game birds. And the winner of the reserve grand prize was his sister of 11 April Rushdoony. So it has been a good week and it has been a pleasurable week because we have had Sam Blumenfeld with us.

Otto and I are going to ask Sam some questions after he gives us an introduction on OBE and he will explain what that means. But before we get started on that, I would like to call attention to a problem too may people have when they think about public education. They assume that having dropped the Bible, driven out prayer and introduced sex education, the schools have achieved their goal and things are continuing about as they have been for some years. Many are ready to believe that there actually has been a return to phonics in the schools which is not true. The name has been used, but it is not true phonics. But statist education is a revolutionary movement. It is not going to stand still. It goes from one thing to another so that to assume that there is some kind of status quo there is a very, very serious error. And that is why I feel it is so important that we have Sam Blumenfeld here to explain OBE to us.

Otto and I will ask some questions, Sam, after a while, but take your time and take as long as you want to develop an exposition of it.

[ Blumenfeld ] Well, the... the first thing you have to know about outcome based education is that it is a totally new form of education meant to replace what is left of traditional education. Now there isn’t very much left of traditional education, but this would be the final blow which would just sweep away everything that has preceded education in this country up till now. And it is based on the psychological studies of Benjamin Bloom, a professor at the University of Chicago, a social scientist who worked out this ... a method of education that would produce the desired outcome of the ... of the Humanists. For example, the desired outcome of a Christian education is a believing Christian, a... a... an individual who would have... have a certain moral background, et cetera. And you... and a Christian school devises its education, creates a curriculum that creates the product that they want.

Well, the same thing now is being done in education to produce Humanists who will fit into this new ... this new world order that the educators have decided is going to exist. It is going to be humanistic, that is, with no reference to God, no reference to religion. It is also to reflect their vision of what American society is going to be like economically. For example, they see—that is the OBE visionaries—see America as... as really a kind of three tiered society. You will have at the very top the universitarian elite, those who are, you might say, born to rule like Hilary and Billary, you see, they have been ... they have been chosen by fate, I guess. And they are groomed to be the rulers, this university elite. That is the top tier and their education, they will be, you might say, guided in that direction if they show that they have some talent as obviously Bill Clinton showed and Hilary.

The second tier will be made up of the managers, the technicians, the scientists who will keep the economy moving, who will keep the economy working. And then all below them will be the... the third group, the {?}, the workers who will just get a... a sufficient education which will make them competitive with the other low wage earners in the rest of the world. In other words, American... Americans will be groomed to accept a low wage status comparable to that... what we have now in Mexico or in ... in Taiwan or elsewhere, because they realize that we are losing jobs because Americans are simply paid too much.

Well, that is... that is the kind of system that they want and they are devising a curriculum that is going to produce those results. They are going to create what they call certificates of mastery, a certificate of initial mastery. In other words, it is going to replace the diploma. You see, the present diploma you get a present diploma by being in school for 12 years and getting various credits and if you get, you know, three credits for this course and four credits for that one and you have a certain number of credits, you graduate.

Here you will not graduate until you are able to demonstrate that you can ... that you know and have the right attitudes that the educators want you to have. In other words, you could be in school for as long as it takes for you to jump through the hoops. If you are... if you do not repeat, if you do not ape what they want you to so-called learn, you don’t graduate. You don’t get your certificate. And from what we... from what I have been told you won’t be able to work unless you have a certificate. In other words, it will be your... your means of eligibility to get a job.

Also this... this system is a... a very controlled system. They are going to put everybody on the computer. Every child who enters the system gets into this master computer which also exists, incidentally, this master computer that is going to track every single child beginning at the age of three. Now they are also going not monitor pregnancies, because they believe that the reason why there are some children who can’t learn is because of something that the mother did in pregnancy. In other words, as you know, Rush, and ... and you know, Otto, I have been talking for years about how reading disability is created in the school by the methods that are being used by the educators. Well, of course, they flatly deny that. They claim that the reason why these children aren’t learning is because of something genetic or something that happened to them in the womb or some brain damage and so now they have an excuse, a pretext for monitoring pregnancies. Now what are they... I don’t know what they are going to do about women who want to abort their fetuses. That ... that... that is going to be a problem that they are going to have to deal with.

But in any case, they will have a... they will start a... tracking children from... from day one and once you get on the computer, that is it. And they are going to have a file on you that is going to be in the computer which who knows who will have access to it. There is no true security.

Otto, I am sure you know that there is no true security in any computer data bank.

[ Scott ] No, of course not.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes. And so that is ... that is what they are going not do. Now as far as subject matter is concerned, they are going to only teach what they believe is needed to solve problems, to solve our problems. For example, they are going to eliminate history as history. They will just deal with problems and then as they say they will try to solve whatever problem. For example, if they have a problem... if we have a... a problem in... in... in Bosnia, they will think in terms of, well, now how can we, you know, solve that problem, quote, whether they know anything about history or not. They are not going to know much about American history also because basically they want to destroy the past for these youngsters. They want to create a new person. They have divided their... and... and all of this is being done by psychologists. All of these plans have been made by psychologists, not educators, as we would... more intellectuals or... or... or people who are truly interested in the intellect. This is being done by... basically by psy... psychologists. And they have divided the ... the curriculum into the cognitive domain and the affective domain and the affective domain, of course, is related to beliefs and values and emotions and sexuality and all of that. And then they say that even the cognitive domain has its affective aspects so that you are never free of the emotions. In other words, when I was going to school and I was taught arithmetic or I was taught to read the teacher did not want to know how I felt. She did not want to know what I believed. She didn’t want to know what my parents felt or what they believed. She just wanted to make sure that I knew what she was teaching.

Now they want to know how you feel, what your relations are with your family, what you attitudes are. That is going to be very important in this whole new scheme of things.

[ Scott ] {?} Can I interrupt?

[ Blumenfeld ] Sure. Sure.

[ Scott ] Now what you are telling us is that there is going to be a structural change.

[ Blumenfeld ] Total, complete structural change.

[ Scott ] It is not going to be elementary, intermediate and college.

[ Blumenfeld ] No, no. Well, there may be universities. They haven’t gotten up to the universities. This is going to deal with, basically with your public school system which now goes from K through ... through 12. But they are not going not have that as such as grades, you see, it is not going to be done as grades. Also there are limits... for example, they are going to have the extended calendar, school calendar. They are eliminating summer vacation because they are saying that that is a relic of... of an agrarian society. And therefore children should go to school all year round. And also they are going to mix ages. That is one thing that isn’t too bad, the fact that they are ... you are not going to only be with your own age group. In other words, if the... it is a... it is a... it is based on what you are supposed to know. In other words, if ... But if you... if you, for example, know the information, you cannot move ahead until you know what they are teaching. In other words, they will repeat it and drum it into you until you can repeat it back, you see. That is the... that is the so-called mastery learning system.

[ Scott ] There is also the implication that they can keep them beyond 16.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes, you see, they are going to have to do something about the compulsory school attendance laws because they don’t want these kids to be able to walk out at the age of 16. They want to force these kids to stay in that school until, as I said, they can ape what the educators want them to know. And, of course, that is still up in the air. We don’t know exactly what the content is of this education.

[ Scott ] It is... I have... I have ... can’t see where somebody at the end of 12 years goes into a university. What will they go in equipped with? And what will the university do?

[ Blumenfeld ] Well, they... they will go ... they will go in equipped with what they would call a certain, you know, values or certain goals. Now the government is setting these goals. Incidentally, this is totally... this is going to make a... create a totally national education system. Forget about local control.

[ Scott ] Same everywhere.

[ Blumenfeld ] For... yes. It has got to be the same everywhere. It is... and, of course, it is... it is the federal government that has been paying for all of this up to now. You see it is the... it is the U S Department of Education which has been pumping millions of dollars into these education labs that are located all over the country that are producing these various programs. They are all psychologically based because they want to change the attitudes of the students to conform with humanistic goals.

So, in other words, if you are a Christian you are going to have a very tough time in that school because the schools are going to say ... tell you that evolution is a fact. And they won’t let you out until you...

[ Scott ] Until you agree.

[ Blumenfeld ] Until you agree, right. In other words, you will not be able to disagree and get your certificate, you see. That is the kind of thing we are headed for. We are headed toward a... I would call a Totalitarian... educational Totalitarianism. And... and it is being... it is being introduced and implemented all over the country and people don’t even know it is happening.

[ Scott ] This would render everyone else obsolete.

[ Blumenfeld ] Oh, yeah, yeah.

[ Rushdoony ] Apart from you and two or three who have, under your influence, taken up the matter, no one is calling attention to the implications of OBE.

[ Scott ] Phyllis Schlaffley is.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes, she has. She has and...

[ Rushdoony ] I wasn’t aware of that.’

[ Scott ] Yeah, yeah. Phyllis has done a... a good ... she did a good report on it. And we have a network of people in the country who are aware of what is going on and we are on the phone all the time and exchanging faxes and doing all kinds of... we have been aware of OBE now for ... for a while. I... I think that the one person who was probably aware of it for quite some time is Charlotte Isobel who lives in Maine who has once worked for the department of education. She saw all of these grant proposals going through. She knows who the... the major individuals involved in this whole process are and she is a ... a ... she is very well aware, but she has been ahead of us. But the... the... the method of education is basically Skinnerian, this mastery education methodology. It is basically behaviorist, the use of the animal training techniques, you see, to educate these... these youngsters. And incidentally what you are going... what ... what they are going to teach the ... the ones at the very bottom... First of all, they are not going to learn how to read very well because whole language is now part and parcel of this whole program, whole language. And, as you know and as I have spoken about whole language before, it is a dumbing down process so that they will be relegating that lower, probably, two thirds of the population...

[ Scott ] What would be the criteria for selecting the lower?

[ Blumenfeld ] Well, it is very hard to say. You know, you have your so-called gifted and talented. What they will do is find out who can survive. Who manages to get through. I mean, for example, how does a Clinton become a Clinton? And he went to... he went to a private...

[ Scott ] He went to...

[ Blumenfeld ] ... a private school.

[ Scott ] He went to private schools.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yeah.

[ Scott ] And he obviously was an expert apple polisher.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And just the type...

[ Blumenfeld ] Yeah.

[ Scott ] That the teachers like.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes. Well, obviously there are going to be some kids who are bright and who will be selected to be the rulers of tomorrow, just as Clinton was.

[ Rushdoony ] There is, of course, an obvious plagiarism in all of this. The three tiered society is straight out of Plato’s Republic which is the great pattern for all totalitarian societies and the prols, the proletariat, of course, are those who could not qualify for anything else so they were like cattle to be used by the planners at the top.

[ Blumenfeld ] Exactly.

[ Scott ] But in this instance, you know, Plato was living, after all, in a ... as a member of a nobility. And the prols were born into that situation and the middle class, if there... what it was, was the entrepreneur of the day. Here, obviously, the schools or the psychologists will select irrespective of race of family....

[ Blumenfeld ] Oh, yes.

[ Scott ] Now this is a great illusion that race is irrelevant.

[ Blumenfeld ] Well, but you are ... you know, they have... they have devised all sorts of tests, attitudinal tests.

[ Scott ] Right.

[ Blumenfeld ] Values tests, which will permit them to select those, you know, by computer they can do this very easily.

[ Scott ] Sure.

[ Blumenfeld ] Everything is going to be on a computer.

[ Scott ] Right.

[ Blumenfeld ] They will be able to select very easily who are the ones destined to be the rulers.

[ Scott ] Sure, they have the...

[ Blumenfeld ] ...to be the ruling class, the elite.

[ Scott ] Right.

[ Blumenfeld ] It is an elitist society.

[ Scott ] Right.

[ Blumenfeld ] All... all socialist societies are elitist societies.

[ Scott ] Well, all societies are elitist. There is no society without a top.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And so that is a term which I really don’t see ... I know that it is frowned upon today to use elitist as a pejorative, but if you don’t have an elite, you don’t have a society.

[ Blumenfeld ] Well, yeah, we have always had an... an elite in this country, but our education system left it up to the...

[ Scott ] Up to the individual....

[ Blumenfeld ] ...individual to decide.

[ Scott ] ...that is right.

[ Blumenfeld ] ...what he was going to do with his life.

[ Scott ] Yes, more of a meritorial or the natural elite in Jefferson’s terms.

[ Blumenfeld ] Right.

[ Rushdoony ] A natural aristocracy.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] A natural aristocracy. Here it is... I mean... well, let me ask you. Do you consider Hilary and... and Bill Clinton to be elite... elite in a sense of knowledge?

[ Scott ] No, of course not.

[ Blumenfeld ] They are not elite material. So how did they get there? How did they get there?

[ Scott ] Well, of course they were pushed through.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yeah. As a matter of fact, I... I... I don’t... I don’t know, Rush, if you recall the... the speech that Clinton gave when he received the nomination of the Democratic party. And in that address he paid homage to his great professor at Georgetown University, professor Carol Quigley.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] Now 99.9 percent of the American people have no idea who is professor Quigley, but as you and I know, Rush, professor Quigley wrote a very famous book called Tragedy and Hope in which he explained the existence...

[ Scott ] As...

[ Blumenfeld ] ...of the establishment of this group of men who were working secretly to create a world system. And obviously Clinton was aware of that and the Rhodes scholarships, as a matter of fact...

[ Scott ] Well, he... he was a Rhodes scholar.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And, of course he didn’t... it is interesting. He worked for Fulbright.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Scott ] But he didn’t get a Fulbright. He got a Rhodes scholar...

[ Blumenfeld ] He got a Rhodes scholar.

[ Scott ] ...because the Rhodes scholar has a little more prestige. And, of course, at Oxford you don’t have to work if you don't want to. It is not like an American college. So he didn’t work his second year and never got his degree there.

[ Blumenfeld ] No. You don’t have to. But... but the ... the purpose of the Rhodes scholarship is to train leaders.

[ Scott ] Well, it is to put you into a network.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yeah, into ... because, you know, Hawks, the prime minister of ... of Australia had... was a Rhodes scholar.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] You have got Rhodes scholars through out our congress.

[ Scott ] It is really a political appointment.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yeah, yeah, in a sense. So it is... it is... it is... so we do have this elite at the top, but it is an elite that is chosen by the manipulators.

[ Scott ] Well, it is interesting. This is a fascinating... Phyllis Schlafley, I just happened to run across her. Somebody sent me a copy of what she had written and it wasn’t as clear as what Sam was saying by any means. She got all bound up in the curricula.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Scott ] It is interesting. We have already an academic elite that is running our society.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Scott ] That is a... a certificated elite.

[ Blumenfeld ] Credentialed.

[ Scott ] A credentialed elite, yes. And they are doing a lousy job, because most of them are not educated. They are specialists and the specialization is so intense that it leaves them totally ignorant outside their specialty.

[ Blumenfeld ] You see, now you believe that they are doing a lousy job, but to them they are ... what we have is what they want.

[ Scott ] This chaos?

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes, yes. As a matter of fact, take, for example, the illiteracy that we have in this country. We know how to teach children to read. It is no big mystery. It isn’t as if we are trying to find a cure for cancer, you know. I mean, after all, the Romans did it.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] The Greeks did it.

[ Scott ] Well, we...

[ Blumenfeld ] I mean it has got to...

[ Scott ] This country...

[ Blumenfeld ] {?}

[ Scott ] This country... this country did it very, very well.

[ Blumenfeld ] Right.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] Now and... and I have been fighting to get intensive phonics back in the schools since 1963. And it has been like hitting your head against a stone wall.

[ Rushdoony ] By that time there were articles in Harper’s and elsewhere which said that one third, at least, of all the children in America were not literate and did not need to know how to read.

[ Scott ] In 60... by 63?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And you have encountered that in education literature.

[ Blumenfeld ] Oh, of course.

[ Rushdoony ] ... in the 20s.

[ Scott ] Yes, as a matter of fact when I was I California some ... a couple of years ago down in the San Joaquin Valley, I visited a school, a Washington Elementary School in Selma, California, a small town.

[ Rushdoony ] I know Selma very well.

[ Scott ] A friend of mine, Sue Dixon, wrote a... a good phonics program and I asked Sue. I said, “Well, where is it being used in America?”

And she said, “Well, there is this little school in Selma, California that is using it. Why don’t you go down as you are there and visit.”

I happened to be in the area so I stopped off and I... I went to see the principal, a very nice young lady whose name I can’t recall at the moment who welcomed me in and, you know, and I asked her about how she got to use this phonetic system which was teaching these little children from migrant workers to read very nicely. And she said, well, when she had gone to teacher’s college—I forget it was Fresno or... or one of those... one of the universities there—her professor told her to expect that one third of the children would not learn to read, could not learn because of some defect.

[ Scott ] That is ridiculous.

[ Blumenfeld ] A second third would only become moderate... moderate readers and only one third would become proficient readers.

So she left school believing that that was so and she started teaching and she was so frustrated and so disturbed by the failure that she was getting with the programs that she was using, some look say program, that she felt there must be a better way to do things. And she happened to come across Sue Dixon’s program in a catalog. So she sent away for it and began using it in... in her class and lo and behold everybody learned to read, you see. So she was... suddenly realized that she had been lied to. She had been lied to by her professor.

[ Scott ] I remember, if you will pardon the interruption, at about 1963 running into a ... a literary agent who was agenting for children’s books. And I said, “Well, I guess anyone with a flare for fantasy would probably do rather well in that field.”

And she said, “No, no.” She said, “We... we... we deal with limited vocabulary by age.”

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] And not only were... were the words limited, but you could only use that ... those words.

[ Scott ] Oh, yes. As a matter of fact, I... I have been working with a.. with a... a very interesting gentleman down in North Carolina who read by book The NEA and read that particular chapter on the artificial inducement of dyslexia. He himself is dyslexic. And for the first time he realized that the reason he had his... his problem was because of the way he had been taught to read in school. And he was very concerned about his grandson who was having a terrible time learning to read and so what he would do is he would buy these little phonetic books. And even though this man was dyslexic he had somehow managed to read enough and his grandson had this block against phonics. And he said, “Now how could that be? How is it this happened?”

Well, he looked at his... at the books that his grandson was reading and he realized he had all of these Dr. Seuss books which he could read like that, at the snap of a finger.

[ Scott ] Sure.

[ Blumenfeld ] So he began to test it. He realized that this boy was memorizing the Dr. Seuss books. All of the words holistically as little ... little, you know, little figures, as little ideographs.

[ Scott ] Right.

[ Blumenfeld ] And because he had this automatic holistic way of looking at words had developed a block against looking at words phonetically, you see. And so this was a great discovery, because millions of pre schoolers are memorizing these little Dr. Seuss books. Now the interesting thing is that Dr. Seuss did not write these books out of his head. He was given 220 words by the publisher, sight words the purpose of these books was to turn these kids into little sight readers so that when they entered the first grade, oh, they would be able to read very nicely and their parents would be very satisfied and... and would say, “Oh, my child is learning to read, you see?”

[ Scott ] Right.

[ Blumenfeld ] Then by the time they got to third grade they would break down and become dyslexic and have all kinds of problems. So my friend devised a very simple test whereby he could ... whereby he could discover, well, find out whether the child was a sight reader, was looking a words... holistically or phonetically. He took the sight words from the... from the Dr. Seuss books and put them in ... in on a page and then he took an equal number of words from Rudolph Fleish’s book Why Johnny Can’t Read simple phonetically regular words. Well, the typical sight reader would whiz through the... the Dr. Seuss words, but then when he was come to the simple phonetic words he would stumble. He would be unable to read them, slow down considerably.

[ Scott ] Couldn’t read them at all.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes. So he was able to demonstrate quite dramatically this difference.

[ Scott ] Well, the method you have described and the damage that they have created is really diabolic. And Bob, who is running the tape for us, said: Why are they doing this?

[ Blumenfeld ] And why are they doing this? Well, it is part of the general dumbing down of the American people. First of all, you have to realize that the end aim of... of American education or the educators, the elite, the progressives is to create a world socialist pagan system. We know it is going to be pagan, because if you attended the conference at Rio you would realize that everything is tending toward a pagan system.

Now who are the... who are the ... those who will be the most resistant group to a world pagan socialist system?

[ Scott ] Well, the religious groups.

[ Blumenfeld ] The believing Christians.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] They represent the strongest opposition. Now this... this group realizes that that is the case. Now how can you destroy that opposition? Well since 85 percent of the Christians put their children in the public schools, you see, what they are going to do is do two things to the kids. First they are going to dumb them down sufficiently so that they can’t read the Bible. They can’t read the Declaration of Independence. They can’t read the Constitution. In other words, they will be completely at the mercy of their superiors.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] That is the first thing they will do to make them pliable and easily manipulable. The second thing they will do is sexualize the children as early as possible in order to make them into pagans.

Now so that is why they are introducing sex education in kindergarten, AIDS education in kindergarten which they are going to describe to the... to these five year olds and six year olds all of the various ways that you can get AIDS. And they are going to leave nothing to the imagination.

[ Scott ] As I read recently, they do this, Rush, as an illustration of what is happening in their parents’ bedroom.

[ Blumenfeld ] Is that what it is?’

[ Scott ] That... that... that is part of it. And that, of course, changes a child’s whole attitude...

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...toward his parents.

[ Blumenfeld ] Right. We also...

[ Rushdoony ] Oh...

[ Blumenfeld ] ...we .... oh, go ahead, Rush.

[ Rushdoony ] I was going to say in... by way of illustration what you said with regard to not being able to read the Bible. One of the most common practices in the first half of this century was that in the Sunday school various children were asked to read the lesson from the Bible or they went around the class each one reading a verse very often. Since then that is less and less the case, because they cannot read it if they are public school students.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] There is an interesting cartoon in the September Reader’s Digest that Bob handed me. It shows this college hallway and the door on which is the inscription, “History Department.” And underneath a sign, “Closed for rewriting.”

[ Blumenfeld ] Well, it is interesting. The Russians are rewriting their history books because they know they are full of lies. And we are rewriting ours in order to put more lies in. But getting back to this... this... why they are doing this. That is the only way that they can overcome the Christian opposition is to first produce fewer Christians. In other words, de Christianize a Christian children. Now once they become sexualized, then they will be in conflict with their Christian beliefs and they will have what is ... they will develop what is known as cognitive ... what is it? Cognitive disorder. Not cognitive... oh, I have forgotten. There is... there is a term that the scientists... that the psychologists have ... have devised which ... which is a ... a description of internal conflict. Dissonance, cognitive dissonance.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] Oh, cognitive dissonance. Which means that the youngster will have these two conflicting values systems, two conflicting belief systems. He will have been experimenting with sex and he or she will have to decide, well, can I remain a Christian or should I adopt Humanism which says that I can do everything I want, you see. And more likely than not the... then the individual will become a Humanist or a... or an Atheist or a Nihilist or you name it, because ... but they certainly will give up Christianity because Christians... because it is much more difficult to lead a Christian life than it is to lead a Humanist life.

And as we know from the growth of the new age movement one of the reasons why so many people are adopting pagan beliefs is because Paganism lets you do all the sinning you want.

[ Scott ] Well, the modern version of Paganism.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Scott ] I mean, we know that the pagans had gods and rules. We are worse than the...

[ Blumenfeld ] Yeah.

[ Scott ] What they are propounding...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ... is worse than the pagans.

[ Blumenfeld ] Well, the pagans also had human sacrifice.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] which...

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] We will come to that.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yeah, probably.

[ Scott ] Yes. Well, there are different ways of... of human sacrificing people.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yeah.

[ Scott ] To an extent the treatment of our troops in Vietnam was human sacrifice.

[ Blumenfeld ] Oh, absolutely.

[ Rushdoony ] And abortion.

[ Blumenfeld ] And abortion.

[ Scott ] And abortion.

[ Blumenfeld ] So we have human sacrifice ...

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] ... going on today. The point is, though, that that is... that is... I hope that answers the question of why they are doing this.

[ Scott ] Well...

[ Blumenfeld ] Because they are aim is the socialist, pagan system.

[ Scott ] For power and control.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yeah.

[ Scott ] In other words.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yeah, yeah. And to de Christianize the opposition. In other words, if you can take 85 percent of the Christian children and over two... over... how long would it take? One or two generations to de Christianize them? Not very long.

[ Scott ] Not too long.

[ Blumenfeld ] And then you just have a remnant that you have to deal with.

[ Scott ] If you have...

[ Blumenfeld ] A very small remnant.

[ Scott ] If... if... if nobody can get a job without a credential....

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Now when I worked at Ashland Oil I was the only man in the headquarters that was there without degree. I found out later the personnel department would not interview anyone without a degree.

[ Blumenfeld ] Sure. Yes.

[ Scott ] And this was set in place by a man ... yes, who were the first in their generation to get degree.

[ Blumenfeld ] And ... and what form...

[ Scott ] The first in their... in their families to get a degree.

[ Blumenfeld ] You know what is interesting also is that the ... is that the business people have been brought into this thing by the educators and the business people are being ... are being persuaded that high literacy is not necessary. They are being told that it is better to have... it is better to have a lower level, a lower level of literacy for these workers because we don’t want to ... we don’t want to create false hopes that they can rise to the middle class. In other words, we want to make them satisfied with their place in society as laborers, as workers doing whatever it is that industry is going to require, you see. So they are selling this to the large corporations and, believe it or not, the large corporations are going... going along with it which is ... which is a terrible...

[ Scott ] Do you suppose that... do you suppose that that is a result of having distributed degrees wholesale?

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...in this last couple of decades and then produce people who expect more from society than it has places to provide.

[ Blumenfeld ] That is it. That is it.

[ Scott ] So it is being...

[ Blumenfeld ] As you... as you ... as you have pointed out to me, Otto, we are entering a... a period of a... of tremendous change in which they are... the are going to be fewer jobs.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] You see, now, of course, in our society it is the small firms that have created the jobs.

[ Scott ] Right.

[ Blumenfeld ] The large corporations are... are cutting back. I mean, you know, they are... they are cutting down by the thousands while it is the... it is the creation of these small firms of 20 people, 30 people that are creating the jobs. Now how long that is going to last we don’t know, because according to the tax ... the new tax program, they are going to penalize these smaller ... these entrepreneurs and these small firms.’

[ Scott ] Well, most of them have discovered that they previously cracked down on S corporations...

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...which are small corporations, increase the taxes. So therefore, most of the new entrepreneurs have been operating on their own personal account without incorporating at all so they are charged according to the income tax rates. Well, when you put the income tax rates up to 40 percent, which is the latest bill...

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...thirty-nine percent, plus the state and the county, you are taking over half of what these entrepreneurs can make.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yeah.

[ Scott ] ...what they can earn.

[ Rushdoony ] To illustrate what you said earlier about the absorption of the business community, some years ago a man who had been in banking in New York City and had done some investigative work for Congress in areas of his expert knowledge, told me that routinely the people with money were absorbed into the establishment and he cited the instance of one family, a man, a successful businessman who left a foundation of not too many million, but one that provided, oh, four to six million dollars a year for grants which he hoped would go to good, Christian and conservative causes.

When he died, his widow turned over control of it to the three sons who had already been a part of the board. After some time she learned from friends with horror that all the money that her husband had made was being given in grants to left wing causes. And she called in someone to investigate the matter and it ended with the investigation because it was obvious nothing was going to happen. The boys were in control.

But it was simply this. The first time the three sons took a trip to Europe before they went, a state department official visited them, told them that they were the kind of tourists to Europe they wanted to see more of. So would they mind if they had them met when they arrived at London, visit some prominent Englishman and stay at their estates and so on.

Well, they were entranced at the idea and they came back walking on air because they met lords and ladies and wherever they went chauffeurs met them courtesy of the embassy and they were included in a variety of things hat were quite heady for them. They were meeting the elite.

They came back. They were invited to a prominent event, social event in New York City and they were asked to talk to a small group about their reactions. And they were walking on air.

A little later someone called on them and discretely solicited funds for a project in New York City and they quickly realized that if they wanted the same kind of association as they had encountered on the trip to Europe, this was the way to do it. So little by little all the money that was available every year was going to causes suggested to them.

So this is the kind of thing that is done and other methods, no doubt, to absorb the wealth that Christian and conservative men have laid up into the new world order.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes, there is the famous Sun Oil, as you know, fund.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] Fortune Pugh.

[ Scott ] Gerald Pugh, yeah.

[ Blumenfeld ] ... who would endow Grove City college and was a great contributor to conservative...

[ Rushdoony ] I knew him personally.

[ Blumenfeld ] Now where is it? It is all going to left wing...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] ...liberal causes, because these foundations are taken over by these people.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I... I know for a fact that Pugh left some grants that were to be permanent to certain organizations. And his instructions were carefully spelled out, but within a year after his death these had been cut out.

[ Blumenfeld ] How could they do that if they are supposedly made permanent?

[ Rushdoony ] Oh, they just do whatever they want. The courts are not agreeable to permanent wishes.

[ Blumenfeld ] That is true. That is true.

[ Rushdoony ] The Girard case is an example.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] ... of that.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes. That set a precedent.

[ Scott ] There is also the fact that the courts have... the government first and then the courts followed have destroyed private contracts.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] So we are not living under contractual law anymore. And a judge can set aside ...

[ Blumenfeld ] Anything.

[ Scott ] Anything. And ... and... any contract.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And are doing it regularly.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Although that the... the restructuring of society is ... is underway. You are... you are giving us the ... the educational side of it.

[ Blumenfeld ] Right. And they call it restructuring.

[ Scott ] They call it restructuring.

[ Blumenfeld ] Oh, yes. It is called restructuring.

[ Scott ] That is what the... strikes me immediately.

[ Blumenfeld ] Oh, yes.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes. And of that is what they call it. And, of course, that is what they want. I... I ... you know, my friend in... in North... North Carolina, Edward Miller, has used that test, you know, the... the sight words on one side and the ... and he has got a public school in his area and he tested the children in that school, the Rhonda Klingman school.

I just wanted to give you what the results were. He said of the 26 second graders only four could be considered good phonetic readers out of 26 second graders. And then of the 25 fourth graders only seven were phonetic readers.

And so it turned out that to sum up the results, of the 68 children tested, 53 were already educationally dyslexic.

[ Scott ] Great. It just occurs to me that when you say nobody would be able to get a job without a credential from this system...

[ Blumenfeld ] Right. Yes.

[ Scott ] That that is the way to stop the outlaw individual from rising in society.’

[ Blumenfeld ] Oh, yeah.

[ Scott ] Now this is a very old prejudice. Emerson had it and his friends against the men who set up the mills and the factories.

[ Blumenfeld ] Right.

[ Scott ] And the railroads and so forth because they hadn't gone through the university system. And it was felt that only the people who went though the university system had a right to rise in the society and others did not. So you closed that door of the entrepreneur. What you are really talking about is... is creating a China.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] But... but, you see, the difference ... the difference that is... is striking. We have had many immigrants to this country who are basically illiterate.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] And were able to build fortunes.

[ Scott ] That is right.

[ Blumenfeld ] And that is because their minds had not been tampered with. They were illiterate simply because they hadn't learned to read and hadn't had schooling, but yet they had native intelligence.

[ Scott ] Sure.

[ Blumenfeld ] They had common sense. You know, they know up from down. They knew right from wrong and they knew that what Capitalism was all about. But these...

[ Scott ] Well, some of them arrived here illiterate only in English.

[ Blumenfeld ] Right. But the functional illiterate who was made illiterate in our schools becomes generally so dysfunctional...

[ Scott ] Oh.

[ Blumenfeld ] ...becomes a delinquent, becomes...

[ Scott ] So they really.

[ Blumenfeld ] ...anti social.

[ Scott ] So they really figured out a way.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes. As a matter of fact, Kurt Llewellyn one of the social scientists who came out of Germany in the 30s and came to this country and he invented sensitivity training. And he was responsible for creating the ... the lab, the national training lab at ... in Bethel, Maine which was sponsored by the National Education Association. He experimented on who to create frustration, how to frustrate children.

And he knew how to do it. You see, they had worked on all of these techniques. So what functional literacy creates is what you have in Los Angeles and south central Los Angeles, gangs of functional illiterates who have no employable skills. As a matter of fact when Rodney King was on the stand and he was asked to read something, he was asked to read something, he looked at it and he said, “Would somebody read it for me? I can’t read.”

I think if these gangs were tested for literacy you would find that 95 percent of them were probably functionally illiterate.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] You see?

[ Rushdoony ] Well, you mentioned the immigrants...

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] ... who came here unable to read English. Back in the 20s and 30s I know California and briefly or for... for a few years Michigan one of the commonest things was your night school for immigrants who went there to learn how to read and write and to speak English properly. And it was a course that required a great deal of drill and it was not a snap course. They really taught those people and they went there because they had the motivation.

[ Blumenfeld ] Oh, yes.

[ Rushdoony ] They wanted to get ahead.

[ Blumenfeld ] Oh, yes.

[ Scott ] Of course, of course.

[ Blumenfeld ] And night school in those days.

[ Scott ] You remember the education of Hyman Kaplan?

[ Blumenfeld ] Oh, yeah.

[ Rushdoony ] Yeah.

[ Scott ] A delightful book.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Now that was a classic in its day and I don’t think I have thought of it for maybe 40 years since you mentioned it now. That was a joy to read.

[ Scott ] It was.

[ Rushdoony ] I read it two, three times.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes. But it is interesting that so many of those immigrants were able to do so well over the... because, of course, they had the opportunity.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] But they had common sense.

[multiple voices]

[ Scott ] And they were not locked up at the time they arrived.

[ Blumenfeld ] Oh, yeah.

[ Scott ] Now it is locked up and I tell you that this large company wouldn’t interview anybody that didn't have a degree. That is a lock up.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes. Definitely.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] Incidentally, another important thing that was done by Miller was that he went back to this Rhonda Klingman school two years later to test the same youngsters that he had tested in 1990. He was able to test 51 of the original 68 students and here the results are really astounding. He showed... he... he proved that dumbing down was taking place. He said the results showed that none of the students who were holistic readers in 1990 have become phonetic readers in the interim. Most of them were able to read the words faster and their accuracy had increased in the phonetic part of the test, but more than half of the dyslexic students miscalled some of the very same sight words that they had read correctly in 1990.

One student who as a fourth grader had made a total of 12 errors in 1990 made 29 errors in 1992 as a sixth grader in the very same first grade test.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] This is the same test given two years later and they make more errors two years later on the same first grade test. And nowhere was the dumbing down process more obvious than among the good phonetic readers in the second and third grades of 1990 who were now in the fourth and sixth grades. Of the 13 students who had achieved the best scores in 1990, nine made more errors on the very same test in 1992.

[ Scott ] All right. Now Mc Intire is teaching children... he has a day school. It is... it is a real school.

[ Blumenfeld ] Right.

[ Scott ] He is teaching them as students. He takes them in as soon as they are toilet trained. And I think the senior class is six years old. I am not sure. Whenever they have to go to first grade.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yeah.

[ Scott ] And most of the parents put them on to the first grade because, of course, that ends the ... the expense of the day school and these are single parents or people that have ... have to work hard.

So what you are saying is that when the public schools get them... Now he turns them out able to read and write. They are going to destroy that ability.

[ Blumenfeld ] Absolutely.

[ Scott ] That is what you are saying.

[ Blumenfeld ] Absolutely. Yes and he proved it with this testing. I was amazed. And the results were astounding. This is the first ... first ... how would you say? Objective evidence we have of the dumbing down process whereby the best students read more poorly two years later, the very same first grade test. This is not a more difficult test, the very same test they were doing more poorly. As a matter of fact, one fourth grader who had made only two errors in 1990 made 18 in 1992 as a sixth grader, you see. So the... so what we are dealing with is a dumbing down process of... that has been worked out so cleverly. I mean it is an ingenious thing that they have done, diabolical.

[ Rushdoony ] A little while ago we were talking about the lock up of various areas, closed to any...

[ Blumenfeld ] Right.

[ Rushdoony ] ... but those who are credentialed. An interesting area where that has happened has been in the churches. Originally you could study theology under a prominent theologian or a pastor. All you had to do was to pass the examination. That went out in most churches by the time of World War II. I think one of the last where it went out was, strangely enough, the Episcopal Church. All you had to do was to pass the bishop’s examinations. But that ended.

Now what has happened is that the churches blessed with seminaries have gone downhill. The phenomenal growth from 68 to 88 of those who professed to be born again Bible believing Christians is from 40 million to 90 million, 18 years of age and older, has been churches that did not require a seminary training, just a man who knew what it was about who had studied on his own.

Now two things are obvious. There was a risk. Not that these other churches didn’t have their share of incompetent and morally delinquent men, but let’s grant, for a moment, that those who did not require the lock up process of seminaries and credentials and all that, let’s say maybe they had more delinquent clergymen. They had the phenomenal success, because the men had not been trained to knuckle under to a system, but were driven by a mission.

[ Blumenfeld ] Well, yes. As a matter of fact, I think it was... it was Fred Niles who told me and... and in Australia that the whole purpose of... of the seminary was to destroy his religion.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] I remember he told you that.

[ Rushdoony ] That is very common.

[ Blumenfeld ] But... but, you know, they wanted to produce doubt in him over the... over the inerrancy of ... of the Word and ... and I understand that there are thousands of young men who have entered seminaries with a... with a, you know, a heart full of ... of spirit willing to be, you know, wanting to become great ministers and yet the seminaries have virtually destroyed their faith.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, even where the faith has not been destroyed, it has drilled them into a straight ... a life that is a straight jacket life.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] So that I have actually seen young men who preached marvelously before they went to seminary come out and they were wooden and in competent.

Well, our time is virtually over. Before we conclude I would like to urge you all to subscribe to the Blumenfeld education letter which comes out every month and is usually about 10 pages...

[ Blumenfeld ] It is eight.

[ Rushdoony ] Eight pages.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] The rate is 36 dollars for a year. For a subscription, write to the Blumenfeld Education Letter, P O Box 45161, Boise, B, as in boy, O I S E, Idaho 83711. I think you will find it eminently worthwhile. It will keep you up to date on the kind of thing we have been talking about this evening.

[ Blumenfeld ] Rush, you might give them the phone number. It would be easier for them to call.

[ Rushdoony ] All right. Call 208 322 4440.

Thank you all for listening and God bless you.

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