From the Easy Chair

Contemporary Education

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 167-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161DK207

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161DK207, Contemporary Education, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 319, August three, 1994.

This evening Douglas Murray, Otto Scott, Mark Rushdoony and myself are happy to have with us one of our staff members, Sam Blumenfeld.

Sam Blumenfeld’s work here, in Australia, New Zealand, Britain and elsewhere has been outstanding in the area of phonics and home schooling. He is very much alive to the issues in the contemporary education, what is happening, what is planned and what we need to do. So it is a pleasure to have you with us this evening, Sam. And we would like you to start off and just give us an overview of things or whatever you want to tell you.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes. Well, Rush, as... as always, it is a pleasure to be here with you, with the Chalcedon bunch. And let me just review what has happened over the year, the last ... the past year. There has been continued growth in the home school movement in terms of numbers, conferences, publications, book fairs, attendance at conferences and there are many more local support groups. For example in... in... in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania 6000 people showed up at a home school conference in Harrisburg.

[ Rushdoony ] That is amazing.

[ Blumenfeld ] It is. It is. So... and there are many more books being published for home schoolers. The best and... but the best groups are the Christian ones. That is where you get real spirit and... and... and something is happening there that is not happening in the more secular ones.

On the public education front what we are seeing really is an acceleration of the federalization of public education. What we have had in the past year is an avalanche of legislation coming out of the Congress that is really federalizing public education. The local control is being stripped away with laws like Goals 2000, HR 6, et cetera. You have the government really taking over, the federal government taking over public education.

Now one very significant thing happened while this legislation was being enacted and I am sure you have heard of it, the HR 6.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] ...law that was a reauthorization of the secondary...elementary and secondary education act of 1965. And there were a ... one of your California representatives added an amendment, Mr. Miller. And he added this amendment which would have affected those George Miller, Democrat of California. Very left wing, very liberal individual. He added an amendment which on certification which would have affected the home schoolers. And one of our home school people became aware of that, got in touch with H S... home school legal defense association and they put out an alert, a fax alert, a phone alert. The phone tree lit up like Christmas trees. Washington or the Congress was inundated by one million phone calls and faxes. Some of these machines were put out of commission by the response. And for the first time in our history the home schools were able to force Congress to make a complete about face. They rejected the amendment, the Miller amendment, unanimously except for Miller himself. He was the only one.

So it was quite an achievement, quite an achievement. And suddenly, suddenly the home schoolers realized that they had this enormous power, that they up and creating and... and, you know, about through these networks. And who knows how they intend to use in the future. Of course, this was an extraordinary circumstance, but they managed to stop that. They haven’t stopped anything else. They haven’t stopped Goals 2000 and they didn't stop all the rest of the legislation, but the NEA, the National Education Association was absolutely outraged and startled by this turn of events and they realized now that certification as they want it is a dead letter in this country because of the home schoolers.

[ Scott ] What does this certification mean?

[ Blumenfeld ] Well, it means that the teachers have to... that a home school parent would have to be certified by the state. And in order to be certified by the state you have got to go to a teacher’s college or you have got to take certain courses. You have got to take tests or something or other. In other words, it is the state’s attempt to control home education.

[ Scott ] It is... in effect it would put home education out of business, wouldn’t it?

[ Blumenfeld ] Well, that is what it was intended to do, you see. A

[ Scott ] Oh.

[ Blumenfeld ] And, of course, they denied that that was going to happen.

[ Rushdoony ] I was testifying once. I have mentioned this on another occasion in Virginia.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] And a professor of physics testified that he was so disgusted with what his two daughters were learning in the state schools that he proceeded to teach them himself and found that he was not considered a fit teacher by the state and to teach physics to his own daughters he would have to have approval by a state official who knew less about physics than he did.

[ Blumenfeld ] You know, that is the kind of thing that that would have brought about. And, of course, it would have affected also the private schools, the private Christian schools that don't use certified teachers. They don’t use state certified teachers. So this was a... really quite a... quite an event, quite... and it will down in... in the history of the home school movement of having... as having been the moment of truth.

I get the feeling that the homeschool movement has reached the point of, what do you call it? The ... the mass...

[ Murray ] Critical mass.

[ Blumenfeld ] Critical mass. Exactly. In other words... and that they are not going to be able to get rid of home schooling without causing a tremendous... a tremendous uproar in this country, because you are dealing with parents who feel very strongly about this sort of thing.

These are parents who are not going to lie down and let the state walk all over them. So now they are... they have to contend with this incredible new force and how it is going to go and manifest itself in the future is... is to be seen. Of course, what is also going on in public education is the total reform based on outcomes based education, that is the system that you might say was created by Benjamin Bloom, the professor at Chicago University the behavioral scientist, which is really the curriculum for the new world order. It... it destroys every last vestige of traditional education.

[ Scott ] But it sounds so wonderful, out come... outcome based education.

[ Blumenfeld ] Well, yes, I mean, because all education has an out... you know...

[ Scott ] Every time.

[ Blumenfeld ] ...form of education has an outcome. The outcome of a Christian education is to produce a Christian, you know. A... a... a well educated, a learned Christian, a Catholic education is to produce good Catholics, et cetera, not that they always succeed, but they always have that outcome. And the outcome for outcome based education is to produce little humanists.

You see, because what they want to do is take children who come from Christian homes and totally reorganize their minds, their feelings, their beliefs and turn them into little humanists, because, you see, the ... the battle of Christianity... against Christianity has to be waged against Christians. Well, adult Christians are not about to be influenced by these people, but they feel that since 85 percent of the Christians in America put their children in public schools, that by paganizing these children, creating little humanists, they can in two generations destroy the... the both of the Christian population and they will deal with the remnant as they did with the Davidians in Waco. You know, there will just not be too many left apparently. And I would assume that that seems to be their... their... their tactic.

Of course, this has created parental opposition in... in all of the country wherever it is being tried in Pennsylvania.

[ Scott ] Do the parents understand this is the goal?

[ Blumenfeld ] Well, yes. The awakened parents, Christian parents understand that this is the new world order. This is the new age. This is ... this is the gaya.

[ Scott ] Isn’t this what the Soviets tried to do?

[ Blumenfeld ] Well, you know what is interesting about the Soviets is that they wanted highly skilled engineers, technicians and so they got rid of progressive education. In 1931 the Communist party of the Soviet Union threw out the Dewey system. You see...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] Lenin’s wife {?}...

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] Put in the Dewey system.

[ Scott ] Oh.

[ Blumenfeld ] John Dewey and the progressives. His books were very widely circulated and they used the whole word method. Now the kids were becoming illiterate. They were having functional illiteracy in Russia and the Communist part became very alarmed because Stalin wanted to build the greatest war machine in the world. Well, you couldn’t do it with a bunch of functional illiterates. And so they threw out the entire Dewey system and they reinstated phonetic teaching of ... of reading and separate subject matter, you see. And the result is that they have a highly literate population. They were restricted in what they could read, but they could read. In other words, they could read Dostoevsky and they read Tolstoy and they could read whatever the Communist party permitted them to read.

[ Scott ] The Communist party here never seems to have learned that.

[ Blumenfeld ] Well, they have learned it. You see, what is good for the Soviet Union is not necessarily good for the United States, you see, because there they already had Communism.

[ Scott ] Yeah.

[ Blumenfeld ] So they needed a highly literate population. This country was still Capitalist. They have to dumb us down, continue to dumb us down until we can be totally controlled.

So here were our educators who were very much disappointed in what had happened in Russia. They knew all about it. They wrote about it, because I have... I have gone through the ... the documents and I have... I have seen what they have said. They were terribly disappointed. They knew that the system had failed in Russia.

[ Scott ] But they didn't care about it here.

[ Blumenfeld ] But they put it ... they then put it in the United States, you see.

[ Scott ] Well, then, they deliberately did it in order to keep the American kids from learning to read.

[ Blumenfeld ] Exactly. You see, that is one of the proofs that we have that this was all deliberate, because they knew it was failure from the experiment that failed in Russia. And then they deliberately put it in this country because the Dick and Jane books were brought in around 1930.

And so the Russian system is quite different. And, in fact, the teaching of reading throughout the eastern block was based on phonetics. And I think that one of the reasons why these... the Soviets were.... were able to throw off outward Communism, at least, was because they could read, you know? These people could read. They knew what was going on in the world.

Your average American youngster hasn’t the faintest idea what is going on anywhere in this world or any other world. I mean, you ask them very simple questions like when was the Civil War... when did the Civil War take place and they look at you. And they... well, did it happen after World War I or before World War I? They have no sense of chronology, nothing. But the Soviets went back to a strict subject matter chronological form of teaching, because they believed that Marxism was objective truth.

[ Scott ] Of course it wasn’t.

[ Blumenfeld ] Now also part of outcome based education is whole language. Whole language which is the... the worst form of teaching reading. It is... it is ... I call it deconstruction. In other words, in whole language the youngster constructs meaning. Do you know what that means he constructs meaning?

[ Scott ] No.

[ Blumenfeld ] It means he makes up whatever he wants to.

[ Scott ] Good God.

[ Blumenfeld ] In other words the text is irrelevant.

[ Scott ] The sentence means anything he wants it to mean.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes. Well, but... what limit is there, you know? If you tell a child to, you know, read it any way you want, to interpret it as you want, as a matte of fact, let me quote to you a definition of the... of whole language to give you a ... an idea that these people are serious. I mean, I am not talking about idiots. I am talking a... well, they are idiots, but I mean I... they are educators.

[ Scott ] They are educated idiots.

[ Blumenfeld ] Right. Here is their... here is their definition of... of whole language taken from a book entitled Whole Language: What is the Difference? Published in 1991, written by three whole language professors. They say, quote, “From a whole language perspective reading is a process of generating hypotheses in a meaning making transaction in a socio historical context.”

I am sure you have got that.

[ Murray ] Oh yes.

[ multiple voices ]

[ Blumenfeld ] Well, that... I am finished.

[ Scott ] Empty, empty sounds.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes. And then they go on. “As a transactional process, reading is not a matter of getting the meaning from text as if that meaning were in the text waiting to be decoded by the reader. Rather, reading is a matter of readers using the cues print provides and the knowledge they bring with them to construct a unique interpretation. Moreover that interpretation is situated. Readers’ creations, not retrievals of meaning with the text vary depending on their purposes of reading and the expectations of others in the reading event. This view of reading implies that there is no single correct meaning for a given text, only plausible meanings.”

[ Scott ] Well, yes. Well, then why do they need a text?

[ Blumenfeld ] Good question, a very good question.

[ Rushdoony ] Their attitude is, Otto, that the kind of writing you and I do imposes a meaning on the reader.

[ Scott ] Darn right.

[ Rushdoony ] And we are...

[ Scott ] It is darn right.

[ Rushdoony ] We are fascistic. We are dictatorial. We don’t allow them free play for their own interpretation. So you ... they have this kind of jargon which has very little meaning.

[ Scott ] Yes. It fits in with the argument now that if you express your belief, you are trying to push it down somebody’s throat.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] Well, you know, that... that may go on to say... they say, “Meaning is created for a transaction with whole meaningful texts. It is a transaction, not an extraction of the meaning from the print in the sense that the reader created meanings are an infusion of what the reader brings and what the text offers. In a transactional model, words do not have static meanings, rather they have meaning potentials and the capacity to communicate multiple meanings.”

[ Scott ] What a wonderful way of repeating ... who was it? Tweedle Dee or Tweedle Dum?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ... who said that words mean what I want them to mean. It is a question of who is to be master, you or the word.

[ Blumenfeld ] Right. Yes. So... So there you get... this... this is coming from professors of education. These are the people who now control the system and this is what children are being given.

[ Scott ] Gosh.

[ Blumenfeld ] ...in... in the schools. And you can imagine what kind of readers these kids are going to become, if they...

[ Scott ] Oh, they are not going to be readers at all.

[ Blumenfeld ] No. And they don’t teach phonics because phonics is verboten, because in whole language you must teach everything holistically and phonics breaks up things into tiny little...

[ Scott ] Letters.

[ Blumenfeld ] ...letters, right.

[ M Rushdoony ] Did the new education bill ban phonics?

[ Blumenfeld ] Well, it didn’t ban it. But it was very much against it. It... it sort of.... there was a statement in it in the policy statement saying that drill and rote memorization were bad, you see. And, of course, the only way you can learn to read phonetically is by rote and memorization and drill.

[ Rushdoony ] In my university days it was held that phonics slowed down readers.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yeah.

[ Rushdoony ] It tied them to the text.

[ Blumenfeld ] Oh, yes, yes. But now let me give you... now let me give you another quote. To give you... to give you an idea of what is behind this. Here are these teachers with this absurd, this absurd philosophy of reading. Now here is another professor. This is a Harvard professor, Anthony Ottinger who also happens to be a member of the council on foreign relations, it just so happens. He... and... he... he spoke to a.... he deals with communication. And he spoke to... at the executives of Northern Telecom a large, you know, communications, global communications organization and in 1981, a big corporation. Here are all these executives. Here is the professor talking to them. This is what he is saying, 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 do they acquire the skills necessary to solve their problems? Do we really want to teach people to do a lot of sums or write in a fine round hand when they have a five dollar hand held calculator or a word processor to work with? Or do we really have to have everybody literate, writing and reading in the traditional sense when we have the means with our technology to achieve a new flowering of oral communication? It is the traditional idea that says 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.

[ Scott ] We don’t need people who know how to read or... to read or write.

[ Blumenfeld ] Well, what he is saying is do we really have to have everybody literate?

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] In the traditional sense.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] When I...

[ Blumenfeld ] And everybody is saying some people have to, us, the elite, Harvard.

[ Rushdoony ] One of the first to advocate this position and it was in an essay in Harpers in the 50s said that perhaps a third or more of all the people in the country are not the literate type and do not need to know how to read.

[ Blumenfeld ] Well, apparently that idea is now the ...

[ Scott ] It is now...

[ Blumenfeld ] The... the gospel of the...

[ Scott ] Official policy.

[ Blumenfeld ] Oh, yeah, of the elite, of the elite. In fact, I will... I will give you another quote along the same lines made in 19787 by a man by the name of Thomas Dick who is now ... he is a specialist in adult literacy and he is now assistant to Robert Reich, the ... the, you know, secretary of labor.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] This is what Mr. Stick said in 1887. 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 its 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.”

[ Scott ] So, an end to the upward mobility of the American people. Let’s get some good coolies here.

[ Blumenfeld ] That is right. So what we are... what they are creating is a pyramidal society with an elite at the top, a university elite at the top with ... with brilliant people like Bill and Hillary at the very pinnacle of intelligence and... and, of course, George Stephanopoulos and others of... of ... in that category. And directly below them is the professional class, the CEOs, the managers.

[ Scott ] The scribes.

[ Blumenfeld ] Your friends in industry.

[ Scott ] Yes, well...

[ Blumenfeld ] Otto.

[ Scott ] The... this is a regression of about 3000 years.

[ Blumenfeld ] It is. It is. Well, you are getting to a pyramid.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] Where... that... isn’t that when the pyramids were built.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] And then below them is the hoi paloi, the masses.

[ Scott ] Right.

[ Blumenfeld ] The people who are being dumbed down.

[ Scott ] What {?} would called the {?}.

[ Blumenfeld ] That is right. And these people according to these elitists do not have to know how to read.

[ Scott ] That is right.

[ Blumenfeld ] As long as they can read comic books, you see, on a comic book level, they can, quote, function, in our society. In other words, the purpose of outcome based education is to produce people who can function.

[ Scott ] And who are not educated.

[ Blumenfeld ] And who are not educated. Exactly.

So that is what we have come to. That is what public education is today. That is what is being voted in every state legislature in the union including California.

[ Scott ] Do you suppose that the polysyllabic language that they are using has absolutely obscured the point of the meaning to the extent of the politicians don't understand what they are going along with?

[ Blumenfeld ] Well, the educators understand it, but you know politicians don’t do the work. It is their staff that does it. You know, some of these politicians certainly know what is going on. But I don’t think they understand it to the extent as, say, a person like myself does, who has doe a good deal of reading and research on this. Most of them would not even believe that this is going on.

[ Scott ] That is right.

[ Blumenfeld ] They would assume...

[ Scott ] It... it sounds Orwellian.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes, it is.

[ Scott ] It sounds so exaggerated.

[ Blumenfeld ] It is. It is. For example, your friends in industry...

[ Scott ] At Ashland...

[ Blumenfeld ] ... at Ashland who were...

[ Scott ] Oh, no, they... they themselves are not particularly literate.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yeah, but nevertheless they are backing the Kentucky Education Reform Act which has ... which has produced this situation in Kentucky where the scores are going down.

[ Scott ] Well, across America.

[ Blumenfeld ] ...where they are using whole language.

[ Scott ] It is very embarrassing.

[ Blumenfeld ] And... and the people in Kentucky are up in arms. I have a feeling that it won’t last for much longer, that the people are simply going to just throw it out. They are going to throw the legislators out.

[ Murray ] Yet there is article after article that industry is frustrated because they can’t find people who can do simple tasks, with an eight grade education.

[ Scott ] Can’t read.

[ Murray ] Can’t read, can’t do arithmetic. Can’t fill out ... read or understand a contract. And they are having in house education...

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Murray ] ... to try to bring them up to speed.

[ Blumenfeld ] Well, what they are going to find out in... in a couple of years is that this new fangled education reform program is not producing the workers they want. But there is another point. There is another aspect to this. You see, he talks about .... Stick talks about a labor force that can be managed and trained, not its general educational level. In other words, the Filipinos work very nicely. The Taiwanese, the people in Java were... you know, where all of these things are being made now by our American goods are being made in...

[ multiple voices ]

[ Scott ] Don’t forget. These are people who are citizens in an autocratic society.

[ Blumenfeld ] Right. Now the point is he is saying that why should we teach American kids all about the Constitution and American history because Filipinos don’t know about it. The Taiwanese don’t know about tit.

[ Scott ] No, they don’t.

[ Blumenfeld ] And look at the wonderful things they...

[ Scott ] Yeah.

[ Blumenfeld ] They don’t have to know it. So he is just saying all we need is a labor force that is managed and trained and that is what they are telling the big CEOs like professor Ottinger is telling the CEOs everybody doesn’t have to learn to read. And if the traditional view of literacy is old fashioned, you know, it is passé. And a lot of these CEOs are apparently buying it.

Now you explain to me why they are.

[ Scott ] Well...

[ Blumenfeld ] If you can, Otto.

[ Scott ] Well, the biggest rule of thumb right now for American corporations is don’t make waves.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Because the government regulations have become so enormous...

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ... so multidinous that any organized group that you get against you can cause you an awful lot of trouble. The NEA is a big organized group. And the press works hand in glove with the NEA. And so does the government.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Scott ] The department of education is involved with the NEA. And I am just doing the best as the devil’s advocate and saying that therefore the average public relations executive in a corporation feels that his job is to not make waves and to keep the company from making waves.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And at the same time to get along with any organized group that can make waves is his number one job. So therefore Ashland and other companies will go out of their way to go along with the equal employment provisions. They go... they went when these ... when the civil rights business first started they hired a... an executive to do nothing but placate the civil rights people.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And in this case they are placating what they consider part of the establishment, the educational establishment. And the chief executive does not look beyond that and does not look into that. His idea is that I delegated people to take care of that. Let them do it.

[ Blumenfeld ] Well, you know, of course, it is just sheer ignorance and they are slitting their own throats in a way.

[ Scott ] Well, it is ... it is a reflection, you might say, of specialization. The United States has turned into a country of specialized people, not a... not a country of educated people.

[ Blumenfeld ] Right.

[ Scott ] We have specialists, but we don’t have an educated elite.

[ Blumenfeld ] Well, we have an elite, but it isn’t educated.

[ Scott ] It is not educated.

[ Blumenfeld ] It is a... it is a power elite.

[ Scott ] It is a power elite. It is a specialist elite, but it is not an educated elite.

[ Blumenfeld ] As you say these people are not very literate.

[ Scott ] No they are not.

[ Blumenfeld ] These big CEOs.

[ Scott ] And they get very upset when you tell them that.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, it doesn’t do much good to tell people who will to see nor hear what the reality of our situation is. Our Lord said we are not to cast holy things before dogs, nor pearls before swine, lest they turn and rend you.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] And our Lord told his disciples when he first sent them out, two by two, that if they will not hear you, don't take time to try to persuade them. Shake the dust off your feet and move on. We are not to waste our time trying not tell things to people who will not hear. We are to speak to those who will hear.

[ Scott ] Well, a lot of people don't realize that it is a supreme courtesy to tell people your honest opinion. If it doesn't suit their statements, they are apt to take it as hostility.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Attempts to start an argument or whatever. They don’t take it as courtesy, but it is the ultimate courtesy.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] Well, I find that the ... the people who listen to me are the home schoolers, are the parents, basically. I don’t get any ... many teachers who are attending my lectures or my seminars. They are usually the home schoolers. And those are the people I talk to or other small groups.

See, the powers that be don't want to know. The... the big CEOs don't want to know. Arnold Simcus, a good friend of mine in ... in Michigan has done everything in his power to brig to the attention of prison wardens, CEOs, local legislators, selectmen, you name it about the reading problem. And everywhere he goes a big door is slammed in his face.

[ Scott ] Well, Archer...

[ Blumenfeld ] It is amazing and he has done everything possible to reach these people.

[ Scott ] I remember one executive saying to me one day, “Who reads?” And I said, “People who give orders to people like you.”

[ Blumenfeld ] Yeah. Well, now, you see, that was apparently these people are not that concerned about reading. They are saying, oh, they complain that these people can’t read. Well, then why aren’t they open to people like me, you see?

Let me give you an idea also of how dumbed down the nation is becoming just by citing two very simple statistics. You know, the SAT score, the SATs are taken by the best kids, the ones who are going to college. So now we are talking about those at the top. We are not talking about the dropouts. We are not talking about kids who are, you know, who are falling thought the cracks. The higher score that you can get in the SATs is between 750 and 800. Now in 1972 the number of youngsters who scored between 750 and 800 was 2817. In 1992 the number of students who scored at that level was down to 1371.

[ Scott ] Out of how many?

[ Blumenfeld ] Well, in ... in 1972 you had 1,088,223 students taking the test .

[ Scott ] And only 2000 hit on the top scores.

[ Blumenfeld ] Two thousand eight hundred and seventeen.

[ Scott ] Out of over a million.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes. And in 1992 you have 1,034,131 taking the... fewer taking the test and, of course, the number was down to 1371. So half as many. That is really dumbing down on an... on an incredible scale. I mean, we are losing our brains.

[ Scott ] Well...

[ Blumenfeld ] We are losing our brains.

[ Scott ] Well, you made the point that the corporate executives are not concerned to the extent that they say. Don’t forget that you cannot even be interviewed by the average 500 corporation, 500 Fortune corporation unless you have a degree. So they don’t generally run into the results of this.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yeah, yeah. You are right.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, the ones with degrees are often illiterate.

[ Scott ] They are not what they were.

[ Blumenfeld ] Oh, yeah.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] At one time a degree was an absolute guarantee of literacy.

[ Rushdoony ] The editor...

[ Scott ] That is not true anymore.

[ Rushdoony ] ...of a scientific journal not too many years ago told me that it was appalling to read the research papers he received, that many were illiterate. He could not even figure out what their point was, let lone find them to be a valid research paper. So people with PhDs do not have the ability to write intelligibly.

[ Blumenfeld ] And other... incidentally, another statistic from those SATs are concerning those at the very bottom, those youngsters who scored between 200 and 290. Now they say that you can get 200 by just signing your name.

[ Scott ] Practically, I am sure.

[ Blumenfeld ] Ok. In 1987 the number of youngsters who scored at that... at the... that low level was 123,470.

[ Scott ] A hundred and twenty-three thousand?

[ Blumenfeld ] Four hundred and seventy. And in 1993 it was up to 133,718.

[ Scott ] That is over 10 percent.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes. In other words, the ... the dumber... the dumb are getting dumber and the smart are getting dumber.

[ Scott ] Right.

[ Blumenfeld ] So you are having a dumbing down process throughout the entire system.

[ Scott ] You know that in ancient Rome toward the end and ending centuries, that is, they ran out of clerks.

[ Blumenfeld ] [ affirmative response ]

[ Scott ] That is one of the reasons they had to split the administration of the empire. They didn’t have enough people left that could write right. This is what we are going to run into.

[ Blumenfeld ] Well, we already have it, but they are saying, “Oh, well, we have got spell check and we have got computers.. and...” For... in a sense, the computers are sort of helping us get away with this, or helping the... the ...

[ Scott ] Cover up.

[ Blumenfeld ] ...cover it put by saying, well, we have got all these machines now. We don’t need these people. We don’t need readers any longer.

But what is going to happen is though you are going to... is you are going to have a small group of highly literate people who are going to run the country and then you are going to have all of these others who are going to envy, you know, like, the... like the underclass in Los Angeles.

[ Scott ] All right. You are going to run into something here, you know that the old slogan that the one eyed man is king of the blind. Well, that is not true.

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Scott ] The one eyed man is killed by the blind.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] H. G. Wells wrote a very telling story about that. I don’t believe it... he was killed, but he had to flee for his life.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes. Yes.

[ Scott ] I didn’t... I didn't read that.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] But that has been my observation.

[ Blumenfeld ] But, in any case, it is these facts that are ... that are forcing thousands of parents to take their kids out of the public schools and put them into private schools and to home school them. So we expect that the home school movement is just going to grow exponentially as these... as these reform bills are passed by the state legislatures. And they seem to be passing because of pressure.

[ Scott ] From...

[ Blumenfeld ] ...from above, from the federal government.

[ Scott ] From the NEA.

[ Blumenfeld ] From the NEA.

[ Scott ] The department of education.

[ Blumenfeld ] The Carnegie Foundation.

[ Scott ] Carnegie.

[ Blumenfeld ] You see, you have these Carnegie carpet baggers going from state to state getting the elite in the state to impose this. This has been going on for quite some time. And they are getting... they have gotten away with it. For example, in... in Kentucky where there is... there is growing opposition the state still is enforcing KERA, Kentucky Education Reform Act and, in fact, they even have set up a kind of internal Gestapo that ... of ...

[ Scott ] Operates... where does it operate?

[ Blumenfeld ] Out of Louisville, you know, out of...

[ Scott ] That means... does it operate among... in the schools?

[ Blumenfeld ] Oh, yeah. They...

[ Scott ] School districts?

[ Blumenfeld ] Right. They have... they... as a matter of fact the ... they have a committee called the Pritchard Committee which is a committee of the elite and they have received a grant from the Carnegie Foundation to ... in order to hire monitors to go to each school district to make sure that this... this reform is being carried out. And Ashland Petroleum Oil.... or... is Ashland Coal or whatever it is these days, oil, is one of them on the Pritchard Committee, one of the sponsors.

So here you have a new sort of Gestapo coming in to play on America.... in the schools of America’s.... parents are finding this out. They are getting very upset and they are...

[ Scott ] Well...

[ Blumenfeld ] They are going not be... there is going to be a tremendous exodus from the public schools.

[ Scott ] Well, now that you bring the matter up, we do know that even somebody like myself who is far on the sidelines that the courts were long ago convinced of the value of our public schools because they used to abuse parents.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yeah.

[ Scott ] And accuse them of abusing their children for not putting them in public schools. It is truancy is now a crime. It was a crime when I was boy.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes. But... Well, that is... that is the way things are. The... the goal, of course, is the new world order. It is going to be a socialist, pagan new world order. And I think we have confirmation of that, of the... of the whole trend toward the new world order from Quigley, from Malachi Martin, from Norman Dodd and from the ... what we have discovered now about the Rhodes secret society and all of these ... and the use of the Rhodes’ scholarship as a means of ...

[ Scott ] That is the elite.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes. ... of... of finding selecting those young people who will be the elite controllers of tomorrow. And they are already in the White House, already in the White House.

[ Rushdoony ] I think I should cite here again what I reported to you earlier. John Lofton’s comment that the theme song of our leaders is: Give me that old time irreligion. And that is what they are working for, irreligion.

[ Blumenfeld ] Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

[ Scott ] Well, of course, they have... they don't have an homogenized country to do this in. You have ... you have a Muslim group in the country which is on the verge of exceeding in population the Jewish group. And ...

[ Rushdoony ] Thanks to the state department and its policies.

[ Scott ] That is right. They are not going to go abandon their religion very easily. They haven’t in the past and they are not likely to do it here.

[ Blumenfeld ] Well, you know, this whole business of... of religion as... they are going to use the schools to take care of the kids. They are not... they forget... they know they can’t convert the adults.

[ Murray ] Yeah.

[ Blumenfeld ] They are dealing with the children and now they are accelerating this whole paganization process in the schools themselves.

[ Scott ] Do they think that that will swap?

[ Blumenfeld ] Right, right.

[ Scott ] The minorities.

[ Blumenfeld ] Right. Now, you know there have been an awful lot of... of ... of speculation on who controls... who is the controlling group behind this? Why is everything moving in this direction? People say it is the council on foreign relations. It is the illuminati. It is the ... the masons. There are all sorts of theories. I think in the last couple of years we have been able to sort of zero in on who are the controllers and I believe that basically this Rhodes secret society. I have come to the conclusion that they control the foundations, particular the Carnegie Foundation. And there was an article in the New York Times when... when Rhodes died, March 26th, 1902. The headline read, “Mr. Rhodes’ ideal of Anglo Saxon greatness, statement of his aims written for W. T. Stead in 1890.” He believed a wealthy secret society should work to secure the world’s peace and a British American federation. And Stead quoted copiously from ... from Rhodes’ own writings.

[ Scott ] Well Rhodes was dealing with a world in which the Anglo Saxons were dominant at that time.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And possessed the dominant influence in terms of the finance.

[ Blumenfeld ] That is true.

[ Scott ] Today the financial world has broken free of the Anglo Saxons and every other group. They are almost... you know, we have 22,000 currency speculators, professional currency speculators.

[ Blumenfeld ] Right.

[ Scott ] Who operate electronically and they exceed all national and ethical and religious boundaries. It is... we can no longer say .... now I mean like the anti Semites accuse the Jewish minority of controlling international finance. Well, it was never really true and it is not true now.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Rhodes is... what I am saying is that Rhodes’ concept was too narrow, was... was conceived in a rather narrow and... and controlled...

[ Blumenfeld ] Oh, yeah, yeah.

[ Scott ] ... day of his time. And that now I don’t really see the financial world aiming at any sort of ...

[ Blumenfeld ] No it may not...

[ Scott ] ...thing.

[ Blumenfeld ] It ... it ... it probably will not come to pass.

[ Scott ] No. I don’t think it will.

[ Blumenfeld ] The point is that they all have already have already accumulated so much power and so much money that ... and they are headed toward this new world order, this paganized, socialized new world order. It is no longer controlled by the original ...

[off mic voice]

[ Scott ] No, it is not.

[ Blumenfeld ] ...formulators of this, but the... the point is to see how it started and what was the ideas in their... in their heads.

[ Scott ] Right, well...

[ Blumenfeld ] As far as Rhodes’ head.

[ Scott ] Well, the kind of... of mentality that put together these great fortunes in the first place, Carnegie, et cetera, is not present in the... in the secretariat that manages the fund.

[ Blumenfeld ] No. Of course not.

[ Scott ] The... the people who manage those funds, the Carnegie funds and so forth and I have met some of them.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yeah.

[ Scott ] And so have you, including the secretariat of the CFR, simply are not very bright people.

[ Blumenfeld ] Well...

[ Scott ] And this is why they are taking us down into these stupidities.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes. Well, let me just quote from this article just briefly to give you an idea. It said, “Mr. Rhodes added, ‘The only thing feasible to carry out this idea, this idea of world government, is a secret society gradually absorbing the wealth of the world.’”

[ Scott ] Only somebody as stupid as Woodrow Wilson would believe this.

[ Blumenfeld ] “...to be devoted to such an object.” And then he says, “There is Baron Hirsch. With 20 millions very soon to cross the unknown border and struggling in the dark to know what to down with this money. And so one might go on ad ifinitum.”

In other words, he convinced the rich: Don’t leave your money to your dissolute heirs. Put it into this wonderful scheme that is going to save mankind, you see? And then he says, “Fancy the charm to young America just coming on and dissatisfied for they have filled up their own country and do not know what to tackle next. To share in a scheme to take the government of the whole world.”

[ Scott ] Well, this is like a sorcerer’s apprentice after the masters die.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Now we have got the U N and we have got Boutros Boutros whatever his name is.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yeah.

[ Scott ] And the rest of those idiots, the ones in Brussels who are putting up a great big paper labyrinthine plot to control all Europe, as if anybody could control Italians alone, let alone speak of Europe.

But we are ...what you are dealing with here is that you are dealing with the idiocies and the mischief that they are really creating.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yeah.

[ Scott ] No matter where they think they are going, they are actually doing all this damage.

[ Blumenfeld ] Oh, of course, they are.

[ Scott ] And that is... that is the central point.

[ Blumenfeld ] Look at the damage that the Communists did in Russia.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] I mean 75 years of Communism, what did they have to show for it? An impoverished nation.

[ Scott ] That is right.

[ Blumenfeld ] Total loss of morals.

[ Scott ] Right.

[ Blumenfeld ] And morality.

[ Scott ] Right.

[ Blumenfeld ] You know, and ...

[ Scott ] And obstruction of...

[ Blumenfeld ] And millions and millions of children of individuals, human beings wiped out.

[ Scott ] Right.

[ Blumenfeld ] Here is another interesting quote. “But towards securing this millennium,” this is from the New York Times, “Mr. Rhodes believed the most important factor would be a secrete society organized like Loyola’s, supported by the accumulated wealth of those whose aspiration is a desire to do something and who would be spared the hideous annoyance, daily created by the though to which of their incompetent relations they should leave their fortunes. These wealthy people, Mr. Rhodes thought, would thus be greatly relieved and be able to turn their ill gotten or inherited gains to some advantage,” unquote.

[ Scott ] Well...

[ Blumenfeld ] What an incredible scheme, you see.

[ Scott ] Well, you know, money alone will not hold people together.

[ Blumenfeld ] No. No, of course not.

[ Scott ] It wouldn’t hold them together any more than it held any body else together.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Scott ] You have to have a higher value. You have to have a spiritual value to make life and effort worthwhile.

[ Blumenfeld ] Do you know that Rhodes also was... was involved in ... he helped create the Boer War. Rush, you are familiar with the Boer War.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] And it is interesting that the Socialists in Britain were on ...

[ Scott ] They were on...

[ Blumenfeld ] ... the {?} side. They were not on the Boer’s side. And I will explain. Here is... here is from a book called The Fabians. It says, “Apart from out and out imperialists, many liberals and a significant section of the Fabian Society could not tolerate the Boers whom they saw as reactionary religious fundamentalists standing in the way of progress.”

[ Scott ] Oh, you didn’t treat the blacks right. That was their propaganda.

[ Blumenfeld ] Right.

[ Scott ] They were.... they did this ... the Boer war was to help the blacks.

[ Blumenfeld ] Well, the...

[ Scott ] The gold and the jewels were just a side ... a side issue.

[ Blumenfeld ] They were attracted to the ruthless autocratic milliner who had a mystical belief in Britain’s imperial destiny.

[ Scott ] Which was interesting.

[ Blumenfeld ] And civilized...

[ Scott ] {?} German.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yeah. And in the civilizing power of the superior British race.

So you could see their Dalton’s eugenics, Darwin, an entire confluence of all these idiotic ideas and, of course, even Carnegie admitted that it was Darwin that made him get rid of theology.

You know, that theology meant nothing to him.

[ Scott ] Oh, sure.

[ Blumenfeld ] .... after he... he became a Darwinist.

[ Scott ] Well, Darwin killed God.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yeah.

[ Scott ] And he also brought in racial superiority.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...which nobody seems to want to talk about.

[ Blumenfeld ] Well, the other point, the reason why I bring this up is because the Rhodes’ scholarships have become suspect now that we have a president who as a Rhodes’ scholar. We have got congressmen and senators who are Rhodes’ scholars. We have Rhodes’ scholars like {?} Talbot, Ira Magaziner, others, you know, marbleized throughout these...

[ Scott ] Well, it his fraternity.

[ Blumenfeld ] ...administration.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yeah.

[ Scott ] This is Clinton’s fraternity, but...

[ Blumenfeld ] George Stephanopoulos is a Rhodes’ scholar.

[ Scott ] I think... I think I have said this to you before privately and that is that I think the reason that Clinton went with the Communists when he was in Oxford was that he thought they were going to win. He believed in the inevitable victory of Socialism which was the shibboleth of that particular time. Once the... it became obvious that they did to win, he nevertheless continues to believe that the liberal ideology of the United States which believes in organizing everybody is... intellectually and socially and ethically will win.

[ Blumenfeld ] Right.

[ Scott ] Will win.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yeah.

[ Scott ] So he still believes in a method although he believes in the people who invented the method didn’t succeed with it. But this is fundamentally a man without any true belief at all. He simply wants to be swimming with the other fish.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes, yes. Well, it is... it is... you have to ask yourself. How do we deal with this situation?

[ Scott ] Well, your... your... your exclamations of the campaign to destroy the ability to read is hitting at the very heart.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Scott ] You are really hitting at the very heart. If you are... if your message was to be broadcast to the whole country over international TV for a few weeks you would change the country.

[ Blumenfeld ] Oh, yes, but that is why I am prevented from doing so.

[ Scott ] Yeah.

[ Blumenfeld ] You know, I haven’t gotten any calls from Oprah Winfrey or from Phil Donahue or any of the people who control the outlets to the national media.

[ Scott ] Well, can you... can you get to Limbaugh, that would help.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yeah, yeah, but he is... he is not too keen on ...

[ Scott ] This is too esoteric for him.

[ Blumenfeld ] ...secret societies.

[ Scott ] Yeah.

[ Blumenfeld ] ...and conspiracies and generally I don't like to discuss these things, but, you know, you have to. You... you can’t ignore them. And, of course, there is a whole book on the subject. Quigley wrote The Anglo American Establishment...

[ Scott ] Yes, that is right.

[ Blumenfeld ] ... which is a documented...

[ Scott ] Well, it is a...

[ Blumenfeld ] ... exposé of this entire cabal.

[ Scott ] I have...

[ Blumenfeld ] ...everything they have been doing since the... it was started back in 1902 after ....

[ Scott ] Yeah.

[ Blumenfeld ] Rhodes’ death.

[ Scott ] I cribbed a lot of it from my South African book.

[ Blumenfeld ] Oh, well, there you are.

[ Scott ] And, of course, that went underneath the waves very quickly. It was the only book I ever wrote that wasn’t reviewed across the country.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes. Now here is a man... here is a ... a... here is a... a historian, an eminent historian who writes a book about contemporary history I which he reveals the existence of this ... he calls it a group.

[ Scott ] Yeah, fair enough.

[ Blumenfeld ] I like cabal, of a conspiracy. And he wrote this... he revealed it in this huge tome and it was published by Macmillan.’

[ Scott ] Tragedy and Hope.

[ Blumenfeld ] Tragedy and Hope and so he had access to its papers. He said, “I …” He said, “The only thin... the only object... the only objection I have to what they are doing is that they want to remain secret.” He said, “They ought to come clean and tell the American people what they are doing, because what they are doing is very noble. They want world peace.”

[ Scott ] And this was Mr. Clinton’s professor.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes. Strange that you should bring that up.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I read Quigley and I wouldn’t contest any of his facts. But I think the heart of the matter is not what they intended to do, but what is the governing faith of our time?

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] Is it a belief in God and his law or a belief in man and man’s acts? I would say that tens and hundreds of millions of people around the world would agree with Quigley that these things are wonderful, that man has to do it all. So I don’t think Quigley’s book even though it got such tremendous notice...

[ Scott ] Not really. Underground notice.

[ Rushdoony ] No, yes, underground notice. Really made a nickel’s worth of difference.

[ Scott ] Because in any event it is an impossibility.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes, but also it is a question of faith. And if people are going to believe in man and the state as their savior, they are going to be sucker for any group that comes along.

[ Scott ] Well, this is the oldest series of ideas in the world. James I wanted to sit down with the pope and settle the affairs of the world. Woodrow Wilson wanted to settle the affairs of the world alone, by himself, without even the pope. And we have got the U N, Mr. Franklin Roosevelt wanted to settle everything in the world and these people. But the people that Sam is talking about have created as much damage... maybe they will create more damage here than the Communists.

[ Blumenfeld ] Oh, yes.

[ Scott ] Because the... what they are doing is that they are going to create an illiterate America.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, you are right. It is damages that they will create just as Plato with his Republic.

[ Scott ] Exactly.

[ Blumenfeld ] Exactly.

[ Rushdoony ] ...created damage to the...

[ Scott ] It is a great analogy.

[ Rushdoony ] ... to the present. But it never was able to establish an order, never.

[ Scott ] Oh, no.

[ Rushdoony ] Because it is impossible.

[ Scott ] No, but a disorder they can do.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes. The point is I don’t... I don’t believe that they will succeed. None of these utopian plans have ever succeeded.

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Blumenfeld ] Because they are based on false premises, on lies. So they are not going to succeed. But it is the damage that they do. That is so...

[ Scott ] Well, look at the damage they have already done.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yeah.

[ multiple voices ]

[ Scott ] We have got... we have got children or young people, not just children... I am very impressed by the home school parents, because they themselves came out of public schools at a time when the public schools were no good.

[ Blumenfeld ] That is right.

[ Scott ] And the fact that they are smart enough to realize it and to pull their kids out of it and to struggle to educate themselves as well as their kids....

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Is a wonderful thing.

[ Rushdoony ] I have seen home school mothers who started out barely able to write a sentence who are now highly literal or literate as they have taught their children.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] The change is dramatic. I can think of one or two cases where I was frightened to think that the children were going to be taught by such mothers. And yet today the mother is reading very superior materials.

[ Scott ] Well, if an adult decides to learn then they can do it very speedily.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

Well, our time is up now. 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.