From the Easy Chair

The Relationship of Look

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 195-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161Q29

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161Q29, The Relationship of Look, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 118, March the 24th, 1986.

This evening I have with me one of our Chalcedon staff members, Samuel L. Blumenfeld, author of a number of very important works, most recently his two books on education Is Public Education Necessary? and NEA: Trojan Horse in American Education have been reprinted.

During the past year and a half Sam has been talking all over the United States and, in fact, as far afield as Alaska where he was with John Lofton last year in May or June.

[ Blumenfeld ] It was October.

[ Rushdoony ] October, yes. But the meeting was set up, wasn’t it...

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] ... in May? Where they had, as elsewhere, an excellent reception.

Sam, it is good to have with us for this Easy Chair. And I would like to have you discuss a subject that when we were together in Chicago recently you dealt with, something I feel is very important, the relationship of our education today, the look say method, John Dewey and then progressive education trinity to idolatry.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes. Well, first let me simply say that John Dewey... it... it was John Dewey’s job to create a new curriculum for the public schools which would educate children to become little Socialists instead of little Individualists and... and believers in God. And they had to devise a way of ... of not only changing American public education so that they could create a socialist society in the United States, but they also wanted a lower literacy in America, dumb down the American people, so to speak, because in a Socialist society you have an elite at the top that does all of the thinking for everybody else. And high literacy produces individuals or with... with sufficient intelligence so that they can stand on their own two feet and think for themselves.

And Dewey considered high literacy to be an obstacle to Socialism. And so these men, these progressives decided that they would have to do something to lower literacy in the United States. They had to give the American people the impression that they were educating the children while at the same time dumbing them down.

Well, the put their minds to the problem. These men were the world’s top psychologists and they decided to teach children to read English as if it were Chinese, reverting back to a hieroglyphic or an ideographic writing system. And, of course, this fit right in with John Dewey’s basic ideas about education. For example, he said in his My Pedagogic Creed that “I believe that the image is a great instrument of instruction.” And the image, as you know, is... is associated with idolatry, with the pre biblical writing. When I... when I talk to... talk to audiences, I point out to them that the invention of the alphabet was very crucial to man’s spiritual development, because as soon as the alphabet was invented the Scripture began to appear. And why did that happen? Well, because man had to wait until the alphabet was invented before the Word of God could be put on paper. God communicates with the human race through the Word and not though the image.

God did not give Moses a comic book.

And ... but Moses wrote down the 10 Commandments in alphabetic writing. Now the alphabet was invented about 2000 years before the birth of Christ and prior to that, the forms of writing that existed, the earliest form, of course, was pictography, which is symbols which were like the things they represent, as in the cave men’s drawings. You didn’t have to go to school to learn how to read that sort of writing. But then as civilization became more complex the scribes had to invent little pictures to represent ideas and things that were very difficult to depict. So how did you draw a picture of something that could not be depicted?

For example, take a concept like the word accept or accept or demand. How do you draw a picture of those things? You can’t. And so they drew little pictures of things that did not look like anything they represented. Well, and they became known as ideographs or Egyptian hieroglyphics. And, as you know, it took centuries before scholars were able to decipher, decode Egyptian hieroglyphics. They were only able to do that when they discovered the Rosetta Stone. And then you had Egyptian hieroglyphics on one side and Greek writing on the other. And they were finally able to find out what the ideographs stood for.

The important thing about ideographic writing is that these symbols stand for ideas, but not for the spoken word. The spoken word is used to interpret the symbol.

And we use them ... in... in modern life, for example. We are very familiar one of the... of the circle with the cigarette in it and the slash through it, which could be interpreted as meaning no smoking, thou shalt not smoke, {?}, {?}, {?}. In other words, language used to interest the symbol. So the symbol is not a precise, accurate means of communication. But the alphabet, the invention of the alphabet was based on a very remarkable discovery and that is that all of human language is composed of a small number of irreducible speech sounds. And the... the man who made that discovery, I suppose, decided that why not replace all of these thousands and thousands of little pictures and symbols with a ... with a very small number of letters standing for the irreducible speech sounds of the language and then we would have a means of transcribing the spoken word into a written form and then the means of translating it back into spoken form.

The most important thing about alphabetic writing is that it is a precise, accurate means of transcribing the spoken word and, thus, man for the first time, had the means of putting God’s word on paper in a form that could be reproduced and handed down through the ages so that you have an incredible, high degree of accuracy. For example in... in... in the Bible since the... the ... the very first manuscript was put down they have found... they have found very little variation as far back as the oldest texts that they can find. And, of course, another interesting point is that man is the only species that uses language. Now why is that? Of course, the behavioral psychologists tell us that man’s language is simply verbal behavior, that it is a further development of animal communication. It is a further development of the bark and the meow and the chirp and the growl. But I believe that the reason why man speaks is because God wanted to communicate with his creation. And, as you know, Rush, God had conversations with Adam in the Garden of Eden. And so God gave man the ability to speak because he wanted a means of communicating with him.

And, of course, after the fall there was that long period in which man was swept away in sin, but then God began his reconciliation with man, first with Noah and after the flood, of course, there was the ... the covenant made with Noah. And then after that the covenant made with Abraham which shows us further desire on God’s part for a reconciliation with man and then, finally, of course, sending his Son to... to this earth to provide salvation to the... for all of mankind, which is the, you might say, the final stage of reconciliation that we have. But the Bible, the... the... the invention of the Bible and the use of... of... of the alphabet, I mean, the invention of the alphabet was very crucial in that whole reconciliation.

[ Rushdoony ] How many basic sound are there in human speech? And how many pictographs are there, for example, in Chinese?

[ Blumenfeld ] Well, there are about 50,000 pictographs in Chinese. And, as a matter of fact, you he to learn at least 5000 of them in order to read a Chinese newspaper. Recently when the United Nations was celebrating its 40th anniversary they had a TV crew go behind the scenes to take pictures of the translators. And one of them stopped in front of the Chinese translator who was seated in front of a Chinese type writer. And, Rush, how many keys do you think a Chinese typewriter has?

[ Rushdoony ] I don’t know, but more than I could master.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes. One thousand keys.

[ Rushdoony ] Oh, my.

[ Blumenfeld ] And it shows... and it is a very cumbersome, difficult system to master.

[ Rushdoony ] No portable Chinese typewriters.

[ Blumenfeld ] No. Not at the... not at the moment. I... I imagine the Japanese will invent a portable Chinese typewriter. But, in any case, I would say there were probably about 100 sounds that they human ... that human speech makes if you include all languages. In English we only have 44 sounds. And I would assume there are some sounds which are simply not used in... in English that are used in other languages around the world, but probably no more than 100 sounds in all of human speech.

And so it didn't’ take very... you know, very many symbols to... to ... to designate those sounds.

[ Rushdoony ] And since not every language has all those sounds, it means that a limited number of letters...

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] ...can convey a language very clearly.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] ...with a little bit of duplication in some alphabets as in English.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes. We have a 26 letter alphabet to stand for 44 sounds. Incidentally, Rush, I always ask the question to every audience. I always ask them if they know how many sounds there are in English, how many irreducible speech sounds. I very seldom ever get a correct answer. And that is because Americans in general have been so poorly educated in the very basics of their own reading system. You know, they don’t even know how many sounds the are in English. They all know there are 26 letters.

Now the reason why we have a 26 letter alphabet, of course, is because the ... when the Romans conquered the British Isles, they imposed the Latin alphabet on the Anglo Saxon speaking peoples. And so this has created some problems for English speaking people, but they are not insurmountable problems. In other words, some of our letters stand for more than one sound. However, there are alphabets which are... have a perfect letter and sound correlation as I believe Armenian does.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] ... which is a... a... from what you have told me, Rush, was ... was very purposefully created to do exactly that, you see. And there have been attempts to create a new English alphabet. But they have never succeeded because by creating a new alphabet and a new writing system for English we would produce readers incapable of reading the hundreds and hundreds of years of literature that have been written into the old orthography and the traditional orthography.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, it is interesting how the alphabet is less and less known.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] ...in schools. A week ago or less than a week ago, Dorothy and I were in the home of some very dear friends, very strong supporters of Chalcedon. The man of the house, the young man was an outstanding student at the university and on the dean’s list. But he said it was not until he left the university that he learned how to use a dictionary, because he never knew the alphabet.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] Mastering a card file was a major problem for him. And, of course, I encountered this when I was a graduate student at Berkeley because the newer, the younger students coming in did not know how to use a card file because they had never learned the alphabet.

Now I think it is very significant and, of course, I am just stating what I have heard you say. The Bible calls Christ the Word of God.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] He expresses God. And we are given the Word of God, the Bible, as against images of God. We are forbidden in the 10 Commandments to try to represent God in images. But as Dewey said in that quote you read...

[ Blumenfeld ] He says...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] Let me go... “I believe that the image is the great instrument of instruction.”

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. I think it was you who cited this, but I have heard many such illustrations that for these look say progressive educators and a child reading a word P O N Y he doesn't read it P O N Y, is told, “That is a pony.”

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] But if he reads it as horse, it is correct in the eyes of the teachers.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes. Because he is seeing the picture. And it is interesting that Dewey.... that Dewey and his fellow psychologists, behavior psychologists should have even believed that... I ... I don’t really believe that Dewey believed that the images are a great instrument of instruction. We know that it is the word. Man learns by the word through language and not the image. The image, as a matter of act, is a very poor imitation. But, you know, it is interesting that in... in... in Saint John where it says, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God,” you have the equation of God and the Word. And I interpret it as meaning—and you correct me if I am wrong, Rush—as meaning that the ... that the Word is very important.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] ... to God. And that is the means of his creation, because how did... how did God create the universe? He didn’t hire a contractor. And he didn’t draw a set of blue prints. He simply said, “Let there be light,” and in those words was creation.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] And, of course, man’s... man’s use of language as a similar kind of power in prayer, because prayer is man’s means of... of reaching God. Man does not draw pictures. He does not send God little pictures. He speaks to God directly through ... through the voice, through the Word and the Word reaches God just as radio signals reach human beings.

It is interesting when ... if you use a radio on a table and it is shut off it won’t receive any words. You have got to turn it on and then you receive the Word.

[ Rushdoony ] To me one of the most interesting things in the history of this century is the fact that because we have given the image priority over the Word, it is the avant garde modern artist who sees himself as the true prophet of the modern age.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] And it was one such painter whose famous paining Nude Descending a Staircase an abstract, Marcel Duchamp.

[ Blumenfeld ] That is right.

[ Rushdoony ] ... who finally felt that there was only one way to eliminate God and meaning from the world and that was to create a language in which there was no propositional truth, because our words are a propositional.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] They denote a particular meaning. And he said all current languages, because they have propositional truth in every word, point to God and we have got to have a non theistic language. But that would mean a language in which no word meant anything. And he kept trying for years and years, spent the latter part of his life trying to find out how he could have a substitute for a language which pointed to God. And he finally had to confess failure, spent the rest of his life playing chess. He had the means to win.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] So I think that is an eloquent witness to the centrality of language, because Duchamp saw the fact that words point to meaning. They tell us the world is a world of meaning, that it is God created, that God has written propositional truth into all creation.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes. You know, the interesting thing about the... about the look say method is it also.... also is that they use the techniques of Pavlovian conditioning to teach children to read...

[ Rushdoony ] Oh, good point.

[ Blumenfeld ] ... to read the Dick and Jane books, the constant repetition and the use of these rather silly sentences like see ... see Spot run and see, see and look, look and that sort of thing. And, of course, when you are teaching children to read as if they are dogs, you are going to get some very strange results because children are not dogs. You see, when a dog enters the first grade all that a dog can say is arf, arf. And let us assume that that dog is then socially promoted in our progressive school and comes to the end of his career and at the end... and at ... in the 12th grade and holds out his paw for a diploma. What can he say when he looks up into the principal’s eyes, but arf, arf?

But a human child comes to school at the... in the first grade with a speaking vocabulary between 5000 and 35,000 words. Children begin teaching themselves to speak their own language virtually at birth. I mean, very soon after they are born they have this innate capacity to use sound symbols, to integrate sound symbols. And you find very young children can understand about God and religion.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] At the earliest time in life they can grasp these concepts. As a matter of fact, in the earliest primers that were used in this country when they were teaching alphabet the first letter A was taught in Adam’s fall, we sinned all.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] Which is much more eloquent and full of meaning than see Spot run.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] But, you see, what they have done in the teaching of reading they have removed all of that and it is to the credit of the Puritans that they knew that they could teach these things to a four year old or a five year old.

[ Rushdoony ] As a matter of fact, Sam, the mother would very commonly teach the child the alphabet at about two or three by tracing the letters in the hearth in the ashes. And as late as about 1850, some years ago, at the Stanford Education Library I found manuals recommending that a mother teach her child to read before the child starts school.

[ Blumenfeld ] But, Rush, you know, that was common that the child had to know how to read before he went to school.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] It was expected that a child would know how to read and to write before entering school. And it was only when the Unitarians took over that they demanded that the schools also embrace the primary subjects. That was considered something for the home to take care of. And that came later with the public school movement, this extension of the public school into the primary grades.

[ Rushdoony ] One of the things that interests me and a professor of philology when I was a student told me this was not uncommon, was something that occurred in my own family. Two of my cousins, Richard and Paul, are identical twins. And from before the time they learned to speak at somewhere around the age of two, they had developed their own language and would communicate one to the other and they continued that language for purely private communication until they were well along in school. It was their personal language. And I understand that is not uncommon with twins who are very close, which indicates how at an age we don’t realize, because we are created in the image of God, we have the capacity for speaking, for verbalizing our thoughts.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes, but... that makes a big difference. But the... the other important thing about the look say method is not only does it promote idolatry and.... and... and an idolatrous view of... of the world, but also it promotes functional illiteracy.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] It creates, it destroys the... the youngster’s ability to use his mind, because what that... that method was created to destroy a child’s ability to develop language, not only reading. And I am sure that you are aware that many of these youngsters who have these reading problems have very poor vocabulary.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] They can... they can barely, you know, express themselves. And that is because this... this method of... of teaching reading produces learning blockages that deliberately retard not only the child’s growth, but sometimes the child will even go backwards to an earlier period in his life. And so they are... they are... they are thwarted and I would say they are mentally destroyed. They are crippled for life.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] ...crippled by this technique. And I... I.... I have... I have encountered adults who come to me, you know, after, after I have lectured and come up to me and tell me that they are victims of this and they want to be able to change and ... and... and the thing that you find out about them is that they have ... they have suffered all their lives with this horrible handicap, not having been taught to read correctly. And yet our schools keep doing it even today. And for example here in California in 1981 the ... the school book, the text book adoption committee adopted all look say textbooks for all of the elementary schools in California, guaranteeing that millions of children would become learning disabled well into the 21st century.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, the only hope, of course, is the Christian school and the home school movement.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] As against this. I think one of the problems it is creating among the many is that since we are created in the image of God and we are created to speak, to talk with God, to communicate with him, it limits our ability to function as human beings one with another and also with God.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] It means that today verbal crutches, you know, you see...

[ Blumenfeld ] That is right.

[ Rushdoony ] ... are increasingly common as people try to substitute something for verbalization.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] Because they cannot verbalize. I think one of the disasters, here, too, that I have seen in my lifetime, when I was in school, first, one of the most marvelous things was that our generation, Dorothy’s and mine, were up with a feel for the richness, the variety and the music of language so that we knew poetry. We loved it. Within five or six years that was gone in the schools.

[ Blumenfeld ] Oh, yes.

[ Rushdoony ] And now poetry to all practical intent is dead.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] Dorothy to this day can recite a great deal of poetry, remember entire sections of Lowell’s “The Vision of sir Launfal,” which was still taught when we were in school, because we were in more rural settings, at least I was. And this sort of thing still more or less governed our education, books like Mill on the Floss and...

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] ... and all were read in grade school as well as Dickens. And that older literature which while sometimes very slow going because the authors were never in a hurry, respected the cadence of language.

[ Blumenfeld ] Oh, yes, the beauty of language.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] ...was very important.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, to continue, Sam, with this matter of the loss of beauty, of cadence, of appeal in language, language as itself a gift, one of the things that I find most interesting is this. when I was a boy in school in the early years, one of the problems that the teachers faced and one that was a problem with me at home was that when I got a new textbook it was so interesting that I went home and I spent the rest of the evening into the night reading it. And, at first, the kerosene lamp was blown and taken out of the room so I couldn’t read and later on the light bulb was taken out. And I was not alone in that. That was common place when I went to school, because the text book was so interesting.

[ Blumenfeld ] Oh, yes, yes. As a matter of fact, I ... I remember as... as a youngster in... in New York City in the early 30s I fell in love with Paradise Lost by Milton, with all the great English poets. And, of course, the ... the Bible, you know, the King James... which I don’t know of any of the work in the English language that is quite as beautiful and of... full of incredible content, great spiritual content as the Bible and yet isn’t it interesting that in public schools today not only is the bible not read or forbidden to be read, but the kind of books the children are given to read today are so inane, so poorly written. They are written by professors of education who have to have a, you know, a certain number of social qualities to the... to the book, to their text.

There are no... no real learning takes place, Rush, in any of these books any longer. There is nothing of... of any use in the content.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, even then they feel the material is too advanced for the children and they are continually simplifying it. And yet when I started school there was no one in my class that I can recall, except possibly one boy, whose language at home was English. They were predominantly Scandinavian and a scattering of others. We all had a home language that was not English. In my cousin’s school, because he was a mile further out we walked into town to school. There were no school buses until much later. He walked two miles to a two teacher, two room school, grades of one through eight. And in that school, again, no one whose mother tongue was English. They studied Milton before they had finished the eighth grade. They read Mill on the Floss and Adam Bede and they were introduced to Shakespeare, all of that in grade school.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes, yes. And that was the same in New York City, Rush, because all of my friends in school came from the same kind of background as I did, from the homes of... of Jewish immigrants where the language at home was Yiddish and yet all of us took to English like ducks to water.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] I mean we loved it. We loved the language. We loved the poetry. And ... and it became our language.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] ... you know. And we loved developing vocabulary.

As a matter of fact, it was everyone’s... you know, we... we strove to develop the best vocabularies possible while today young people as writers are told to simplify...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] ... their writing. I have been interviewed by young journalists who have told me that they are required by their newspapers to write simple sentences and to simplify their use of vocabulary. They are told, well, make it interesting for college graduates, but at a level which anyone can read, that a ... that a drop out can understand. And what this has done to written English in... in American magazines and newspapers that now we have a kind of generic English that has no style whatever. Time, Newsweek, U S News, they all sound like they have been written by the same person.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] And we have lost a tremendous amount when it comes to the beauty of language in America.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, and a lot of meaning, too. I will very often read a paragraph in some newspaper story to Dorothy and tell her: What does this mean? What is the reporter trying to say? It will be so garbled.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yeah, yeah. Well, that is usually because they are... they are... they have such a poor grasp of the language themselves and they have no sense of absolutes, you see. They have no sense of truth. They are sort of in a world of relativity, you know. Everything is relative because one of the things I... I have found out about look say readers, Rush, in... in... in tutoring them and trying to ... to repair the damage, is that a look say reader will leave out words that are there or put in words that are not there, will guess at words that he has never seen before and will ... will misread, constantly misread words that he thinks he knows the meaning of. And so you get highly inaccurate readers. You get people who really have a very inaccurate view of what the written language is like. They think that it is something that you can edit as you go along, that you can write yourself.

As a matter of fact, one of the earliest writers on this subject, Edmund Burke Huey who wrote the book The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading in 1908 in which he tried to show the superiority of the look say method admitted that children would become inaccurate readers. But he said that was all right. He said that that was part of the reading process was to interpret what was on the age. In other words, it wasn’t important what the writer had to say, but what the reader thought that the writer had to say. And, in fact, Kenneth... professor Kenneth Goodman who became the president of the International Reading Association, he defined reading as a psycholinguistic guessing game.

So, you see, they are destroying meaning.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] That is... that is... that is the purpose of all of this, Rush, is to destroy meaning.

[ Rushdoony ] And we shouldn’t be surprised at this because they deny there is a meaning in the universe. I recall that one of the most intense explosions I ever saw in any platform I was ever a part of was at one particular conference where I was one of several speakers and we were on a panel. And in the course of the discussion—and I don't remember the subject—this was apart form our speeches, I made the statement that we had to view the universe as a universe with everything having a common strand of meaning because it was created by God. And therefore, even though not necessarily intelligible to us at all points, totally rational because it came from the mind of God and had a coherence. And this one prominent professor at a graduate university nationally known, came boiling out of his chair in anger that this was totally unacceptable to assert the rationality of the universe. There was only a thin edge of rationality and meaning in all the universe and it was only in the mind of man. Everything apart from that was totally irrational.

Now naturally they are going to convert even man into irrationality and reading into irrationality and meaninglessness.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes, yes. As a matter of fact, what... what Dewey... Dewey said that the purpose of speech, of language was simple, simply social, that... that the ... the function of speech was social, that it had nothing to do with the relationship with God. It was simply a relationship of man to man. And since, I suppose, man is so completely undependable, you know, and so fickle, then anything that man says to man does not have quite the same power that... of what God says to man or man says to God.

And it think that is the important point is that when God speaks, you have to be precise and you have to be accurate and ... in understanding what God means and what God says while to the Humanists, if you are going to destroy God, the best way to do it is by destroying language, because then you have destroyed man’s means of communicating with God.

And I know that Dewey and... and his colleagues were... were determined to destroy Christianity.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] They were not indifferent to God. They were Atheists. But they were not indifferent Atheists. They were ... they had set out on a messianic mission to not only destroy Christianity and substitute a new religion, a new Humanist religion, man centered religion, but also they were going to destroy Capitalism, individualism and the ... the entire structure of our society and substitute in its place Socialism, Collectivism and Atheism.

And so they had a... a very, very far reaching program. And the use and the destruction of language was a very important part of it. And also they proceeded to do the same thing with mathematics, as you know.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] ... in their creation of the new math and of destroying the ability of the youngster to... to deal with numbers and quantities, because there, also, you are dealing with absolutes. You are not dealing with relativity, although, when we get into ... into number theory or set theory, then you get into all kinds of problems. And set theory was invented by a German mathematician who died in an insane asylum. Of course, set theory was what was supposed to replace the teaching of arithmetic, you know.

[ Rushdoony ] One of the founders of one aspect of the new math used to advocate it and I have a series of quotations from the man in my Philosophy of a Christian Curriculum. But he would tell teachers—this was in Belgium—that the beauty of the new mathematics was that it enabled everyone to be their own creator and to play God.

I recall vividly when our daughter Martha was exposed to the new math, unfortunately in a Christian school where she was for a year or so, and the explosion that took place when she came home with a problem and asked her mother, Dorothy, to explain the problem to her and help her solve it. And it began: If five is greater than eight... and Dorothy said, “Stop right there. Five is never greater than eight. And don’t you let them ever teach youth that.”

But, you see, it is destroying meaning. It says everything can be reversed. You play God. You can alter meaning. Therefore, ultimately, everything becomes meaningless.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes, yes. And, of course, man relies on symbols. I mean, the fact that we... that we use sound symbols, that we develop some, it is such an innate part of our being to develop these sound symbols and every child develops them at such an early age means that we ... we ... we not only seek meaning, we are a meaning seeking creation. We seek meaning. That is what makes us different from the cats and the birds. They are not asking what is the meaning of life.

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Blumenfeld ] But man does. Man starts asking questions and seeking meaning and figuring out meaning on his own from the age of practically at birth.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Yes, that is a very good point. Animals have more intelligence than people often recognize, but the intelligence is directed only in one way, serving their wants and needs.

[ Blumenfeld ] That is right.

[ Rushdoony ] We had a German Shepherd... when I say we, Dorothy did. It was Dorothy’s dog emphatically. And the dog was a problem, because Dorothy would talk to it all the time when I was gone. She was alone and the dog was good company. Juno was her name. And it got so that when we were going to go out to the pool and swim Juno knew immediately what we were talking about. And we had to resort to spelling because if we mentioned swimming or a pool or any word connected with it she would be nagging us to go, for sure. So we resorted to spelling. But soon she figured that out, too. And it was the same with taking a walk. She was there at the door and running and trying to drag us to the door to take her for a walk.

But that was the sole limit.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] The intelligence was totally directed in terms of wants, needs, an incapacity, of course, in animals to ascend above that level of their physical requirements than wants.

[ Blumenfeld ] Burt, of course, that is what the behavior psychologists want to reduce man to.

[ Rushdoony ] Exactly.

[ Blumenfeld ] That is what B. F. Skinner and the others... that is why they have conducted all of their experiments on animals.

[ Rushdoony ] And Pavlov as well.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes, Pavlov. Well, Thorndike did his experiments with chickens.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] Pavlov with dogs, Skinner with rats. And, of course, B. F. Skinner considered human beings and rats not to be too different.

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Blumenfeld ] And... and that is their emphasis is that human beings are animals.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. But a dog can be very happy if its basic physical needs are supplied, but a man can’t be.

[ Blumenfeld ] That is right.

[ Rushdoony ] Men who have everything physically and materially regularly commit suicide, because meaning is gone in their lives.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes, that... that is the point. And they are not only destroying meaning in ... in... just in the use of symbols, but meaning in everything they have destroyed, history for the American youngster through social studies. They have broken up history in such a form that no youngster can... very few youngsters in America can even recite the... the wars... the American wars in chronological order. They have destroyed chronology. They mixed up, you know, they will teach the child about the Eskimos and then the Indians and then the Chinese and then Columbus and then the Civil War and then they will go back two centuries. They go ahead three centuries. They jump from culture to culture and the youngster is so confused....

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] He had no idea what happened when. This is all part of the same conspiracy to destroy intelligence and destroy meaning. So that today’s youngsters are on the level of the animals today. All they are doing now is simply satisfying their basic needs, you know, for a hamburger, for pizza, for that sort of thing. But today’s youngsters don’t ... they don’t... they don’t think. They don’t argue. They don’t ... have you ever heard them have philosophical conversations?

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Blumenfeld ] They don’t anymore. They are... they are back to the... they have been reduced to the animal level by our education system.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] And it is all quite deliberate because the men who have concocted of all of this were the world’s leading psychologists.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] These are men who are ... who have used animal training techniques, extrapolated those techniques and applied them to the training of human beings. And they even use it in the text books. They use stimulus response. I mean, if you read any curriculum today put out by a state department of education, they talk constantly about stimuli.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] You see.

[ Rushdoony ] And people wonder why our city streets have been turned into jungles and our youth into wild animals.

[ Blumenfeld ] Well, that is right, because they are. They have been told they are animals. You see, when you tell a child that... that there is no God, that he is the product of evolution and that there is no meaning to life except the satisfaction of ... of animal appetites. Then what do you do?

What do you create? You do create a human animal. You create an animal.

[ Rushdoony ] In the past 10 years I think somewhere in the past five or six years a state educator in New Jersey said that one of the problems in contemporary education was that public education had deprived youth of the right kind of role models. And he said our modern culture says that we are apes, advanced apes. So he said since we refer to man in a book, he said, which has been widely used in our schools is The Naked Ape he said, “We should not be surprised that they grow up and act like wild apes.

[ Blumenfeld ] Well, you are right. As a matte of fact it was Thorndike who said that, well, well, he said that we were a domesticated animal, you know? That we were and... and he has a very interesting paragraph in Animal Intelligence. As a matter of fact it is the final paragraph in his book written in 1911. And he says, “No where more truly than in his mental capacities is man a part of nature. His instincts, that is his inborn tendencies to act and feel in certain ways show throughout marks of kinship with the lower animals, especially with our nearest relatives physically the monkeys. His sense powers show no new creation. His intellect we have seen to be a simple, though extended variation from the general animal sort. This, again, is presaged by civil variation in the case of the monkeys. Amongst the minds of animals, that of man leads not as a demagogue from another planet, but as a king from the same race.”

So, in other words, we are simply the king of the animals according to ... to Thorndike.

[ Rushdoony ] And some of them would have been ready to say that we are a very poor king that ought to be dethroned.

[ Blumenfeld ] Well, I think we are the only animal that practices abortion, that kills our own young in such horrendous numbers. And usually when... when we equate human beings with animals, for example, if they do evil like we will sort of say that Hitler was an animal or Stalin was an animal. The point is they were not animals. They were human beings....

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] ... you see, who fell from grace and who were completely living a life of sin, who have... who have discarded God and are letting their own sinful natures express themselves to the fullest extent possible, you see?

That is what... that is ... I believe, Rush, perhaps, that is even the greatest proof that God exists is the fact that when man... when man has... discards God he becomes so Satanic.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] The animals don’t become Satanic in any way shape or form, do they?

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Blumenfeld ] They just behave in their ordinary ways. They are... they are... whatever they do is a matter of instinct.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] But when man gives up God he becomes something entirely different. He becomes ... he becomes that personification of Satan.

[ Rushdoony ] Our time is beginning to run out, Sam, but before ending I would like to call attention to these two books of yours which have just been reprinted. In fact, the one, Is Public Education Necessary? which even Fortune magazine calls brilliant revisionist history. Got you on the Today show last week here in Sacramento, or nearby in Sacramento.

[ Blumenfeld ] That is right, yes.

[ Rushdoony ] ... with former secretary of education Bell.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes, yes. That was a lot of fun. And apparently what happened was that the members of the Reagan administration had shoved this book in front of him and wanted him to read it thinking that he might become a conservative as a... as a result. But he simply considered the whole thing off the wall and ...and... and told the press that he considered the writer to be a member of the lunatic fringe.

But you know, the reason why they ... they will constantly designate us as members of the lunatic fringe or radical nuts, Rush, is because they want to put us out of the pale...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Blumenfeld ] ... of discussion. In other words, you don’t argue with a lunatic. You don’t take anything a lunatic says seriously. And so if they call us members of the lunatic fringe, well, then they don’t have to discuss their ideas or our books.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, after the program was over I think perhaps he looked...

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes...

[ Rushdoony ] ... a little closer to that fringe.

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes, I... I think I got the better of him. He was... he was very weak and offered really nothing of any substance to the American public and certainly the parents who want to know what to do when it comes to education got very little advice from him. The only thing that we could tell them to do was to, you know, patronize the public schools and help out which is what parents have been trying to do for the last 30 years with not much success.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, could you tell our listeners where they can get these books from and at what price?

[ Blumenfeld ] Well, they can get either book from... by calling an 800 number in Arizona. That is 1 800 528 0559. That is 1 800 528 0559. Now both books are 9.95 each and they can order them by using their credit cards by phone.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. These two books are Is Public Education Necessary? and NEA: Trojan Horse in American Education. But there are two others that I think they would be interested in. Would you tell them about the other two that are available from the same place?

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes. How to Tutor. I wrote that book back in the 70s because I wanted parents to have a means of teaching their children the three Rs at home. And a lot of homeschooling parents are now using that book. The How to Tutor book is available for 7.95. And Alpha Phonics: A Primer for Beginning Readers is a book I wrote to permit anyone to each anybody to read, that is a child or an adult. There are so many functionally illiterate adults who need tutoring and I wrote that book to permit them, any one, any tutor to have a means to teach anyone to read. And that book is available for 19.95 and it is to be used directly with a student.

[ Rushdoony ] If you want to order by mail and send your check, just order from Research Publications, P O Box 39850, Phoenix, Arizona 85069, 85069. I think you will find them very worthwhile.

Well, Sam, it has been a delight to discuss these matters with you. And I think it has been very important because your point that modern education is a form of idolatry needs to be recognized, that it is a sin to subject your child to a schooling which is alien to everything we as Christians believe, but says it is the image, the idol not the word...

[ Blumenfeld ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] ... that is central. Is there any final comment you would like to make, Sam?

[ Blumenfeld ] Well, the... the... the.... I suppose the encouraging thing, Rush, is that there are so many Christian schools that are being created now that are teaching reading well phonetically and, of course, home schooling. And the parents can do something about this. They can remove their children from the public schools.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, thank you very much. It has been a pleasure to discuss these things and God bless you all as you think these things over and apply them in your lives.

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