Easy Chair Series

Interview with Samuel Blumenfeld, Part 2

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 60-91

Genre:

Track:

Dictation Name: EC362

Year: 1986

This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 362, April the 30th, 1996.

In this session we will continue hearing from one of our staff members, Sam Blumenfeld, on our contemporary education problems.

Since education and law are the two key areas in any society which reveal its religion, it is very important that we be concerned with these areas. Again, it will be Billy Welch, Douglas Murray, Andrew Sandlin, Mark Rushdoony and myself who will be listening to and asking questions of Sam. Will you go ahead now, Sam?

[Blumenfeld] Yes. I referred to the Mark Tucker letter to Hillary Clinton.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Blumenfeld] ...at the beginning of the... the last tape. I just want to read to you three paragraphs from that letter so that you get an idea that these are real people who really believe in taking over.

This was written right after the election of Bill Clinton. It is dated November 11th, 1992 and he says:

“Dear Hillary. I still can't believe you won. But utter delight that you did pervades all the circles in which I move. I met last Wednesday in David Rockefeller's office with him, John Scully, Dave Barram and David Haselkorn. My own view and theirs is that this country has seized its last chance.

“The subject we were discussing was what you and Bill should do now about education, training and labor market policy. Following that meeting, I chaired another in Washington on the same topic. Those present at the second meeting included Tim Barnicle, Dave Barram, Mike Cohen, David Hornbeck, Hilary Pennington, Andy Plattner, Lauren Resnick, Betsy Brown Ruzzi, Bob Schwartz, Mike Smith and Bill Spring. Shirley Malcom, Ray Marshall and Susan McGuire were also invited. Though these three were not able to be present at last week's meeting, they have all contributed by telephone to the ideas that follow. Ira Magaziner was also invited to this meeting.

“Our purpose in these meetings was to propose concrete actions that the Clinton administration could take — between now and the inauguration, in the first 100 days and beyond. The result, from where I sit, was really exciting. We took a very large leap forward in terms of how to advance the agenda on which you and we have all been working — a practical plan for putting all the major components of the system in place within four years, by the time Bill has to run again,” unquote.

So there you could see how these people work.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Blumenfeld] You see, directly with the White House. Got to get the legislature done. And the names of these people, while they might not mean very much to our listeners, David Hornbeck, for example, was responsible for putting OBE in Kentucky. Lauren Reznick has been working on assessment tests at the University of Pittsburgh. All of these people are key planners who are in charge of some component of this major organizational reorganization... education reorganization. You have John Scully of McIntosh, of Apple Computer. You have David Rockefeller, Junior representing the Rockefeller interest in all of this. So you see that this is not... you know, these things just don’t come out of nowhere. There are human beings with specific agendas who are doing all of this. And if you read down the board of trustees of the National Center on Education in the Economy, you find you have got John Scully is the chairman.

[Murray] Who just got fired, incidentally, because he practically took Apple into extinction.

[Blumenfeld] Right. That’s right. Great manager he. Mario Cuomo is the ... is the honorary chair. James B. Hunt, Junior, former governor of North Carolina is vice chairman. You have got other big corporate executives. You have Vera Katz of the Oregon state legislature. She is known as the furthest left wing legislator there. Ira Magaziner and others. David Rockefeller, Junior, Hillary Clinton. At that time she was just a... she was with a law firm, a law firm in... in Arkansas.

Why is... is plan being implemented, being voted on by conservative Republican? You see, that is the big mystery. That... I cannot figure that out. Why don't the conservatives come up with their own plan?

[Murray] Which conservatives are we talking about?

[Blumenfeld] Well, I mean, the Republican party.

[Murray] Are we talking about real conservatives?

[Blumenfeld] I am talking about the Republican party that is supposed to be in opposition to this sort of thing. You know, if the Republican party wanted to come up with its own education plan, they can create their own national center. They can have their own board of trustees. They can have their own commission that would work on a curriculum for the public schools or a reformed program. Where is it? Why doesn’t it exist?

[Voice] They are not conservatives. They are only slightly less liberal than the Democrats.

[Blumenfeld] Well, that is what Dabney would say, wouldn’t he?

[Voice] Exactly right.

[Blumenfeld] But that is what is so puzzling. And that is what is... that is what is... that is the question that now a lot of conservatives are asking, a lot of true conservatives. Why is this happening? How is it happening and why have not we been informed by our own people that they are pushing this as if there were no tomorrow?

[Murray] It is a sell out.

[Blumenfeld] Exactly. It is a sell out. That is why you really can’t trust the Democrats or the Republicans in this sense, because the key is in education reform. What are the two parties doing? Do you know what they are doing? The exact same thing. And that is not what the American people want. That certainly is not what I want and take, for example, this ... this computer system that has been in the works now since the 70s. This is not new. It has been funded over and over again by Congress and now it has reached the point where it is ready to go online.

[Murray] Which Mr. Perot built, incidentally.

[Blumenfeld] I don’t know if Perot built this particular system.

[Murray] The commerce department, the social security administration and all these me are intertied now as one large areas of work.

[Blumenfeld] Yes. Well, this computer comes out of the National Center for Education Statistics which is part of the Department of Education. And now who will have access to this information? They list it in the ... in the data... in the ... in the book.

1.                   School employees who have a need to know.

2.                   Other schools to which a student is transferring.

3.                   Certain government officials in order to carry out lawful functions.

4.                   Appropriate parties in connection with financial assistance to a student.

5.                   Organizations conducting certain studies for the school.

6.                   Accrediting organizations.

7.                   Individuals who have obtained court orders or subpoenas.

8.                   Persons who need to know in cases of health and safety emergencies.

9.                   State and local authorities to whom disclosure is required by state laws adopted before November 19th, 1974.

So just about anybody who wants the information can get it.

[Murray] That’s right.

[Blumenfeld] It is obvious. Does a government of a free people keep in its vaults a computer, a data bank of information, of personal information on every single individual? Now if they had that when Rush was going to school, they would have all of that, all of those test scores that you made on those IQ tests would be in the record there. They would have complete record of everything that Rush had done or I had done over the years.

It is interesting that my school record, high school record was on a little card. You know, they had each grade with your final grade. A, B, C, D, a little card. That was all you needed. You didn’t need this gigantic computer that was going to gather all of this personal information about you, because this is the key to the control of everybody is the information. If they have that information on you, they can control you.

[Murray] Well, everybody things that technology is {?}

[Blumenfeld] Well, that is a two edged sword.

[Murray] Exactly. But if it can be used... abused, it will be misused.

[Blumenfeld] And these people would like to misuse it.

[Murray] Yes.

[Rushdoony] Very true.

[Blumenfeld] And how you fight it, well, you just have to get people involved. Take, for example, my friend Charlotte {?}, worked for the... she worked for the department of education years ago. She was a senior staff member. And she had access to all of these grant proposals, all of these grants that were going out to these different labs, universities, et cetera and she saw what was being planned. Now when she sounded the alarm back in the 80s, nobody believed her. They said, “Well, we will worry about it when it is being implemented. But obviously these people have been working on all of this for many years going back to the 50s with Benjamin Bloom and his taxonomy of educational objectives. So it has been in the works quite some time and now finally it is coming to the surface. We see the tentacles. It is like that monster in the Scottish lake, you know, what is it? Lock...

[Voice] The Loch Ness.

[Blumenfeld] The Loch Ness... well on occasion. Now it is coming to the surface. You can see its tentacles. And those of us who are a little more ... who are better informed than others are ... are, you know, sounding the alarm. We are saying, hey, wake up. This thing is really bad. And... and it has got to be stopped. It has to be stopped.

[Voice] We have talked about the problem, Sam. Now let’s talk about what can we do about it? What constructively can be done about these problems?

[Blumenfeld] Well, of course, the ... the most important thing is to get Christian children out of the public schools.

[Voice] Amen.

[Blumenfeld] To get all of the children out of the public schools, but Christian children in particular and I don’t know why certain important Christian leaders who have vast audiences have not yet sounded the alarm to all of their... their constituents, all of their patrons and told them to get the kids out. They are, you know, these are very fine Christian leaders and you know their names. I am not going to name anybody, but you know who they are. They are leaders of major Christian organizations who encourage parents to talk to their teachers, you know, and go to the school board and... and run for ... run for school board and all of that. And the school boards are simply going to be, you know, they are just not even going to have any power at all. I mean, maybe they will designate parking space, but that is about it.

[Voice] Sam, we want to make clear that this is a fundamental issue. This is not ... this is not a tangential issue.

[Blumenfeld] No. It is fundamental.

[Voice] This is a fundamental issue.

[Blumenfeld] It certainly is fundamental for the Christian community because if their children are entrapped in this system and, incidentally, once you get on the computer how do you get off of it, you know? And incidentally, they also have a ... a designation out there for home schoolers on this computer program. It is not as if they are leaving them out. They have a special ... a special designation for the home schooler. Let me see if I can find it here in my notes. But they are... they are... they are not going to omit anyone because, for example, they will have, you see, under the address contact information we find code 056. Non resident attendance rationale. The reason that the student attends a school outside of his or her usual attendance area. And the are 10 subcategories including: 07 which is home schooling. The student is receiving educational instruction offered in a home environment as regulated by state law for reasons other than health.

Then they have private schools are also included under the school information code 076 includes a subcategory: private, non religiously affiliated school, private religiously affiliated school and under school type you find subcategories, alternative and Montessori. And then you have a category discontinuing schooling reason. We find subcategory 19: religion. The student left religion because of religious convictions. Then under non entrance information we find category 116. Reason for non entrance in local or secondary school under which we find subcategory three, home schooling which says, “The individual is receiving educational services offered in a home environment for reasons other than health.”

Then the... there is another subcategory: religious reasons. The individual or his or her parent, guardian has religious convictions that prohibit participating in the educational program in the school or education agency and the individual is not receiving approved instruction elsewhere.

So, but they are going to include everybody. They will know who the home schoolers are. They will know what category of home schooling or Christian schooling you ... you fit in.

[Rushdoony] A far cry from the kind of country we were when I was young. I know that many, many country doctors when I was a child never bothered to file a birth certificate. They did not regard it as anything important or their attitude was: What business of the counties is it if a child is born. The parents know it. They are the ones that count.

[Murray] Well, now you have to have a mandatory social security card and {?} and the next move is that they want to implant a microdot sized computer chip that will contain all of the basic information and parents are being lulled into this idea of having their kids finger printed on the idea that they will be easier to locate in case they are abducted or wander off, but the other side of it is also that they are gaining the acquiescence of parents of having their kids labeled and... and the micro dot chip implanted under the skin is the next move. And you were talking about that bar code. The bar code is already technologically obsolete. The microchip, it can be read very easily and it doesn't cost very much and it will probably be mandatory at the time of birth. They will be put in at the hospital. Parents won’t even be aware that it is put in.

[Rushdoony] You mentioned social security. That started a lot of record keeping in this country because they took down everybody’s name and birth date and other information. I recall that very vividly because I would occasionally see this man who was a bit of a playboy. He was a widower. I think he was in his mid 40s, but he looked a good 10 years younger. And he didn’t have a birth certificate like a great many others, so he thought he was smart and he bragged about it. He put down that he was 35. He said, “This will be my official age and I will do better with the girls from now on,” because if I tell them I am 45, they are not as interested.”

Well, I didn't see much or anything of him, but years later I heard that he had reached 65 and he was very miserable, because he had 10 more years to go in reality before he could collect his social security. So his lie caught up with him.

But, you see, you could do that sort of thing in those days. And the lack of records meant that you were anonymous. You could go to another part of the country, create your own past. I know on the Indian reservation on the edge of it in the mining camp there were a lot of people who were known to be fugitives from the law and who had created synthetic pasts for themselves. And as long as they were of law abiding, nobody bothered them.

[Murray] Well, you know, you are able to look back over a span of years that is maybe one third of the entire history of this country. So this country isn’t that old.

[Blumenfeld] It isn’t. And we are headed so quickly toward a totalitarian system, it is just amazing how... how far, you know, how much has been done in such a short period of time to create this ... the structure, the super structure. And it is interesting, you know, the totalitarianism should be coming through the education system, because it is... it is state owned, state financed.

[Voice] Absolutely.

[Blumenfeld] It has a lien on everybody’s property.

[Voice] That is right.

[Blumenfeld] It is... it is the one ... it is the one institution in America that is so embedded and the one institution that people, you know, believe in, whether they like it or not that, oh, well, you mean there wasn’t public education before, you know, 1840? I mean, they think it... it is in the Constitution. They think that, you know...

[Voice] No.

[Murray] Every totalitarian regime in history has ... has started with the young.

[Blumenfeld] Yeah, exactly. So it stands to reason that if they want to get their totalitarian system, they would use the education system as the means to do it, because they already have the tax payer’s cash flow coming into it. It is mush more difficult to start a new systems of cash flow from the tax payers, than to use one that already exists and which has constantly been used by the... by the powers that to extract more and more and more from the public. And what little resistance has come from the public has been negligible compared to the amount that they are getting.

[Voice] That is right.

[Rushdoony] Mussolini introduced very, very early when he took over in the 20s, early 20s mandatory school attendance, because he knew that was the way to control the citizens of the future. And that is why in the next 25 years he had a solid hold on the Italian population.

[Blumenfeld] Well, also and... in Nazi Germany the Weimar Republic practically prepared the school system for Hitler, because they were already phasing out private schools during the Weimar period.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Blumenfeld] And so when Hitler took over, all he had to do was have the teachers go, “Heil Hitler,” and they were in business.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Blumenfeld] And all they had to do was change the curriculum and the system worked perfectly for his purposes.

Every totalitarian regime has used government education as the means of control. That is true in Russia, in Cuba.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Blumenfeld] As a matter of fact, whenever the Communists take over that is where they put their emphasis. And, in fact, in Beijing in the Communist regime, they have these records on every student. But it is in a paper form. It is in a kind of a loose leaf book. I remember reading an article from... in the New York Times in which they spoke about how this record went with you wherever you went in life, but it was a fully complete record of everything about you that accompanied you and if you wanted to say, for example, to leave the country or something like that, that ... that record might stand in the way.

So we have computers. So it is going to be easier for us to do the same thing, you see. There is this conceit that the computer is going to give them the power, is going to give them the ability to control, while at the same time the computer is going to loosen up things. You know, there are... there is such a thing as... as sabotaging even computers.

[Voice] Right.

[Murray] The most arrogant people in the world are engineers, because they think they can control ever aspect of a particular function. You know, I have watched it all my life and arrogance feeds on arrogance. It perpetuates itself up to a point until the system collapses. You just... they are going to run out of money.

You know, the one common thread you can... you can look at throughout history is the innate perversity of the human mind.

[Voice] Yes.

[Murray] I mean, if people will disregard God’s laws in the face of overwhelming judgment to the point of losing their lives, you know, there are always people who are going to turn away from the pack. And, you know, when you were mentioning, when you started out, Sam, about the human resource development system. The acronym is HERDS. You know, they want a herd mentality.

[Blumenfeld] That is very good.

[Murray] They want everybody going in the same direction. But a herd can also turn around and trample you. You know, the...

[Blumenfeld] Well, let’s hope that this herd does.

[Voice] Yeah.

[Blumenfeld] But Tucker says in this same letter, he says, “Radical changes in attitudes, values and beliefs are required to move any combination of these agendas. At the narrowest level the agenda cannot be moved unless there is agreement among the governors, the president, and the congress. Ills roll at the Charlottesville summit leads naturally to a reconvening of that group, perhaps with the addition of key members of Congress and others.”

Of course, that was the latest Gerstner meeting which was supposed to do that. But he says, “But we think that having an early summit on the subject of the whole human resources agenda would be risky, for many reasons. Better to build on Bill's enormous success during the campaign with national talk shows, in school gymnasiums and the bus trips. Bill can be sure that the agenda is his, and he can go into it with a groundswell of support behind him,” unquote.

So, you see how these people plan everything, every minute detail of what they want to get and how they are going to get it. And here are... here are we. You know, when... when Mark Tucker set up his... his National Center in Rochester, New York, it was as if the Messiah had come to Rochester. And this is what the Rochester Times Union wrote in August of 1988. Quote, “An aura of the prophet surrounds Mark Tucker when he walks through the oversized walnut doors of his new Education Research Center. There is his full beard, his long dark hair streaked gray. There is the sound of his upbeat voice in the immaculate white walled room lined with century old fireplaces and towering wood framed windows. This, the National Center on Education in the Economy will be Mark Tucker’s pulpit beginning today. It will fill with eager research assistants and influential educators and the waiting and the watching will begin. Both national and local educators, other researchers, school administrations and politicians will be watching to see if the center becomes the spiritual headquarters of education reform, creating policy for presidential candidates and the nation’s work force.”

[multiple voices]

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Murray] And the liberals get overconfident, because that is when you can hit them in their soft under belly.

[Rushdoony] Sam, what more can you tell us about this whole campaign to push us into Socialism via education, Goals 2000?

[Blumenfeld] Well, it is ... it is all based on Humanism. It is all based on an acceptance of evolution as gospel. It is based on the dumbing down techniques of... of mastery learning which is the Skinnerian methods of teaching, you know, the Pavlovian conditioning techniques.

In other words, it is going to dumb down the nation further. You are going to have an even greater decline in true literacy. You will have people who, perhaps, can read at a comic book level, you know, if even that much. They will not know much of history or geography. They certainly won’t know much about American history, because the standards are not being put in place and the standards that came out, is it the UCLA the fellow who was working on the history standards? It was so ridiculous. There was more ... more on Marilyn Monroe than there was on George Washington. And they had many mentions of Joe McCarthy, a terrible person Joe McCarthy.

So the... the students are going to get only a politically correct view of the world, skewed so that they will be easily controllable, trainable, manageable. The literacy skills will be ... if... if not whole language, some other version of it, because they are not going to go back to intensive systematic phonics, because that means getting back to logos and that is the last thing they want to do is get back to the true word. They don’t want the children to be able to read. And, of course, that was always part of Dewey’s master plan, was to shift the emphasis away from high literacy from knowledge of the word to the affective domain.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Blumenfeld] So an emphasis on attitudes and values and beliefs and reorganization ... reorganizing the minds of students. So this... this system is... is... is not going to produce what the American people want. It is totally incompatible with the... the precepts of a free society. It has nothing to do with... with a free society. It is going to change America radically. And I can’t see Americans accepting it unless they have been so brain washed and so completely sold a bill of goods and are so helpless and are so needy of the government to do everything for them that they are willing to accept it.

But you are going to have more and more people home schooling, more and more parents taking their kids out of the schools and...

[Murray] Do you think there is going to be a rebellion, then, by the parents?

[Blumenfeld] Well, there is a quiet rebellion.

[Voice] Absolutely.

[Blumenfeld] In the home schooling movement itself is a... is a movement of rebellion against the ... the powers that be and... and more and more parents are becoming aware. I mean, that is the beauty of... of attending home school conferences when you meet parents with very young kids who say, “My child will never see the inside of a public school.

[Voice] Yes. That is right.

[Blumenfeld] Because many of today’s young parents have gotten enough of the bad stuff out of public schools to know how bad they are. In other words, people who went to school in the 60s and 70s, they were already pretty bad in the 60s and 70s.

[Rushdoony] I have encountered going across country home school mothers who are barely literate and yet in year they... they were not only literate, but their grammar and their speaking ability had improved, because in beginning with phonics they learned it.

[Blumenfeld] Yes.

[Rushdoony] In teaching their children reading, they learned how to read. And so the... the parents have been reeducated in the course of educating their children.

[Blumenfeld] That is... that is a very important point is that the parents are learning even more than the children. They are reeducating themselves. They are getting the education they never got. You even have some parents who are learning Latin, believe it or not, as part of home schooling. So it is a ... it is a remarkable phenomenon, this home school movement.

Billy, did you want to say something?

[Voice] Well, I was just going to say that a lot of people are home schooling now because of the dangers in the public schools.

[Blumenfeld] Oh, yes.

[Voice] They are afraid to send their children to school because they are intimidated.

[Blumenfeld] Right.

[Voice] In the bathrooms and in the halls, on the school ground. And it is... it is a dangerous situation. And I don’t care what community that you are in, whether it is in a small town like Prescott or, of course, the... the cities are impossible.

[Blumenfeld] Well, yeah, but the...

[Voice] And it is just...

[Blumenfeld] Sure. The violence. The... the guns, the weapons.

[Voice] Exactly.

[Blumenfeld] The assaults. Our schools have become very dangerous places for kids. They are no longer the safe haven and so from that point of view alone you have parents removing their children because of the first the academic... academic reasons. They are not learning anything, two, because of moral reasons, you know, sex education. Wherever you have sex education you have increased sexual activity. I mean, it just stands to reason.

[Voice] That is right.

[Blumenfeld] You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure that one out. Then you have the spiritual dangers, undermining Christianity, the... the children’s Christianity is being undermined. And, of course, the ... the... the violence, the physical violence.

[Murray] What is... what is going through the brains of the public school teachers? I mean, they are kind of hoist their own petard here. They are creating these ... these psychopaths that commit these crimes in the public schools and they are just as subject to the dangers as the children that attend these schools. I mean, if these people have got an IQ above C level, they have got to figure out that they are generating a problem that is going to be their own undoing.

[Voice] The teachers aren’t always at fault. They can’t touch the kids. They can’t discipline them.

[Voice] Yeah.

[Voice] If they send them to the office to be disciplined they usually just send them back and the administrators they have ... they have no control either. I mean, it is to the point where...

[Blumenfeld] You have chaos.

[Voice] It is chaos.

[Voice] Yeah.

[Voice] I think we should jump in here and mention that Sam has just completed a book on this topic of OBE and, Sam, would you maybe discuss that?

[Voice] Yeah.

[Voice] And talk about how it could be obtained?

[Murray] Outcome based education.

[Blumenfeld] Well, the title of the book is The Whole Language OBE Fraud. Whole language slash OBE fraud. And it covers the history of the reading problem and how it evolved into OBE and what is behind OBE. I mean, what is behind whole language. There is a political agenda, a social agenda, an ideological agenda behind all of these things which parents are unaware of. It is not merely a new way to teach children to read. First of all, it doesn’t even teach them to read. It teaches them to guess and it teaches them to look at each word as if it were a holistic, you know, configuration like Chinese. And when you do that, of course, you train children to look at words as if they were holistic configurations. They develop a holistic reflex, which means that they look at all words as whole designs. And when they do that, then they develop a blockage against seeing words in their phonetic structure. Because, first of all, they haven’t been taught very much phonics. What little phonics they have been taught is simply parked up in their heads as information that may or may not be used.

Now, once the develop that holistic reflex they are dyslexic. That is what dyslexia is. And, of course, the Russians, the psychologists are very much in the know concerning reflexology. I mean, that is what ... that is what Pavlov was working on. And he and his colleagues discovered that you could cause behavior disorganization by creating two opposing reflexes.

[Murray] Didn’t the Russians throw that out about a year ago?

[Blumenfeld] Oh, no. I mean, this is... this is psychological experimentation that is in the books.

[Murray] No, but I mean the reading method, the...

[Blumenfeld] Oh, no, well, they got rid of look say back in the 1930s. The Russians... you see Dewey had convinced Lenin’s wife to adopt the progressive system of education. In the early days of the revolution she thought that was a great idea so they used the whole word method.

[Rushdoony] Could you give the title of your book and the publisher, his address and the price?

[Blumenfeld] Ok. The title of the book is The Whole Language OBE Fraud. And it is being published by the Paradigm company in Boise, Idaho. The easiest way to get hold of the book is to call 1 208 322 4440. That is 1 208 322 4440. I believe the price is 19.95.

[Rushdoony] Then your newsletter. If you could tell...

[Blumenfeld] Oh, yes.

[Rushdoony] ... the people how much it is for a year’s subscription, the name of the newsletter and how to order it.

[Blumenfeld] Oh, it is the Blumenfeld Education Letter. It is a monthly newsletter containing much of the information that I discussed tonight.

[Rushdoony] And it is about eight pages?

[Blumenfeld] Eight pages. Yes. And I keep it at eight pages because I want people to read it as soon as they open it. Usually if you get a newsletter that is very thick, you will put it aside and say, “Well, I will read it later on.” And then, of course, other things get piled on top of it. But I wanted a newsletter that people will open and read immediately because it was short enough and succinct enough.

So The Blumenfeld Education Letter is 36 dollars a year for the 12 issues. And it can also be obtained by calling the same number 1 208 322 4440. In fact, anyone listening to this tape who would like to get a free sample copy of the newsletter could do so by just calling that number and telling them ... telling my publisher that I mentioned that they could get a free sample copy by simply calling.

[Rushdoony] Very good.

[Blumenfeld] And so I have been tracking all of this for quite some time, as you know, Rush. I have been dealing with the school reform programs and finding out all about these things and it has been a revelation, because this information has not been readily available to the public.

For example, when they had the Charlottesville meeting back in 1988, the governors, you know, had the so-called education summit. Bill Clinton was then governor of... of Arkansas and was a very important player in that summit. Little did any of us know that the program that was being adopted by those governors was Mark Tucker’s program. And little did we know that the program that George Bush was promoting in the state of the union message was Mark Tucker’s program. And you ask yourself, “Why is a Republican governor promoting a program concocted by far left liberals?”

[Voice] Yes.

[Blumenfeld] And now we see the whole pattern. We see what has happened since then, how all of this has grown and developed and finally we are getting the truth. And how this letter from Mark Tucker to Hillary got into the hands of our side nobody knows. All we know is we have got one Xerox copy after another.

I got a call from a lady who wanted a pristine clear copy of the letter and I said, “You had better call Mark Tucker’s office. Maybe they will give you a pristine clear, you know, copy of the letter.” But all we have are ... is a Xerox of a fax and a fax of a Xerox and so we take it...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Blumenfeld] But we have got the information. That is the most important thing is now we know who is doing this, what their plans are, who is in back of it, what it amounts to. It amounts to a totalitarian system of education and that it is our duty now to stop it now that we know what... what is in it and what it is all about.

[Rushdoony] Readers of your newsletter, of course, have been kept well informed on this.

I would like to call attention to something that really pleases me, because very often unconsciously things reveal how people feel. A while back, I don’t recall where in the country it was, I met someone at a meeting who is in real estate who said in most communities now you no longer advertise when you are selling a home proximity to school. That used to be routine. Now it is uncommon. In some communities it is still...

[Blumenfeld] Oh, yes.

[Rushdoony] ...it is a plus, but by and large, being close to a school is being close to a lot of rowdy kids and trouble.

[Blumenfeld] Oh, yes.

[Rushdoony] So home buyers are not attracted to going to see a house if it is advertised as close to a school.

[Blumenfeld] Yeah. You are absolutely right. And in the old days that was a ... a big thing that would say that this town has the best schools, you know, a particular suburb would advertise that. As a matter of fact, my friends in Concord, Massachusetts moved to Concord because it was reputed to have, quote, the best schools and their little boy was in first grade and they were destroying him with whole language. And they got hold of me and I tutored him and it was... it took a lot of work to undo the damage that they had done to this six year old. And so they... they are now home schooling, but they realize that that was a joke, this business of the schools doing a wonderful job.

[Rushdoony] In one major city one of the things that hurt the schools was a teacher’s strike. And parents were shocked as they drove by the school and saw the students picketing and saw what the teachers looked like. So many, many of the male teachers had hair way down below their shoulders.

[Blumenfeld] Oh, yeah.

[Rushdoony] They looked scruffy. They were not neatly dressed. And the old time teachers, very properly dressed, very much a lady or a gentleman was no longer in sight.

[Blumenfeld] Right. As a matter of fact, the people know in the colleges of education, the professors, they are all the 60s hippies. That is where they went to.

[Voice] Exactly.

[Blumenfeld] I mean, you... they didn’t just disappear.

[Voice] The radicals have become the status quo.

[Blumenfeld] The radicals have become the status quo in the education system.

[Voice] Yes.

[Blumenfeld] And they are determined to finally get their ... what they want their Utopia through ... through education. And they control the colleges of education and what the teachers learn. That is why the system cannot be changed or reformed. You have to just get rid of it. It is totally corrupt from top to bottom. There is no way you can possibly reform the system or take back the schools...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Blumenfeld] ... as some conservatives like to say.

[Rushdoony] Well, one of the things that made it possible for the public schools to succeed and to supplant the Christian schools or uncommon schools that preceded them was the fact that in those early days there was almost no teachers training.

[Blumenfeld] That is right.

[Rushdoony] As a result, they were a local young women and young men not unlike the parents coming out of the community representing their standards who were the public school teachers. And that continued for some time. Then teachers training schools began...

[Blumenfeld] The normal schools.

[Rushdoony] The normal schools, as they used to be called, began to create a different type of teacher.

[Blumenfeld] As a matter of fact, the first teachers seminary as they called them that was created of Horace Mann...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Blumenfeld] The two major subjects were phrenology and the whole word method of teaching reading.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Blumenfeld] That was the very first ...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Blumenfeld] ...government controlled teacher’s college. They immediately went the wrong ... in the wrong direction.

[Rushdoony] Well...

[Blumenfeld] Phrenology, of course, was the forerunner of psychology.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And Horace Mann believed totally in phrenology, bumps on the head told you what the character and aptitude of the person was.

[Blumenfeld] That is right. If you had a high forehead you were intelligent.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Blumenfeld] You know, or something like that.

[Rushdoony] I used to have... I probably misplaced and lost them, a couple of small sized phrenological charts.

[Blumenfeld] Yes.

[Rushdoony] And they were really funny.

[Blumenfeld] A friend of mine has a porcelain skull, you know.

[Rushdoony] Oh, yes. I remember those.

[Blumenfeld] A head with all of the traits...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Blumenfeld] ... the different.

[Rushdoony] Amativeness.

[Blumenfeld] Right.

[Rushdoony] That sort of thing.

[Blumenfeld] They actually believed that parts of the brain were responsible for specific...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Blumenfeld] ... personality traits. I mean, there is no scientific basis to it.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Blumenfeld] But they believed it.

[Voice] It was a religious faith.

[Blumenfeld] Well, it is the same with modern psychology.

[Voice] That is right.

[Blumenfeld] There is no scientific basis to any of it and yet it permeates our society.

[Murray] It is just as reliable as chicken bones and tea leaves.

[Blumenfeld] Exactly. Well, we think then this so-called modern age with our high technology would be a little more scientific.

[Voice] No.

[Blumenfeld] ...than it is. But it is just ridiculous.

[Rushdoony] Well, Horace Mann attacked the schools of Massachusetts. He tried to present them as incompetent. He worked to destroy the Latin schools and destroyed all but the Boston Latin School...

[Voice] Right.

[Rushdoony] ...which still survives although now, finally, I hear it is going downhill. Do you know anything, Sam? You taught there once, didn’t you?

[Blumenfeld] No, no. I... I didn't teach there, but they have... what has happened, in other words, with affirmative action, you see.

[Rushdoony] Oh.

[Blumenfeld] Where they had to lower the standards for entrance. It was considered the elite school, a test school. You had to take a test to get into it. As a matter of fact there is a white girl who passed the test very well, but she was not admitted because of affirmative action and her father has sued the school. So that is a big case in our area. It will be interesting to see how that... that pans out.

Incidentally, there is one other topic that...

[Voice] Yes...

[Blumenfeld] ... you might be interested in. You have heard of ADD, haven’t you? Attention Deficit Disorder. I am often asked by parents, you know, well, what causes it? And I suspect that a lot of it has to do with the configuration of today’s classrooms. As you recall, Rush, when you and I were going to school we sat in desks.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Blumenfeld] ... that were bolted to the floor.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Blumenfeld] In rows and our attention was focused on the teacher who sat in front.

[Rushdoony] Right.

[Blumenfeld] And the walls were pretty bare in those classrooms. You didn’t have all the distractions or anything. You... maybe a picture of George Washington or something like that.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Blumenfeld] And we were all taught the same thing. You didn’t have an individual educational plan. So there was no way that you could have an attention deficit.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Blumenfeld] ...in that kind of a classroom. You couldn’t even talk to your fellow student. That was considered a no, no. So ADD was unknown in those days. Well, now if you walk into today’s first grade classrooms, what do you find? You find that the kids are seated around little tables. They are chatting with one another, pestering one another. You know, communicating. The teacher is wandering around the room. She is no longer the focus of attention. She is a facilitator. The walls are crammed with every picture of a dinosaur you can imagine, you know. There is talking. There is distraction. And then they say, “Why can’t you concentrate?”

Well, how can any child concentrate in such an atmosphere? So if the child can’t concentrate they say, “Well, you have got Attention Deficit Disorder.” I mean, any normal child would find it impossible to concentrate in such an atmosphere. And yet the child then is designated, you know...

[Murray] Defective

[Blumenfeld] Defective, exactly and then is put on Ritalin or some other drug or... or something like that to turn him into a little zombie and ... but then you get the... they say, “Well, my child was ADD from the ... from birth, you know, we know.”

And usually I tell people like that, well, yeah, some children are born more hyperactive than others. Some children are very physical. I mean, if they were not so you wouldn’t have Hollywood stunt men. You wouldn’t have daredevil flyers. You wouldn’t have ... you wouldn’t have athletes. You wouldn’t have all these people who do can do these incredible physical feats. I mean, it is... they have got to be born that way, because certainly I can’t do any of that stuff, you know?

So what do you do with kids like that? Do you drug them and say that they are sick or that they are abnormal or there is something wrong with them? No. What you do is you live with them and you encourage them to channel all of these energies into something that is productive or ... or that will make them happy. You know, if they want to become the star athlete, that is their business. But ... but the way that the culture is going that any child who exhibits this kind of superabundance of energy is labeled...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Blumenfeld] ... abnormal.

[Rushdoony] I encountered this situation in which a young man who had been nationally prominent as an athlete had a son who, I think, was seven or eight when I saw him, takes after him. And has all of his father’s physical energy. And what they have done is to require that he be drugged every day and they cannot tamper with that, the prescription.

[Blumenfeld] He is in a public school?

[Rushdoony] In a public school. And the result is that that child is going to reach maturity having been drugged all though his childhood and youth.

[Blumenfeld] Yes.

[Rushdoony] That is a... a... a frightening fact.

[Blumenfeld] And that is... that is what... and it is going on all over the country.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Blumenfeld] There are about two million children now are on Ritalin and it is growing every day as the solution to a, you know, to a problem that didn’t exist when you and I were going to school.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Blumenfeld] There was no dyslexia in those days.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Blumenfeld] And there was no ADD in those days.

[Rushdoony] Well, our time is just about up. Thank you, Sam. It is always a privilege and most stimulating when you come here and fill us in on the most recent developments in education. Thank you and God bless you and God bless all of you who are listening.

Use this knowledge to defend freedom. Thank you and good night.