The other night I was watching interviewer Piers Morgan, CNN’s replacement for Larry King, who retired from TV in December 2010. Morgan was interviewing Arianna Huffington, the Greek-American political commentator-activist, whose Internet journal, the Huffington Post, or HuffPo, is comprised of daily comments from liberal bloggers and columnists. The subject was the American Dream and what’s happened to it.
They both agreed that the great entrepreneurial spirit that drove the American economy to heights of ingenious productivity was somewhat lacking. They blamed it on all sorts of factors, but neither Morgan nor Huffington was willing to acknowledge that socialist societies generally kill entrepreneurial freedom and enterprise. Neither did they acknowledge that the American government had become too big and too intrusive in the lives of its citizens. Of course, Morgan had been born in 1965 in socialist England and came to socialist America just a few years ago. So he simply doesn’t know what it was like to live in an America where true economic freedom once existed.
Nor was Ms. Huffington any more enlightening. She came from socialist Greece, which has now reached the end of its rope, married a rich Californian and has no idea how a free economy works. They both agreed that government and the private sector should work together to create jobs. They cannot conceive of a time when government stayed out of the economy because the Constitution gave it no power to intrude in the economy except in problems dealing with interstate commerce.
Nor do either of them understand that government’s total control of public education has been the cause of the dumbing down of America and the destruction of the American brain. They did single out Steven Jobs as the kind of American entrepreneurial genius who has been able to change the world. But Jobs is the exception to the present rule where the potentially bright minds of thousands of Americans have been seriously handicapped by the dumbing down process that takes place in American government schools.
Neither Morgan nor Huffington would dream of interviewing Charlotte Iserbyt, or Sam Blumenfeld, or John Taylor Gatto. As far as they’re concerned we don’t exist. So whenever there’s an establishment education conference, you will never find any of us among the panelists.
For example, on August 18th, at the historic Whaling Church in Edgartown, Martha’s Vineyard, there was an education conference organized by Henry Louis Gates and his team at the DuBois Institute at Harvard. Nowhere was it mentioned in the program that DuBois was a communist. The moderator was Charlayne Hunter-Gault, formerly of NPR and PBS. Participants included the usual suspects: Diane Ravitch of Teachers College, Columbia University; Michelle Rhee, ex-head of Washington, DC’s, public schools; Dr. James Comer, a Yale physician who has created the Comer Schools, and Professor Angel Harris of Princeton. The subject was the Education Gap.
John Merrow, PBS commentator on education, attended the conference. He wrote on HuffPo:
Here’s just part of what we learned: A child born in poverty (black or white) has a 10% chance of getting to college, and our poverty rate eclipses that of other industrialized nations. By graduation day, there’s a 4-year skills gap between black and white graduates -— and that does not factor in those who drop out. We also lock up more of our citizens than other countries, and the black/white incarceration ratio is 8:1. Angel Harris of Princeton spoke persuasively about the depth of the ‘Education Gap’ and the public’s failure to grasp that. Because we don’t get it, he asserted, we grasp at “silver bullets” and “magical cures” instead of hunkering down and committing to long term solutions.
In other words, they spoke of the symptoms of the dumbing down process, but they never spoke of the cause of the disease: the deliberate dumbing down of American school children. They ignore the fact that prior to the takeover of the schools by the Progressives, children from poor families learned to read quite well and were able to lift themselves out of poverty by becoming scientists, engineers, small business owners, inventors, salesmen, actors, journalists, writers, broadcasters, etc.
Nor did the panelists speak of how American children have been robbed of their brain power by teaching methods that actually deform the brain. In my book, The New Illiterates, I called the sight method of teaching reading as the Thalidomide of public education. But who among the panelists had ever read my book, or Charlotte Iserbyt’s enormous tome, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, or John Taylor Gatto’s Underground History of American Education, or Beverly Eakman’s Walking Targets: How Our Psychologized Classrooms Are Producing a Nation of Sitting Ducks?
The only one among the panel who seemed to make sense was Dr. James Comer. Merrow reports:
Dr. James Comer, the Yale physician whose ‘Comer Schools’ are beacons of hope, brought the crowd to life with his eloquent explanation of why and how so many schools for poor children fail. It is, he asserted, largely because teachers and administrators do not understand child development and the needs of children. Time was, Comer told the audience, when most families were able to meet their children’s developmental needs, but today, with about 35% of children living in poverty, the schools and teachers are overwhelmed. And, to make matters worse, schools of education do not prepare teachers to understand, let alone meet, developmental needs, Comer said.
Diane Ravitch, who was once considered a conservative, seems to have been reborn in her old age as an establishment liberal. She added nothing new. Merrow writes:
She] sounded some familiar themes: Poverty is the key here. Small classes make a difference. She bemoaned that, because of No Child Left Behind and its testing requirements, schools are eliminating art, music, PE and “all the stuff that keeps kids coming to school.” And she suggested that we take some of the billions we spend on testing and spend it on early childhood education instead.
As for Michelle Rhee, who tried to reform the public schools of Washington, D.C., she was forced to resign because of teacher union resistance. She is a strong believer in “accountability,” and knows that schools cannot cure poverty. However, she believes that teachers do make a difference, but that society cannot afford to give demonstrably poor teachers years to improve.
But the real trouble with Ms. Rhee is that she is too young to know the true history of the reading wars and how the colleges of education have perverted the teaching of reading so that none of their graduates have the faintest idea how to teach reading in the correct phonetic manner.
By the way, the great brain robbery is an ongoing criminal activity that the Progressives initiated in the early twentieth century and have no intention of stopping. Try to get an intensive, systematic phonics reading program in a public school and see how far you will get. In September, all over America, the young, dynamic, language-learning brains of first graders will be subjected to the technicians of brain thievery. This will be done by a non-surgical prefrontal lobotomy that not even the teachers who perform it know what they are doing. The process will turn perfectly normal, healthy children into dysfunctional, neurologically impaired human beings.
You can see these brainless individuals everywhere, and particularly at shopping malls where they usually congregate in groups. You know you can’t have a serious conversation with any of them. The brainless American is a product of our public schools. Their brains have been stolen by an evil elite that wants to rule its New World Order without opposition. And, unfortunately, I see no one in American politics who understands the depth of the problem. George W. Bush said he favored phonics, but instead gave us No Child Left Behind.
Obviously, it would be better to leave government behind and allow teachers and parents to properly educate children without government’s interference.
