Introduction to “Whole Language: Deconstruction in the Primary School”
“Behold, the days come, saith the Lord GOD,
that I will send a famine in the land,
not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water,
but of hearing the Words of the LORD:”
(Amos 8:11)
As part of our ongoing effort to recover research documents, we are re-posting an important article on the history of how the evangelical church, and our culture at large, has become purposefully dumbed down. This has been accomplished by attacking literacy itself – the ability to read written text. The Bible, the Word of God, is a written text.
Samuel L. Blumenfeld, the author of this article and recognized expert on illiteracy in America, visited our home in Iowa in the Fall of 1990. He was noted for his national advocacy of instructing children and tutoring adults how to read. He asserted that the English text could be sounded out with letter sounds, and letter group sounds, according to easily memorized rules. There were also easily learned exceptions to these rules. Sam asserted that the written word was decodable and its universal meaning could be accessible to all. This method of teaching reading is known as Phonics. Phonics is the way all children used to be taught how to read the English language.
There was a serious homeschool freedom threat by the State in the early 1990s and Sam had become our most staunch defender.[1] He was interviewed by WHO radio host Jan Mickelson on his popular morning talk show. When Sam delved into the history of why phonics was no longer being taught, he mentioned the key role of John Dewey, “the father of modern education.” A noted Socialist,[2] Dewey had traveled from the University of Chicago to Iowa towns in the 1930s to experiment on rural children with his new reading method (often referred to as “look say”). After Sam dropped this bombshell, the phone lines lit up with older Iowans calling in to report that they must have been part of that experiment. Some were very upset because they had been labeled a “dummy” all their lives. Lynn later asked his mother about this . She had grown up in one of these small towns in that same era. She recognized the experiment and said that she had struggled to read her entire life.
I told Sam that In the early 1970s, while working on a degree in elementary education, I had purposefully taken the last remaining course on phonics instruction ever taught at the university. I asked him detailed questions about its demise. He answered by telling me his testimony. His Jewish family believed they were of the tribe of Levi, he said, yet he had become a Christian believer. While tutoring children in Boston in the 1960s he discovered that education leaders (professors, bureaucrats, etc.) despised the phonics methods he was using. They published derogatory articles about phonics and this began influencing public policy. He noticed a peculiar thing – their scholarly writings consistently disparaged the Christian Reformation. To learn why, he conducted extensive research into church history. He discovered the Reformers believed that the Bible should be accessible for all to read, translated into the languages of the common man. They also taught the biblical view of the priesthood of all believers (1 Peter 2:5,9). Therefore, individual literacy of both men and women was deemed essential to enable people to read Scripture for themselves. Wherever biblical Christianity flourished childhood education became a societal priority. Sam said he then read the Bible for himself and his eyes were opened to the Gospel.[3]
After the crisis Sam remained in close contact with us and became an essential part of a national group that coalesced in 1993 around researching education reform issues.[4] In 1995 Sam published a groundbreaking research book titled The Whole Language/OBE Fraud. He gave us permission to publish a key chapter, “Whole Language: Deconstruction in the Primary School,” in its entirety in our magazine The Christian Conscience (July/August 1996). A few years later when we set up a website he gave us permission to post this same chapter online. He wanted to this key piece of research to reach a wider audience.
Sam’s chapter describes a revolutionary method of reading instruction that took the education community by storm in the 1980s and 1990s, commonly referred to as “whole language.” This became the cornerstone of “higher order thinking skills” – an existentialist divorce between text and meaning. Parents, teachers and communities were misled that “whole language” was necessary for the information age; that children needed to be taught new ways of mental processing for the burgeoning computer era. But the “whole language” method is patently fraudulent. Each child’s “truth” is deemed “correct” even when it is factually wrong. The sad fact is that children untrained in phonics can no longer sound out the word “d-o-g”, but it is counted as “correct” if they guess the word “puppy.” In this method of instruction, children often missed the key eye-brain-hand coordination skill of reading and writing from left to right. They also missed out on linear thinking skills leading to logical and rational thought. Instead they were taught to think with a “web” – a blob of disorganized information nodules.
As a result most of the Millennial generation, and every generation since, has been intentionally handicapped. They have not learned the necessary skills to decode the written word. Many are now dependent upon graphic images for context and interpretation. Children have learned to read alphabet letters as if they were icons. This, of course, has set the stage for idolatry – the dependence upon visual images for deciphering “truth.” These technological images, which can be seductively altered to amplify certain brainwaves, easily turn into a tool of psychological deception. Big Brother Artificial Intelligence is geared to inform us what is “true” according to its own algorithms, a selective collation of facts and fictions to manipulate the illiterate populace.
In his public speaking across the country, especially at large homeschool conventions and on radio interviews, Sam advocated for churches to open their doors for remedial instruction. He suggested a novel method of evangelism – start evening classes at your local church to tutor the illiterate people in your communities with reading skills. His book How to Tutor is for the purpose of aiding that effort.[5] Sam also developed the curriculum Alpha-Phonics: A Primer for Beginning Readers. This inexpensive book is designed to be used to teach children and/or adults the basic rules of English phonics in a sequential process. A beneficial side benefit is that as children acquire basic phonics rules, they also learn how to spell words correctly. I’ve successfully used Alpha-Phonics to teach my children, grandchildren, and teenagers with learning disabilities.
Despite Sam’s advocacy for biblical literacy, the evangelical mission world chose to go in a different direction, adopting this same deconstruction methodology which they rebranded as “orality.” We warned about this in 2006:
This new heresy is called ORALITY, which is telling biblical stories based on pictures and images. Orality short-cuts Bible translation and language methods of teaching the Word of God to “people groups.” The rationale for this is, of course, the “urgency” in fulfilling the Great Commission “mandate.” Orality is by its very nature condescending, treating Third World peoples as “children” who supposedly do not have the “ability” or “desire” to learn to read. It is being touted as an alternative method of evangelism. However, it is very evident that some mission groups have no intention of EVER teaching these people to read, or give them a Bible in their own language.[6]
For a period of time Sam published a monthly Blumenfeld Education Letter and was a frequent speaker at homeschool events . He became very influential in homeschool curriculum development, restoring some of the reading and writing basics. Sam also wrote the Foreword to Charlotte T. Iserbyt’s massive tome the deliberate dumbing down of america: A Chronological Paper Trail which we published in 1999.[7]
As part of our ongoing effort to curate research documents on this website, we will also be posting Sam’s reports on two homeschooling families persecuted by the state of Iowa. In the early 1990s Sam gave us permission to reprint these reports and widely distribute them. We passed out ten thousand inexpensive newsprint copies across the state of Iowa to increase public awareness of the homeschool persecution. The back story is detailed in our testimony “Homeschooling Under Fire” posted on this website.[8]
Endnotes:
[1] See our posted testimony “Homeschooling Under Fire,” subsection “The visit to meet Barry Bear” for a detailed account of this visit. https://herescope.net/2024/04/homeschooling-under-fire.html
[2] John Dewey was a co-author of the Humanist Manifesto I, which was originally published in 1933 in the New Humanist (Vol. VI, #3, 1933: Yellow Springs, Ohio), a publication of the American Humanist Association. Dewey “called for a synthesizing of all religions and a ‘socialized and cooperative economic order.’” His main goal was to dumb down the populace intentionally by altering the method of teaching reading, making it more difficult for people to be literate. It would be easier to impose Socialism upon a more ignorant citizenry. From the deliberate dumbing down of america by Charlotte T. Iserbyt (Conscience Press, 1999), p. 21. Ths book is downloadable at no charge at this website: https://deliberatedumbingdown.com/ddd/
[3] Leading Reconstructionists adopted Sam and furthered his message during the 1990s. On the positive side, this helped to increase the ranks of homeschoolers and Sam was enabled to have significant input into curriculum development using his phonics methods. However, these men were postmillennialists and held to Dominionist beliefs. Already the leaders were exhibiting great compromises both politically and spiritually, which we began warning about through our publishing for three decades. Sadly, Sam experienced some difficult experiences with being used and taken advantage towards the end of his life.
[4] Due to the homeschool crisis in Iowa we had formed a research group to study the education reform issues that were adversely impacting our freedoms. We networked with many other groups around the country in that next decade. We assisted in the publishing of a newspaper The Iowa Report, which quickly went national and was re-named The Free World Research Report (published by Wayne Wolf). In 1994 we set up the publishing corporation Iowa Research Group, Inc. which began to publish The Christian Conscience magazine. Sam’s research was very helpful to our understanding of the historical and philosophical background to this so-called “reform.”
[5] Samuel L. Blumenfeld’s books are still available on Amazon.com and from other booksellers. Visit the About the Author” page for a listing of his books.
[6] “The Newest Heresy of the NAR: Orality,” Discernment Research Group, March 8, 2006, https://herescope.net/2006/03/newest-heresy-of-nar-orality.html
[7] This book is now quite rare and expensive, but it can be read online: https://deliberatedumbingdown.com/ddd/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/DDDoA.pdf A new chapter was added in 2011 and is available here: https://deliberatedumbingdown.com/ddd/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/ddd_update.pdf For those who want in-depth historical documentation, this book is a must-read. There was a whole plan for Deconstruction that took decades to implement, and we now see its terrible fruits.
[8] See https://herescope.net/homeschooling-under-fire and recorded testimony.