Preface to John Dewey’s Plan to Dumb-Down America
By Samuel Blumenfeld
The dumbing-down of America is no accident. It is not the result of uncontrollable natural forces floating in the air we breathe or the water we drink. It is the result of a planned scheme launched in 1898 by Progressive-in-Chief John Dewey outlined in an article titled "The Primary-Education Fetich” (sic). Dewey was a diehard socialist with a deep hatred of capitalism, individualism, and orthodox Christianity. He, and his small army of academic followers, were determined to turn America into a humanist collectivist society and he figured out that the best way to separate Americans from their constitutional freedoms and individualism was to dumb them down.
And the easiest way to do this was to change the way children were taught to read in their primary schools. Get rid of intensive phonics, the foundation of language mastery and independent intelligence, and put in its place a “sight” or “look-say” method that teaches children to read English as if it were Chinese. Have them memorize a sight vocabulary so that they develop a whole-word reflex and cannot see the phonetic structure of our alphabetic words. Thus they will become reading disabled, dyslexic, or simply low-level readers.
Need proof? Look no further than what happened to the four Rockefeller boys back in the 1920s when John D. Rockefeller Jr. put his four sons—Nelson, Laurence, Winthrop, and David—in the Progressive Lincoln School in New York. As a misguided admirer of John Dewey, Rockefeller donated three million dollars to the school which then turned his four sons into dyslexics. Mr. Rockefeller’s ignorance condemned his sons to lives of literary frustration. Yes, they had plenty of money, but their life-long reading handicap deprived them of the great pleasures of reading.
Dewey’s vision of an egalitarian, socialist America was based on a novel written by Unitarian journalist Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward . The novel is a fantasy of America becoming a socialist paradise in the year 2000. Economic planning replaced free-market competition, and Americans became members of a regimented industrial army, all paid by the government.
Of course, Dewey knew that Americans would not voluntarily give up their economic and individual freedoms, so he told his colleagues: “Change must come gradually. To force it unduly would compromise its final success by favoring a violent reaction.” And so, wholesale deception became the modus operandi of the progressive movement.
We are reprinting Dewey’s article because it is important for Americans to understand how they’ve been deceived by their so-called educators. The plan to deliberately dumb down the nation has been hidden from the public for almost 100 years. Reading it today is to become finally aware of the deceit and treachery behind this treasonous conspiracy to destroy the intellect of millions of Americans behind the benign façade of Progressive education.
When you consider the misery, frustration, despair and humiliation these teaching methods have caused in millions of American children, it becomes clear that the professional educators behind all of this were diabolically inspired.
Can we repair the damage done by Dewey’s plan? Only if the will is there and Americans are willing to face the fact that they have been betrayed by their educators.
Dewey, of course, is long dead, but his disciples control American public education, and whether they know it or not they are continuing to implement Dewey’s plan. And we see the results every day. In 2007, the National Endowment for the Arts released its report on the decline of American literacy. Its chairman, Dana Gioia stated:
“This is a massive social problem. We are losing the majority of the new generation. They will not achieve anything close to their potential because of poor reading.”
The only way to reverse this situation is to make sure that every child in every American school is taught to read with intensive, systematic phonics. We know how to restore high literacy to America. But is there the will to do it? Many parents are doing it by homeschooling their own children. But will it be done in the schools? It will be done only if there is enough of an outcry from concerned parents and citizens. That is why we urge readers of this article to distribute copies of it to as many people as possible. If this article is read by millions of Americans, it will have an impact that the educators and politicians will not be able to ignore.
By Samuel Blumenfeld
The dumbing-down of America is no accident. It is not the result of uncontrollable natural forces floating in the air we breathe or the water we drink. It is the result of a planned scheme launched in 1898 by Progressive-in-Chief John Dewey outlined in an article titled "The Primary-Education Fetich” (sic). Dewey was a diehard socialist with a deep hatred of capitalism, individualism, and orthodox Christianity. He, and his small army of academic followers, were determined to turn America into a humanist collectivist society and he figured out that the best way to separate Americans from their constitutional freedoms and individualism was to dumb them down.
And the easiest way to do this was to change the way children were taught to read in their primary schools. Get rid of intensive phonics, the foundation of language mastery and independent intelligence, and put in its place a “sight” or “look-say” method that teaches children to read English as if it were Chinese. Have them memorize a sight vocabulary so that they develop a whole-word reflex and cannot see the phonetic structure of our alphabetic words. Thus they will become reading disabled, dyslexic, or simply low-level readers.
Need proof? Look no further than what happened to the four Rockefeller boys back in the 1920s when John D. Rockefeller Jr. put his four sons—Nelson, Laurence, Winthrop, and David—in the Progressive Lincoln School in New York. As a misguided admirer of John Dewey, Rockefeller donated three million dollars to the school which then turned his four sons into dyslexics. Mr. Rockefeller’s ignorance condemned his sons to lives of literary frustration. Yes, they had plenty of money, but their life-long reading handicap deprived them of the great pleasures of reading.
Dewey’s vision of an egalitarian, socialist America was based on a novel written by Unitarian journalist Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward . The novel is a fantasy of America becoming a socialist paradise in the year 2000. Economic planning replaced free-market competition, and Americans became members of a regimented industrial army, all paid by the government.
Of course, Dewey knew that Americans would not voluntarily give up their economic and individual freedoms, so he told his colleagues: “Change must come gradually. To force it unduly would compromise its final success by favoring a violent reaction.” And so, wholesale deception became the modus operandi of the progressive movement.
We are reprinting Dewey’s article because it is important for Americans to understand how they’ve been deceived by their so-called educators. The plan to deliberately dumb down the nation has been hidden from the public for almost 100 years. Reading it today is to become finally aware of the deceit and treachery behind this treasonous conspiracy to destroy the intellect of millions of Americans behind the benign façade of Progressive education.
When you consider the misery, frustration, despair and humiliation these teaching methods have caused in millions of American children, it becomes clear that the professional educators behind all of this were diabolically inspired.
Can we repair the damage done by Dewey’s plan? Only if the will is there and Americans are willing to face the fact that they have been betrayed by their educators.
Dewey, of course, is long dead, but his disciples control American public education, and whether they know it or not they are continuing to implement Dewey’s plan. And we see the results every day. In 2007, the National Endowment for the Arts released its report on the decline of American literacy. Its chairman, Dana Gioia stated:
“This is a massive social problem. We are losing the majority of the new generation. They will not achieve anything close to their potential because of poor reading.”
The only way to reverse this situation is to make sure that every child in every American school is taught to read with intensive, systematic phonics. We know how to restore high literacy to America. But is there the will to do it? Many parents are doing it by homeschooling their own children. But will it be done in the schools? It will be done only if there is enough of an outcry from concerned parents and citizens. That is why we urge readers of this article to distribute copies of it to as many people as possible. If this article is read by millions of Americans, it will have an impact that the educators and politicians will not be able to ignore.
