Why Johnny Really Can't Read

An analysis of the current crisis in the American Educational System, via reviews of The Leipzig Connection: Sabotage of the US Educational System by Paolo Lionni and Educating for the New World Order, by B. K. Eakman

By Jerry E. Smith

 

Paolo Lionni, then Headmaster of the Delphian School of Sheridan, Oregon, wrote a marvelous little book called The Leipzig Connection: Sabotage of the US Educational System (Heron Books; ISBN: 0897390016 (January 1993)) in which he documents how the Rockefellers virtually took over control of the American educational system. Why would the Rockefellers, perhaps the greatest of all the American "Robber Barons" want to control how or what American's are taught?

"Every civilization has had slavery as an essential element of its economy --including our own. Have you attained the "American Dream" by making payments on our own home? But who owns your home really? If you're still making payments, who owns your car? Washer/dryer? Refrigerator/freezer? Big screen TV? Just stop making payments and see what happens. Let's say you have paid off your car, paid off your home. What happens if you don't pay property taxes on time, or pay car insurance? What if you suddenly take ill? Ever hear of indentured servitude? Before the Civil War, free men who needed money could sell themselves into slavery for a period of time, usually seven years. Most Americans are way over their heads in debt. Daily they sell themselves into slavery --in forty hour weeks, eight hour shifts, if they can find them."

-- Jim Keith

Preface to Secret And Suppressed: Banned Ideas and Hidden History

An honest appraisal of human history will reveal the shocking truth that every civilization that has ever existed has run on slave labor --including, as Mr. Keith points out, this one. The only real change since the Renaissance has been better quarters for the slaves. Credit cards and mortgages and the baubles they buy (and fear of losing our pensions and privileges) are the new chains of slavery. How much more convenient for the masters! Now the slaves happily enslave themselves. "Wage Slave" is not a hollow joke, but an exact statement of the condition of the working class around the world.

And if the slaves could be kept ignorant of all but the most basic knowledge necessary to do their jobs, how much easier would it be to keep them under control? toiling their lives away for table scraps while their owners become billionaires?

Why the Rockefellers, in particular, would want to control the way we were taught is open to speculation. The fact that they have spent millions this century to accomplish it is a sobering fact. The Rockefellers, however, are not the only players in this game of academic mind control. First, I will give you the "Leipzig Connection" as outlined by Mr. Leonni, then the Carnegie Foundation-Behavior Modification Psychology "conspiracy" as revealed by B. K. Eakmen in her book, Educating for the New World Order.

By the turn of the century the Rockefellers were probably the richest family in America. The Rockefeller oil empire spanned the globe and unquestionably led them into "global thinking." It could be argued that they were among the first of McLuhan's "global villagers." As neighbors, however, Mr. Rogers they aren't. Perhaps they decided that only through controlling the commoners could they effectively, and profitably, control the natural wealth of the many nations that they had acquired.

Around the turn of the century they founded the Rockefeller Foundation and participated in the setting up of many other charitable and "societal control" organizations. Since that time they have been, among many other activities, at the forefront of the world eugenics and population control movement(s), apparently believing that excess population would destabilize governments under their sway and lead to lost revenue. (For a detailed analysis of this one of their many dirty dealings read Jim Keith's Mind Control and Ufo's: Casebook on Alternative 3 (originally titled: Casebook on Alternative 3: UFOs, Secret Societies and World Control. Illuminet Press; ISBN: 1881532178 (Updated edition, June 1, 1999)). Another of their brainchildren was the founding of the Model School at Columbia University, which, as the premiere teacher's college, has since become one of the dominant paradigms in mainstream educational thinking in America.

We have all heard of the Austrian doctor and drug addict Sigmund Freud, who, at the turn of the century, was developing psychoanalysis as an individualized application of the fledgling (pseudo)science of Psychology. At the same time Wilhelm Wundt, a Professor at the University of Leipzig in Poland, was working up a version for controlling masses of people called, today, Social Psychology.

In Wundt's theories I believe the Rockefellers saw a solution to their problem of, what could be called, effective slave control. Wundt's opinion was that man was just a hunk of meat: that there was no such thing as a "soul." According to Wundt (and his successors), the "psyche" (Greek for "soul") that psychology was supposed to be studying ("-ology" for "study of") did not exist (kinda blows their reason for existing, as psyche-ologists anyway, doesn't it?).

Wundt believed that all human actions could be defined in terms of reactions; i.e., you are not aware, you just think you are, and everything you do is a preprogrammed reaction to the environment controlled by various factors known only to science (e.g. blood/brain chemistry, educational conditioning, etc.). Pavlov with his famous dogs was working in that same field. Today this field is called Behavior Modification, or BehavMod, and is dominated by the late B. F. Skinner and his followers.

Wundt applied these principles to society as a whole, developing techniques for controlling whole populations. A belief that people are merely stimulus-response robots allows you to do just about anything you want to them. The Nazi death camp psychological experimenters and today's Industrial Psychologists hold this same view of people.

One of Wundt's most famous students was John Dewey. Dewey had a number of impressive accomplishments in his lifetime. He was a Socialist and a card-carrying Founding Member of the American Communist Party. He was the senior editor of the first modern English language translation of the Holy Bible (!). And, as the prophet of Progressive Education, founded the Model School at Columbia University in 1902 with Rockefeller money.

The Model School's purpose was to demonstrate application of Wundt's theories of social psychology, via Dewey's Progressive Education concept, in a school setting. Since that time, nearly every American educator has either been trained at the Model School, or has been trained by someone who was. Additionally, the Rockefeller Foundation became a primary supplier of school texts. By 1950 it was nearly impossible to find a schoolbook in America that had not been published by the Foundation, a subsidiary of the Foundation, or written by someone trained and/or funded by the Foundation.

Johnny's inability to read was no accident. American students are being taught not to read. At the time of the founding of the Model School Americans were among the most literate people in the history of the world. Literate not just in the sense of being able to read, but literate in actually having read, and thought about, and discussed important ideas. In 1902 an awful lot of Americans could actually think. Thinking slaves are dangerous slaves. The Rockefellers, in the guise of a charitable organization, together with the Carnegies, as we shall see in a moment, took care of that problem.

How were we taught not to read? Here's one way: words have precise meanings. If I were to say to you, "Hand me the thing-a-ma-bob," unless I were pointing at it, you would have no idea what I was talking about. How about this one: "During the crepuscule the children were less active..." What the heck does that mean, you ask? Now, if I were to add "...than they had been earlier, before sunset," you might try to figure out what "crepuscule" meant from context, as you were taught to do in school. Except... you would never actually know that "crepuscule" means twilight, you would never be able to use the word. It would have become just another "thing-a-ma-bob" bumping around in your head. My point is: teaching children not to look up words in a dictionary, but to try to guess what they might mean from context, is not just lazy, it's criminal. It makes you stupid. It fills your mind with a lot of wrong definitions, vague ideas and mysteries.

Another technique for fouling children's minds is embodied in the Dick and Jane readers. Once upon a time phonics was the only reading method taught in schools. That was because it worked. Then came our aristocratically funded school reformers. They instituted a new way to learn reading, by learning to recognize individual words, called "sight reading" or "whole word." All those "See Spot. See Spot run." books were from this crew. The trouble is, "whole word" doesn't work with a language based on an alphabet (it's fine for languages composed of ideograms, like Chinese or Japanese, though). It is a great deal easier to learn the few dozen sounds in the English language than it is to learn to recognize the several hundred thousand (common) words! Why would we teach a technique for reading Chinese to students learning English? The end result of this sort of "education" is the creation of non-readers. Just what this "conspiracy" wants! And none of the teachers lose their jobs, as it at least looks like they're working.

In George Orwell's 1984 one of EngSoc's three "truths" was "Ignorance Is Strength." Have you ever noticed how ignorant people have a great deal of strength in their convictions? Not being able to think is, at least subconsciously, terrifying. Unable to arrive at ideas and understandings on one's own, every idea must be held onto like a life preserver in the sea beside a sinking ship. Every idea is as important as every other idea because there is no mechanism to judge between them.

"Authority" (the Church-School-State Establishment) is strengthened by ignorance as well. The ignorant must rely on Authority for opinions. This keeps Authority on top. The "conspiracy" has a vested interest in maintaining this druggie-like dependence on Authority. It is a very short "hokey-pokey" little step from authoritarianism to totalitarianism.

The program to reduce mental competency is accelerating. In the last few decades new educational ideas have been sweeping the country under the lofty sounding names of "Goals 2000" and "outcome based education." I warn you, you will be shocked if you examine them. "Whole word," for example, has been replaced by "whole language." In phonics a child is taught to recognize letters and sounds as the basic building blocks of language; in "whole word" children are drilled in recognizing whole words (leaving them unable to "sound out" words that are new to them). In "whole language" this nonsense has been taken to its illogical conclusion and paragraphs are taught as if they were letters in phonics! This is totally insane. I wish I were making this up; they really are trying to get school systems to switch over to "whole language" education. And you think Johnny has trouble now!

These new educational methodologies high-end on social programming (becoming good little "politically correct" worker-robots) and involves precious little real learning. They have abandoned grading, for example, saying it puts too much pressure on the children; so there is no way to determine if the kids are learning anything (this, I think, is really a way to "hide the bodies").

They actually discourage some basic learning; for example, the children are deliberately being "taught" to misspell words! These new "outcome based" educators say misspelling is a form of creativity! Yes, this "education" is "outcome based" all right, but the outcome is one chosen by the social engineers in the employ of the conspiracy.

Paolo Lionni wrote: "Wundt established the new psychology as a study of the brain and the central nervous system. From Wundt's work, it was only a short step to the later redefining of the meaning of education. Originally, education meant the drawing out of a person's innate talents and abilities by imparting the knowledge of languages, scientific reasoning, history, literature, rhetoric, etc. - the channels through which those abilities would flourish and serve. To the experimental psychologist, however, education became the process of exposing the student to "meaningful" experiences so as to ensure desired reactions:

' ...Learning is the result of modifiability in the paths of neural conduction... The situation-response formula is adequate to cover learning of any sort, and the really influential factors in learning are readiness of the neurons, sequence in time, belongingness, and satisfying consequences.'

"If one assumes (as did Wundt) that there is nothing there to begin with but a body, a brain, and a nervous system, then one must try to educate by inducing sensations in that nervous system. Through these experiences, the individual will learn to respond to any given stimulus, with the "correct" response."

"Wundt's thesis laid the philosophical basis for the principles of conditioning later developed by Pavlov (who studied physiology in Leipzig, in 1884, five years after Wundt had inaugurated his laboratory there) and American behavioral psychologists such as Watson and Skinner; for lobotomies and electro-convulsive therapy; for schools more oriented toward the socialization of the child than toward the development of intellect; and for the emergence of a society more and more blatantly devoted to the gratification of sensory desires at the expense of responsibility and achievement."

This conspiratorial relationship between psychology and philanthropy may be a case of the tail wagging the dog. I cannot honestly say for sure whose plan it was. Perhaps the conspiracy hired the BehavMod folks to do their dirty work, or perhaps the psychs evolved a brilliant strategy to use the elite to further their own purposes -- or more likely, it's a bit of both. Either way, my research conclusively shows (at least for me) that the destruction of our educational system can be laid squarely in the lap of the psychs and the foundations that fund them.

This is where we segue into another major, and slightly earlier, book on this subject: Educating for the New World Order, by B. K. Eakman (published by Halcyon House, a division of Educational Research Associates, Portland, Oregon; ISBN: 0894202782 (June 1991)).

I want you to read Mrs. Eakman's book, so I don't want to give too much of it away here. Briefly, what she discovered is that the Wundtian BehavMod folks are working several fronts against us: through government at federal, state and local levels, as well as through charitable institutions and academia.

Apparently, the practitioners of Behavior Modification Psychology believe themselves to be the sole repository of an understanding of what sanity really is. It would seem that they believe that this society, its parents and institutions, are not sane; and that they consider themselves alone to be capable of shouldering the heavy burden of bringing sanity to future generations. Since we, the parents, are crazy, in their estimation, we cannot be trusted with the rearing or education of our young -- only (the alleged science of) Behavior Modification can be entrusted to do that. The BehavMod freaks know that if we found out what they were doing, we would string 'em up, so they have evolved a clandestine plan for "saving" the human race (from itself).

By federal law, the federal government cannot set curriculum for local schools (yet, that is; they're working on it). However, that has not, in practice, prevented them from doing it. The mechanism is federal funding. For a local school district to get (badly wanted, even if not badly needed) federal funds the schools have to be accredited.

Accreditation is a process whereby a federal board examines the curricula of a school to see if it meets certain federal guidelines. If it does then the feds release the funds. The trouble is, education experts, largely the BehavMods who have come to dominate the field, write the federal guidelines after testimony. Further, the members of this accreditation board are themselves BehavMod psychs or fellow travelers. The accreditation board, perhaps not unnaturally, accredits only schools that implement curriculums written by their pals, also BehavMods.

This "approved" curricular material is supplied to the nation's schools from a very few sources, primarily from ones funded by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (CFAT), which is, you guessed it, up to its eyeballs in BehavMods. CFAT has created and continues to fund a vast complex of organizations, boards, commissions, lobbies, and much more that affect most aspects of education in America. Those experts who testify before Congress, as well as the educators who sit on the plethora of municipal, state, and federal boards and commissions are almost exclusively provided by CFAT and/or organizations under its umbrella.

The organizations that create, administer, evaluate and database the nation's major academic tests (such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and the National Teacher's Examination) were also created and funded by CFAT and its BehavMod psychs. These tests do not measure what a child has actually learned; instead, they are used to determine the progress of the behavior modification program. Results are used to fine tune future curricular releases. They are not "educating" children; they are "socializing" them. This explains why so many "educators" have endorsed a recently floated plan to drop scholastic achievement tests (that actually measure what a student has learned) for college entrance exams and replace them with these murky aptitude tests that measure the degree the "socializing" program has succeeded with that student).

This direct and indirect control of American education via CFAT dominated organizations effectively puts the Carnegie and Rockefeller funded BehavMods in control of a very neat, self-perpetuating circle where every key base is covered by a behavior modification psychologist, from Capitol Hill to the classroom.

I say that there is a conspiracy here, in our educational system turning out, not thinkers and artists, but ignorant dolts and robotized workers, but maybe there isn't. Maybe it's just a random series of unrelated events, an embarrassing coincidence that the Rockefellers and the Carnegies accidentally funded theories that destroyed American education and several generations of children. Rotten luck. It just worked out that way... Yeah, right.               http://www.jerryesmith.com/index.php/54