Thus, intelligent children who, with proper instruction, would otherwise become truly literate are relegated to the junk heap of our society because of a perverse elite that is hell-bent on dumbing down the nation. Black children suffer the most because their parents, who themselves have been dumbed down, are least capable of understanding what is happening to their children in the public schools.

In America we compel children to be subjected to wholesale educational malpractice with hardly a complaint from our intellectual establishment. The only people who genuinely care are socalled rightwing "extremists" who write books critical of the system, which are never reviewed by the academic community.

Here's what Professor Anthony Oettinger of Harvard University, a rabid advocate of dumbing down, told an audience of corporate executives in 1982:

        "The present 'traditional' concept of literacy has to do
        with the ability to read and write. But the real question
        that confronts us today is: How do we help citizens
        function well in their society? How can they acquire
        the skills necessary to solve their problems?

        Do we, for example, really want to teach people to do
        a lot of sums or write in 'a fine round hand' when they 
        have a five-dollar hand-held calculator or a word pro-
        cessor to work with? Or, do we really have to have
        everybody literate writing and reading in the tradi-
        tional sense when we have the means through our
        technology to achieve a new flowering of oral com-
        munication?

But make no mistake about it. Even though the educators have no intention of teaching those children how to do sums, or write in a fine round hand, or read and write in the traditional sense, they still want them in the classroom for twelve years. What for? To turn them into abject failures.

Regardless of whether the child will be going to a better public school outside his or her neighborhood or to a charter school, chances are very good that he or she will be trained to read by one of the whole-language programs that produce reading disability and dyslexia.

How can this be, you might ask. Hasn't whole language been thrown out and replaced by intensive, systematic phonics? Unfortunately, not. The educators may not call their reading program whole language, but you can be sure that it will be whole language in a new disguise. The new program is generally referred to as "A Balanced Approach." It is all part of the dumbing-down agenda, which is the basis of our dumbed-down curriculum.

The reason why the schools are not teaching reading by way of intensive, systematic phonics is because there are virtually no primary teachers capable of doing so. Their training at college emphasized whole-language instruction. Therefore, even if they wanted to teach intensive, systematic phonics, they would not know how to do it.

The American public school system has become a sadistic trap for the unwary. It turns some teachers into sadists, who gain secret pleasure in watching the students they hate and can't control turn into failures. And, unfortunately, there is nothing in President Bush's education reform that will change this. Thus, the only solution for parents is to get their kids out and either teach them at home or put them in a private school they can trust.

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