HOME EDUCATION REVOLUTION

Home education revolution!
By Samuel Blumenfeld

The only effective group of citizens today in open opposition to big government are the home schoolers. They are the only Americans willing to take on the public education system that props up the entire statist enterprise of big, intrusive government. Forget about conservative politicians. They are more concerned about conserving their legislative privileges than rolling back increasingly intrusive government.

Although President Bush has said nice things about home schoolers, he is doing more to expand federal control over education than any previous Republican president. His call for standardized testing is, in reality, a call for a federal curriculum, which will be used by the establishment to continue dumbing down the nation.

In the last two months, I've spoken at four home-school conventions in liberal New England, and there is no doubt that those who attend the conventions are revolutionaries in the true sense of the word. They have rejected the tax-supported school system, which is the chief instrument the totalitarians are using to construct a socially controlled society.

Only by reasserting the need for educational freedom can this nation restore its adherence to the principles of a free society. Leading in that fight is the Home School Legal Defense Association, founded by Michael Farris and other home-schooling attorneys, to defend the rights of American parents to educate their children at home in accordance with their own values. Two years ago, Farris founded Patrick Henry College to educate home schoolers in constitutional law and to train them to serve as aides to conservative congressmen.

The fact that parents can still legally take their children out of the government schools and educate them at home is an indication that this revolution can be won peacefully. The simple fact is that the home-school movement has reached critical mass and cannot be destroyed without causing a civil upheaval, and no politician can afford to let that happen.

Why are so many parents home schooling? Because they've come to the realization that the schools are destroying the brains of American children. It all starts in the first grade where teaching methods are used to deliberately cause dyslexia and reading disability. The method is popularly known as whole language, or the sight method, in which children are required to memorize a sight vocabulary. That is, they are required to memorize English printed words as whole configurations, like Chinese characters. Sounds harmless enough, unless you understand what that kind of memorization results in: a holistic reflex.

What's wrong with a holistic reflex? It becomes an obstacle to learning to read phonetically. An alphabet is a phonetic system in which letters represent language sounds. To become a fluent reader, you must develop a phonetic reflex, not a holistic one. With a phonetic reflex, achieved through phonics drill, the reader can easily see the phonetic structure of the words he is reading and discern the syllabic units that make up the word. But a reader with a holistic reflex cannot see the phonetic structure of the words, because he has the automatic habit of looking at words as whole configurations.

In other words, the holistic reflex and the phonetic reflex are mutually exclusive. And it was Ivan Pavlov, in his pysch lab in Moscow in the 1920s, who proved that when an animal is subjected to two mutually exclusive reflexes, it has a nervous breakdown. All of this is known to American psychologists, for the results of Pavlov's experiments were published in 1932 in a book, "The Nature of Human Conflicts: Researches in Disorganization and Control of Human Behavior," by A. R. Luria, professor of psychology, State Institute of Experimental Psychology in Moscow. It was translated by an American student of Pavlov's, W. Horsley Gantt.

The other day, a mother called me on a radio talk show. She complained that her son was having trouble with reading. It turned out that the school was teaching phonics and also requiring the child to memorize a sight vocabulary. I told her that her son was experiencing a collision of reflexes, which was causing his confusion and difficulty. I told her to get my Alpha-Phonics program and teach her child to read at home.

The literacy scandal is only one reason why parents are now home schooling. There are over four million kids on Ritalin, academic chaos in the classroom, a curriculum of boredom, pornographic sex education, school massacres and more. If you love your kids, get them out!

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Sam Blumenfeld is author of Is Public Education Necessary? and other titles on education.