On October 8, 2023, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) issued by the U.S. Department of Education released the reading and math scores for students tested in the fourth and eighth grades. NAEP made public their testing results in the Nation’s Report Card, revealing that 60% of U.S. students in U.S. public and non-public schools read below their grade level.
While this problem is not a new one, it America’s public and private schools’ issues with literacy are not new, but after years of a downward trend, they do seem uncorrectable. The history of literacy in education reveals that common denominator in the decent of literacy is when powerful men in charge of our educational systems took a step away from God toward socialism our students suffered.
There is a spiritual connection between reading and It’s time to look at some historical events in public education that started this nation toward its slow drift toward socialism. Could there be a connection between those events, our disconnect from God in our public schools and our dismal literacy issues? Historical events shed some light on how we arrived at this place and may give us some light on how to overcome.
One of the first events happened in 1837. The Father of Public Education and Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, Horace Mann, critical of the traditional alphabetic teaching method used in Christian schools, opted to adopt a less intensive and more innovative reading program originally invented for deaf and blind students. The textbook, titled the Mother’s Primer became the literacy textbook of the newly formed public schools. The primer delivered on it’s promise to take children away from strict Christian teaching to a less restrictive method.
John Dewey, the Father of Progressive Education, was first to argue in his 1916 book School and Society that high literacy would be an obstacle to socialism. Mr. Dewey opted to promote the look-say method of reading devoid of any phonics. Textbooks that promoted values, taught morals, or referenced belief in God were discarded. Mr. Dewey’s look-say method used in the Dick and Jane primers removed from the child the spiritual connection a child receives when a student reads.
The failure of Dewey’s program became the topic of Rudolf Flesh’s 1955 blockbuster book, Why Johnny Can’t Read. Mr. Flesh, an Austrian- born, naturalized American, writer made a compelling case for phonics-based reading programs, instead of the trendy look-say methods used in schools beginning in the 1950s.
Flesh’s book prompted what became known as the Reading Wars as educators bantered which method was best, look-say or phonics. As arguments failed to significantly move the needle on the use of phonics-based reading programs in public schools. the Reading Wars officially began in 1955 when Austrian-born, naturalized, American writer, Rudolf Flesh published his blockbuster book Why Johnny Can’t Read.
John Dewey methods won the Reading Wars and sixty-eight years later we face the stark reality that Johnny still can’t read. John Dewey opened the door for socialism and communism to enter this nation through the students educated in our public schools.
The next wave of educational innovators in education that would reading occurred during the 1960s and 1970s when educators like the Havelocks began their program for training teachers to become change agents. Ronald G. and Mary C. Havelock, two University of Michigan professors, received grant money to help facilitate the training of newly hired public-school teachers. As devout socialists, the Havelocks produced two books, A Change Agent’s Guide to Innovation in Education and Training for Change Agents. Both books relied heavily on the works of Carl Marx. Their book sales exceeded their expectations. The Havelocks became instrumental in the promotion of producing socialistic material that would promote change-through-crisis will be utilize the disruption in educational systems as an important input variable.
Perhaps the most influential of socialist innovators in the 1970 is Palo Freire who felt that literacy was a white construct and should be totally revamped. According to Freire, all reading should promote social justice issues that would cause the student to become a social activits. . done away with and replaced with reading for the sake of encouraging the student to become a
To understand what happened to American education and why the primary emphasis of public schools may not be to teach basic skills to the students, especially reading skills, it’s imperative to look the at Paulo Freire, a Brazilian professor, educator, and devout Marxist. Freire authored two books the Politics of Education and Pedagogy of the Oppressed. The latter work landed Freire a Harvard professorship in 1969. Nurtured at Harvard, Freire’s work blossomed and eventually trickled down to become educational policy in the classrooms across America. Pedagogy of the Oppressed being the third most cited book in social sciences and is used in virtually every, if not literally every, education program in North America today (pg 10).
James Lindsay in his recent book The Marxification of Education: Paulo Freire’s Critical Marxism and the Theft of Education,details the radical Marxist ideas implemented in today’s classrooms.
· For Freire, all education must be political. Teaching children to read using phonics or the look-say methods teach children to learn and therefore reproduce the existing oppressive system.
· Instead, students must be taught to read using social issues relevant to the political system they know. The responsibility of a teacher is to teach political literacy. In Brazil, Freire taught ignorant laborers to read the sentence, The land belongs to the tiller. Freire would continue with a political discourse on who should own the land.
· Lindsay points out that Freire in The Politics of Education seeks to replace the Christian theological beliefs regarding the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, with a blatantly Marxist counterfeit in which the individual dies to the existing world and is resurrected into a Marxist, Socialist man (pg 30).
· It is not for those in power or privilege to determine what it means to be educated, and thereby reproduce their social construct. Everyone, even illiterates are knowers and has the capacity to transform reality according to their own vision of political reality (pg 46).
Mr. Freire’s methods gave us schools that promote critical race theory and illiteracy exacerbating the learning crisis in America. While education’s labor unions continue to ask for more money, we realize that our answer is in God and the prayers of those who love our nation and the students in our schools.
Originally Posted on Intersessors for America.