America seems almost as divided today as it was during the Civil War... WHY?

We worry: Why are we so polarized? (this is getting scary!)

We wonder: What’s the cause? Because we need a solution!

One of the best-selling futuristic novels of the last century was A Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. Many who read it today are amazed at how eerily it predicted much of what we see in our culture today. The most disturbing practice of this Brave New World was the manner in which the “Central Planners” manipulated the people in order to control them and create a “utopian world”. They needed to manufacture certain classes of people who were capable of performing only the most simple tasks – and be virtually unable to function at higher levels – so that the factories of the future would be well-stocked with worker-bees who simply accepted their plight without ever considering any alternatives. The Central Planners successfully squelched critical thinking among the populous. The state became God, and individuality was crushed.

The following article explains clearly how this has been done in our non-fiction world of today. If you don’t want to see your family fall prey to these crushing tactics and embrace the wild, foolish, and dangerous ideas our culture is buying into, this article is a must-read. The solution will be clear.

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Illiterate New World

By Bruce Deitrick Price   (this article appeared in AmericanThinker.com, March 31, 2018)

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World appeared in 1932.  Everyone at that time was dazzled by the technocratic skills of the Ford Motor Company, able to turn out identical cars by the millions on highly efficient assembly lines.  In Huxley's novel, the calendar counts years A.F. – After Ford – and God's new name is Ford.

 The [up-and-coming progressives of that era] became obsessed with control.  Ideologues liked the possibility of more precise social engineering.  Communists in particular were focused on planned societies and central economies, with super-smart experts sitting around a table and deciding what every citizen could do and could not do.  Psychiatrists like Ivan Pavlov wanted to show how drastically you could manipulate cognition and personality.

Aldous Huxley devised a single beautiful image for capturing all of these hopes and fears: a hi-tech assembly line where infants were manufactured to specification.  In particular, oxygen levels were adjusted to create babies of very low, low, medium, and very high intelligence.  This image, this metaphor, was stunning in its concreteness.  A huge industrial operation, all clean and shiny, all stainless steel and glass, did what nobody had thought of doing before: control human intelligence in the embryo.

 It turns out there is an activity in the real world, in real society, that is exactly parallel.  That was the creation of readers to order.  By the simple device of depriving some children of certain key information, they were stunted, no longer able to become professors, more or less predestined for low-level jobs.

 As Huxley in the year 1931 was doing the final edit on his book, this country's Education Establishment built a new sort of assembly line for producing flawed children.  Instead of withholding oxygen, this factory withheld the alphabet.  Parents were told that the ABCs are not essential and could be ignored.  As one famous expert announced dogmatically, "[c]urrent practice in the teaching of reading does not require knowledge of letters."  Really?

[NOTE from GTI: This is known as the Whole Word or Whole Language Method. You can read about its beginnings HERE. We at GTI are thoroughly convinced that this method is responsible for the fact that nearly 50% of America’s population is “Functionally illiterate” (see Illiteracy in America | Stats on U.S. Illiteracy‎ from the US Department of Education and the National Institute of Literacy). Before this method was introduced in public schools, America was the most literate nation the world had ever seen!]

Instead of the alphabet (twenty-six fairly simple objects that can be memorized in a month or two), children in this new factory were told to focus on complete words. Instead of memorizing B, for example, you had to memorize BEACH.  Just five letters, but a hugely complex design – and there were more than 200,000 of them.  Parents were told their children could routinely memorize these visual designs with "automaticity."  That's like instant recall.  The child was supposed to know hundreds and then thousands of these designs with perfect accuracy.  In reality, virtually no child could do this, except the few with photographic memories.  So in practice, the factory created millions of non-readers and weak readers.

 In this ruthless new factory, the obsession with power and control was the same as in Huxley's factory.  Humans would be conditioned and engineered to be what the controllers wanted.  This creepy, highly invasive scheme was a brilliant "success," once it's understood that the new goal was limited literacy.  Anyway, that was the predictable result.  Reading levels dropped from 1931 onward.  Several decades later, the country had tens of millions of functional illiterates. Those are people who memorize several hundred sight-words with good accuracy, and probably hundreds more with medium or low accuracy.  Reading as traditionally understood – a skill both easy and fun – was extinct for a great percentage of the population.  What this bold new factory was creating was damaged readers, like the embryos that didn't get enough oxygen.

This scheme was wildly improbable from the first day.  What sort of unconscionable people would dare to perpetrate it?  That the citizenry could accept it was improbable.  How many semi-literate people would the society tolerate?  That so-called "experts" could put this scheme over on the public remains unlikely to this day. 

It's probably not doable unless the Education Establishment has the support of certain unions, certain government agencies, certain foundations, certain universities, and much of the media.  There is a big silence.  How will the public learn the truth if the controllers make sure it's well hidden?  (Check the archives of the New York Times.  You will not find insight into why sight-words can be considered a dubious development.)

Hardly 20 years after the introduction of this brave new illiteracy, the situation was already so bad that Rudolf Flesch felt compelled to write a book explaining what had happened to the country (Why Johnny Can't Read, 1955).  Many millions of Americans felt compelled to read the book.  Almost everyone knew that something had gone horribly wrong.  It continues to go wrong today.

 In Brave New World, the controllers are always smugly pleased with their factory.  The same sort of people have been controlling K-12 education for the past century.

Bruce Deitrick Price's new book is Saving K-12.  He deconstructs educational theories and methods on Improve-Education.org.  Support his work on Patreon.

Concluding note from GTI:

How can you protect your children? If your child is in public school, make sure they are learning to spell phonetically. If the school is not emphasizing phonics, you would be wise to teach your child on the side.

Reading is the most vital skill your child must master, and whole word spelling has proven disastrous. Over 90% of all prison inmates are functionally illiterate; but less than 4% of adults with proficient reading skills live in poverty!

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