Widespread illiteracy and the ignorance it produces represent an existential threat to the United States today. But it wasn’t always this way.

And it can be fixed.

Fortunately, neither the cause of this crisis nor the solution to it is a mystery—at least to anyone who has studied the issue.

To blame for this dangerous phenomenon are socialist “educators” going back to the mid-1800s. In particular, it was their quack methodologies ostensibly aimed at “teaching reading” to children.

The answer to the illiteracy crisis is simple, though: America must go back to what worked for thousands of years and continues to work today: systematic phonics instruction.

Americans were almost certainly the most literate people on the planet in the 1700s and 1800s.

In fact, the earliest settlers in Massachusetts, the Puritans, were so passionate about reading that in the 1640s, they passed the “Old Deluder Satan Act” mandating that everyone learn to read. The thinking was that, without knowledge of the Bible, the devil would be more easily able to deceive their communities. And so, it was understood that every town must strive for universal literacy.

This passion for literacy translated into what would become the most literate society that mankind had ever produced up to that time.

According to University of Montana scholar Kenneth Lockridge’s study, “Literacy in Colonial New England,” 90 percent were literate by 1800, with numbers approaching 100 percent in cities such as Boston.

Even among women, that was true. According to estimates by Joel Perlmann of Bard College and Dennis Shirley of Boston College, virtually all women born in the early 1800s were literate.

At the time, Americans realized that as well. In his groundbreaking 1812 study “National Education in the United States of America,” Du Pont de Nemours estimated that even among young people, not more than “four in a thousand are unable to write legibly—even neatly.”

And in 1800, the Boston Review reported that no other nation in the world had a larger percentage of its population with at least basic literacy skills and an understanding of the “rudiments of science.”

Considering documents such as the Federalist Papers, which were addressed to the common American man, it’s also clear that the level of literacy by the late 1700s was extraordinary—especially by today’s standards.

Remarkably, this was all accomplished with virtually no government involvement in education at all. In fact, most children learned to read from their families using simple but highly effective resources such as Noah Webster’s “Blue Back Speller” and the “New England Primer.” These two tools taught reading using phonics while providing valuable moral lessons.

Literacy Crisis

By the middle of the 20th century, everything changed.

A crisis in literacy was brewing that’s without precedent in the history of the world. Literacy rates began plummeting, particularly after World War II. And today, the government’s own data shows evidence of a catastrophic decline in reading.

In 1993, the U.S. government conducted the most comprehensive literacy study ever performed up to that time. And the results were shocking.

On Sept. 9 of that year, citing the study, the Boston Globe reported that “nearly half of Americans read and write so poorly that it is difficult for them to hold a decent job.”

Many other analysts concluded, based on the findings, that almost half of the nation was either illiterate or at least very close to functional illiteracy. In short, the United States had been handicapped.

Another federal study performed a decade later found similar results.

The numbers are even worse in certain areas, and among America’s youth.

According to the federal government’s most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress, only about one-third of high school seniors are proficient in reading.

And in Washington, D.C., a recent State Education Agency report revealed that two-thirds of the adult population is functionally literate, falling to 50 percent in some wards. In response, top D.C. officials took a trip to communist Cuba to see how that murderous regime “educates” children.

Of course, there had been a sneak preview of what is now being observed in Boston under then-Massachusetts Secretary of Education Horace Mann—a collectivist Utopian who led the government takeover of schooling in his state and beyond—in the mid-1800s.

But the quackery there had been quickly and ably exposed by experienced and professional educators, limiting the damage.

Quackery Pushed by Collectivists

The root of the problem stems from the method used to teach reading. The writing system in English is based upon phonetic characters, with each letter representing one or more audible sounds. For instance, the letter “b” makes a “buh” sound, while a “p” makes a “puh” sound.

So, from the time this writing system was developed thousands of years ago by the Phoenicians, teaching an individual how to read has involved giving the student the knowledge to sound out letters, blend them together, and then decode words.

A great Christian minister and educator, Rev. Thomas Gallaudet of Connecticut, after learning from a French minister in Paris, pioneered a new system. It would come to be known variously as the “whole-word” method, the “look-say” method, or the “sight-word” method. It seems clear that Gallaudet had nothing but the best of intentions, even if his ideas ended up producing so many problems.

In his capacity as director of the American Asylum at Hartford for the Education of the Deaf and Dumb from 1817 to 1830, Gallaudet worked to refine methods to teach reading to children who were deaf and mute. Because deaf children are incapable of hearing sounds, obviously, teaching them to associate certain sounds with certain symbols—letters in this case—wasn’t feasible.

So instead, he taught the children to look at whole words as ideographs or pictographs, similar to the Chinese writing system, as if the words themselves were the symbol, rather than a group of symbols each one representing a sound. Instead of teaching a child that the word “hat” includes three symbols, each one representing a specific sound, Gallaudet would show them the entire word, along with a drawing of a hat, encouraging children to memorize the whole word and its meaning.

For deaf children, this was an enormous leap forward. But Gallaudet and others theorized, incorrectly, that this same method might help non-deaf children. Gallaudet even created a reading primer based on these ideas, and began promoting his methods in educational circles and publications.

Just a few short months after being selected to serve as the commonwealth’s first Secretary of Education in 1837, Mann, a collectivist who seemed always ready to embrace quackery, would oversee the introduction of this new system into the government primary schools of Boston.

It was a disaster.

Basically, children suddenly struggled to learn how to read, with many of them displaying symptoms that today would be diagnosed as “dyslexia.”

Within a few years, the schoolmasters of Boston joined forces to expose and repudiate the quackery before it did more damage. In a stinging paper, more than 30 school chiefs wrote that “such a change, as that proposed by Mr. Mann and others, is neither called for, nor sustained by sound reasoning.”

The critical comments, made in the “Remarks on the Seventh Annual Report of the Hon. Horace Mann,” pointed out that many of the arguments made in support of the whole-word method were “fallacious” and “based upon false premises.” Others were irrelevant.

And the results were clear, too: “There has been a great deterioration during the trial of the new system.”

That was the end of that—at least for a while.

Resurrecting the Quackery

Incredibly, some 50 years after being exposed as harmful, the whole-word method would be resurrected by “education reformer” John Dewey, a hardcore socialist who is almost universally recognized as the founding father of America’s “progressive” public education system.

While Mann may have genuinely believed that the whole-word method would work, it appears very likely that Dewey suffered under no such delusions. For one, the method had been conclusively debunked in the 1840s under Mann. In addition, Dewey used the method on children in his “experimental” school in Chicago, with results similar to those obtained in Boston generations earlier: children unable to read properly.

Dewey also left smoking-gun evidence of his desire to intentionally destroy the high literacy rates among children that existed throughout America at that time. In his controversial 1898 essay “The Primacy Education Fetich [sic],” he openly argued that schools should de-emphasize the teaching of reading, which he believed led to individualism.

In fact, he said children in the early grades were better off not receiving much instruction at all in the so-called “3 Rs”; reading, writing, and arithmetic. Instead, Dewey, an ardent admirer of the Soviet Union, thought young children mostly needed to be properly socialized to become functional members of the collective.

He knew his ideas would not go over well with parents, teachers, or taxpayers of the era.

“Change must come gradually,” Dewey wrote in that essay. “To force it unduly would compromise its final success by favoring a violent reaction.”

So instead, he went to the Rockefeller dynasty and the elites.

Years later, Dewey disciples—a motley collection of socialists and racist eugenicists—would create “reading” primers based on the whole-word quackery. William Gray at the University of Chicago, where Dewey led the education faculty for years, would produce the “Dick and Jane” series. Meanwhile, Arthur Gates at Columbia University’s Teachers College, where Dewey went after Chicago, would produce the Macmillan Readers.

It took a while for them to catch on in America. But after World War II, with plenty of taxpayer cash to burn, school districts across the United States, many being influenced by Dewey and his minions, started buying up the books and imposing the whole-word method on millions of innocent students.

Literacy rates promptly collapsed.

By the 1950s, the crisis was so serious that the public was starting to ask questions. And in 1955, Rudolf Flesch published the explosive book, “Why Johnny Can’t Read,” blowing the lid off the quackery.

“The teaching of reading—all over the United States, in all the schools, in all the textbooks—is totally wrong and flies in the face of all logic and common sense,” he explained, lambasting the whole-word method and the literacy crisis it produced.

The ensuing scandal caused many schools to restore traditional phonics instruction. But the Utopian advocates of reading quackery did not go away.

Less than 20 years after Flesch exposed them, legendary educator and reading expert Dr. Samuel Blumenfeld would expose them again in “The New Illiterates.” In the book, he systematically analyzed the most common reading primers then in use across the United States, highlighting the problems and showing the enormous damage being done to children.

Again, scandal ensued. And again, quackery advocates rebranded their schemes as “whole language” and offered minor alterations, then went right on handicapping American children by the millions.

Incredibly, some especially unhinged “educators” argued that teaching children to read properly was all part of a vast “right-wing” conspiracy.

Now, brain scans performed with new technology have actually shown the damage being done to the physical brains of children victimized by the quackery. Dr. Stanislas Dehaene, director of the Cognitive Neuro-Imaging Unit at Saclay in France, demonstrated the harm and explained that reading must be taught by systematically teaching children the correspondence between sounds and letters.

The education establishment pretended not to notice. And the absurdity continues.

Today, key elements of the “whole-word” method still haunt public schools across the United States, often under new terminology such as “balanced literacy” and “guided reading.” Under the national “Common Core” education standards imposed on the United States by former President Barack Obama, kindergarten children are even required to memorize “sight words.” This causes a whole-word reflex to develop that can produce lifelong reading disabilities, despite having a bit of phonics mixed in.

Perhaps more incredibly, even though the methods have been totally discredited since the 1840s, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) claims children all over the world should still learn a “sight vocabulary.”

Consider: People who can’t read can’t readily educate themselves. They are much easier to control and manipulate, too. And perhaps that is the point.

With Mann, it’s entirely possible that this was all an innocent mistake. Certainly, that’s true of most teachers in the United States today as well who haven’t been trained to teach reading properly.

But the fact that this giant “mistake” continues to be supported by the education establishment to this day—and that it always seems to be socialists, communists, and collectivists pushing it—suggests that there is a much more nefarious agenda at work.

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This article was originally published by The Epoch Times, and is one report in a series of articles examining the origins of government education in the United States.

America’s founders believed in God and His word, and predicated our founding documents on those immutable, biblical principles.

Though Leftists love to spout revisionist nonsense about many of the Founders being deists or worse, those accusations don’t hold water when faced with the weight of those early patriots’ own words and actions.

Thomas Jefferson, often upheld as vying for the least religious spot amongst the Founders, wrote:

I am a real Christian – that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus Christ.¹

And Jefferson’s worship habits speak even louder:

Many people are surprised to learn that the United States Capitol regularly served as a church building; a practice that began even before Congress officially moved into the building and lasted until well after the Civil War.

On December 4, 1800, Congress approved the use of the Capitol building as a church building.

The approval of the Capitol for church was given by both the House and the Senate, with House approval being given by the Speaker of the House, Theodore Sedgwick, and Senate approval being given by the President of the Senate, Thomas Jefferson. Interestingly, Jefferson’s approval came while he was still officially the Vice- President but after he had just been elected President.

Jefferson attended church at the Capitol while he was Vice President and also throughout his presidency. The first Capitol church service that Jefferson attended as President was a service preached by Jefferson’s friend, the Rev. John Leland, on January 3, 1802.

Significantly, Jefferson attended that Capitol church service just two days after he penned his famous letter containing the “wall of separation between church and state” metaphor.

Now, just over two centuries later, many Americans maintain a post-Christian worldview. As written at IMB.org:

In a Christian culture, the majority of people have been shaped by Christianity, and it shows in how they live their lives. Post-Christianity, just as it sounds, is a culture that was once shaped by the Christian faith and worldview, but has since moved away from the primacy of such a worldview.

In a post-Christian society the Biblical story that once shaped culture is no longer the narrative that gives meaning to life.

The Barna Group conducted studies beginning in late 2016 and ending in mid-2017 concerning young people and their faith worldview; the findings are especially troubling.

The study sampling and definition:

Two nationally representative studies of teens were conducted. The first was conducted using an online consumer panel November 4–16, 2016, and included 1,490 U.S. teenagers 13 to 18 years old. The second was conducted July 7–18, 2017, and also used an online consumer panel, which included 507 U.S. teenagers 13 to 18 years old. The data from both surveys were minimally weighted to known U.S. Census data in order to be representative of ethnicity, gender, age and region.

One nationally representative study of 1,517 U.S. adults ages 19 and older was conducted using an online panel November 4–16, 2016. The data were minimally weighted to known U.S. Census data in order to be representative of ethnicity, gender, age and region.

GEN Z were born 1999 to 2015. (Only teens 13 to 18 are included in this study.)
MILLENNIALS were born 1984 to 1998.
GEN X were born 1965 to 1983.
BOOMERS were born 1946 to 1964.
ELDERS were born before 1946.
NO FAITH identify as agnostic, atheist or “none of the above.”

Some of the findings?

Gen Z is the first purely Post-Christian generation — the percentage of Gen-Z identifying as atheist is DOUBLE the U.S. adult population.

The article presenting the findings (with a related book available for purchase), “Atheism Doubles Among Generation Z,” notes:

For Gen Z, “atheist” is no longer a dirty word: The percentage of teens who identify as such is double that of the general population (13% vs. 6% of all adults). The proportion that identifies as Christian likewise drops from generation to generation. Three out of four Boomers are Protestant or Catholic Christians (75%), while just three in five 13- to 18-year-olds say they are some kind of Christian (59%).

The decline in a Christian-based worldview is illustrated in the graphic posted to the right.

Appallingly, over one third of Gen Z don’t believe it’s possible to know if there really is a God.

What happened to the country whose motto is “In God we trust”?

Noah Webster, the “Father of American Scholarship and Education,” wrote:

The religion which has introduced civil liberty is the religion of Christ and His apostles… This is genuine Christianity and to this we owe our free constitutions of government.²

The Christian religion… is the basis, or rather the source, of all genuine freedom in government… I am persuaded that no civil government of a republican form can exist and be durable in which the principles of Christianity have not a controlling influence.³

And, George Washington, the Father of Our Nation wrote:

While we are zealously performing the duties of good citizens and soldiers, we certainly ought not to be inattentive to the higher duties of religion. To the distinguished character of Patriot, it should be our highest glory to add the more distinguished character of Christian.⁴

Yet in the span of just over 200 years, the youth of America knows next to nothing about God and the Bible. Church attendance, at least in mainline Protestant and Catholic churches, is declining precipitously.

What is the answer? Is it too late?

The Apostle Peter admonished us:

But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect. (1 Peter 3:15)

“Always be prepared to give an answer” — the underlying precept of apologetics, the defense of the faith.

And a vital part of Apologetics is knowing your worldview.

Gen Z may be overwhelmingly lost and devoid of hope, but we believers have the answer that restores hope. We must be ready to give that answer to a generation that sorely needs hope.

With that dire need in mind, Illinois Family Institute presents the Fourth Annual IFI Worldview Conference Featuring John Stonestreet.

10 AM – 3:30 PM 

Medinah Baptist Church (map)
900 Foster Avenue, Medinah, IL 60157

$20 per person/$50 per family 

Just who is John and why is he a tremendous resource for such an event?

As President of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, John’s passion is to illuminate a biblical worldview for today’s culture. He’s a speaker, writer, cultural commentator, and collaborator of worldview initiatives.

John directs conferences and curriculum projects, speaks to groups nationally and internationally, consults on worldview education for schools and churches, and appears frequently on web and radio broadcasts.

John is the co-host with Eric Metaxas of Breakpoint Radio, the Christian worldview radio program founded by the late Chuck Colson.

Don’t miss this tremendous opportunity to “study to shew thyself approved…”!

The Founders invested their hope and their faith into this burgeoning Republic, infusing our Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution with biblical precepts and a Judeo-Christian worldview.

Now is the time to recapture the explicit understanding of that worldview, and to share that hope and understanding with a lost and hopeless generation.

_____________________

¹ – Thomas Jefferson, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Albert Ellery Bergh, editor (Washington, D.C.: The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1904), Vol. XIV, p. 385, to Charles Thomson on January 9, 1816.
² – Noah Webster, History of the United States (New Haven: Durrie and Peck, 1832), p. 300, ¶ 578.
³ – K. Alan Snyder, Defining Noah Webster: Mind and Morals in the Early Republic (New York: University Press of America, 1990), p. 253, to James Madison on October 16, 1829.
⁴ – George Washington, The Writings of Washington, John C. Fitzpatrick, editor (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1932), Vol. XI, pp. 342-343, General Orders of May 2, 1778.

In today’s “politically correct” America, it is evidently a possible offense to quote a former president and discuss the role of Christianity in the founding of the nation.

The State Journal-Register’s political reporter Bernard Schoenburg recently reported on an invocation given at a recent Sangamon County Board meeting in his column titled “Prayer at county board raises church-state question.” The prayer, delivered by board member Mike Sullivan is, according to Schoenburg “getting some attention and has come under some criticism.”

Sullivan’s prayer began:

“Lord in heaven, during this Christmas season as we celebrate the birth of your son, Jesus Christ, we are reminded that our country … was founded on godly principles by God-fearing men and women who believed in the Holy Bible and thereby set up a form of government for a God-fearing populace.”

You can listen to the entire prayer here.

(Note the enthusiastic “Amens!” after it.)

County board member Mike Sullivan also included quotes from founding father John Adams and from Noah Webster, who famously wrote in a letter to James Madison, “The Christian religion, in its purity, is the basis, or rather the source of all genuine freedom in government.”

Was quoting Adams and Webster what triggered the need for some to seek out a “safe space”? Was it how Sullivan introduced the Adams quote?: “Today Lord, as our country appears to be more and more divided between believers in your son Jesus Christ and non-believers…”

Or was it how he closed the prayer by asking those assembled to:

“humbly pray for the forgiveness of our sins and that our fellow countrymen will unite with us in inviting you into their hearts and souls making us one nation under God, thereby allowing the God of the universe to bless our country so it will be truly great again.”

“In the name of your Son, Jesus Christ, Amen.”

Board Chairman Andy Van Meter explained that it is “routine for board members to give the invocation,” and that the members “take turns giving the prayer as each meeting begins.”

“All are heartfelt,” Van Meter said. “Some are more articulate than others. We also have invited religious leaders from denominations not represented on the board from time to time as well. We do not presume to give guidelines. Tony is welcome to give the prayer any time.”

Tony DelGiorno, the offended board member who posted the prayer on Facebook cited his ancestors who were persecuted in America because of their Catholic faith and said, “I find religious elitism abhorrent to the 1st Amendment principle of religious freedom in a nation and a community that is made better by our friends of all faiths.”

It is unclear from Schoenburg’s article what, exactly, demonstrated “religious elitism” in the prayer, nor, exactly, how it is “abhorrent to the First Amendment” to exercise freedom of speech and to express one’s faith during an invocation.

Sullivan said that he didn’t mean to offend anyone with the prayer, and that he was “merely stating some factual history.” Evidently, to paraphrase John Adams, to some people “facts are scary things.” This sad tale is why prayer has never been more important — especially when it comes to the operation of our government.

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End-of-Year Challenge

As you may know, IFI has a year-end matching challenge to raise $110,000. That’s right, a small group of IFI supporters are providing a $55,000 matching challenge to help support IFI’s ongoing work to educate, motivate and activate Illinois’ Christian community.

Please consider helping us reach this goal!  Your donation will help us stand strong in 2017!  To make a credit card donation over the phone, please call the IFI office at (708) 781-9328.  You can also send a gift to:

Illinois Family Institute
P.O. Box 876
Tinley Park, Illinois 60477

Education in America was originally the province of parents and churches. “Homeschooling” was the norm from colonial times through the mid-1800’s, and a classic education was the model.

Classical education consisted of the three stages of learning:

• The Grammar Stage — In this stage young children, whose minds are receptive to mass amounts of basic information, learn by memorization. Students learn the numbers, the alphabet, then words — the building blocks for the next stages of learning.
• The Dialectic Stage — In this stage the young students learn to compare and compartmentalize the building blocks. Sentence structure and grammar come into play.
• The Rhetoric Stage — In this third stage, students communicate “the truth of the subjects learned in the dialectic stage through writing, speech, or conversation…The third stage in learning a subject is to use what you’ve learned to solve a problem, write an original paper or speech, or lead a discussion.”

As noted at Classical Conversations: “This is the classical model of education that was used by the great thinkers and leaders of the past, including Aristotle, Plato, C.S. Lewis, and Thomas Jefferson.”

What is stunning is to consider that America’s founders and early settlers often had superior knowledge of the world, languages, and sciences without computers or a Department of Education!

Until approximately 1940, the schools in America adhered to the classic education model, preparing students for college with “classical curriculum [which] included Latin, possibly Greek, often French or German, English, history, mathematics, and some science.”

People may scoff at someone such as my grandmother who only had an eighth grade education. Yet Grandma had had Latin, Algebra, extensive English grammar, and even some Calculus in those eight years. She had a work ethic and, with the help of her husband, my Grandpa Ole, bought and managed businesses and real estate and achieved, to a modest degree, “the American Dream.”

Following 1940, and after World War II, there was a demand for more workers in trades, and fewer students had the money or ability to go on to college. So American education took a turn away from solely classical education, to also providing vocational education, allowing young people to learn a trade, enter apprenticeship programs, and join the ranks of tradesmen and factory production.

But somewhere along the way, the Progressive (think socialist) principles of John Dewey, germinating since the 1920’s, began to take hold. Dewey, like President Wilson, and like modern day Progressives, believed that, rather than giving students facts and the eventual ability to reason and argue, that people should be led by experts. That young people should be molded in such a way that they would acquiesce to suggestions and mandates by the enlightened elitists.

Faith and the Bible had been a foundation of education in America. Noah Webster wrote often on the subject and claimed:

The moral principles and precepts contained in the Scriptures ought to form the basis of all our civil constitutions and laws…All the miseries and evils which men suffer from vice, crime, ambition, injustice, oppression, slavery and war, proceed from their despising or neglecting the precepts contained in the Bible.

Unfortunately, the Left has continued a quiet, but relentless war on that foundation, often aided by SCOTUS opinions and rulings. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Abington Township School District v. Schempp — decided on June 17, 1963 — “prohibiting school officials from organizing or leading prayers and devotional Bible reading in public schools.”

Though Schempp did not outlaw prayer and Bible reading in schools, but prohibited teachers from leading Bible study or prayer, the 60’s radicals (the latest permutation of Dewey and Wilson’s Progressives) took advantage and schools took a left turn. Gone was the classical education and in its place came a host of programs — sex ed, new math, whole language learning, and revisionist history.

What was the subtle, though potent, effect of all this “new curriculum?” Students were weaned from a reliance on parents and faith standards, from facts and reasoning, and pointed toward reliance on the “enlightened experts.” A new generation of students were raised up to question authority (at least their parents’ and grandparents’ authority) and blindly follow their teachers and profs.

Also, during this time the Federal government began to be more involved in education:

By 1965, the federal government, through the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), expanded its involvement beyond areas with explicit defense connections. Importantly, the government did not mention increased federal control over education; rather, funding was the primary justification for this expansion

In 1979, the Department of Education was created, largely at the behest at the National Education Association (NEA). The NEA was, at this point, a new teacher’s union (albeit a very large teacher’s union). When Jimmy Carter was elected President, power over education became further concentrated in Washington.

Jump ahead to 2009, with Obama promising to fundamentally transform America. And one area of transformation was education. The Obama administration proposed criteria to evaluate every state’s education system, and the only way to standardize the education was through Common Core.

What in the world is “Common Core?”

That’s hard to pin down because it can be a different set of standards in different states. Some of the standards are terrible, some not so much.

But the REAL, issue with Common Core? Federalization of education. As written at Heritage:

Why is Common Core problematic? As evidence from both inside and outside the United States makes clear, centralization and control do not work; rather, freedom is the force that sparks educational improvement. Freedom unleashes competition, which, in turn, drives innovation and leads to specialization. The idea that there should be one monolithic set of standards and that everybody should move at the same rate makes no sense, as anyone who has met more than one child can readily attest.

Moreover, real accountability, immediate accountability, comes from freedom, choice, the ability to leave a provider that is not giving you what you want and take your business elsewhere. That is why there are a lot of recommendations for what to do when states get rid of Common Core.

Ultimately, the solution to America’s education problems is not more centralization. Instead, the answer is to create school choice for everyone.

Common Core appeals to Dewey disciples, to Progressives, because finally the masses of unenlightened Americans can be molded and coerced into a proper worldview and leave antiquated ideas and values behind.

But Common Core is nothing more than a Trojan Horse, enslaving towns and local communities to the mandates of Washington, and thereby the Progressive-driven NEA.

This country was birthed by people seeking freedom to live and worship, freedom to raise their offspring with a certain knowledge of God and the world He created. Common Core in the hands of über Progressives would seek to supplant the wisdom and role of parents with the mantra of secular and socialist ideals.

Common sense and real wisdom should warn us away from the centralized control of Common Core, and back to the time-tested truths of our forebears.

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Dr. Duke Pesta on Common Core: DVD

IFI video recorded an event we had earlier this year with Dr. Duke Pesta, a nationally renown expert on the dangers of Common Core.  This DVD is available with any donation of $20 or more.

If you are a taxpayer, have young children, grandchildren, nephews, nieces, are an educator, are a therapist, are a religious leader, are an elected official of any party, or care about very young children getting an excellent education in grades K-12, it would be worth your time to learn more about the federal takeover of education.  Watch it yourself or with a group!