'Close Enough is Good Enough' - Not

I have this past week made a couple of comments on the thread of an article on the TNA (The New American) e-newsletter site, titled 'How to Cure Dyslexia', by Sam Blumenfeld. His was a good article on the subject; and it opens up a window on a larger terrain. But first - the thread. My first comment on it (which kicked off the thread):

Excellent article....
"...and work that you are doing, Sam. Although migod, how long is it going to take to rid us of this pestilential technique?

"I remember getting angry nearly 50 years ago now when I came across info about this look-say business, when my eldest nephew was starting school, and I discovered that he was being taught, eg, to 'read' the word 'monkey' by a pictograph of a monkey hanging off the tail of the 'y'. That's not reading. That's hieroglyphics. Why bother with the creation of the alphabet...

"In digging further into the matter, I found that it seemed to be a political thing, whereby the 'liberal' educational authorities wanted to control the bringing-up of the children, and get them to read only what the social engineers wanted them to read - to break the familial control over the children, so that they would become nice little puppets of the State. And here we are, with the same attitude of control going on A few buckets of tar and some feathers would be in order."

The next poster said:

"Outcome Based Education (OBE) may be responsible for uptick in dyslexia
"Researching education trends beginning in the 1980s, one will find that OBE implemented many non-proven learning theories. One of those theories was 'look-say' or better known as 'Whole Language'. Instead of integrating this method with the proven phonics method, most schools did away with phonics and dived head first into whole language. These are part of the many liberal, 'feel good' theories that give children great self-esteem while lowering current standards in Education.

"'Look-and-say,' 'whole-word,' 'sight-reading,' 'linguistic,' or 'psycholinguistic' refer to an approach to reading instruction taken by educators such as William S. Gray during the first third of the twentieth century. They wanted to turn schools away from 'heartless drudgery'. Gray advocated a look-and-say approach.

"'Phonics is concerned with teaching letter-sound relationships as they relate to learning to read...When a child has learned to associate all specific printed letters with specific speech sounds, the code has been mastered, or cracked.'

"'Learning To Read and Whole Language Ideology' by Jeffrey M. Jones, M.D., Ph.D.

"We've had an uptick in people with dyslexia, especially since Whole Language has been implemented. It would be interesting if there is any connection between this learning method and people have [sic] trouble reading words correctly."

I was tempted to respond to this posting by commenting (a) that Gray and others may have said that they "wanted to turn schools away from 'heartless drudgery'," but that was, more probably, merely their cover excuse for the implementing of their ideological bias; and (b) that there is, indeed, another factor to consider in this business, of the children not learning to read either well, or seeing the letters backwards (which I believe is the official definition of the term dyslexia; or that the letters 'dance around' on the page). And that is the very possible role of vaccines in all this MBD - Minimal Brain Damage/Disorder - business, But I didn't want to muddy up the matter, with a subject that it would take too long to get into, in all fairness to that subject.

In the event, another poster made an interesting observation; thus:

"FOREIGN LANGUAGES TOO
"Similar story for foreign language instruction! In the sixties, the 'drudgery' of learning the grammar and acquiring vocabulary by graded readings was replaced by simply learning phrases since, as we were told, that's the way a native learns his own language. What was forgotten was that the native is taking roughly five years to do it and is immersed in the language! So after a trial, classroom instruction returned to the hard, but effective, way. (I went through both processes in German.) Apparently, however, the establishment recently decided to try the memorization of phrases approach again."

That got me back on track in/to my anger, and outrage at the high-handedness involved in this matter; and I fired off the following addition to the thread:

"And by simply memorizing phrases...
"...that's all you can 'read'. Oh, you may vaguely recognize something from your shape-memorized 'vocabulary' in another context, and try to apply it outside of your comfort box; but if you don't know what you are actually 'reading'...

"It is people control technique, plain and simple. Many children will tire of trying to read anything outside of their sequentially 'vocabulary'-increased readers (ie, 'word' recognition expanded a certain number of hieroglyphics-'stands for' (such-and-such a word) - per year), and will opt to learn everything they know - everything they think they know - from the boob tube. Which is more easily controlled, in its content, than books. Which is precisely the point of the exercise.

"The people controllers - the real ideologues amongst them in particular - want to start the public at a Year One, wiping the old from their minds as much as possible. That is to say, wiping out all we have learned, or hopefully have learned, from our history. It is the belief of the materialists that the human mind is a tabula rasa, and can be manipulated at will - at the will of the State. Silly people. We are more than our bodies, and our body's mind, and emotions, and personality. We have a greater destiny than to be the cattle of our keepers.

"Another reason for this approach, to my way of thinking, is for the Establishment to inculcate the idea in its herd that 'it's close enough'. If the word 'horse' comes up [an example given by Sam in the article], and the child thinks and thinks about the shape of the word/letters, where (s)he has come across something similar to that before, and has a mental flash, and says 'pony?', and the teacher says in response, 'That's close enough; keep going', the child is/children are being conditioned into thinking 'that's close enough' about things in life in general, ie, that everything is relative. Which must be the salient reason why the Constitution of the United States is currently being trashed, by people who know precisely what they are doing, and by others who hear something about the original, legal definition of 'a Natural Born Citizen', and consider that the man currently occupying the office of the presidency of the U.S. may not fit the definition precisely - but hey, his mother was a citizen; so what's the big deal - and think and say: 'Oh, it's close enough. Don't be a silly bugger. Get a life.'

"And Mission Accomplished: a brainwashed citizenry, subject to the manipulation of experts in the field of 'public relations'. And what a euphemism that term is. (Edward Bernays, anyone??)" - that is to say, the subject, and history, of propaganda...


Before I delve further into this general theme, of an ideological tool, and take it a little deeper than its presenting subject: a good addition was made to this thread, by this contribution (which I have edited a little for clearer punctuation purposes):

"Whether by experience, research or intuition, many of us know what has been ging on in Education:
"At the behest of Horace Mann and many other leading citizens, we borrowed the style of Prussian schooling as our own. You need to know this because over the first 50 years of our school institution, Prussian purpose - which was to create a form of state socialism - gradually forced out traditional American purpose, which in most minds was to prepare the individual to be self-reliant.

"We got from the United States to Prussia and back because a small number of very passionate ideological leaders visited Prussia in the first half of the 19th century, and fell in love with the order, obedience and efficiency of its system and relentlessly proselytized for a translation of Prussian vision onto these shores.

"In this fashion, compulsion schooling, a bad idea that had been around at least since Plato's 'Republic', a bad idea that New England had tried to enforce in 1650 without any success, was finally rammed through the Massachusetts legislature in 1852.

"How did a Prussian system of dumbing children down take hold in American schools?

"In1896 the famous John Dewey, then at the University of Chicago, said that independent, self-reliant people were a counter-productive anachronism in the collective society of the future. In modern society, said Dewey, people would be defined by their associations - not by their own individual accomplishments.

"In such a world, people who read too well or too early are dangerous, because they become privately empowered; they know too much, and know how to find out what they don't know by themselves, without consulting experts. Dewey said the great mistake of traditional pedagogy was to make reading and writing constitute the bulk of early schoolwork...He advocated that the phonics method of teaching reading be abandoned and replaced by the whole-word method...not because the latter was more efficient (he admitted that it was less efficient), but because independent thinkers were produced by hard books; thinkers who cannot be socialized very easily. By socialization, Dewey meant a program of social objectives administered by the best social thinkers in government.

"Bertrand Russell once observed that American schooling was among the most radical experiments in human history; that America was deliberately denying its children the tools of critical thinking.

"(These are just a few excerpts from this newsletter)
"by John Taylor Gatto
'THE KOSSOR EDUCATION NEWSLETTER Volume 4 Number 10"


Amen. And especially including the warning about 'listening to the experts'. That warning can be carried over into a number of subject areas; including medicine, and 'health'. And those two areas are not, shall we say, joined at the hip...

But to move on. And where am I going with this thought, and material.

This has been in part to clarify that I am not on the side of creating a 'dumbed-down', programmed citizenry, broken to the saddle of socialism. But there is something deeper going on here; implied by, implicated with the ideal, the desire of 'social engineers' to bring society into a state of unity. The 'socializing' impulse is, to say: not all bad.

Consider.

The welfare state in/of the UK is in a state of major crisis. As is the rest of Europe, and the world in general. But the point I want to make is how this country got into such a fiscal mess, that it has had to cut back so drastically: by pouring tax monies into the 'social justice' aspect of the welfare state. Creating two outcomes in particular: (1) the resentment of the average citizen, ie, taxpayer, about the 'scroungers' - those individuals seduced by the easy money climate of 'entitlements' into not pulling their weight, instead living off the work of others; and (2) the reaction of the very clever, and 'productive', in deciding to get what they can before they are taxed to death to support the growing welfare state - to the point of a huge gap developing between the 'average' wage earner and those at the top of the heap, with their bonuses, and conspicuous consumption lifestyles. It is not a healthy situation, or system. It's important that 'the system' cleans up its act; so that it can move on -somewhat paradoxically, by releasing the 'act'. That is to say, the money system. More specifically: the interest-bearing money system; which is precisely what is standing in the way of a society, a system, of 'enough for all'. An equitable system, way of being.

There is a world waiting to be born, which will reflect a higher level of human consciousness than we are expressing at the moment. It is a world without money - as we have known it. Embedded in the world of interest-bearing money - conditioned by it, for eons - some people think that is the only way that we humans can live. By the profit motive; that carrot, and that stick.

Nonsense. There is a higher motive for Man to live by. Which is coming into its own, now, because of the 'internal contradictions' of the capitalist system, which are creating such mayhem at this time. This key time in human history. When Crisis is providing us with the Opportunity to move up to that higher state of civilization, characterized by that higher motive for Man to live by. The highest motive that Man could possibly hope to relate to: to share out goods and services with one another - and give of our best in the process - out of gratitude to our Creator for life with meaning.

Out of, in a word: Love.

And in doing so - living by that motivating factor - Man will enter into an era of incomparable Abundance.

All, by releasing his desire for 'money'. By releasing money as an end, and returning it to its proper status, as a means. As simply a medium of exchange. Facilitating the distribution of goods and services still in some degree of scarcity, by a simple system of credits, for services rendered to the System. (Just like, on the micro level, a local LETS system has.)

Which 'leftists', socialists, have sensed, as a possibility; but never put it in its proper context, of a reflection of Homo sapiens' true, full nature. As 'spiritual beings having a human experience'. With a far greater reality to our life than just this narrow window, of a single experience of the material realm, would indicate. That far greater reality encompassing not just multiple lives, via the Plan of reincarnation. But multiple levels, dimensions of reality. And a Reality beyond what we know - think we know - as reality.

And the key to our entering into a higher state of civilization than any heretofore experienced on planet Earth is, in a word, Love. The love I indicated, that we feel for, and direct to, and engage in with, our Creator. But as well, to each other. As brothers and sisters of our common Source. And just so, entering into a relationship with each other that honours each other, by treating each other with respect, and honesty, and a quality of equality. Living with the concept that As we do unto others, so do we do unto ourselves - literally. For We Are One Another. And more deeply: We Are One. (And All IS One.)

And so we must all pull our weight, to pull this move up in consciousness off. Must share with one another, as though we were giving each other gifts. Must not, that is to say, carry over into the New any idea of being a scrounger; living off the gifts of others.

So: scroungers, in the current state of social affairs - who often learned to be scroungers because of the seductions offered by the system, in giving them the opportunity to scam it - need to learn habits of personal responsibility, before humanity can enter its new stage; its Golden Age. Because that's how that new, higher state of social development works.

In an essentially moneyless society (except, as I say, for those things that are not, by their nature, available in abundance; for which there will need to be a system of credits), there is plenty for all - as long as the people continue to demonstrate the level of personal responsibility that it takes for the system to be able to work.

And this is not such a stretch as some people might think. Already, there are harbingers of this spring in human affairs. One of the Occupy Movement 'thinkers', a fellow by the name of Charles Eisenstein, has already shared with audiences his sense, his understanding, that the way a system could work without money is by the attitude of sharing our 'gifts' with each other. That way lies community.

Our common unity. As individual sparks of divinity, exploring our free will as such; and now beginning the process of returning home to the home of our Father, in the terms of the story of the Prodigal Son.

Where he will be treated with the love of his dutiful Parents, who allowed him to go exploring on his own.

It doesn't matter what the specific nature of that Godhead is, beyond the duality in and of the Creation.

It's home.

And we get back there by recognizing our true, higher natures.

In a state of Unity.

Just what the 'socialists' amongst us sense, is the essence of our being. But who need to appreciate, and honour, the individual as well.

For we are individually responsible for ourselves, beyond the workings of the collective.

Both the individual and the collective have karma to clear. But the key is down on the individual level. And when that is cleared, the collective is free to progress.

And that is how the 'left' and the 'right', in current terms, are going to be able to come together, and progress into the New.

By recognizing themselves as brothers and sisters, on the same journey.

So let's go, OWSers and Tea Partiers: Get your acts together.

'Against' the 1%.

Who, you must recognize by now, are just playing their parts. In this drama we call Life.

'Written' by ourselves.

For a Purpose.

Which we are getting closer to, as we speak.