FUN WITH DICK AND JANE

All play and no work make Jack a dumb boy.

In Spring 2006 I was reading a book about education and the author mentioned how the phonetics (phonics) method of teaching reading had been replaced by the Whole Word (Look-Say) method. It was a failure. A few years later the Whole Word method was brought in again, mostly unsuccessfully. The tug of war continued. It made no sense. Hey, try a new idea, it doesn’t work, no shame, move on. Why flog a dead horse?

The author recommended The Underground History Of Education by John Taylor Gatto. I got it, read it, and more than once Gatto mentioned the Federal Reserve System and recommended The Creature from Jekyll Island by G. Edward Griffin. I had no idea what banking had to do with public education. I got it, read it, and Griffin sent me to The Secrets of the Federal Reserve by Eustace Mullins.

It was here that it all came crashing down on me. The cabal, who criminally installed The Fed, DON’T WANT US TO BE GOOD READERS. They don’t want us to be particularly good at anything, besides toiling long hours and paying taxes.

This broke my heart forever and changed my life. The cruelty found here is pornographically evil. We’re talking about methodically destroying a person’s life.

"In our dream, we have limitless resources, and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hand. The present educational conventions fade from our minds; and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or science. We are not to raise up from among them authors, orators, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians. Nor will we cherish even the humbler ambition to raise up from among them lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we now have ample supply."

*Rockefeller Foundation Director of Charity, Frederick Gates, 1913 

“Director of Charity.” Etch this into your mind. All the great “philanthropists” are murderous pirates and psychopathic devils ─ steal a million and give back a hundred (or, preferably, fifty matched by fifty from the tax coffers).

(No, I haven’t forgotten about Dick and Jane) Click to enlarge:

LIAR$$WORLD is a free subscription, hoping you will pay-subscribe to other Substackers who have greater expenses and post more often.

Much of the following text is from Chapter 3 of Gatto’s magnificent book, which is filled with thousands of facts and hundreds of original insights – please consider reading it. This chapter is available online at Lew Rockwell (link).

THE QUOTES IN THIS POST ARE FROM GATTO UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED

At the start of WWII millions of men showed up at registration offices to take low-level academic tests before being inducted. The years of maximum mobilization were 1942 to1944; the fighting force had been mostly schooled in the 1930s, both those inducted and those turned away. Of the 18 million men were tested, 17,280,000 of them were judged to have the minimum competence in reading required to be a soldier, a 96 percent literacy rate. Although this was a 2 percent fall-off from the 98 percent rate among voluntary military applicants ten years earlier, the dip was so small it didn’t worry anybody.

WWII was over in 1945. Six years later another war began in Korea. Several million men were tested for military service but this time 600,000 were rejected. Literacy in the draft pool had dropped to 81 percent, even though all that was needed to classify a soldier as literate was fourth- grade reading proficiency. In the few short years from the beginning of WWII to Korea, a terrifying problem of adult illiteracy had appeared. The Korean War group received most of its schooling in the 1940s, and it had more years in school with more professionally trained personnel and more scientifically selected textbooks than the WWII men, yet it could not read, write, count, speak, or think as well as the earlier, less-schooled contingent.

A third American war began in the mid-1960s. By its end in 1973 the number of men found noninductible by reason of inability to read safety instructions, interpret road signs, decipher orders, and so on—in other words, the number found illiterate—had reached 27 percent of the total pool. Vietnam-era young men had been schooled in the 1950s and the 1960s—much better schooled than either of the two earlier groups—but the 4 percent illiteracy of 1941 which had transmuted into the 19 percent illiteracy of 1952 had now grown into the 27 percent illiteracy of 1970. Not only had the fraction of competent readers dropped to 73 percent but a substantial chunk of even those were only barely adequate; they could not keep abreast of developments by reading a newspaper, they could not read for pleasure, they could not sustain a thought or an argument, they could not write well enough to manage their own affairs without assistance.

This is not progress, my friend. Are we being too picky? Are we exaggerating?

Looking back, abundant data exist from states like Connecticut and Massachusetts to show that by 1840 the incidence of complex literacy in the United States was between 93 and 100 percent wherever such a thing mattered. According to the Connecticut census of 1840, only one citizen out of every 579 was illiterate and you probably don’t want to know, not really, what people in those days considered literate; it’s too embarrassing. Popular novels of the period give a clue: Last of the Mohicans, published in 1826, sold so well that a contemporary equivalent would have to move 10 million copies to match it. If you pick up an uncut version you find yourself in a dense thicket of philosophy, history, culture, manners, politics, geography, analysis of human motives and actions, all conveyed in data-rich periodic sentences so formidable only a determined and well-educated reader can handle it nowadays. Yet in 1818 we were a small-farm nation without colleges or universities to speak of. Could those simple folk have had more complex minds than our own?

I’m embarrassed to admit that I tried to read this book twice, and with each attempt got to page ten or so. Dense with narrative and concepts, and rich with high‑end language. I fear I’m part of the reason Mark Twain quipped, “A classic is something that everybody wants to have read, and nobody wants to read”.

Some more “that was then, this is now” from Gatto:

In 1882, fifth graders read these authors in their Appleton School Reader: William Shakespeare, Henry Thoreau, George Washington, Sir Walter Scott, Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Bunyan, Daniel Webster, Samuel Johnson, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others like them. In 1995, a student teacher of fifth graders in Minneapolis wrote to the local newspaper, "I was told children are not to be expected to spell the following words correctly: back, big, call, came, can, day, did, dog, down, get, good, have, he, home, if, in, is, it, like, little, man, morning, mother, my, night, off, out, over, people, play, ran, said, saw, she, some, soon, their, them, there, time, two, too, up, us, very, water, we, went, where, when, will, would, etc. Is this nuts?"

Here is a quote from someone who doesn’t think this is nuts:

Do we really have to have everybody literate ─ writing and reading in the traditional sense ─ when we have means through our technology to achieve a new flowering of oral communication? *Anthony Oettinger (in 1982)

Oettinger “… served as a consultant to the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and the National Security Council and NASA’s Apollo moon-landing program.” (Wikipedia) This guy ain’t no dummy. His top-level involvement in the moon hoax tags him as an agent. I bet he knows how to read. I guess it’s other, lesser mortals who can forgo the skill. And his cruel attitude is not recent:

The plea for the predominance of learning to read in early school life because of the great importance attaching to literature seems to be a perversion. *John Dewey (in 1899)

Dewey is an absolute god of “modern” education (read: the destruction of modern education). His labeling reading a perversion tells you all you need to know.

Here’s an example of what skipping the whole learn-to-read thing results in:

According to The Journal of the American Medical Association (December 1995), 33 percent of all patients cannot read and understand instructions on how often to take medication, notices about doctor’s appointments, consent forms, labels on prescription bottles, insurance forms, and other simple parts of self-care. They are rendered helpless by the inability to read.

OK, he never said that ─ it’s an internet favorite. It was probably said originally by someone like Diogenes or Epicurus of Samos. But ─ he’s perfect for it, yeah?

I remember when I was college-age, circa 1970s, when samples of a new dishwashing liquid were sent to a zillion households, in tiny plastic bottles. They had to stop doing it because some people who couldn’t read saw the orange on the label and drank the shit. I kid you not ─ I remember getting one.

(Irony Alert) We now read a quote with a profound insight about Whole Word reading from a man who died in 1991 leaving a $75 million estate:

The legendary children’s book author, Dr. Seuss, creator of a string of best-sellers using a controlled "scientific" vocabulary supplied by the publisher, demonstrated his own awareness of the mindlessness of all this in an interview he gave in 1981: 

“I did it for a textbook house and they sent me a word list. That was due to the Dewey revolt in the twenties, in which they threw out phonics reading and went to a word recognition as if you’re reading a Chinese pictograph instead of blending sounds or different letters. I think killing phonics was one of the greatest causes of illiteracy in the country. 

Anyway, they had it all worked out that a healthy child at the age of four can only learn so many words in a week. So, there were two hundred and twenty-three words to use in this book. I read the list three times, and I almost went out of my head. I said, " I’ll read it once more and if I can find two words that rhyme, that’ll be the title of my book." I found "cat" and "hat" and said, the title of my book will be The Cat in the Hat.”

He understood the error, the foolishness. I’m going to say he understood the agenda, because I’m so sick of LIARS wreaking havoc upon the common citizen, 24/7 every day of the year including Christmas. The Grinch didn’t steal Christmas, he stole your child’s mind, and his creator lived a life of fame and fortune.

We looked! Then we saw him step on the mat! We looked! And we saw him!

Nobody talks like this, not even children. Geisel (Seuss’ real name) went to Dartmouth and Oxford, two major spook schools. He was a cartoonist. He worked for Vanity Fair (now owned by the CIA) and also did political cartoons. He did advertisements for Standard Oil. He sold 600 million books. Nobody sells this many books unless it is willed by the cabal.

Sure, I remember reading Seuss as a kid. Horton … Mulberry Street … very cool. I remember the cartoons, but the writing was inane, even to a child. Children are drawn to things that are contrary or weird. The Pied Piper of Hamlin is not a happy story. You may know that many traditional fairy/folk tales are quite gruesome. They prepare children for life, not for rhyming cat cartoons. The Pied Piper is a warning, The Cat in the Hat is a seduction.

THIS BRINGS TO MIND THE MUPPETS.

(No, I haven't forgotten about Dick and Jane)

In 2015 I read a 1995 essay about The Muppets by Kay Hymowitz (link). I was stunned. The bullseye insight was that the nano-short vignettes shown on this program had the purpose of training children to watch TV commercials. (!!!!!!!!!!!) It’s so obvious once you’re told.

Sesame Street began with the loftiest of intentions. In 1967, Joan Ganz Cooney, a television producer hired by the Carnegie Corporation, developed an idea for a show "to promote the intellectual and cultural growth of preschoolers, particularly disadvantaged preschoolers." *Hymowitz

“… loftiest intentions” … That’s a LIE, so Hymowitz is probably a partial hangout agent. Just know that Cooney was married to Peter G. Peterson for nearly 40 years until his death in 2018. He was once CEO of Lehman Brothers (one cog in The Great Recession), a co-founder of The Blackstone Group (which, along with Vanguard owns the United States), a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (a colloquium of corruption) and was Commerce Secretary under Nixon (the revolving door). A billionaire, and therefore a criminal. Nobody needs to be a billionaire, and they only exist with the blessing of the trillionaires.

Sesame Street was a project run by the cabal, and it’s still going strong. And don’t ever think it started in 1967:

Plans are underway to replace community, family, and church with propaganda, education, and mass media … People are only little plastic lumps of human dough. *Edward A. Ross, in his book Social Control (1901)

Sidenote: Ross admired the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.

So, what was it Dr. Seuss mentioned about Chinese pictographs? This is of central importance.

English writing and the Western Alphabet: The alphabet system we use was invented by the Greeks – truly a Big Bang event in the history of civilization (please set aside the awkward detail that the astronomical big bang theory is pure hogwash).

NAMING SOUNDS RATHER THAN THINGS WAS THE BREAKTHROUGH! While the number of things to be pictured is impossibly large, the number of sounds is strictly limited. In English, for example, most people recognize only forty-four.

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The average five-year-old can master all of the seventy phonograms in six weeks. At that point he can read just about anything fluently. Can he understand everything? No, of course not. But also, no synthetic barrier to understanding is being interposed by weird-looking words to be memorized whole, either. Paulo Freire taught ignorant campesinos with no tradition of literacy at all to read in thirty hours. They were adults, with different motivations than children, but when he showed them a sentence and they realized it said, "The land belongs to the tiller," they were hooked.

So, 26 letters, all learned as that wonderful little ditty all of us can sing while chewing gum and walking, followed by 74 phonograms which take a bit more effort … but the payoff is monumental.

There are roughly 2,000 core/essential Chinese pictographs/ideograms which are needed for literacy. Here are two images from a firm which makes tutorial posters for students of same. The first shows one of a two-poster set, each with 1,000 characters. The second photo shows their 1,500 super-essential character poster.

The Chinese system works, right? For thousands of years, right? There are tons of smart people in China, yes? So what’s the beef?

OK, there are 2,000 essential characters. More than a week’s work, but doable.

BUT, if you treat English words as pictographs, memorizing each one as it’s introduced, you’re talking a mountain of words.

By the end of the fourth grade, phonics-trained students are at ease with an estimated 24,000 words. Whole Word trained students have memorized about 1,600 words and can successfully guess at some thousands more, but also unsuccessfully guess at thousands, too.

The youngster knows several thousand words before entering a school building. And, as you know, kids learn by leaps and bounds (sometimes absorbing stuff we wish they hadn’t, at least not quite yet).

The disparity shown in the excerpt above represents the whole point of this post and reveals the heartbreak and tragedy of this evil hidden agenda.

Finally. I promised …

… the debut of two young Americans who would change millions of minds into mush during their long tenure in school classrooms. Their names were Dick and Jane.

This is a bit anticlimactic – you know what I’m going to say.

Obviously, Dick and Jane are at the opposite end of the vocabulary spectrum as that of the Oxford English Dictionary (171,476 words).

How bad is it? Check this out (Scott, Foresman is the publisher):

Are you ready? Let’s dive right in:

Wow. I’m exhausted. What’s up with “look”. Do we really need such a complicated word?

Maybe we could stop at “oh” and go to recess. We’ll institute a 2-letter communication system in which OH will signify consciousness; AH will signify approval, consent, or pleasure; EH will signify quzzicalness (good job we won’t need to learn that long word); and UH will signify a delay in comprehension.

Sorry! I was being lazy and smart-alecky. We needed to learn the word “look” for an important storyline development on page 8.

I’ve refocused. Let’s move on:

SOMETHING??? What the … that’s gotta be about 14 letters long. Well, it is page 28 …

Actually, dear reader, I vividly remember – as in re-living the moment as if it were a month ago – sitting in the First-Grade classroom of Mrs. Murphy, looking with the rest of the class at the Dick and Jane poster page containing the word “something” for the first time. I remember thinking, “You want us to learn THAT? Are you crazy?” My only other memory of this school year is throwing a rock through a classroom window and then praying to the patron saint of naughty children I wouldn’t get caught (I wasn’t).

By the way, our British cousins, deprived of Dick and Jane, were blessed with Janet and John:

I was not taught phonetics, but I am a good reader (not sure if that’s proper English). So, what am I whining about?

I was lucky. I “got” the code. I grasped the phonograms, by the grace of God and all His heavens. Many others did the same. Many other others did not.

This is analogous to the principle of biowarfare wherein you rely upon the inherent variety of individual metabolisms in your victims in order to claim plausible deniability: “Mary Jo got the HPV vaccine, and she didn’t experience fainting, seizures, brain damage, paralysis, speech problems, short-term memory loss, pancreatitis, or death.”

Yeah.

Please note: I’m not talking about spelling or being a grammar Nazi. I’m a good speller. My mother was not. She just kept a dictionary at her desk –problem solved. She finished high school in 1934 at age 16. Here’s a list of about half the books she read after retiring from the work world:

FOLLOW THE MONEY

Here at LIARWORLD,wecouldhavethissectionpresentineveryessay,becauseallthewoesoftheworldarebasedongreed.Thecabalhaveamonochromaticvisionofhumanity:$.

Gatto points out that the reading problems fostered by the Whole Word (Look-Say) method of teaching in turn fostered two huge industries – another textbook industry and the remedial reading industry; just like the endless poisons in our lives have created the cancer industry (ballpark: $96 billion/year in the US).

Rather than using Noah Webster’s Blueback Speller and McGuffey's Reader, two resources which had engendered nearly 100% literacy for decades, book publishers could now entice public school systems to buy all manner of new books designed to “help the problem” (muffled guffaws in the background).

Also, we will now bring in a cadre of well-meaning individuals eager to help with this perplexing erosion of the general citizens’ competence. It's the same bullshit as with autism: Rather than thinking of clever ways to keep autistic children from slapping their heads and moaning incoherently let's just quit poisoning them to begin with.

This is the famous PROBLEM-REACTION-SOLUTION paradigm which the cabal impose upon us year upon year, decade upon decade. Perhaps you've heard of Sturgeon’s Law: “90% of everything is crap”. I propose Rothschild 's Law: “90% of societal problems are synthetically induced by the cabal”.

By 1920, the sight-word method was being used in new wave progressive schools. In 1927, another professor at Columbia Teachers College, Arthur Gates, laid the foundation for his own personal fortune by writing a book called The Improvement of Reading, which purported to muster thirty-one experimental studies proving that sight reading was superior to phonics. All these studies are either trivial or highly ambiguous at best and at times, in a practice widely encountered throughout higher education research in America, Gates simply draws the conclusions he wants from facts which clearly lead elsewhere.

One way they sell this moronic blather is by declaring that learning by rote and doing practice drills are boring to the youngsters and alienate them from their true thirst for learning.

I learned the “times table” as a kid. After 40 years of relying on a handheld calculator, I’ve gotten a bit fuzzy about, say, 7x8 or 9x6, but otherwise do OK. I’ve met 20-year-olds behind the cash register who aren’t sure how to count coins with the computer announcing the amount! That’s what “rote” is, folks.

The other dissed practice is … practice. Drills. For heaven’s sake, you egg-head ivory tower lunatics – tell all the Olympic gymnasts and all the concert pianists and all the master plumbers and all the chefs of the world that drill and practice are boring and unnecessary. Go ahead … do mind if I watch?

If I don’t practice for a day, I know it. If I don’t practice for two days, the critics know it. And if I don’t practice for three days, the public knows it. *Louis Armstrong

When I learned about the Federal Reserve crime in 2006, I realized that anyone who didn’t talk about this as a crime is not worth listening to. Thus, I’ve not watched cable news since then. Yet, I need to observe what the “mainstream media” is foisting upon us throughout the week. My home browser page is Edge/Bing. Bing has a linked news feed which serves me well. Often, they have paywall articles re-published for free. (Tip: If you ever see a Washington Post or NYT or WSJ article not behind a paywall, it’s important propaganda which the CIA wants you to read. Heck, they’re rolling in dough anyway).

THE REASON I STARTED THIS POST

The BING stream of BS has this annoying format of slide show frames with staged photos accompanied by one or a few sentences.

Dick and Jane for adults!

Worse, the emotionally charged photos (featuring staged poses by actors/models from the same source) are some creepy attempt to bypass the intellect and register in your subconscious. As you know, propaganda is directed at the emotions, because it’s usually irrational.

The following examples will end this post:

Handsome young boy wonders if he’s a boy, hoping finger in mouth will help – it being the international sign for wondering.

Lovely young girl hears about the mismatching of biological and true sex, so consults rainbow colored divination tablet.

Somber young man hopes that gazing downward in darkened room will help clarify his gender.

Critical analysis now replaced by convenient sign declaring critical analysis is complete … kind of like one of those red “easy” buttons from Staples.

Rather than spend a lot of time analyzing boring statistics, a handy graph can just indicate “more” or “less” of whatever you’re concerned about.

Lovely young girl wonders if she should try wearing a costume mustache for a few weeks before getting hormone therapy, you know, to see if it feels right.

Friend of the boy in the darkened room swears that a dim blue light is superior for self-obsession and angst, to accelerate gender dysphoria.

Irritated family members pretend they understand what Junior is blubbering about, hoping he’ll obsess about something more manageable next week ─ for instance, Pacific Rim earthquakes, or whether the Tide Pod Challenge is still in effect.

Not sure what this one is about, but subconsciously I’m thinking “Just the hell stop it now, will ya?” Notice how they saved money by hiring a George Clooney lookalike, since he would be really expensive.

Young girl exploring her gender covers face with hoodie so she can’t see Mom rolling her eyes.

The continuity department flubbed this one – showing the doctor as a man, and the confused patient as a woman. That is so 19^th Century!

Claim of credible study supported by picture of room with credible people studying.

This slide has more verbiage than all the others. Hopefully the reader will see that long paragraph and just think, “Whatever … they’re all high-fivin’ – must be cool”.

Professional help disclaimer, to avoid regulatory penalties. Not sure if either or both of these women are biological women or trans women, or woman, which is a guy who’s a woman, or at least says he is, I mean she is. You know. They could be neither sex too, I think; or both – not sure.

They hired an actual doctor for this one, to make sure the grin is genuine. After all that expensive doctor‑schooling this man will be more than happy to chop off your **** or your **** if that’s what you really want. And he’s got all kinds of pills to pick from.

John Taylor Gatto cites appreciation for research done by Samuel Blumenfeld which provided important elements of this Chapter 3. Please consider reading something by these brilliant and articulate men.

Arnie, your host, signing off now. Thanks for stopping by and God bless you in your own research and studies. Keep relying on Substack for genuine information about today’s world.

You can reach me at arnie1815@proton.me