Tips to help you do better in school

28: Tips for Helping Your Child Do Better in School


I went to some great schools (e.g., Norfolk Academy, Princeton, the Army) but I can assure you that even the best schools do not hit all the right notes. I’ve been writing and thinking about education for decades, trying to pinpoint what tactics work best, especially for students who are not all that eager to be students. And let’s face it, some schools don’t try as hard as we might wish. Here are some ideas that can serve as occasional First Aid:

1) GEOGRAPHY, MAPS, SCALES OF MILES

Geography is the stage on which events happen. Nobody can study History, Politics, World Civilizations or Social Studies without first knowing Geography.

Every classroom and every home ought to have a map of the USA and a map of the world (but not the Mercator kind, where Greenland looks as big as South America). Or a globe of the world. Keep them handy, turn to them whenever it’s natural to do so--for example, a story on the news.

Start local. Get children to look closely at their own state and work outward. Trace the shape and cut it out--then children can place this shape on other areas and quickly get a sense of sizes and distances.

Nothing is more important on a map than a scale of miles; and to learn to compare distances on the map to distances you know in the real world. Let’s say a child has traveled by car from New York to Washington, D.C. Encourage the child to compare that trip with various trips one might take on the map. (Point out that super highways are one thing, mountainous wilderness another.)

Maps are great but the best maps of all are the ones that show elevation--often called “raised relief maps.” Then you can see and feel the terrain. Terrain shapes history.

The one “toy” I got the most out of was a jigsaw-puzzle map of the USA. Made of wood; each state a different color. I learned the shapes and locations as I learned the names. Years later, I made myself memorize the few states I didn’t recall, so I can start in Maine and name all 50 states. I believe that every American student should know this, as part of being a citizen. If schools would start in the first grade with the closest states, and then work outward in subsequent grades, this task could be painlessly achieved by sixth or seventh grade.

Google makes it easy to find a map of anything. Just enter, e.g., map Paris (be sure SafeSearch is on). Here’s a huge and interesting portal: Geography.about.com

(Note to teachers: maps, diagrams, charts and schematics are conceptually the same: a picture stands in for something else. I’d think that even first graders could grasp entry-level variations--e.g., a precise diagram of their own classroom. Children would learn to orient the diagram, then to find their own desks and other objects. It could be treated as a game.)

2) LITERATURE, READING, POEMS

Reading is crucial. Without it, nothing else is possible.

I still suspect the age-old methods are best: start with nursery rhymes, doggerel and other fun and dramatic stuff. I loved “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” the first time I heard it; I still love it. I’ve seriously argued that “I’ve never seen a purple cow” is one of the great moments in English literature. I’ve written some kids’ poetry myself, and my favorite opening salvo goes: “A goosie named Lucie fell in love with a moosie named Brucie.” Ah, isn’t that sublime? Point is, go for the amusing, the memorable, the silly. I’d say comic books are okay. What children read is not primary; that they read is primary. There are only two things an adult reads for: entertainment or information. Why would it be different for a child?

The average adult doesn’t want anything deeper than a thriller. Why would a child want deep lit? Beware of adult pretension. Letters in the local paper debated the wisdom of placing “The Mayor of Casterbridge” on a summer reading list. Personally, I’d rather spend the summer sleeping in sand than have to read this book. You read a novel like this after you’ve read three hundred more entertaining novels. Whom was the teacher trying to impress?

Here’s a huge reading site: Bibliomania.com. About 2000 books, all the big names out of copyright. Just to test the technology, I read two whole books on my monitor. It’s nice. You don’t have to hold a book. You turn pages with the mouse.

The best rule of all for kids: if you don’t know a word, look it up. Dictionaries--small, large, and specialized--should be stuck around the house. TheFreeDictionary.com is excellent. Or place a dictionary widget on your desktop.

Here’s some Big Thoughts you can throw around: did you know that only English has a thesaurus? Because the vocabulary is so big--almost a million words. We have 5 words (synonyms) for almost everything. Most long words come from Latin. The short violent ones are from Anglo-Saxon. Plus words from almost every language on the planet. The history of the last 2000 years is contained in the English language.

Older students should know that English has many hundreds of pure Latin words, words that Julius Caesar spoke, such as: exit, bonus, area, forum, alibi, etc. (See “3: Latin Lives On” on this site for more such words.)

Even adults confuse it’s and its, whose and who’s. To clarify some of the common mistakes, I wrote an article called SPELLING FOR BUSY EXECS (Google the tile).

In the last 10 years, phonics made a roaring comeback, but there are still here and there spots of sight-reading. Often, if children learn to memorize shapes, they will have trouble with sounds. Children may not be able to explain why they are having problems. Schools casually throw around the term “dyslexia,” implying that a child is defective when, in fact, the reading pedagogy may be defective. I interviewed a reading coach in Canada, and she said: “Perhaps I should mention the best all-purpose indicator: the flipping of words like was and saw, and felt and left. These are examples of whole-word memorization gone wrong. Simple phonemic awareness or being taught the alphabetic principle would tell children that was could not say saw."(For more background, Google "Interview with a Reading Coach." Also see my video on YouTube.com titled “Phonics vs. Whole Word.”)

3) HISTORY. AND A SENSE OF TIME

Gilbert Highet, one of America’s legendary teachers, said it this way: “No one ever knows enough history.” (Highet also said: “No one knows, no one can even guess how much knowledge a child will want and, if it is presented in the right way, will digest,” which is pretty much the premise of all my work and of this article.)

I think the secret in history, and most other subjects, is to start with only a few facts, the most important ones. And then go over them at another time, adding more facts. Then again, and again. It’s like painting furniture--if you want a deep lustrous shine, you need about five coats of paint. (Conversely, the worst way to teach anything is to start at the very beginning, and work your way methodically to the end. Students forget the beginning before they reach the end. We learn quickest when we see the Big Picture.)

The second secret is a massive reliance on visuals: maps, pictures, art, film clips, Hollywood reconstructions, anything that will let a child of today see what another time and place look like. (Note: in Google Images, you can quickly find a picture of just about anything: Liberty Bell, Spartan warrior, Aztec city. Show your child how this works.)

Secret three, for the student: always start studying any new subject with the shortest summary or description you can find (a dictionary, for example). Growing up, I loved the one-volume Columbia Encyclopedia (Browse www.bartleby.com/65). I’d start there, then go to World Book. If I wanted more, I’d look up the same thing in Britannica (when I got to college) or find a book. Nowadays, there are so many great tools--Wikipedia.org, for example.

The History Channel is one of the best things on TV. Also great is HistoryChannel.com. Wait for a child to ask a question or have a project, and then show them how to navigate this huge resource.

Have you ever wondered why the 18th century refers to the 1700s? This is confusing for kids, and even many adults, Think about the first years AD--25, 78, etc. These are necessarily in the FIRST century. Years such as 123 and 178 are in the SECOND century. And already the numbers are out of whack. Extrapolate forward, and the year 1865 is in the NINETEENTH century, the year 1980 is in the Twentieth century. Make children try to explain this back to you. If they can, they are way ahead.

THE WEEK magazine ran one of the most oblivious remarks I’ve seen recently: “And as every American schoolchild learns, King George III hired 30,000 Hessian mercenaries to try to crush the American Revolution.” What percent of American children do you think actually learn that?

(If you want more along this line, please see “26: How To Teach History, Etc.”)

4) SCIENCE. AND A SENSE OF AWE

I’m writing an essay now called How to Teach Science, and the basic idea is simply this: emphasize curiosity and wonder.

Why is anything the way it is--a hand, a worm, a shell, a wave, a tree? Why does it work the way it works? Why does it work at all? Isn’t everything marvelous and almost beyond belief? Look up at the starry sky. You’ll never explain it but you can always feel wonder.

Some teaser questions: did you know there are more than one billion galaxies, each with a billion stars? Galaxies are so big that light, to travel from one side to the other, might take 100,000 years. Wow! That’s big.

Just teaching a child to distinguish animal, vegetable and mineral is a good place to start thinking scientifically. Or how about the difference between ice, water and steam. Most people know all this, but they don’t stop to think that gold, lead and almost every other element goes through the same three stages (solid, liquid, gas).

Exploratorium.com is a great science portal.

I tend to think every kid, at some time, would enjoy a big magnifying glass, a microscope and a telescope.

Perhaps the most amazing thing to me about my own education is that nobody (in family or school) ever made me learn the names of this region’s most common trees. The trees are standing there, in the yard, waiting to be noticed!

5) COUNTING, NUMBERS, MATH

Next to reading, the most crucial thing is arithmetic and feeling comfortable with numbers. Numbers, it should be stressed, are fun. But as with learning a foreign language, some of it is just, well, memorizing something so you always know it.

Here’s something that I made myself learn, as an adult, because none of my schools did the job. A thousand thousands is a million. A thousand millions is a billion. A thousand billions is a trillion. Put another way, a million means 6 zeroes, a billion means 9 zeroes, and a trillion means 12 zeroes.

So now, if I read that the human body has 50 trillion cells, I know that means 50,000,000,000,000.

The bottom line is real obvious: how can anyone discuss the budget or nature or anything really big or small without knowing what million and billion mean?

I recently ran into somebody at a party who said they had to memorize the multiplication table up to 20 by 20. I’d be happy if children knew the table up to 12 by 12. (Simply because it saves a lot of trouble, I made myself memorize 15 times 15, which is 225 and easy to recall.)

Here’s a simple way to travel into the dark heart of multiplication. Use a chessboard (or square-tile floor). Cover up all the squares except for an area 4 by 5. Let the child see that 4 by 5 means five rows of four, or four rows of five. Doesn’t matter. The total is still 20. Go ahead, count the squares. But explain there’s no way to do this simple math other than as an addition problem--4+4+4+4+4 or 5+5+5+5. It’s so much easier if you just memorize the common situations....Do the same routine with 6 by 7 squares....Then tell the child, okay, now you pick a rectangular area and explain to me what I just explained to you....Little by little you walk them through through the multiplication table--but now they really know what it means.

One of the odd things some schools do is to hand calculators to children without teaching them any computational sills. So the children, if a calculator isn’t handy, are helpless. Furthermore, calculators are a problem when the operator doesn’t have a ballpark number in mind. In other words, if you know the answer is around 45,000, you instantly know that 500,000 means you didn’t punch in the right numbers. You start over. The child without any sense of numbers accepts 500,000.

So much nonsense has insinuated itself into math education. I highly recommend a video on YouTube.com called “Math Education: an Inconvenient Truth” by M J McDermott.

6) FACTS, MEMORY, AND THE MNEMONIC

It’s safe to declare: “FACTS ARE FUN.” Why else do people love Jeopardy and Trivial Pursuits? I suspect that humans are hard-wired to collect miscellaneous information. You never know when a single tiny fact will help you find something (e.g., food in the jungle), or solve an emergency, or realize that something is amiss in your kitchen or backyard--and you had better act quickly.

Conversely, an amnesiac is always starting over. Young people without any information in their heads are always at a disadvantage.

Starting a century ago, some educators argued that children didn’t need to bother memorizing much of anything, which might be a good idea if you want to dumb everybody down. But if you want children to do well, I’d say the trick is to subtly encourage them to acquire as much knowledge as possible. The Greeks and Romans were fanatical about devising techniques for retaining, organizing and presenting information. A man who couldn’t give a good speech was not highly regarded. To this day, a gimmick for memorizing anything is called a mnemonic device, after the Greek word for memory.

I was charmed to read about schools in England where children in sixth grade are told to devise first-letter mnemonics for the planets (in order from the Sun). The demotion of Pluto changed the game somewhat, prompting Stephen Colbert to concoct this solution: My Very Educated Mother Just Said "Uh-oh! No Pluto!" With this sentence in mind, most people could rattle off Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune.

As a kid, I tried to invent mnemonics for anything annoying. For example, concave versus convex lens. The concave lenses are the one that cave inward. Stalactite and stalagmite are really annoying. The syllable “mite” made me think of “might,” such as a fortress, which is definitely going to be on the ground. So stalactites must hang from above. The mnemonics you think of yourself are going to work best.

It’s handy to know the powers of 2. Here’s the verbal formulations I use to remember the two easy ones: “2 to 6 is 6-4. 2 to 10 is 10-2-4.” (Which provides all sorts of useful information, e.g., 10 generations back, and that’s only about the American Revolution or 1800, there were 1,024 people who contributed equally, from a genetic point of view, to what you are today.)

I remember as a teenager thinking that alliterations were fun. And palindromes. And oxymorons. If your child is home sick, mention Fun-with-words.com, which features all kinds of word play.

Basically, my notion is that if we don’t remember something, in what sense can we be said to know it? To dramatize that some schools had gone too far in downplaying memorization, I created The Quizz, which is 100 simple facts that every high school graduate should know. Older children might enjoy testing themselves against this list.(See “20: The Quizz” on this site.)

7) THE ROLE OF QUESTIONS

Teachers tend to ask questions that only they know the answer to...I’ve ruminated on this a lot.

Adults, in normal conversations, never use questions this way. Adults ask a question because they don’t know the answer and they genuinely want to know, e.g, “What time is it?” Conversely, adults asking questions they know the answers to would tend to be thought of as show-offs.

I suspect the most useful questions with children would be ones you don’t know the answer to, e.g. “What’d you learn today that surprised you?”; “What’s your favorite subject?”; “Which historical figure do you find most interesting?”; and many others.

Gilbert Highet touched on this in a different way. He said he thought teachers did a disservice to their subjects by suggesting that the big questions were all answered. And, therefore, for students, there was nothing new to be done. When the reverse is usually the case. Most fields are wide open. Teachers should encourage students to think they can ask original questions and discover new truths.

Similarly, I always think the mainstream media do a great disservice to the public when they present a collage of theories and guesses, and package it all as some big ball of ultimate truths. You have to read these articles carefully. You’ll see a lot of weasel words: could, maybe, might, possibly, may, in a few years. Encourage your child, somewhat like Diogenes, to search for an honest sentence.

8) RECESS, EXERCISE, SPORTS

I don’t hesitate to call myself an intellectual but nobody believes in the importance of sports more than I do, for all ages. The idea that schools can eliminate exercise is just fatuous. There was actually a blurb in the local paper about schools that curtail recess to make room for “more academics.” If children are restless and agitated, they won’t learn more of anything. Better to let them run around outside for a half-hour; the time is not wasted. Then maybe the teacher can accomplish something. And maybe there can be fewer prescriptions for drugs to keep them docile.

9) CREATIVITY, ART, CRAFTS

Might be worth a mention that there’s a big debate now in educational circles about what is called a creativity curriculum. The idea is that children, in order to be ready for the complex world of the future, must learn to be more creative. I’m an artist (both novelist and painter) so I think I am entitled to point out the problems. Really creative people usually have a thorough grounding; they know lots and lots of facts and information. Often their creativity springs from rearranging all this stuff, and seeing things in a new way. Educators sometimes seem to be describing a world where empty-headed children will somehow tackle grand problems and pull solutions from empty air. If a so-called creativity curriculum is a pretext for downplaying academics, be suspicious.

I met a woman at a party who teaches Art to sixteen-year-olds. Not Art History, which might be quite useful. But painting in a studio. What is being replaced, that’s my question. I always think that children, at all levels, are better off learning something substantial. After all, there’s only so many hours in the day. The most obscure bit of Chinese history, or something really insignificant from astronomy--well, that’s exactly what might inspire a young artist or poet.

It always seems to me that the most creative person in the 20th century was James Joyce. He was educated in a very restrictive setting--Catholic Ireland during the Victorian Era. Nuns were rapping his knuckles from an early age. He was made to learn Greek and Latin. Etc. Etc. But he became a very volcano of creativity.

Even at the college level, if a future artist asked me for advice on what to study, I’d say, “For the most part, anything solid, anything unknown to you. History. Biology. Philosophy. Literature. Math. Things that will bend your mind into new shapes, and make sparks in your head. Art will find you.”

Extra Credit Quiz Worth 50 pts

Paper is mainly made from what?

How many stars are on the US flag?

How many stripes are on the US flag?

9 times 9 equals what?

Clouds are made of what?

Shakespeare wrote in which language?

Diamonds and coal are made of what?

A hexagon has how many sides?

The Romans were famous for their aquaducts. True or false?

How many pounds in a ton?

Napoleon ruled what country?

Water boils at what temperature?

Australia is the same width as the United States--which is about 1000 miles, 2000 miles, or 3000 miles?

The average of 6, 10 and 14 is what?

Non-fiction means that it’s true or that it’s false?

What is the chemical composition of water?

Name an important event that occurred during the 19th century.

If it’s winter in the northern hemisphere, in the southern hemisphere it’s what season?

Ants and flies are examples of what?

The Amazon flows into what body of water?

Name a famous American novel written before 1990.

A constellation is what?

The body of water to the west of California is what?

The Pilgims came from what country?

The two sides in the American Civil War were called what?

Bats can see in the dark. True or false?

Which brothers invented the airplane?

Sharks are fish but whales are mammals. True or false?

2 to the third power equals 8, 10 or 12?

President Kennedy was killed in what city?

Name an “Old World” country.

Name a “New World” country.

A caterpillar becomes a what?

The US Supreme Court has how many justices?

An acre is roughly the size of a baseball diamond, a football field or a typical city block?

Rembrandt was famous for his what?

What’s the difference between a hurricane and a typhoon?

The Taj Mahal is in what country?

The moon is one quarter, one half, or the same size as the Earth?

Name three planets besides the Earth.

Fish breathe with their what?

Abraham Lincoln was President in 1855, 1865, or 1875?

A camel can walk a long way without what?

The shortest distance between two points is called what?

Give an example of precipitation.

What is the Southern Cross?

Name a major desert.

The Great Pyramids are located in what country?

In New York City the shortest day of the year occurs around what date?

Washington, DC is located on what river?

The US national anthem is what?

Who ordered the German invasion of Russia in 1941?

Which countries border the USA?

The Leaning Tower of Pisa is in what country?

The deepest spot in the ocean is about 3 miles, 7 miles or 11 miles?

How many days from one full moon to the next?

Roughly how much of the Earth is covered by water? 30%? 50%? 70%?

The tallest mountain on this planet is what?

Name three of the countries that make up Scandinavia.

Wall Street is located in what city?

Hollywood is located in what state?

How many quarts in a gallon?

The Eiffel Tower can be found where?

The pole vault record is approximately 15’, 20’ or 25’?

The most famous canal in the Western Hemisphere is where?

How many times zones in the USA?

Name six continents.

Which is bigger, a virus or a bacterium?

There’s more gravity on Jupiter than on Earth. Why?

Which country has the largest population?

Name three oceans.

How many days in a year?

In 1492 Columbus sailed in which direction?

A baseball game has how many innings?

In much of the world, soccer is called what?

What is the capital of Mexico?

E pluribus unum means what?

A spider web is made out of what?

Mussolini ruled what country?

The Great Wall is located where?

The Continental Divide is where?

Antartica is primarily ice or land?

What is a syllable? Give an example.

Quote a line of American poetry.

Name something that Thomas Edison invented.

If the groundhog sees his shadow on Groundhog Day, what does this mean?

The Nile River is almost the same length as the Missouri/Mississippi River combination--about 2000 miles, 3000 miles, or 4000 miles?

USA stands for what?

CNN stands for what?

MPG stands for what?

Italy juts into what body of water?

1776 was a bad year in British history. Why?

The car and the airplane were made possible by a third invention. What was it?

Sci-fi stands for what?

The equator separates what from what?

The Roaring Twenties occurred between what two wars?

What leader was the biggest mass murderer in history? (Three names are arguably correct.)

Name four of the major religions.

A typical car engine has 4, 6 or 8 what?

Which Super Bowl was Super Bowl XXIV?

The emperor who fiddled while Rome burned was named what?

Fencing is a sport, criminal activity, or light construction? (Okay, that’s sort of a trick question.)

Article

Nine Reading Experts Explain the Sad State of Reading
Bruce Deitrick Price
October 14, 2009
The Reading Wars continue to rage. Flawed methods continue to cause illiteracy and dyslexia. It´s a huge tragedy. But why has it happened? And how do you keep your child from being damaged?

I asked nine of the world´s foremost reading experts for their personal "take" on reading and reading instruction today. I assure you that these are our best authorities--smart, vastly experienced, and trustworthy. (I say "world´s foremost" because two are Canadian and one is British.)

This fairly terrifying article is intended to be a wake-up call for parents, especially those with young children. Please protect them from the wrong-headed methods (Whole Word, etc.) used in many public schools.

1) Don Potter, phonics expert: "The situation across the US is dramatically worse than anyone can possibly imagine. When I ask the teachers why they teach sight-words, they inevitably tell me that it is because their students are going to be assessed on them. They are totally unaware that sight-words are positively harmful. They consider sight-word memorization part of a good reading program that includes some phonics, not realizing that sight-words create a reflex that interferes with later phonics instruction. Sight-words are an obstacle to reading, not an aid." (donpotter.net)

2) Mona McNee, author of "The Great Reading Disaster" and creator of "Step by Step": "Before 1939 the UK had almost universal literacy. Teacher training was minimal. The common sense of parents and teachers got children reading with the simple c-a-t: cat. Sixty years of mistraining, without the old-fashioned synthetic phonics, has wrecked education throughout the English-speaking world. The experts have advised a method of teaching children to read that is a denial of every rational principle of education. By now our society has collapsed. Half the children in juvenile court are dyslexic; many prisoners cannot read. We should take education out of government at once. As for learning to read, parents should teach their own child. Why miss out on the best fun in the world?"

3) Wanda Sanseri, literacy teacher and creator of the Spell to Write and Read program: "I remember as a child admiring a tall building that won national honors for architectural design. A few years later the same structure had to be condemned as a public hazard. Short cuts had been taken on the land study and foundation work. Similarly, many approaches to reading instruction today are colorful and creative but neglect foundational truths of the language. McKinsey and Company, management consultants, recently reported, ´The longer American children are in school, the worse they perform compared to their international peers." (Wanda Sanseri gave a famous speech to the State Senate of Oregon about phonics: swrtraining.com)

4) Samuel Blumenfeld, arguably the country´s most eminent authority on reading: "To understand what is going on in reading, you have to start at the beginning of the conspiracy to dumb down the nation. It starts with John Dewey's 1898 essay, 'The Primary Education Fetich.' Those who set the course took power over the education system by promoting their own disciples and excluding all others. They took control of the major colleges of education: Columbia, Chicago, Palo Alto, etc. They commissioned books to be written promoting whole-word instruction. And they got publishers to publish the new programs because the professors were in a position to get these new primers purchased by virtually every public school system in the country. Many whole-language advocates are simply the latest of the socialists who are willing to destroy this country in order to change it. I put a lot of this in my books 'The New Illiterates' and 'The Whole Language/OBE Fraud.' Evil is a force in this world, and it manifests itself in many different ways. Including deliberately dumbing down a nation." (samblumenfeld.com)

5) Kim Latta, Canadian reading instructor and founder of Exceeding Reading Learning Systems: "The state of reading instruction in 2009 is dismal to say the least. Instead of teaching our children to read by phonics, a rather simple, logical process, we make learning to read a difficult, overwhelming obstacle many children never conquer. I consider this totally reckless especially when the research shows overwhelmingly that phonics is the best way to teach beginning reading to children." (ExceedingReading.com)

6) Siegfried Engelmann, prophet of Direct Instruction and author of "Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons": "Where is education today? About a hair´s width above where it was when I first worked in education, in the 1960s. At that time there were a couple of phonics programs that were not great but that worked reasonably well with most middle performers. That era ended when the New Math failed and the spotlight focused on 'humanism,' not schoolwork, and on recognizing the individual strengths of learners. Language experience was the big vogue. Finally, the weight of these failures led to a replay of the 1960s, with phonics revisited and bolstered by 'phonemic awareness' and other 'research-based' components. The problem is that the logic of the field is still around the same primitive level it was in the ´60s. The field hasn´t learned that categories like 'phonics' are far too broad to let the potential consumer know whether or not the phonics program will work with lower performers. In other words, a skilled technician who understood the actual variables that make reading programs successful with low performers could design a program that met all the requirements of 'research based' and that would not work with a very large percentage of beginning readers. So here we are still pretty far from the bull´s eye." (zigsite.com)


7) Malkin Dare, famed founder of Society for Quality Education: "Here's my take on how reading is being taught in Ontario's schools. Ontario continues to ignore the overwhelming research evidence in favour of systematic phonics. Like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, Ontario's whole language/balance literacy gurus are still leading the province's trusting teachers in the wrong direction. The result is massive illiteracy and misery." (societyforqualityeducation.org)

8) Geraldine Rodgers, author of "The Born Yesterday World of the Reading Experts": "My sabbatical research in 1977-1978 tested the oral reading accuracy and comprehension of some 900 second-grade children. My unexpected finding was that different kinds of readers, or mixtures of the kinds, result from different beginning reading emphases, from sight-word "meaning" (which I label Code 1) to pure phonic emphasis (Code 10). The most surprising finding was that the ´meaning´ emphasis permanently damages so-called ´reading comprehension´ (besides producing highly inaccurate readers). I later found that Oskar Messmer in Germany in 1903 had already discovered the existence of the two kinds of readers, which he labeled subjective (for sight-words) and objective (for phonic sound). Brain research confirms the existence of the two types. Those learning initially by ´sound´ read with the left ´language´ side of the brain, but those learning by ´meaning´ read initially with the soundless right ´picture´ side. Most ´meaning´ readers do then switch from the right to the left, but, as Sally Shaywitz's research with such so-called ´good´ readers unwittingly showed, they remain hampered in reading by sound."

9) Elizabeth Brown, literacy tutor and phonics advocate: "I have given out hundreds of reading grade level tests. Since we´re a military family that moves often, I´ve seen results from many different schools and school districts throughout the United States. When I started tutoring in 1994, many schools were still using whole word methods, and I found that about 60% of students in these schools had reading problems. Currently, most schools teach with a mixture of phonics and Dolch sight words--30 to 40% of students I've tested from these schools have problems. In the few schools that teach with only a few sight words and good phonics programs, I have not yet found a student with reading difficulties. Unfortunately, sight words and balanced literacy only seem to be getting more popular, so, while I would love to see a pure phonics resurgence, it doesn't seem likely in the near future." (thephonicspage.org)

I so tremendously admire these experts for their conscientious efforts on behalf of intelligent education. They have all had to be warriors, because there is so much entrenched nonsense. I urge parents to pick several names and learn more about what they have to say.

Please tell other parents about this article. And tell teachers--most do not realize they have been lied to.

My personal conclusion is that the flawed methods used in many public schools are not only a national tragedy but child abuse. I want to remind everyone of Rudolph Flesch´s "Why Johnny STILL Can´t Read" (1981). Chapter 7 is titled "We Do Teach Phonics," which is the official lie that many teachers are still told to use. Caveat emptor.

The USA is said to have 50,000,000 functional illiterates and 1,000,000 dyslexics. They are victims of educational malpractice. This article is dedicated to them.

Article

Eight Warning Signs of a Bad School
By Bruce Deitrick Price
Bruce Deitrick Price
Level: Basic PLUS

Author, artist, poet, education activist. Founder of Improve-Education.org. Author of "THE EDUCATION ENIGMA--What Happened to American Education," a short, lively tour of why public schools ...

Article Word Count: 1285 [View Summary] Comments (0)
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How do parents find a good school? Not only are public schools crippled by dozens of bad ideas, but the schools seem intentionally designed so that parents cannot understand what's really going on inside the classrooms. Probably it's more practical to stay alert for the danger signs that can be observed from a distance. Here's a checklist of the top eight signals that you don't want your child in this school:

1) READING: The most important skill is reading. If you hear any mention of Whole Words, Sight Words, Dolch Words, Fry Words, or Balanced Literacy, run the other way. English is in alphabetic/phonetic language, and should be taught phonetically. Children must immediately learn the alphabet, and that letters stand for sounds. (There seem to be five or 10 good phonics programs available. I'm not convinced the small differences matter. What's been killing us is this one big difference: teaching basic alphabetic information or NOT teaching it. Any synthetic phonics program, mixed with poetry, song, and a light touch, seems to do the trick. Advocates of phonics report that virtually all their students learn to read by age 7. Advocates of Whole Word say children should memorize a few hundred words each year, in which case they'll be effectively illiterate through high school.)

2) MATH: The next most important thing is arithmetic. If you hear any mention of Reform Math, run the other way. (Reform Math is an umbrella term for at least 10 different programs, with names such as Everyday Math, Connected Math, MathLand, TERC, CPM, etc.) These programs tend to push advanced concepts at children who don't even know how to add 10 and 16. These programs like to use obscure methods and algorithms so that children end up confused and scattered. The proper goal is that children gain mastery of basic arithmetic, for example, easily adding and subtracting one- and two-digit numbers. Then they move on to multiplying and dividing one- and two-digit numbers. There should be no use of calculators, no "spiraling" about from topic to topic, no mention of college-level concepts.

3) KNOWLEDGE: The next most important thing is that children are routinely expected to acquire knowledge. This used to be ordinary; but for 75 years our educators have waged war against content, facts, and memorization. "They can look it up" is a huge danger signal. To study history, for example, requires that children first learn the names of oceans, continents, rivers, mountains, and countries. Basic geography should be a staple throughout the first few years; there should be maps in every classroom, both of the US and the world. In general, in all subjects, children should first be taught the very simplest information, the essentials, the foundational knowledge, all in preparation for studying the subject at a higher level. If children do not learn the names of the oceans in the first grade, they are not at a school but a babysitting service.

4) SCIENCE: Children should be taught, from the start, the rudiments of science and scientific thinking. For example, children can look at common objects and say whether they are animal, vegetable or mineral. Children should be able to talk about water changing from solid to liquid to steam. Older children should be able to discuss the different kinds of problems dealt with by doctors, chemists, biologists, physicists, mathematicians, etc. Studying simple maps, diagrams, charts, illustrations and blueprints is a good sign. (Put it another way, I can't imagine that a bad school would think of teaching children to understand simple diagrams in first grade.)

5) CONSTRUCTIVISM: One of the big fads raging in some public schools is called constructivism. (It can turn up in the teaching of any subject.) The giveaways are phrases such as "construct new knowledge," "guide at their side," "prior knowledge," "learning strategies," etc. All of these stand in direct contrast to direct instruction, whereby expert teachers teach what they know better than anyone else in the room. "A sage on a stage" is exactly what children need. Constructivism devalues the skill and preparation that good teachers bring to the schoolroom; and helps to conceal the poor training of bad teachers. Constructivism guarantees that instruction will move slowly and be fragmented.

6) FADS RUN RAMPANT: Other popular fads to be avoided include: Self Esteem (where children are constantly praised and awarded good grades even if doing a bad job); Cooperative Learning (where children are constantly forced to work in groups so they never learn to think for themselves); Critical Thinking (where children are encouraged to engage in deep discussions of subjects they know little about); Creativity Curriculum (where playing with the arts is given prominence over learning knowledge); and Fuzzy Anything (where children are allowed to guess, to concoct odd spellings and odd grammar without correction, to be wrong but still be graded as if correct). All of these are warning signs.

7) GOALS: Perhaps the most distinctive trait of good schools is that they talk about what will be taught and what will be accomplished. There are goals and expectations. There is a sense that the school has a map and has traveled the road many times before. Bad schools are distinguished by an endless litany of excuses and alibis. There is a sense that these schools don't have clear goals, and they don't really expect to advance very far. In bad schools, a lot of what happens is actually a sort of make-believe whereby children are kept busy doing pretend-work that doesn't add up to very much. Perhaps the most disgusting part of the whole charade is that some of these schools will pretend that they are being considerate of the children, that they don't want to push them too far, and they don't want to expose the inadequacies of poor and minority children. All of this, it seems to me, is the merest drivel, not to mention racist. Children need to be challenged and pushed, not to the point where they give up but to the point where they think, "Wow, look at me go."

8) SAFETY: A signal that cuts across all the others might be called basic orderliness and security. Schools should be safe places, both law-abiding and predictable. The point is that children should be able to relax so they can learn. A scary school ceases to be a school. The Principal (comparable to a small town's Mayor and Sheriff) is a crucial figure in this paradigm: he or she sets the tone. Principals explain goals and policies to students and parents; principals motivate and support teachers. (This might be called the Principal Principle.)

Summary: The Tao of Education is very simple. Learning basics and academics is the goal, and the path to that goal. Facts and knowledge are the lifeblood of the classroom. Teaching should be as creative as possible; schools should be fun and student should smile a lot. But the whole process has to go somewhere, has to advance. At the end of each day, students know more than they did the day before. The problem with American education is that elite educators shifted away from knowledge-based education (a/k/a cognitive learning) toward feeling-based education (a/k/a affective learning).

A lot of psychotherapeutic prejudices were mixed in with a contempt for facts and a disregard of foundational knowledge, including even literacy. The result, as one would expect, would be a very dumbed-down, mediocre school, such you might find in any American city. The solution is to ignore the bad ideas that caused the trouble, turn away from the touchy-feely cliches, and seriously try to render service to students by giving them the best possible preparation for the rest of their lives.

Article

19: Form, Function, Foolishness

19: Form, Function, Foolishness


why "form follows function" is fluff

The 20th century produced a number of stupendously evil dictators and one stupendously annoying cliché. That would be this bit of alliteration: form follows function. Thousands--nay, millions--of intelligent people have fallen all over themselves in a grotesque rush to hail this cliché, to repeat this cliché, to take this cliché home and (one can only surmise) sleep with the damned thing.

So who am I--a mere literary nobody--to snicker at all these people just because they are misguided and duped. Well, I’m a contrarian kind of guy who is quite sure of one thing: the more that experts, pundits and professors tells us something is true, the surer we can be that a hoax is upon us.


What amazes me is that this caterwauling started all the way back in the early 1900’s, was still growing stronger in the 1960s and every time you think the thing has died an overdue death, it’s thrown at you again and again but always as if for the first time! Worse, it’s always uttered with the same cloying solemnity, as if God has spoken and all further discussion can now cease.

Okay, you’re thinking, what is the point here? Explain yourself. Easy! In half the cases where this cliché is used, it’s a trivial and stupendously empty tautology. A knife or scissors is sharp by definition. A knife not sharp ceases to be a knife. Look in the dictionary--cutting will always be mentioned. Anyone saying that a sharp knife is an example of form following function is like somebody piously asserting a circle is round or a square has exactly four sides! The people behind this foolishness were particularly fond of pointing at ocean liners and airplanes. Look at how they’re designed to slide through wind and water. Form follows function, don’t you know? Of course, and poisons will poison you. An ocean liner that does not cut through the water, an airplane that does not move through the air, a poison that isn’t poisonous--well, these are not semantically viable. They’re DOA.

But this cliché is even more dangerous in its other common use, because here the logical nonsense does not immediately jump out and slap you. Yes, my friends, we arrive at design and architecture. “Form follows function” was the war cry of people who wanted to build big boxes and boring typefaces, and they wanted us to pay for them and love them. Forever. People now may not remember but around 1970 the International Style, as it was called (this being code for Big Boring Boxes), was predicted to last for a thousand years. Just like the Third Reich. (Indeed, I believe there is a totalitarian subtext and I’ll come back to it.) First, let’s dispose of this consummate cliche. You can’t justify your design for a building or anything else with the phrase “form follows function” unless you have a situation where something has only one function. Nothing in this universe has only one. End of story.

What is the function of a building? To keep people warm and dry. To make a corporation look good. To be beautiful. To be original. To make workers feel good when they come to work. To make the architect famous. To make the rest of the neighborhood seem to be harmonious. To conserve energy and to use the sun’s energy. To be solidly constructed and not fall down. To hold the most bodies per cubic yard. To be cheap to build....On and on it goes, function after function, and each one gives you different answers. So what kind of fool presents a design and seriously intones “Form follows function” as though that says something very deep. Which function did you have in mind? And you know what? Even if you could settle on a single function, there’s probably numerous forms that would do that particular job equally well.

“Form follows function” was also the rage among many type designers. I must have read 20 articles explaining why Helvetica was the ultimate typeface. Yes, ultimately boring. Here’s the really funny part about all this rational typeface jive. What’s the function of a typeface? If you’re gullible enough to go with that question, the modernists wanted you to accept this answer: to be readable. The Swiss who perpetrated Helvetica just assumed that this face would be the most readable because it was the most “objective.” Big shock: sans serif faces are harder to read. Did you ever see a novel set in Helvetica? But never mind even that crushing defeat. The main point recurs: a typeface has lots and lots of functions (and readability may not even be high on the list). That’s why we have at least 10,000 faces. They create moods and feelings; they express the underlying sentiments of the words; they engage the eye. But the people pushing “form follows function” actually seemed to want every sign to be in Helvetica, just as every building would be a rational box, and every life would be chopped down to the logical essentials...which brings us back to the totalitarian connection.

Around 1985, I made notes for an essay titled "Hitler, Heaven, Helvetica and History," basically a precursor to this rant now. As the title suggests, I sensed a totalitarian compulsion inside the endless repeating of “form follows function,” and the relentless shilling for objectivist and rationalist paradigms. The obvious part of the story was that younger architects wanted to dethrone older architects; “form follows function” and “less is more” were marketing slogans for the young hot shots. The more subtle part of the story is that some of our elites have a secret love affair with central planning. Sick but true: socialism is catnip for intellectuals who suppose a high IQ entitles them to manage other people. These tendencies may be inchoate but I submit you can feel a yearning for control in much of the chatter about planned societies, rational typefaces and objective buildings. The humdrumness and banality of these boxes was echoed in Helvetica (arguably the most boring typeface ever devised) and in planned cities such as Brasilia (where nobody wanted to live) and in regimented societies such as Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China or Castro’s Cuba (where only the bosses have any fun). All of these bad ideas came from the same direction--a quasi-religion based on the unreasonable idea that Reason could solve all problems.

Fade, as the movie people say, to black. People chanting “form follows function” followed each other to the dreary part of town. Please, let’s commit this dead husk to a final burial. “Form follows function” is absurdly reductionist. It pretends that life is monolithic, simple, destined to be boring, and does one thing at a time. When we all know that life is varied, complex, entertaining, and multi-functional.

Article about Poetry

16: The Plight of Poetry

16: The Plight of Poetry

Quick, name a famous living poet. I bet that 99.99% of Americans can’t do this. When I was a boy, they actually interrupted pop music on the radio to say that T. S. Eliot had died. Can you imagine this today? Once the lusty Queen of the arts, Poetry now seems dithering and irrelevant. What happened??

I can do this in 10,000 words but we’re all in a hurry, right? The pretentious and sententious mugged Poetry. Mostly professors, lots of professors. There were also the highbrow critics such as Clement Greenberg, who lamented that middlebrow culture was “infecting the healthy, corrupting the honest and stultifying the wise.” Here’s what he and his friends were saying: if you don’t like what we tell you to like, you’re not entitled to like anything at all. Instead of encouraging people to participate as much as possible, even if only a little, and thus lifting the whole society, Clement & Co. undercut the process. Our self-appointed elite is good at the stilted, the mannered, the brainy, the opaque, the ingeniously pointless, so that’s the genius stuff. Everything else is deemed unworthy.

Fifty years ago we still had great and greatly famous poets. But after World War II, the universities swelled in number and size, and professors swelled with ambition. Poetry got kidnapped by publish-or-perish careerists (because universities count poems as “scholarly publications”). MFA programs claiming to teach the “craft” of poetry--never mind that it’s an art--sprouted like mushrooms. Dozens of little magazines, subsidized by university budgets and infused by academic hauteur, claimed to present true poetry. A small group (were there even a thousand of these people?) wrote, published, reviewed, praised, and gave awards to each other’s poems, all the while sniffing disdain at anything from outside their circle.

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Sure, there are always culture snobs. In moderate doses it’s a fine thing--keeps the intellectual pot boiling, makes life interesting. But when think-alike extremists take over, you can kiss your art goodbye. And this is no short-term phenomenon. As early as the 1980’s, the generic poetry stamped out by academics already had a sardonic name: the McPoem.

McPoems, we might say, are to Poetry what chamber music is to music. Let’s concede that great skill is required to create chamber music, there is beautiful chamber music, and many people do love chamber music. The problems start if you pretend that chamber music is the only kind of music. Well, that kind of snobbery doesn’t go far in the music world, but it got disastrously far in literary land.

McPoems are usually genteel to an effete degree. Which would remind many of the New Yorker, so rich and influential, so enamoured of McPoetry. I confess that I’ve had a long love-hate relationship with Eustace Tilley’s Mag. The cartoons made me laugh. The poems often left me dazed: What is this? Are there actually people who enjoy this?

Whereas McPoetry is usually tired and gauzy, great poetry is typically energetic and lucid. Opaque poetry? Unless it’s at the level of Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens, let’s not go there. (Billy Collins, a poet laureate, crafts his poems so they can be understood on a first reading; you can guess that McPoets hate this guy.) The language of great poems is generally intriguing on its own; but typically you fall through the language into the story or epiphany. No story or epiphany? Why write? And great poetry almost always gives you a grin or a chill, a sigh or a shudder. They’re emotional. McPoems tend to murmur faintly.

Who today writes with vigor and emotion? Our songwriters may be the exemplars. One of the pleasures of being in a Karaoke bar is to really study the lyrics on the screens, study them as if they are great poetry. Some are. You just know, if they published a book of Recent Poetry That Actually Made Somebody’s Heart Beat Faster, most of it would be by the Beatles and 50 other rock and rollers, Tin Pan Alley wordsmiths, blues and country singers, rappers, and other outcasts.

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So, here’s what the McPoets accomplished: a torrent of boring poetry gave Poetry a bad rep. To judge by the proliferation of websites, more people may be reading long-dead Romans than are reading any American poets alive. What’s certain is that writers such as Catullus and Martial are perused with more visceral enjoyment than virtually all contemporary poets, because the dead guys are alive with sophistication and high spirits.

Poems from the Greek Anthology seems also to be more popular than ever. Wow! These poets wrote about every facet of life, including enemies, lovers, battles, and favorite boats. Here’s what poetry was like when it was young:


On a Thessalian Hound (by Simonides)

Even as you lie dead in this tomb
I know the wild beasts
still fear your white bones, huntress Lycas;
your bravery high Pelion knows,
and splendid Ossa
and the lonely peaks of Cithaeron.

Point is, this ancient poetry displays a directness, a force, a fullness of life that literature has traditionally possessed but McPoems abandoned. Just as they abandoned lightness (the kind that ballerinas possess) and a sense of fun. e. e. cummings shows how to do it right:


since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom

cummings also gave us a remarkable poetic credo: “It is with roses and locomotives (not to mention acrobats Spring electricity Coney Island the 4th of July the eyes of mice and Niagara Falls) that [poems] are competing.”

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Horace, a Roman, wrote a long Ars Poetica full of sensible advice to the young writer. Fast forward 2000 years: Archibald MacLeish wrote another Ars Poetica, quite short, quite bizarre. This one has probably been quoted a million times in various McPoem Academies. It starts:

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,
Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb...

Poems should be mute and dumb? So gloriously goofy. Twenty years ago, when McPoems were practically blocking out the sun, I wrote my own Ars Poetica in self-defense. Here’s all of it:

oh to uncage words
as startling as birds
naked and silken
full of song and shriek
flung into the envious air
on a wonder of wings
to spin and soar and rise
dazzling our days
with surprise

MacLeish tells you how to write McPoems. I tell you: there’s other roads. But what the hey, I love these lines by Gelett Burgess:

I never saw a purple cow,
I never hope to see one;
but I can tell you, anyhow,
I’d rather see than be one!

Perhaps you feel the same way...but you’re afraid to admit it? Well, there’s some good in getting older and cranky. I no longer care what professors and cultural commissars think. Here’s advice I gave elsewhere about art: “Don’t be intimidated. If you don’t like it, it’s bad. If you like it, it’s good. Buy it.”

Another of my favorite lines is something I found, decades ago, scrawled on a vending machine in the New York City subway:

Let my red hot lips kiss your blues away

But here we are, pathetic losers. For the first time in the history of the world, in the most word-filled, endlessly communicating society ever, there’s hardly any literary hot lips.

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Coda: Other people have made these same laments. Perhaps not as stridently. But they probably wanted to be respectable. I just want to set you free. First, ignore most of what comes out of academia until they stop being so pretentious. Second, spread yourself around, gather your literary rosebuds as you may, practice that diversity the universities love so much to talk about but don’t always get around to practicing. More than anything else, open up your heart! Let the works in. That’s all any writer or artist can ask. If you then decide, no good, that’s no problem. Don’t apologize, keep looking. There’s so many talented people, in this country and around the world. You’ll love many of them. Find them, and take them home with you.

Article

ARTICLE 15....Lies are the only reality. Beauty is against the law. Executions are a daily routine. A brutal reach for power is all that matters. That is the world described in "1984." Some educators want us to believe the novel is really about corporate conformity and cameras at traffic lights. Sounds disingenuous. One might even say Orwellian...Welcome to "1984--The Cover Up."

15: 1984--The Cover Up
At a campground in the wilds of West Virginia, I happened to find an old paperback of George Orwell’s 1984. I had read it decades earlier, but dipped in anyway...I was surprised. The book was better than I remembered. It’s that rare thing, a fine novel and a brilliant polemic. To do either of these is difficult. Doing both at once, at this level, is unique. I hereby nominate it as one of the best novels of all time, and a book that every adult should read. Frankly, it might be too horrifying for teenagers.

Orwell plunges deeper than anyone else into the totalitarian impulse, the will to absolute power, the lust to inflict pain upon other humans. It’s a harrowing plunge. You don’t want to believe that people can be so evil. You don’t want to imagine yourself the victim of the cruel and stupid society described in 1984. You probably don’t want to deal with these unsettling questions: how would you behave in this inhuman world? Would you betray your family? Could you be made to love Big Brother? Which characters do you most identify with and why?

I then drifted into the Afterword, added in 1961 by a somewhat famous psychiatrist named Erich Fromm. Hmmm. The plot sickened. Pontificating in all directions, Fromm finally snuck up on his big insight. What Orwell was really writing about was corporate conformity--you know, that most evil of doublethink whereby a person working for General Motors would think that Chevrolets are better than Fords. The real problem facing the 20th century was “managerial industrialism, in which men build machines that act like men and develops men who act like machines.” Verbiage on the back cover sums up Fromm’s insight this way: the novel is “a diagnosis of the deepest alienation of the mind of Organization Man.”

How is Fromm’s weirdly disingenuous performance most accurately described? Here’s an exact parallel. Suppose you write a book about toxic waste being dumped in a neighborhood and thousands of people dying. But some reviewer says that your book really deals with the crisis of littering--all those tacky people tossing beer cans from their pickup trucks. Do you see here a terrible disconnect? The reviewer has conflated beer cans and toxic waste under the word litter. Were you the author, you would be indignant: “Beer cans?? I’m talking about stuff that kills people!”

My guess is that George Orwell is similarly indignant. Because he too is talking about stuff that kills people. After it first bullies and torments them.

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Fromm’s Afterword had two effects on me. I became deeply curious about this man and his motives. And I became very sensitive to the coverage that 1984 received in the media. For example, I realized that every few years the local paper would run disquisitions that seemed to direct readers away from the book’s actual message. In 2004, there was a spate of coverage about a project called “1984+20” conducted by the National Council of Teachers of English. The NCTE urged teachers and students to discuss what 1984 “might teach us about life in the contemporary United States.” Can you guess what Orwell was really telling us about our life now? Beware those dress and profanity codes! Look out for surveillance cameras at traffic intersections! NCTE didn’t talk much about the evils of totalitarian government, or the millions who were murdered by such governments.

An even weirder example of betraying Orwell is a curriculum unit offered by Schools of California Online Rsource for Educators (SCORE) in 1999. The stated mission is to study 1984. How? Students are required to read Orwell’s essay titled “Politics and the English Language” and to apply its insights to the Inaugural Address delivered by Calvin Coolidge in 1925! (You can find this silliness by googling: score 1984.)

Here’s a much more logical course of study. Ask students to suppose the USSR had won the Cold War and we were now living under the rule of the Communist Party. How does 1984 help us understand the psyche of such a government and the misery of its subjects? How does 1984 help us understand why Cambodia’s Communists killed more than 25% of the country’s people? Conversely, winning the Cold War gave us what benefits that we now take for granted in the contemporary United States? (First, we can read Orwell’s book.)

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Perhaps some of you have not read 1984 or you have been misled by these dishonest slants. Let me quote a few sentences from the major character named O’Brien. He is candid in describing the world of 1984: “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power...Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together in new shapes of your own choosing...In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph and self-abasement...There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science...There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness....If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--forever.”

The power of the book comes from Orwell’s remorseless, almost matter-of-fact-prose, his relentless depiction of the ultimate nightmare. The essence of 1984 is not surveillance cameras and two-way televisions, nor corporate conformity and managerial style. The essence is Room 101--the torture chamber where you confront the threat that will finally reduce you to a whimpering remnant capable only of total surrender to Big Brother, and total betrayal of everything and everyone you once loved. In the Party’s eyes, as O’Brien explains, an obedient citizen is not enough. “Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation.” No one can possibly misunderstand this plain English. Why then do Fromm, SCORE and the NCTE do so?

The paperback I happened upon in West Virginia was popular in college courses. Millions of this edition have been printed. New editions with Fromm’s essay are still being printed. In his grave since 1980, Erich Fromm pushes the Party Line today. But why does he want to? How is he put in a position where he can?


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Erich Fromm was called a psychiatrist, a Freudian, and a deep thinker. He wrote a lot of books, with titles like Escape From Freedom. Basically, he was a Marxist. He took all of Marx’s themes from 1850--mainly materialism and alienation--and gussied them up for audiences in 1950. Fromm may not have had any original ideas. I suspect in private he considered himself a Communist. His second wife (Henny Gurland) certainly was. And there we come to a totally fascinating bit of history....

The time is 1940. Hitler and Stalin are in business together. The world’s two most ruthless Secret Police forces are working in tandem, across the face of Europe, to find and kill anybody who does not serve the Party Line. Stalin, in particular, does not tolerate wavering intellectuals with doubts about the total correctness of what he says each day. A lot of brilliant people are erased. One of the century’s most famous intellectuals, Walter Benjamin, is fleeing across France, trying to cross the Pyrenees into Spain and safety. He is carrying a precious manuscript, apparently his reappraisal of Marxist thought....But he commits suicide, or so the police report says.

In 2001 Stephen Schwartz wrote a long article in the Weekly Standard called “The Mysterious Death of Walter Benjamin.” The article mentioned a woman named Henny Gurland who befriends Walter Benjamin in his last weeks and joins him in the flight to Spain. She is perhaps the last person to see him alive. The precious MS disappears forever. Suspicious discrepancies abound. Schwartz seems to hint that Henny Gurland is an agent sent by the Kremlin to eliminate a problem. I emailed Schwartz for clarification. He answered: “I do believe that Henny Gurland was involved in the actual liquidation of Benjamin.”

Gurland soon reaches Manhattan. In 1944 she marries Erich Fromm. That’s when I set up in my chair. Arguably, the woman’s a devout Communist and a professional killer. And Fromm marries her?! Wouldn’t he know about her past and her politics? Or maybe she found Fromm to keep an eye on him for her real love back in Moscow. In any event, two very far-left people married; and it’s that political perspective that animates the Afterword. Fromm spun Orwell as much as he could. Henny Gurland died young, after only 8 years of marriage; she wasn’t there to help write her husband’s Afterword. But her spirit might as well have been.


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Let’s look at this from Stalin’s point of view. George Orwell was definitely an intellectual who might better have been eliminated before he could write his two masterpieces, Animal Farm and 1984. If such books are published, they must be dismissed. The genius of anti-anti-Communism was never to say anything good about Communism, but to undermine any criticism of Communism. In the extreme case, Henny Gurland liquidates Walter Benjamin. In a more polite part of existence, Erich Fromm and others liquidate George Orwell’s message.

It’s fair to say that Orwell was more a man of the Left than the Right. It was precisely his hope for an intelligent Socialism that made him experience Stalinism as a monstrous betrayal. He finished the novel in 1949 and died in 1950. He did not write about America now; he wrote about what he had witnessed during his life, and about what Europe might become in a few decades. First, second, and third, 1984 is Orwell’s rage against the savage barbarism perpetrated during the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s in Stalin’s Russia. Fourth and fifth, 1984 is about Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. Sixth, if you like, Orwell is a prophet warning us against whatever you discern in the book.

My point is simple. If you--as a teacher or a student--are going to study this book, then study this book! With open eyes and intellectual honesty. Stalin’s 25++ million victims deserve this much. Let us honor these dead. (Some experts estimate that totalitarian regimes killed nearly 100 million people during the 20th century. Study that.)

Here's a lighter topic for classes to discuss. If somebody tells you that a book means X when it clearly means Y, do we need an exotic term such as Orwellian to describe this behavior, or would cover up quite suffice?

Article

10: MAX Your Creativity

If you have superior technical skills, if for example you draw like Michealangelo or write like Hemingway, skip this. But if you’re burned out, repeating yourself or feel the need to travel new highways, read on. Today’s topic is increasing creativity by doing the wild thing, wild as in weird and even wacky, wild as in experimental.

In the 1920s Andre Breton and Surrealism celebrated the subconscious. Breton said we must listen to our dreams, not our conscious thoughts. To me this is a tiresome debate. What’s clear is that ordinary people go to sleep every night and dream astonishingly original stuff they couldn’t come up with consciously. Clearly the subconscious is a second source you can call on--if it works for you, use it. And I suggest that chance is a third source. (If chance is too Las-Vegas for you, call it serendipity!)

Here’s an experiment intended to tie all this up in a neat package. Take paper and pencil (yes, you writers, too) and draw the most interesting abstract you can in five minutes. Now, do the same in a room without any light. (Turn the paper so you don’t even know what’s up or down.) I bet the blind drawing is going to be comparable most of the time. Can we use the word skill, when there’s no feedback for the eyes? Can we talk about dreams or the subconscious? I think we have to allow for a big dose of you and chance dancing cheek to cheek.

I read an article about a sculptress (actually she was an arty ceramacist) who said: “Sometimes, the most interesting pieces come from a series of guided accidents.” Exactly!! What happens is you try to let interesting things happen and then you stand by like a midwife and catch the baby....Surely skill guides some of that guiding. Maybe the subconscious plays a role. And part of it is that you toss the dice and hope to get very lucky.

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Around 1975 a man named Edward de Bono announced a device he called The Think Tank, a plastic globe with 13,000 words on little plastic strips. You roll the globe to expose new words in a small window; then you were supposed to brainstorm your way to a creative victory. I loved this device; I wanted one. But the price was too high for a poor writer. Eureka! I realized I could generate random numbers with my calculator, let the numbers indicate pages in my dictionary, and then with my eyes closed, pick a random word. Then I’d ad lib the most interesting sentence with that word in it; and wing it as long as I could. Using this technique, I wrote a lot of poetry. Surrealism? Automatic writing? Or just forcing my overly intellectual brain to stay light and loose? Let’s not waste time arguing. The only thing that matters is this: was the poetry any good? Some of it was, I’ll go that far. More to the point, some of it was better than what I was writing before this experiment.

Something else happened. I became addicted to that rootless, thoughtless freedom when the new word comes up. I recklessly decided I would try to write a whole novel this way. I imagined that I’d need to pop a new word every few paragraphs to keep it going. But what happened was, the words suggested story and I ran with each story as many pages as I could. The first word was disclosure, and the first sentence was: “He decided to make a full disclosure.” I saw a man about to confess to his wife....

The next night I drew another word. And the next night. The writing was quite good, but I was creating new people and new stories at an unruly clip. Finally I assigned them all numbers and randomly determined who intersected with whom. Like happy endings? This extreme experiment became American Dreams, published by Permanent Press in 1985, favorably reviewed by Publishers Weekly, and still available. There’s no mention in the book of the technique used. Who’d believe it? But I always felt that American Dreams would be a top contender for Great American Experimental Novel. So, where did all that material came from? Same place dreams come from, I suppose. (You see that the title had a double meaning for me.) But unlike the Surrealists, I never argued that one place is better than another. I’ve written other novels the old-fashioned way where you plan everything. Much, much safer!

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HEMINGWAY SAID WHAT??

Perhaps the best art comes from a zone between partly planned and partly footloose. The most amazing thing I ever read about any writer was the comment attributed to Hemingway. He claimed he never set out to write a novel. He wrote short stories but some of them wouldn’t stop. I once interviewed a novelist (he was semi-famous at the time) who told me he wrote a page each day and put the pages in a box in a drawer. At the end of the year, he sent the manuscript to his publisher!

The thread running through all this is that sometimes you need to give up some control. Let go. What else was Jackson Pollack doing with those dripping brushes? He was tossing paint at the canvas, mostly in control but not entirely. The art was looser and more spontaneous than his earlier work--and better.

I understand completely. If I could throw paint against a wall and make beauty, that’d be my genre. Around 1990 I did a long series of paintings called “Poems” where planning was not allowed. I’d start with a blank, Zen-like mind and, shazam, create the most interesting and unexpected element I could put on the canvas...and then the next most interesting...If I could create five or six surprising elements, I’d have a good piece.

I suspect that Franz Klein, when doing the famous action paintings, was in this same zone. I bet a lot of them were ugly and he threw them away. The ones with that offhand, what-a genius quality, he showed to the world.

The main thing is not to fear failing. Take risks and see what happens. The big challenge is to stifle your practical, critical, intellectual side until the art is done. Then wake up that dour, annoying fellow and see what he has to say.


Creative block is usually caused by too much thinking and straining. Make sure you’re creating stuff that you like creating--so that it’s fun. In a cool period, try warming up by doing an extreme version of your medium. In the case of writing, go with sex or violence or emotional moments. Churn out scenes as fast as you can type. Write with abandon in whatever direction you fancy, and maybe in the torrent of words you’ll rediscover the joy of writing.

Having fun (or trying to) and creating on the edge--that’s pretty much my MO. Now I’m doing those same things as a digital painter. You might wonder, aren’t computers just machines--rigid and inhuman? How do they fit in with being wild and creative? The answer has two parts. First is speed--the computer lets me explore a lot of roads quickly. Second is originality--the computer lets me make a flood of startling stuff. Honestly, if I could draw like Michealangelo, I’d better do just that. I can’t. What I have is a flair for design, a flair for color; I know what I like. So I create a lot of elements and look for magical synergies. Often, I assemble the pieces a la Rauschenberg, David Salle or Rosenquist, so that the total energy is greater than any of the parts. Exactly as with the “Poems” 15 years ago, I stay busy, try to stay loose, and wait for the keepers to show up. A series of guided accidents, all of them!

I’ve seen books that suggest different kinds of experiments. But note well: an experiment is a cold thing unless it taps into your hot core. Which brings us to the final advice: devise the techniques, find the experiments, and cause the accidents that maximize your creativity. Whatever works!


Article 10>>>"MAX Your Creativity" first appeared on CREATIVITY-PORTAL.COM in 2005.

--"American Dreams" can be obtained by going to WWW.THEPERMANENTPRESS.COM (Backlist)

--examples of digital art can be seen on PRICE.MYEXPOSE.COM

--examples of experimental writing can be found on Lit4u.com

© Bruce Deitrick Price 2009

Article

6: Let's Get Serious About Education

Every time I read a column by Paul Krugman, I think, “Oh, what a brilliant sophist!” He wrote a dozen columns leading up to the last election, telling us over and over that the economy is a shambles, it’s all Bush’s fault, don’t vote for him. More recently he wrote that Toyota is building a factory in Canada because workers in Mississippi are too poorly educated to assemble cars. Guess whose fault this is? Bush, of course. Krugman has become a blatant partisan. He’s not going to tell you the real reason those workers are so badly educated. Or how it happens that our public schools produce children who can’t read their diplomas.

Here’s the dirty little secret that explains why Mississippi didn’t get the Toyota factory. And why so many jobs are going to India. And why Jay Leno, when he goes “Jaywalking,” can find adults who don’t know what body of water lies to the west of California. (If you haven’t seen this particular American nightmare, stay up! Get somebody to Tivo it for you. Jay Leno is telling us more about our public schools than a propagandist like Krugman will ever reveal.) Bottom line: since 1930 America’s top educators are ideologues influenced by collectivist thinking. These people believe passionately in leveling. To achieve their goals, they have to dumb down both the schools and the students.

Here’s the capsule version of how educational theory evolved since 1920. Leftists claimed the Russian Revolution heralded a new era in human history. The Great Depression seemed to provide proof for a Marxian analysis. Ideological certainties raged. Stalin’s New Soviet Man must be our future! Capitalism, individuality and Western civilization must be euthanized!

The purpose of our public schools--this is what our top educators believed--was to prepare children for life as cogs in this new Socialist machine. Since it’s probably not feasible to make everybody smart, our far-left educators decided on the bizarre alternative: they would make everybody dumb.

The policy of dumb by design, to the extent our educators can slip it past parents and politicians, guides them to this day. Isn’t it fair to say that not one educational reform crafted by educators actually leads to better education? My impression is that none of these reforms is truly intended to lead to better education. The self-esteem movement. New Math. Fuzzy math. Whole language as a way of learning to read. Bilingualism. Ebonics. Outcome Based Education. Numerous campaigns against testing, homework, standards, or discipline. All seek a lower common denominator.

It’s hard to avoid this conclusion: our educators pulled off one of the great silent coups in history. There’s probably only a few thousand of these extremists but they seized control of the public schools and never let go. Give them credit for tenacity but now it’s time to exorcise the spell. They are doing to the American educational system exactly what Castro does to the Cuban economy, and for the same reasons. It’s fair, don’t you see, that all Cubans be equally poor and all American children be equally ignorant.

If this country is going to be competitive, it’s time to become serious about education. We must stop trying to level down, and start trying to raise up. Most crucially, let’s take education away from people who don’t actually care about education, not in the traditional sense. Instead, bring in people who have shown success in business, industry or the military to do the job. We should liberate teachers from the teachers colleges--one year in these places is enough. And we should liberate teachers colleges from the ideologues who got us in this mess.

Here are two concrete steps. Future teachers should have to major in the subjects they will teach. (This is common sense and the norm around the world; only here can people major in “education” or “psychology” and sally forth to teach history and biology.) Second, alternative credentialing must be made easy--if stock brokers and office manager decide they want to teach subjects they studied in college, or learned professionally, the switch should take months, not years. When you see these approaches enacted, you’ll know the situation is improving.

What’s our goal? At an absolute minimum every kid in Mississippi’s public schools should be able to get a job in a Toyota factory. The educators who delivered less are frauds.

Article 6>>>Written for local paper in 2005 as an Opinion piece (but not published). The limit for such pieces is 750 words. I like the brevity of the article as it turned out; but I know it would be helpful if more people had a sense of just how extreme our educators had become by the 1930’s. So here’s some supporting documentation from three of the main players in American education. In their own words:

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George Counts, 1931: "The ideal of promoting individual success, which is so characterisitc of education in the United States, is almost entirely absent in the schools of the Soviet Union....No man of sensitive mind can remain long in [Russia] without feeling himelf in a veritable furnace of the world where the elements composing human society are in a state of fusion and new principles of right and wrong are being forged. Under such conditions the commonplaces of American education sound like faint voices from a distant and mythical land."

Counts, 1932: "That the teachers should deliberately reach for power and then make the most of their conquest is my firm conviction."

Counts, 1932: "Historic capitalism, with its deification of the principle of selfishness, its reliance upon the forces of competition, its place of property above human rights, and its exaltation of the profit motive, will either have to be displaced altogether, or so radically changed in form and spirit that its identity will be completely lost."

Willard Givens, 1934: "We are convinced that we stand today at the verge of a great culture....But to achieve these things many drastic changes must be made. A dying laissez-faire must be completely destroyed, and all of us, including the owners, must be subjected to a large degree of social control."

Counts, 1934: "Cumulative evidence supports the conclusion that in the United States as in other countries, the age of individualism and laissez-faire in economy and government is closing and a new age of collectivism is emerging."

Counts, 1934: " [Our new magazine] assumes that the age of individualism in economy is closing and that an age marked by close integration of social life and by collective planning and control is opening. For weal or woe it accepts as irrevocable this deliverance of the historical process."

National Education Association Journal, 1936: "Let us not think...in terms of specific facts or skills [that children should acquire] but rather in terms of growing."

NEA Journal, 1937: "The transition of society from the philosophy of individualism to the new emphasis on group goals and cooperative action produces vexing problems in secondary education....Only education which seeks the reconstruction of society is [valid]....Teachers should play an active part in securing acceptance by their communities of new social ideas and ideals."

NEA Journal, 1946: "In the struggle to establish an adequate world government, the teacher has many parts to play...He can do much to prepare the hearts and minds of children for global understanding and cooperation....At the very top of all the agencies which will assure the coming of world government must stand the school, the teacher, and the organized profession."
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Our educators seemed intent not on educating children but on creating a new kind of children...But who asked our educators to embark on this project? Who voted? Who discussed?

Article

40 TECHNIQUES OF THE ILLUMINATI



By Gianni DeVincent Hayes, Ph.D
June 10, 2008
NewsWithViews.com

Americans are possessed with ennui and malaise, and worst of all, fears. Perhaps these conditions explain the rash of suicides, the campus murders, the weariness, the failure to act on others’ behalf, the inertia and apathy, and the near lack of humanism.

The Inner Circle, the Elitists, the Powers—any name you want to call them—plan and organize behind closed doors to bring about their global governance, or the New World Order (NWO) or one-world government. To do this, they must push every country to its knees so that the citizenry cannot fight back. America appears to be the last stronghold for them to conquer, and at that, we are already weakened. They employ a slate of techniques to establish the NWO, but behind each of these methods is one basic practice: To instill fear in the masses so that we will rely on the government for safety and protection, and thus yield our rights and freedoms in the process. Below are some of the major means for the Illuminati to achieve their goal, but don’t mistake a rose for a rose and attribute everything to them:

1. Harassment: When faced with opposition, the Elitists first attempt to overcome by “buying” someone out. If that doesn’t work, they resort to discrediting and then harassment in extreme form via endless phone calls, tapping or tracking, or tailing and following as well as putting out negative, disparaging and secret info on them, snooping in their lives and projects. IRS hassles, accusing one of false crimes, negatively doctoring a person’s personal and work records are all means for the Illuminati to gain superiority over individuals and to make them cede to their goals. Driving opponents or dissenters mad or to the point of paranoia is one of their prized exercises.

2. Population Control: Invented food shortages, water contamination, lack of space, depletion of "green” are maneuvers to slice off 2/3rd of the world’s six-billion citizens, and save themselves, while allowing death and other horrors to befall the other 4-billion. Subtle means of ending our existence include abortion (Planned Parent is the main culprit), genetic engineering (cloning allows engineers to create an army of soldiers bred to have massive muscle bulk, superior senses, powerful killing skills or to breed doubles to replace people; it also introduces chimeras (hybrid animal/human forms), and angels of death (ridding hospitals, clinics—the general population—of infirmed and old people who put burdens on our society. Euthanasia is a form of this, as are fatal surgical procedures).

3. Contamination: Any form of poisoning will kill a sizeable population, and this can be targeted. The elite can contaminate our water supplies and food resources (genetically modified food may be exemplary), and despoil our land (soil impregnated with bacteria, oil and other toxic spills).

4. Detainment Camps are set up as holding areas until termination ensues or the enslavement of those in society they believe will serve as strong and vital slaves. Whether factual or not, that we even believe they exist puts us in a state of fear and anger. Underlying the knowledge of such Gulags is the simple fact that the American populace realizes that a police state or Martial Law is on the horizon.

5. Moral Corruption has been and remains a major technique for bringing about the New World Order, with all its anti-Americanism, anti-patriotism, and anti-traditionalism going on. Destruction of home-taught values has been aligned with the new educational dockets in government schools. Relative values rule over old-fashioned, family-oriented absolute values…what is morally, ethically and legally right and wrong (“Whatever feels right to you, do it, even if it isn’t”).

6. Diversity: This refers to forcing us to show tolerance, understanding and acceptance for values we do not believe in. “Political correctness” was the thrust for this. Censorship and hate crimes are also a means for forcing undesirable changes down our throats.

7. Racial Dissention: This is a method they use to create conflict among races and nationalities, as in “Divide and conquer.”

8. Removal of God: The Elite work hard to prohibit us from making any reference to God or Christ and the sacredness of Christianity in public but yet they promote pagan holidays, Wicca, black magic and practice Satanism. A society lacking in God and spirituality—especially one supposedly built on Christianity—is a doomed civilization, and one that easily cedes to others. Apostasy in our churches, especially Catholicism, is a sign of the destruction foisted on us. Their goal is to reach back to the Ancient Mysteries, and to learn what they believe are advanced technologies from ancient aliens and gods

9. Ecumenism is another parameter for a one-world religion. Believing that Christ is not the savior, or that other people or so called "prophets” are the saviors makes Christianity invalid. Some believe New Ageism will be the one-world religion, while others think global warming with become the hymn. An aspect of their plan is their contrived apocalypse based on the books of Revelation and Daniel.

10. Remiss Authority Figures: Many parents and adults fear today’s youth. Kids scream, yell, mock, and often physically abuse their parents or other elders. They’re rude and disrespectful. Much of this is attributed to the “It takes a village to raise a child” mentality, where children are supposed to be cuddled, free-thinking, and do whatever they want. Parents and authority have become remiss in correcting foul children. The Elite encourage children to resist authority, on one hand, while wanting them to mindlessly obey, on the other.

11. Failing Educational System: Education is the key approach for altering children’s beliefs of what is right and wrong through mind control programs, rewriting history, introducing alternative and debased sexual teachings, and false ideologies. This conditions them to accept whatever the Powers lay before them, and they are dumbeddown so that they won’t learn the truth and rebel.

12. Sexual Perversion is used to advance Elitists’ goals and degrade our morals, getting us to accept and even adopt anything they put on us, and often using such activity to blackmail us.

13. Drugs/Alcohol: Breeding a society of chemically abused and dependent individuals is one way to get people to accept matters contrary to their morals, and to rely on the government to help them get through it. Addiction robs us financially and psychologically while diverting law enforcement efforts to other areas. Prescribed medicine makes us reliant on pills and doctors while ballooning Big Pharma profits.

14. Gambling: Promoting illegal activities through pretenses of “enjoyment” and promises of making big money is yet another scheme by the Elitist to keep us dependent on money and materialism for our happiness, and to be dependent on outside forces for our happenings and success.

15. Chaos is a maneuver to keep us bewildered. By putting events and activities in a framework of utter turmoil where no one knows what to do, who to believe, or on whom to rely, the Powers can emerge as the saviors by offering solutions to the chaos they have secretly exacted. Conflicting issues via the Hegelian Dialectics keep the masses on edge, doubting, and confused, as well as sidetracked from the real issues they want to forward.

16. Cover-ups: What the Illuminati don’t want us to know, they cover up by disposing of the people, making them “disappear,” or placing vital documents under “classified,” or through throwing out red herrings at us. Whistleblowers are often destroyed career-wise, or personally mocked, or injured, and even murdered. Underground and black ops are keys to cover-ups. Propagation of conspiracies is a game for them and a way for them to conflict the masses. Intentional leaks are one of their prescribed methods for conditioning us to their intent and for confusing us.


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17. Environment: Using global warming as a “unifying issue,” the Illuminati are not only making scads of money through corporate green programs and retail merchandise, but also deceiving people into believing that the issue is real, when in reality hundreds of scientists who are not given print can testify against it. Thus the environment is used as a weapon to employ the Elitist’s objectives and to create a common mantra—a religion of its own. Added to this are sustainable development and eminent domain (taking commoners’ lands for their own purposes), and controlled weather (HAARP--High frequency Active Auroral Research Program and other weather weapons), among other processes.

18. Destroying the Workforce: Damaging treaties (GATT, NAFTA, etc.) created the massive loss of jobs in our country via outsourcing and the erosion of our industries. America has been minimized as a strong nation and castrated as a super power. Jobs have been given to illegal immigrants in our country or sent overseas to India and China and other nations. Americans struggle financially as the Elitists lower us to third world status. Illegal immigration is just one of their schemes for running the world.

19. Crimes: A society frightened of being murdered, raped, beaten, held hostage, hijacked, or kidnapped, or victims of vehicular deaths, road rage, and "suicided,” among other abominable offenses, is a society wailing for security, in spite of lost rights. This, then, is just one more method of cuckolding us into ceding our rights to Big Brother. The ICC (International Criminal Court) was created to imprison people of different cultures, including Americans. The protection of hard core, guilty criminals is also symptomatic of a failing country.

20. Terrorism: The Powers keep us in a state of trepidation over terrorism—real or contrived—and cause us to cede our freedoms for protection. 2001's 9/11 caused a major breakdown of the U.S. Constitution, the infringement of rights and policies through Homeland Security, the Patriot Act, biochips, and soon-to-come Martial Law; hence, the concentration camps for those who balk against the Police State or promote dissension.

21. Slavery and Prostitution: Many people, especially younger ones, are rounded up in clandestine ways and are forced into slavery or prostitution. They may be stolen during the night, taken coming and going from school, or whisked off in parking lots. They are often earmarked by the Powers who want young maidens or lads to "entertain” visiting dignitaries or foreign VIPs who abuse the kids and sell them to slave masters, pimps, and other black market factions. Some researchers believe that these missing people have even been sacrificed in satanic rituals.

22. Genocide is a method for wiping out an entire society for depopulation purposes, for government gain, for eliminating enemies, for creating a super race by purging traits deemed negative. Genocide, then, is an effective way for the Elite to sort out which people they want and which they don’t; it gets rid of the unwanted in one fell swoop. Some of their methods include random extermination (holocausts) and heinous atrocities, creating insurrections to kill off a religious or racial group, and holocausts.

23. Decision Makers: The Illuminati’s power shores them up to decide who the next president or prime minister will be, who will receive grants and government funding, and anything else that affect us on a personal and national level.

24. Diseases: Bacteria and viruses can be released during either war or peace time to create a chaos and a demand for protection that would help the powers to achieve their mission of globalism; bio-warfare can be reserved for combat when the substances are unleashed on enemies. Besides using bacteria in germ warfare, they also test substances on humans, some unknowingly. The introduction of HIV, the rise of once eliminated childhood diseases, biochem warfare, and the growing number of unknown bacterial and viral diseases are representative of their manipulations. They can put substances into drinking water; they’ve introduced cell phones knowing the dangers of cancer; and they’ve used microwaves and other technologies against us, as well as various forms of experimentation.

25. Computerization/Technology: The Elite have many classified means of controlling us, though some are still in the trial stages. Consider nanochips (teeny tiny robots can be placed in humans to control them), robotic reproduction (the ability of robots and computers to reproduce), and GTWA (Global Technology World Alliance which is a secret society developing and working with advanced technology to achieve control and denomination of international supremacy and economics. Bluetooth, Wii and other high-tech tools, along with laser and advanced weaponry (stun guns, particle beams) are also tools for fully establishing the NWO. The Elite have secret labs and black ops; yet, they won’t support scientists and researchers who create inventions or medications for the good of mankind.

26. UFOs: Whether truly from another planet or invented by the government, they can be used to instill paralyzing dread in us if they tell us that an invasion is real. Quickly we would give up all our rights to be protected from enemies.

27. Economy: In order for the Elite to completely take over the world, they have to capture the economic sector to create a one-world economy, as seen in the collapse of the American dollar, along with merging the U.S., Canada and America into one of the ten regions. These ten regions each will have a representative on a governing panel, with one member emerging as a dictator. Many of the other ten regions have already been set up. Elitists manipulate the stock market and all other monetary resources; they own the Federal Reserve, and control all international currencies, determining what your paycheck will be worth.

28. Feminism and Working Mothers: From the moment the Powers decided to use left-wing feminism as a way to cause resentment between men and women and their children, is the moment when the institution of marriage faltered. Two incomes gave Mom and Dad the false sense that they had money, and thus materialism also seeped into our lives at the same time. The role of males has been re-defined and belittled.

29. UN: Most damaging for American citizens is the UN which strives to undermine our country, reduce our spending power, eliminate our freedoms, lower us to third world status, make us pay for other countries’ problems, and rape of us of everything that once made us powerful. Doing this allows the NWO to weaken the most prevailing muscle in the world so that we have no strength to fight any of their programs.

30. Confiscation of Rights: The NWO Elitists can’t fully stage their takeover until our country is disarmed, as an armed citizenry can fight back. The day they take our guns is the total end of our sovereignty and our country.

31. Secret societies serve to unite the Elitists in their demise of our nation and the installation of a global government via their networking force and underground operations, as well as control over religious, educational and corporate systems. They will never admit that these societies exist and that they are the muscle behind the authority. Symbolism is one facet of them, and they use newspapers, radio airwaves, and TV to subliminally pass messages to one another.

32. Mind Control: The government and their counterparts are most adept in brainwashing techniques using a litany of resources, such as drugs (MKUltra, LSD), projects (Project Monarch, Phoenix), propaganda (constant bombardment of untruths and omissions by the media), cults/programming (groups giving up their individuality and blindly following some unstable leader), and video games, rock music, violence and witchcraft on TV, such as Harry Potter. Even works of fine art are polluted with vulgarity and crude innuendos. Societies have agents and sleepers everywhere.

33. Media Mergers: The Illuminati own all the major media in print, television, radio, music, and theater. They create conglomerates and monopolies. Doing this gives them control over everything we watch, read, and listen to.

34. Corrupt Government: CIA drugs and arm smuggling, bought politicians, undercover dealings, disinformation, lies and distortions, blackmail, constant deceptions are all part of their bid for a one world government. Disinformation is a major means of confusing us, which they do through false media reports, chain letters, the articles they place on the internet, and the rumors they start.

35. Lack of Missile Defense: An unarmed America is akin to a fire in a theater with no exits. While other countries are building their arsenals, we’re minimizing ours. Disarmament and the decline of our militia, and thus our ability to defend ourselves, certainly mean defeat even before a conflict breaks out.

36. Decline of Military: Our military lacks the self-confidence, the manpower, the equipment and the technology needed to fight opposing forces, and is compromised in morality and morale through unnecessary wars that are not intended to be won.

37. Passing of EOs: EOs (Executive Orders), PDs (Presidential Directives), and PDDs (Presidential Decision Directives) have become so amorphous and customary that no one cares when a new one is enacted. This is an Illuminati tactic to proceed with their personal agendas without first obtaining congressional approval; thus allowing extreme orders to be written that would prove detrimental to the general public. For example, a single EO could dissolve the entire United States.

38. Infiltration: The Illuminati use subtlety to invade churches, schools, corporations, small businesses, organizations, and everything else, and implant their ideology and philosophy of a one-world government through well honed issues, such as global warming. They have their “people” (often members of their secret societies) placed throughout these entities who make decisions beneficial to the Elitists.

39. Regional Government: One of the most effective means for the Powers to gain control and implement their global rule is through regional government where they give mandates to mayors and municipal managers via documents on how matters must be handled. Law enforcement, attorneys and judges are part of the scenario.

40. Created or Contrived Crises: Whether actual or devised, crises “seem real” to us. False or deliberate crises work to scare us and allow the Illuminists to achieve their goals, such as re-designing New Orleans to their desire, or going to Iraq for oil and the take-over of their banks for the Federal Reserve. Examples include global warming, the energy crisis, floods, hurricanes (they can control the weather), and any other disaster they desire.

In summary, the Elitists use these approaches among others to bring about their New World Order or global government. The Inner Circle and their octopus arms suck in prey smaller than they to conquer, and will resort to any method of getting what they want. They have planned long and hard, covering all their bases, and devised ingenious ways to conquer us. Be on guard.

Our hope of overcoming them lies in the schisms they create among themselves, their ongoing feuding and power fight for the top position along with empowering ourselves with knowledge of what they do. That, they can’t take away from us and we can use against them.

© 2008 Gianni Hayes - All Rights Reserved

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Dr. Gianni DeVincent Hayes is an internationally recognized author of 14 royalty-published books (creative-services.biz and amazon.com) and over 100 articles and short stories in highly circulated and commercial newspapers and magazines, such as PARADE, US, PEOPLE, REDBOOK, WOMAN'S DAY, MOODY, and many others. One of her novels, "22 Friar Street," had been under a movie option, and her novel and screenplay on cloning, "Thy Brothers' Reaper," also had been optioned by a production company. "Jacob's Demon" is her newest novel on the Apocalypse. She also owns American Drug Testing Consultants which sells drug and alcohol test kits and does workforce testing, americandtc.com.

She's completing a full-length book on substance abuse as well as one on conspiracies, symbols, and secret societies in all aspects of our lives. See thenazarzine.com to learn about her religious/patriotic stance. Her writing service website is theamusezine.com. She has her own radio show, "New World Order Disorder," on theamericanvoice.com, Wednesdays, from 8:00pm-10:00pm, EST, which is heard worldwide. Contact her at info@thenaz.us.

Hayes has a doctorate in writing/comparative literature /humanities, with a focus on eschatology (Bible prophecy and politics); her bachelor degree and first and second master's degrees are in biology/chemistry and education. Certification has been achieved at several universities, such as the University of Rochester, University of Pittsburgh, and Middlebury College's Breadloaf. She speaks worldwide and has appeared on dozens of national radio and TV shows.

Book her for speaking engagements.

E-Mail: ndhayes@att.net