The following report by a Child Protection League Board member is an excellent example of the deception hidden behind national education elites’ sudden and recent interest in incorporating ‘old’ teaching techniques. For example, phonics, long recognized as the most basic and effective skill for teaching reading, was rejected by the “experts” over three decades ago and replaced with whole language. Whole language used “cues and context” rather than sounding out letters and words and proved to be a complete failure. The 2024 Nation’s Report Card reported that only a shocking 33 percent of 8th graders scored at or above proficiency in reading.
Why would they do something like that? Some have suggested that the U.S. literacy disaster was a deliberate dumbing down of America by dumbing down generations of children. Simply put, an uneducated populace is much easier to control and manipulate. Others have suggested that elites created the problem so that they could then provide “the solution,” because parents would be begging for one. And it’s not that they would suddenly admit that phonics had always worked. Instead, they give the delivery system a new and swanky name like “The Science of Reading,” and act as if they’ve created something new and innovative, because many people fall for the label “new and improved”.
But what every parent must understand, is that this tactic is used to continue the full transformation of education. The shift away from academic knowledge and skills to transforming students’ worldviews by transforming their values, attitudes, and beliefs IS deliberate and it rests upon the content of what students are taught and allowed to read and believe.
That’s why parents and concerned citizens must look beyond the surface and nice sounding words and really understand the content being delivered to students. The following article is an important alert exposing yet another deception being used by education elites.
Read Between the Lines
Education Week, self-described as a premier authority for national education issues and a cornerstone for policymakers, recently hosted a webinar entitled, “Reading Instruction Across Content Disciplines.” The webinar featured expert panelists in the disciplines of science, history, and literature and their recommended “innovative” strategies to teach reading (language skills) across all subjects in schools nationwide.
Without question, reading and comprehension skills are essential for student success. And webinars extolling the virtues of building these skills are attractive for those reasons. However, it is imperative that people recognize that desirable goals like reading comprehension often mask hidden agendas. What are they being asked to read? What “knowledge” and “truths” are the students being taught?
Content matters
The mastery of language skills across disciplines was presented to the public as an innovative way to improve reading scores, but successful education models have used this approach for centuries. The classical education model is one example that Dorothy L. Sayers traces as far back as the Middle Ages in her famous Oxford University essay, “The Lost Tools of Learning.” Her essay is often quoted in the modern classical education movement which has produced students with consistently higher standardized test scores than their peers. Although these results have been widely publicized, modern educators have continually rejected and even vilified the model of classical education as being irrelevant, boring, and too Western-centric. Yet, interestingly, some of the strategies presented in “Reading Instruction Across Content Disciplines” seem to emulate it.
So why would the public education system suddenly have a change of heart? The idiom “read between the lines” signifies the ability to discern a communication’s unstated or hidden message. Parents and concerned citizens must apply this practice to understand the hidden content buried within.
Programs like the ones presented in “Reading Instruction Across Content Disciplines” and the classical education model emphasize mastery of language across disciplines. The foundation of language (structure and function) is systematically taught in the early years of schooling. Background knowledge across disciplines is also taught, forming “tools” of facts or bite-sized concepts that are established as accepted “truths” and “values.” By late elementary or middle school, these programs progress toward the goal of teaching students to use language skills to build upon their background “tools” and form deeper understandings of more complex concepts in a particular subject and how they may relate to other subjects or life.
In the webinar, a panelist promoting literacy in science explained to attendees that teaching students to read a scientific text, make a claim, use evidence, and argue for a scientific phenomenon was key to successful implementation of this model. This is similar to the classical education model which established this process centuries ago. It teaches students to use language and their established knowledge base to define terms, make accurate statements, build arguments and detect fallacies in other people’s arguments.
The fundamental difference between the programs lies not with their delivery systems that train students like this but with the content, the foundational “knowledge” and “truths,” that has been embedded into the students, and which now form the building blocks for logical reasoning. Whereas programs emphasizing mastery of language should yield effective thinkers and persuasive orators, what they will be ideating and advocating for in their future speeches and policymaking is the concern.
What is knowledge?
In classical education, foundational knowledge includes a high view of humanity as creatures of timeless significance and value. It promotes the nurturing of virtuous, morally self-regulating citizens by studying and wrestling with the great books of Western intellectual tradition. This is not to reject the importance of other world traditions, but to unashamedly acknowledge that Western tradition has produced the most free, just, and opportunistic society in recorded history. Foundationally, classical education teaches that truth, goodness, and beauty are transcendent, unchanging virtues that can be known and must be cultivated to promote human flourishing.
Classical education establishes foundational knowledge that citizens should be viewed as individuals with self-determination and a duty to be noble. Importantly, the knowledge base focuses on knowable and observable academic facts of history, geography, science, mathematics, and the moral truths based on the great books of Western tradition. History and Western literature are studied and are abundant with heroes of character to emulate. As a result, classical education often produces citizens who champion and advocate for traditional Western definitions of morality, truth, and goodness in their communities. They will exercise nobility and expect the same of others. They will be defenders of freedom, justice, and equal opportunity knowing that outcomes are self-determined.
In contrast, many schools across the country are still debating what foundational background knowledge they should be teaching the students. As discussed, background knowledge is critical as it provides the truth, value system, and accepted worldview that students are taught to develop and promote through debate and argumentation using literary skills. Interestingly, while schools “debate” what the content of their foundational knowledge base should be, most are simultaneously deploying Social Emotional Learning (SEL) as a tool to inject “critical consciousness,” a Marxist DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) and CRT (critical race theory)-infused pedagogy across all disciplines as well. Thus, they have already made that decision.
The Collaborative for Academic and Social Emotional Learning (CASEL) is a national organization that establishes the framework for implementing SEL. By their own admission, SEL is to be used as “a lever for Equity and Social Justice.” SEL must be implemented across each subject, at every grade level and every student is continually assessed for how well they are performing and demonstrating SEL competencies. Therefore, instead of building foundational, factual, academic knowledge, CASEL’s framework is embedding the building blocks of Marxist conceptual knowledge.
Marxism teaches that humans are born as creatures of either an oppressed or oppressor group with no ability to change. It teaches self-awareness as a member of a racial, socioeconomic, gender, and sexuality group, not as a self-determined individual. Foundational knowledge includes skills to make decisions based on whether your identity is privileged or oppressed and what would be best for the collective, global priority rather than what promotes transcendent virtue. Truth is simply relative, and morality is a social construct that changes by consensus. History taught from this framework emphasizes the biases of the founding fathers and mothers due to their privileged or oppressed status. This teaching encourages students to collectively opine on whether an historical figure is worthy of emulation or even if history can be trusted at all. Ultimately, the SEL framework creates activists advocating for the dismantling of their Western heritage, institutions, and civilization.
As parents and citizens who love our children and our country, we must take the time to read between the lines of our school’s curriculum. Read the content. A traditional Western proverb teaches that evil often masquerades as an agent of righteousness. Any program that aspires to produce articulate students with deep subject-matter understanding using proven language mastery skills sounds wonderful and even could be wonderful.
But if the content does not advocate for truth, the truth about humanity, and the merits of western civilization’s goals to encourage goodness, beauty, justice, and freedom it will produce generations of children who can masterfully advocate for the destruction of their own heritage and future. And they will unwittingly be advocating for their own enslavement.
Much is at stake when making critical decisions regarding your children’s education. Look carefully at school programming no matter how good it sounds. Indoctrinating generations with educational content based upon lies will always lead a society to tyranny and injustice, but truth sets people free.