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Prohibition started on this day, January 16, in 1920. It was a disaster. Well intentioned people attacked personal freedom and created the conditions for criminals to restore it. To day is also the birthday of the only guy ever to achieve the rank of Admiral Of The U.S. Navy, George Dewey. (This rank was superseded by the rank of fleet admiral in 1944.) Do Freepers see the similarities between Dewey's thoughts on education and the thoughts of my friend John Murphy in the Australian freedom movement now?

Almost completely forgotten by average Americans today, Commodore Dewey's smashing victory at the Battle of Manila Bay was, for a short time, a sensation which commanded the attention of the entire nation. It transformed Dewey from an unknown naval officer into one of the all-time American heroes, elevating to legendary status his famous command, "You may fire when ready, Gridley." In another previous post, we looked at some of the events leading up to the battle from a sailor's point of view aboard the USS Olympia taken from the classic memoir, Three Years Behind the Guns by John Tisdale. Now,...

A Russian psychologist tested a "non-literate" from East of the Ural mountains about 1929, not an illiterate where other people read, but a member of a group where literacy was unknown because of primitive living conditions. The shrink found that the answer to "are you a good person?" was, not to say what he did that was individually good, but that his social group considered him well integrated. (Using a conventional intelligence test like we've all taken, with 4 objects, "crowbar" (all metal), "hammer" [wood handled], "saw" [wood handled] and "piece of wood"-- where of us who have gone thru...

Their professional purposes were handicapping the ordinary populations of Europe and America, to render them helpless, to ensure easy control, to regiment them for mass military service and factory employment, to eliminate competition for the accumulation of investment money, competition posed to the great financial families by average farmers, practical engineers and small entrepreneurs. We know why the deliberate dumbing down process was planned and implemented by "Educationists" in the period of 1880 to 1900, at the founding of mandatory, universal public education–with an unannounced agenda of propagating students’ educational failure–a design calculated to “crush the imagination” of school children....

With five months until the election, things couldn’t look any worse for the president of the United States. His approval rating is down to 40%. People are getting tired of his antics and the insults he hurls at his opponents. The media is increasingly confident that, come November, the voters will elect a new chief executive. This might sound like June 2020, but I’m actually referring to June 1948 — when President Harry Truman, a Democrat, was running to keep his job against Republican Thomas Dewey. The similarities between the 1948 and 2020 elections are striking. Like President Trump, Truman...

Forced schooling turned out from the first to be a breeding ground for crime and public outrage, not the “best police” as promised. “As the twenty-first century begins its second decade, mass schooling is much as it was in 1910, at least for the poor and the ordinary. It is test-driven, bell-driven, pedagogue-dominated, and thoroughly dumbed down.” Let me give you an excerpt from a boys’ manual of instructions on how to build things, published in 1937. It was sold on newsstands as The Amateur Craftsman’s Cyclopedia of Things to Make and was expressly intended, as it states in print,...

Police in the Delaware city of Rehoboth Beach issued their first citation for not wearing a mask on the boardwalk against a Lancaster [PA] man. According to a statement from Rehoboth Beach Police Public Information Officer Lt. Jaime Riddle, Delaware has opened beaches and boardwalks as of May 22, but with the regulation that face masks are required to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Despite that, police encountered a “defiant lack of compliance” on Monday from a 56-year-old Lancaster man, Riddle said. Because the encounter was widely circulated on social media, the department received many requests for comment. Riddle explained...

As a student of history, it is painful to watch today’s so-called reporters and analysts pontificate about the Nov. 3, 2020 election outcome. We are currently six months away from that event. Yet analyst after analyst and TV host after TV host will claim if the election were held today Joe Biden would win – as if the Trump supporters should panic or collapse in despair. To some extent, this kind of presentism even infects the White House and Republican leaders and activists. Yet, presentism is incredibly misleading in a period of change. Remember: At this point in 2015, it...

Were Sam Blumenfeld (AlphaPhonics) & Alex Newman (Crimes of the Educators) wrong that miseducation was deliberate, just because they were John Birchers (New American)? I know a duplicitous guy who writes for the New American (John Birch Society). I looked up his articles; they were transparently manipulative, clumsily so. But not Blumenfeld or Newman. (My John Birch acquaintance is a real stinker, he divorced and remarried, on the pretext that his Catholic marriage to his wife was performed by a priest of "schismatic" Catholic group SSPX. But SSPX has been rehabilitated and now has full sacramental faculties. So where does...

In this time when everything about K-12 education is up in the air and up for grabs, we should consider that the default educational context in the period before 1880 was one room schools controlled by working parents and local boards, which rewarded diligence and merit in the educational enterprise, was oriented toward biblical and civic literacy, and inculcated high regard for the Christian acceptance of the classics and good, modest literature (the good vs. the great books) among children of families of modest means, children who had time-limitations on their school career because of the need to go to...

Virtual Study Hall is the Best Contemporary Model for True Education. "We're all homeschoolers now." Virtual Study Hall is a contemporary update, for today's conditions, of the highly successful One Room School model of 200 years past, enlarging the scope of Homeschool socialization groups to encompass the primary education enterprise itself, centering on instruction and study. Study Halls supply a vital, missing element of study progress, for students to coordinate between textbooks and instruction. (The continual demand of junior students for the teacher's attention in the open classroom, tends to limit the effectiveness of the teaching and study enterprise to...

This week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif) announced the creation of the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif), leader of this year's unsuccessful attempt to remove Trump from office via impeachment, is expected to head up this ad hoc committee. President Trump has questioned the timing of this announcement and suggested that "we win the war against this virus rather than wasting precious time and scarce resources trying to allocate blame now. After we've won this war we can assess what went wrong and what went right so we can be better...

Both left and right use a kind of meme or cartoon of the idea of John Dewey. But when you drill down into who he actually was and what he did and did not do, it gets much stranger and messier than a simple stereotype. John Dewey was primarily a philosopher, proponent of a personal school he termed "instrumentalism", heir to mainstream American philosopher William James, whose school was "pragmatism". Dewey's philosophy had much more effect on common people than most philosophies, in that he did (initially) demote commonsense instruction in reading and math, and he did try, and succeed,...

I don't want to go with The New American, which is from 'The John Birch Society', I want corroboration from the Left: There is leftist confirmation of the claim that four Rockefeller boys were dyslexic due to planned educational abuse--the inadvertent, unintended application of John Dewey's Loki-like miseducational plan to the ultra-elite Rockefellers--in The New Yorker, in an article "Big Spender: Nelson Rockefeller’s grand ambitions", by Jeffrey Frank, October 6, 2014, at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/big-spender-2. (Search on the page for "dyslexia") In a YouTube video, Dr. Samuel Blumenfeld asserts that the second Rockefeller, John Jr., was an enthusiast for John Dewey's program of deliberate dumbing...

August 2017, Charlottesville: Police disappear even as belligerents advance toward each other, and fighting in the streets begins. The same tactic had been used successfully in Ferguson and Baltimore. Who but President Obama and the respective governors could have given the orders to stand down? Who else but mayors and police chiefs could have expedited such counterintuitive commands? Democrats got their optics. CNN could chant each day that the USA is full of white nationalists and right-wing criminality. Obama must've been proud. Anyone could see that white supremacists lurked on every street. Funny thing: If you wait around for these...

The American Library Association Purges its Racist Feminist Founder Eugenics, feminism and anti-Semitism. July 4, 2019 Daniel Greenfield32 Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism. The Dewey Decimal System is the foundation of the modern library. Hundreds of thousands of libraries have laid out their collections around the work of the founder of the American Library Association. Now Melvil Dewey has been purged by the American Library Association. The ALA's resolution declares that its founder "does not represent the stated fundamental values of...

American librarians have voted to remove the name of Melvil Dewey, widely seen as the father of modern librarianship, from one of their top awards, citing his history of antisemitism, racism and sexual harassment. The council of the American Library Association (ALA) passed a resolution this week to rename its top professional award, the Melvil Dewey Medal. The resolution explains that Dewey did not permit Jewish people, African Americans or other minorities admittance to the resort he owned, the Lake Placid Club. He also “made numerous inappropriate physical advances toward women he worked with and wielded professional power over” and...

Control and pervert education, and you can convince the masses that they no longer want what their parents and grandparents wanted so desperately. Educated people can reflect on what is being done to them. Ignorant people do not know enough to reflect on much of anything. More and more, American students lack basic skills and fundamental knowledge. How can they understand proposals made by politicians, media, and government? Igor Shafarevich, a famous Russian mathematician, wrote a 1980 book called “The Socialist Phenomenon.” Shafarevich explained that enforced equality was a constant obsession of socialists. To achieve it, they were willing to...

(Summary: In many ways, public schools seem deliberately organized to diminish intellect, not to enlarge it.)An acquaintance sent this note: “My sister tells of teaching math to college freshmen. The question was: If X plus 5 = 10, what is the value of X? It took her an entire week to get the kids to finally say ‘5.’ So the following Monday, just on a hunch, she gave them another problem: If Y plus 5 = 10, what is the value of Y? And no one could answer!” Remember, these students have been admitted to a community college. Presumably, many...

In a book titled "Visions of Progress: The Left-Liberal Tradition in America", the following is written: (page 46) A host of discussion clubs in New York City between 1900 and 1910 brought together Socialist and liberal activists and intellectuals, who clearly felt they had much in common. That common property was the Fabian side of American reform. The flamboyantly named X Club, for example, begun by William James Ghent in 1903, had Algernon Lee, William English Walling, and Edmond Kelly among its members, and visitors to its meetings included John Dewey, Charles Beard, Franklin H Giddings, Walter Weyl, Norman Hapgood,...