In Memory of the recent Passing of Samuel Blumenfeld

David & I (Esther) were public school teachers debating over joining the Teacher's union. We read his book: NEA: Trojan Horse in American Education and that settled the conflict. Then we got to hear Samuel L Blumenfeld​ speak. He was dynamic.

Samuel L. Blumenfeld passed from this life today, June 1, 2015. He wrote the book all of my siblings and I learned to read from. My dad also wore out many copies of Alpha-Phonics teaching his fifth and sixth graders who were behind or "dyslexic." I remember going with him to tutor a young man on "the other side of the tracks." The student's mother showed us a bullet hole through their curtain. She had just had the front window replaced. The mother was thrilled with her son's progress in reading, praising my dad. Dad always gave phonics the credit.

Both were public school teachers, they wanted to study education for their own children. A few months later they heard an ad on Christian radio that Blumenfeld was speaking nearby. He was an exuberant speaker who had recently come to faith in Christ through his study of American education and realized the role of Christianity promoting literacy. Blumenfeld had a passion for literacy having tried to teach his mother to read. A Jewish immigrant and intelligent woman, she was never able to "get it" and went to her grave never learning to read English. After her death, Blumenfeld realized that while he tried to teach her the "look say" memorizing whole word method of reading, English should be taught phonetically; memorizing the sounds of letters and letter groups. His other books showed how education had been deliberately dumbed down to create a class of Americans who follow and don't have the confidence or understanding to lead. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfIN9J7Y9us

Mr. Blumenfeld wrote and published nearly to the end of his life, publishing his last book last year. ~Regina

Available from Amazon.com

Samuel Blumenfeld has blessed us greatly through his teaching and books, especially NEA: Trojan Horse in American Education, Is Public Education Necessary?, Alpha Phonics, How to Tutor and many others. David & I (Esther) first heard him speak when out firstborn, Regina, was crawling. We love this man and pray many will read his books. These are full of history giving wisdom to us all. 

NEA: Trojan Horse

http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=Samuel+L+Blumenfeld&sts=t&tn=NEA%3A+Trojan+Horse+in+American+Education

Alpha-Phonics:

http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=13701768195&searchurl=sts%3Dt%26tn%3DAlpha+Phonics%26an%3DBlumenfeld

Is Public Education Necessary?

http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?kn=Is+Public+Education+Necessary%3F&sts=t&x=0&y=0

5000 Year Leap hits Amazon's Bestseller List

The amazing effect of embracing the free enterprise system had on this country.

Dad read The 5000 Year Leap aloud during devotions when I was little (before age 10).

Sunday Reading

Perusing Leviticus

I am amazed at God's explicit instructions to avoid contagious disease

thousands of years before modern medicine.

Dinah says she does not like the title as she LOVES babies.

And a desire to avoid them is unwelcome in her future family!!

However, the book gives mothers many important bits of info

and gives me confidence in God's design.

My great-grandmother, gave birth to 17 children

but only 14 lived to adulthood.

one, a twin of Great Aunt Lillie, was still born and

and two died in infancy due to "milk sickness"

an apparent inability to digest cows milk.

Although I do not know Great-Grandma's situation fully,

I cannot help but think her babies would have been healthier

and spaced farther apart

if she had understood breastfeeding as a gift from God,

instead of embracing Victorian biases.

Home School Legal Defense founder Michael Farris

delves into a world under the UN treaty on the Rights of the Child

and it's impact on families, a community and a young attorney.

Women in America -- Alexis De Tocqueville 1835

I have often been surprised and almost frightened to see the singular skill and happy audacity with which young American women contrive to steer their thoughts and language through the traps of sprightly conversation; a philosopher would stumble at every step along the narrow path which they tread with assured facility.

Unable and unwilling to keep a girl in perpetual and complete ignorance, they are in a hurry to giver her precocious knowledge of everything. Far from hiding the world’s corruption from her, they want her to see it at once and take her own steps to avoid it. And they are more anxious to ensure her good conduct than to guard her innocence too carefully.

-- Chapter 9 Education of Girls in the United States

For my part, I have no hesitation in saying that although the American woman never leaves here domestic sphere and is in some respects very dependent within it, nowhere does she enjoy a higher station. And now that I come near the end of this book in which I have recorded so many considerable achievements of the Americans, if anyone asks me what I think the chief cause of the extraordinary prosperity and growing power of this nation, I should answer that it is due to the superiority of their women.

-- Ch.12 How the American Views the Equality of the Sexes

Puritan Economic Experiments

By Dr. Gary North

Retail Price: $5.95

Your Price: $1.49

Save: 75%

SKU: BKP-0980

Publisher: Inst. For Christian Economics

Paperback, 70 pages

About the Title: When the Puritans got off the Arabella and waded ashore to Massachusetts in 1630, they carried a heavy burden with them: five hundred years of accumulated unsound economic doctrines. This system of thought is today called scholastic economics. Actually, the later Spanish scholastic economists who were contemporaries of the Puritans had adopted free market views, but the Puritans had never heard of them. So, a series of disastrous economic experiments began in New England.

The Pilgrims had been compelled by prior contract to set up a basically socialist system in 1620 - the common storehouse - and had come very close to starving as a result. They dropped this practice within two years, long before the arrival of their neighbors, the Puritans. The Puritans did not make the same mistake. But they made others: extensive publicly owned lands for grazing, controls on who was allowed to buy and sell land, price and wage controls, quality controls, public guilds and monopolies, and controls on people's fashions. They learned first-hand what government controls produce: conflict and shortages.

For almost half a century, the Puritans ran the experiment. They served as willing guineas pigs. Eventually, they learned. Anyway, their children learned. In 1675, the great Indian war broke out - King Philip's War. The politicians tightened controls on the economy, and it began to break down. By the time the war was over a year later, the Puritans had learned their lesson. They abolished economic controls for good, and the economy boomed.

This is a story of nearly half a century of Puritan experiments with government controls, all in the name of Christian ethics, and why those experiments were finally abandoned as a failure. The Puritans learned from experience. Not until the American Revolution broke out a century later did American colonists again attempt to impose a comparable system of economic controls, and the result of those controls was the near-starvation of Washington's army at Valley Forge in 1777. Similar experiment - similar result.

http://www.americanvision.com/puritaneconomicexperiments.aspx

Lance's 2007 Reading:

The open scripture on the left wasn't on his stack,

but it is part of Lance's everyday reading.

This photo was taken Jan. 11, 2008. He's working on another stack this year. He also read John J. Dwyer's great text book, The War Between the States America's Uncivil War. His focus was that war. This year his focus has turned to theology.