Relationship of the Look-say Teaching to Idolatry (Remastered)

Rushdoony and Samuel Blumenfeld argue that progressive public education especially John Dewey’s “look-say”/whole-word approach functions as a modern form of idolatry by replacing the primacy of God’s Word with the primacy of the image, training children to guess meaning from pictures rather than read words accurately. Blumenfeld contends this shift is not neutral pedagogy but a deliberate program to “dumb down” literacy so a managerial elite can rule a collectivist society: high literacy produces independent thinkers, while look-say produces functional illiteracy, inaccurate reading, and a weakened ability to reason, speak precisely, and even pray coherently. They connect alphabetic literacy to God’s providence in history language exists because God communicates with man, Scripture is written Word (not “comic-book” images), and propositional truth in words points to a created universe with real meaning; therefore efforts to dissolve precision in language (whether in reading, journalism, or “new math” relativism) are ultimately efforts to dissolve meaning itself and with it Christianity, absolutes, and order. The conversation broadens to the cultural fruits of this program loss of poetry and cadence, garbled public speech, broken chronology in “social studies,” and youth reduced toward animal appetites under evolutionary/humanist premises while insisting that man uniquely seeks meaning because he is made in God’s image, and when God is discarded, human evil becomes truly satanic in a way animals never do. Their practical conclusion is a call to resistance through Christian schools and homeschooling, recovering phonics, accurate reading, rich language, and a Word-centered education that refuses the image-idol and restores disciplined thought, truth, and godly dominion. #ChristianEducation #BiblicalWorldview #Rushdoony #SamuelBlumenfeld #JohnDewey #LookSay #WholeWord #Phonics #Literacy #Idolatry #WordOfGod #MeaningAndTruth #Homeschool #ChristianSchools