June 1 of this year marks the tenth anniversary of the passing of author and homeschool pioneer Samuel L. Blumenfeld. Sam’s last book, which he co-authored with Alex Newman, was Crimes of the Educators. A week before Sam’s passing, I called Alex and asked when he planned to visit Sam. They had not met in person, but frequently met on conference calls. Alex said that he planned a summer visit. I told him that he most likely won’t be alive by then. We provided an airline ticket for him, and he flew to Boston the following day, Thursday. I had hoped to videotape an interview of the two of them, but Sam’s condition had deteriorated, and it would have been an injustice to him. They interacted as if they were lifelong friends. Alex, like numerous others, is carrying on Sam’s work.
A number of years ago, Sam told me that he would work until he drops. True to his word, there he was on his deathbed, handing out autographed copies of his book to visitors. Sam willed most of his papers, books, and recordings to us but asked that we take possession of them before his passing. We pledged to him that his works will influence future generations- more on that later. After the visit, we held a tribute to Sam at his request. Sam died five days later. He is buried in the National Cemetery in Bourne, MA.
Sam Blumenfeld was born in New York City on May 31, 1926. His parents were Polish immigrants. His mother, whom Sam adored, was illiterate. Sam attended a public school in the Bronx where he received an excellent education. Sam was a World War II veteran serving in an artillery unit in Italy. He participated in a prisoner escort where he took pity on a starving German soldier and shared his food with him. After the war, Sam graduated from City College of New York. He returned to postwar Europe, visiting some friends he had made during the war, and returned to the U.S. to start a career in the publishing business. Sam was fluent in several languages. In 1963, he traveled to Madrid, Spain, to interview Dr. Moise Tshombe, the pro-Western leader of Katanga, who was ousted by the United Nations peacekeepers who committed atrocities against the civilian population and replaced by the Moscow-trained Patrice Lumumba.
It was while he was an editor for Grosset and Dunlop that he got a request from a friend, Attorney and Hall of Fame tennis player Watson Washburn, to join his reading reform organization, which he had recently started. Sam was surprised by the request, telling Mr. Washburn that reading was a basic thing you learned in elementary school. Mr. Washburn suggested that Sam read the book Why Johnny Can’t Read by Rudolf Flesch. The book changed Sam’s life. Flesch pointed out that the look-say or whole word method was introduced to the nation’s schools in the mid to late 1930s. The Depression made it difficult for most schools to buy the new look-and-say books, but by the mid-1940s, most schools around the nation adopted this method of reading. It proved to be a disaster.
Sam initially believed that if the educators were convinced that the look-say method wasn’t working, the educators would revert to intensive phonics. This is when he learned that America’s public schools were in the firm grip of the so-called progressive educators, who were disciples of John Dewey. Their goal was to promote Humanism and socialism while destroying children’s faith in God. Sam was one of the first to warn Americans that our nation’s children were being deliberately dumbed down in government schools. Sam did an incredible amount of research on the subject, writing books like Is Public Education Necessary and The NEA: Trojan Horse in American Education.
Sam used the word menticide to describe what was happening in America’s government schools. Sam learned how the mind works, and how the teaching methods were causing dyslexia-an ailment that was extremely rare until the introduction of the look-say method of reading. Sam was more than a critic of government schools; he was a man of action. He travelled around the country helping local people start private schools. He helped to establish both the South Boston and Hyde Park academies during the height of forced busing in Boston. Sam was also a pioneer in the modern-day homeschool movement. He attended homeschool conventions around the nation where he would conduct lectures on the history of education in the United States as well as phonics workshops. Sam would routinely write letters to mayors offering to take their worst schools and turn them around in one year. He seldom got a response, and when he did, it was a “thank you, but no thank you” reply. One of the mayors was Corey Booker -now a U.S. Senator.
Sam was a prolific writer, authoring fifteen books, a monthly newsletter, and hundreds of articles in magazines and online media sources like World Net Daily. He even authored a book questioning the authorship of Shakespeare. His most important book was his simplest, Alpha-Phonics, a 128-lesson workbook used to teach phonics. Thousands of parents, including my wife and I, used Alpha-Phonics to teach children how to read. Sam volunteered his time with a group called the WAITT-We Are All in This Together-House, an adult learning center in Boston’s Roxbury section, where he taught functionally illiterate adults how to read.
My first meeting with Sam was at an event in Windham, NH, in 1989. His first words to me were “Don’t let your children set foot in a government school.” It was some of the best advice I ever received. As mentioned above, Sam willed most of his books, papers, and recordings to us. It consisted of over 200 legal-size boxes full of cassettes of his lectures, hundreds of notebooks, manuscripts both published and unpublished, and hundreds of letters of his correspondence with authors, publishers, educators, and politicians. Thanks to the efforts of Mark Affleck, who serves as our camp newspaper editor, and our webmaster Eric Conover, the Sam Blumenfeld Archive was created. Since its creation, hundreds of thousands of people from the Royal family of the Kingdom of Bhutan to educators in Zimbabwe and South Africa to hundreds of teachers to homeschool parents in the United States and around the world have used the archive. The archive contains an online version of Sam’s Alpha-Phonics with all 128 lessons in either audio or video, courses on cursive, and basic arithmetic. It also contains PDF versions of most of Sam’s books, newsletters, hundreds of hours of Sam’s lectures in audio and video, manuscripts, and his correspondence.
For unlimited free access to the archive, all we need is an email address and a username. (Donations are, of course, greatly appreciated.) Here is the link to the archive.
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