The following report is by Wire Reports:
Spry Community Links High School, in the Heart of Little Village in Chicago, says its vision is to “provide a challenging and supportive environment…to enable our students to succeed in the 21st century.” Number one on the school’s focus list? “Increasing reading and math scores to or above grade level.”
But a look at state data that tracks reading and math scores for each Illinois school reveals two frightening facts about Spry. Not a single one of its 88 kids at the school can read at grade level. It’s the same for math. Zero kids are proficient.
Spry is one of 30 schools in Illinois where not a single student can read at grade level. Twenty-two of those schools are part of the Chicago Public Schools and the other eight are outside Chicago.
The failure list in math is even longer. There are 53 schools statewide where not one kid is proficient in math.
The absolute failure to teach even a single child to read and do math in so many schools is yet another indictment of the state’s educational system. At Wirepoints, we covered in detail the failures of Illinois education across the state in Poor student achievement and near-zero accountability: An indictment of Illinois’ public education system.
The data comes straight from the Illinois State Board of Education.
This column focuses on schools where zero percent of kids are able to read or do math. But we could have just as easily looked at the 622 schools where only 1 out of 10 kids or less can read at grade level. That’s a whopping 18 percent of the state’s 3,547 schools that tested students in 2022.
And only 1 out of 10 kids or less can do math at grade level in 930 schools…that’s more than a quarter of all schools in the state.
Defenders of the current system are sure to invoke covid as the big reason for the low scores. But a look at the 2019 numbers show that the reading and math numbers were only slightly better than they are now.
Take Spry, for example. Just 2 of the school’s 127 students in 2019 could read at grade level before the pandemic. In math, zero students were proficient.
The failure isn’t about money, either. Data from the Illinois State Board of Education shows spending at Spry was already at $20,000 per student before the pandemic. Today it spends $35,600.
What’s really incredible is that many of these schools are rated “commendable” by the Illinois State Board of Education. That’s the 2nd-highest of four “accountability” ratings a school can receive.
Not a single one of the 113 students at Sandoval Sr High School can read or do math at grade level. And yet the school is “commendable.”
Same with Ralph Ellison Chicago International Charter School. Over $24,000 spent on each of its 172 students. Labeled “commendable.” And none of the students are proficient in either reading or math.
In a sane world, schools that don’t and can’t teach a single student the most basic of skills would be shut down. But here, they carry on…the system thrives while students wither.
AUTHOR COMMENTARY
Cease, my son, to hear the instruction that causeth to err from the words of knowledge.
Proverbs 19:27
You do not need these statistics to see how illiterate and dumbed-down the people have been made. Each graduating class year-over-year incrementally gets dumber and dumber, which is easily manifested when you attempt to interact with these people.
The school system in the United States is designed to make obedient workers who are functionally illiterate; who are just smart enough to feed themselves (barely), drive to work and clock-in and out, tie their shoes, and passively accept anything the government and media wants them to believe; in an amoral, apathetic, atheistic society that has no hope or belief in anything but himself (maybe).
And yet the American taxpayer is paying absurd amounts of money to fund these institutions. The [De]education Industrial Complex is one of the biggest money sinks and money laundering avenues out there. Ungodly amounts of money are thrown at this every single year by the “loving and caring” politicians on both sides of the aisle, and yet the problems get worse. Meanwhile the money gets redirected to funding gender studies and pro-LGTBQIA+ propaganda, suicide prevention that never works, Critical Race Theory, trophies for everyone, and so on.
If you care about your kid, take them out of the schools ASAP and properly educate them yourself. Don’t let the state ruin them before it’s too late.
[7] Who goeth a warfare any time at his own charges? who planteth a vineyard, and eateth not of the fruit thereof? or who feedeth a flock, and eateth not of the milk of the flock? [8] Say I these things as a man? or saith not the law the same also? [9] For it is written in the law of Moses, Thou shalt not muzzle the mouth of the ox that treadeth out the corn. Doth God take care for oxen? [10] Or saith he it altogether for our sakes? For our sakes, no doubt, this is written: that he that ploweth should plow in hope; and that he that thresheth in hope should be partaker of his hope. (1 Corinthians 9:7-10).
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Homeschool!
This has all been by design as God’s judgement because somewhere America decided they don’t want to obey the King James Bible anymore and would rather pursue a career, the pampered decadent lifestyle of the suburbs, and be another consumer TV-head lover of pleasure more than a lover of God – and so they stick their kids in these hellholes that couldn’t educate a dog on how to rollover.
Then they wonder why their kids graduate and can barely read at a 2nd grade level, they’re perverted and rebellious, and they have no moral compass, or if it’s a religious school which I graduated from, they either become atheists, get messed up in drugs, alcohol, or sex perversion, or worse.
God saved me from that satanic system of cult buildings and false christian schools – in particular, the accelerated christian education (ACE) program which God will gladly vomit out of His mouth!
Big Government/Brother, who demands you worship them (seeing God as ‘competition’) doesn’t love or actually care about you. To make this clear, they see us as subjects, rather than citizens, cutting the heads off any head of wheat that stands above the others–to them, those showing individualism and real leadership must be silenced to maintain their intended status-quo for us. To make this happen, they indoctrinate, rather than educate our children in the public schools, so future-generations will be compliant, unquestioning sheep–just as planned, by Satan, for the world. God has higher expectations for us all, and it flies-in-the-face of Big Brother’s “Narrative”, a soulless, faceless group of people who think they can live your own life better than you! This is why they took prayer and God out of the public schools: an amoral child belongs to THEM, all according to Satan’s plan. Notice nobody in the secular world talks about him anymore? He prefers it that way.
I want to chime in here as a 20+ year homeschooler, now teaching a second generation. One: their survey standards & qualification tests are junk & a joke, totally arbitrary & measuring NOTHING objectively.
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Their IQ tests & so forth, the national tests are ridiculous. They keep it all ‘secret’ so that ‘people can’t cheat’. Which means that if you don’t have a sympathetic ‘qualified & certified’ teacher monitoring the testing: you would never know just how stupid & arbitrary some of the questions asked actually are. You’re not supposed to see them, or to know that they’re asking, and you’re not allowed to document questions with notes or anything.
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Some of them have no correct answer by design. And, as for grade level, that’s subjective & has been dropping in content & actually level of literacy for over a hundred years now.
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Today’s college grads & master degreed would be hard pressed to pass the 1890’s 8th grade equivalency test in math or anything else…and we know that because we copied it out & had a parent with a master’s degree take it. He did no better than regular working class folks on the whole…..and all of us were humbled to see just how dumbed down we were as compared to that standard. (And that guy went full blown wokester when the strange wind & spirit came sweeping in, continually setting humanist philosophy, psychology, & existentialist experience/’knowing’ etc over scripture…..which he never came to believe really exists or is knowable today.)
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Two: Whenever the government, some tax exempt ‘charity’, or someone in ‘the Church’ begins running this sort of story, it means only one thing: “We have to stop this freedom & control the flow of information & knowledge, limiting it to the initiated & sorted, certified cronies alone. It cannot be allowed in the hands of ‘hereticks’ and regular citizens who might think they should be equal as that Bill of Rights we worked so hard to redefine & evade to get back in the drivers’ seat.”
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We used Singapore Math as our main curricula twenty years ago to get around some of the dumbing down. Most of the ‘culturally relevant’ in the early days was the use of foreign names, pictures, & the use of tropical fruit rather than ‘apples & oranges’, but they’re way beyond that today.
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Most of the arithmetic & mathematics are subjectivized & not meant to teach mastery, or true understanding. ‘Teaching Textbooks’ is good for general math, and Katherine Loop’s ‘Principles of Mathematics’ is good if shooting for true literacy, but be aware the first is secular, & the second is Reformed, using ESV & with Augustinian dominionist assumptions.
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We’ve used the old Rod & Staff, and are using ‘Math Lessons for a Living Education’ from Answers In Genesis selectively, for application & understanding. The only conservative & feminine, modest dress left are some of the Rod & Staff….& there you need to discuss the bonnet & the church tradition stuff, though at least a family is still mother, father, & children. Again, they use it dialectically with the either/or being Amish/Mennonite ritual & tradition, or some form of feminism. Matthew 16, Mark 8 …and Luke 12:1, Colossians 2, Titus 2. Interesting to me, ‘leaven’ is 20 x in the KJV. Choice & law: freedom indeed & the strait gate & narrow way with its twin ditches of dead legalism or licentiousness.
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Luke 12:1 In the mean time, when there were gathered together an innumerable multitude of people, insomuch that they trode one upon another, he began to say unto his disciples first of all, Beware ye of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy.
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You can still use any of them, of course, but beware of ‘other’ teaching going on along with arithmetic and math, & know that you must draw it back to biblical truth if you want your student to get that connection. For that reason, I personally really distrust a lot of the online stuff which they’re attempting to switch everyone over to. Even hard copy, formerly conservative & anabaptist Mennonite Rod and Staff is being revised to march Common Core & with a ‘new’ tolerance of flexible ‘family’ definitions, ways of life, etc leaning into tolerating lgbtq+ and critical race garbage with its false guilt & ‘confession’, testimony of ‘repentance’ (of anything lawful or ordered, objectively true, pure or holy) and it’s demand for dependence upon, & blind faith in, the system, the machine.
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It’s good to get old editions if you can, though you need to be sure to have the same editions of teaching, student, & answer key texts. You can get most of it in hard copy fairly reasonably & second hand online.
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In the classroom, students are taught to not waste their time learning to compute, or to master anything, but just to believe anything they’re taught blindly, & to rely on the man or the machine for computing or supplying ‘facts’, so they can get around to the more ‘fun’ stuff (philosophical/imaginative/buzzword: ‘creative’) with little hands on problem solving, or cross specialty (big picture; contextual) understanding.
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They never learn the pleasure of true literacy, problem solving, or mastery of anything of substance. Most are just trained to dull out & endure, exist, then move on to their fun-chasing, entertaining personal lives: ie living for the weekend, easy lust-fulfillment, & a quick, diverted & oblivious slide into Hell.
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‘Christian’ curriculums are ecumenical & Rome centric. Very carefully skating over any real contextual or doctrinal understanding for the ecumenical & social justice humanist application….and this includes their ‘missional’. Changing ‘charity’ to their impure, fornicating & generic ‘love’, confusing the identities of Christ and Lucifer (light-bearer, daystar etc)….which leads right into craft fornications and gnostic spirituality, inner-light ‘self’ intuition & self-will, with a man-god, man-becoming-god sort of ‘hope’, christ, or whatever they want to call it. (Usually Christ since that’s Satan’s big goal with his ministers, both angelic & of mankind: to usurp God’s place & glory.)
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I used to wonder why some of those people pretended to be Christian even as it became obvious they believed none of it. Bible showed me why.
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They highjacked both the creation science & the homeschooling movement at least in part with their ecumenical, generic term ‘Christian’, & revisionist history.
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It was done gradually in steps. First, they whited out, or slandered, the Bible believing baptists and the anabaptists who came of that Antiochan stream. Making them all out to be heretics & extremist experientialists or extremist political humanists….leaving only the categories of ‘Catholic’ and ‘Protestant/Reformed’.
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This covered up the persecutions & doctrinal errors of both, Rome & her Daughters….while erasing the history of the people God used to preserve the texts & doctrine by which the Authorized English Version came. That aids them with their simplistic ‘gotcha’ : “So where was God’s word before the King James Version?”…which seems plausible in the context of those partial truths, & without knowledge of the two textual streams.
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So, they made Rome the ‘mother’ and ‘root’, protector of the faith through which the scriptures came. Then it was an easy matter for the Jesuit & Craft types to lead those, or for many to fall back to, Catholicism.
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In all the Christian homeschooling publishing, that was the m.o.
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Many of us who were new Christians, or from backgrounds not keeping that knowledge alive, or keeping & trusting the King James Bible, were easily led into confusion, or took a long time of recognizing differences in the versions, divergent claims that didn’t add up, & realizing the simple fact that things that are different are not the same, & just did not resonate with the Spirit of truth in us.
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Homeschoolers were using materials from Catholics (Calvert, Buchanan etc), and from Reformed/Protestant Catholics, Pentacostal/Charismatics and cults (7th Day Adventists, Mormons etc) without even realizing it, thinking it ‘Christian’ & trustworthy when it was skewed toward philosophy, tradition and idolatrous humanism rather than whole truth & scripture. Montessori came out of Rome & that existential approach was used to limit & groom useful workers, elevating man & experience over scripture.
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Charlotte Mason ‘Original Homeschooling Series’ referred to that in her teaching which shot for classical Christian humanist literacy & liberalism…& her work & understanding is more biblical, but still Romish & falling short of biblical literacy & discernment into progressive humanism.
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The Francis Schaeffer types of Reformed promote her work & it’s much closer to biblical life in approach & methodology, but the content emphasis on the ‘masters’ of the arts, ignorance (or passive denial) of the Antiochan stream in history, & evolutionary view of history & eschatology leads people right back to Rome & craft if it’s followed without discernment with some canned curriculum. I used some of their materials, but found parts of it troubling & unbiblical, & when we got to ‘the Revolutionary Era’ (as they call it), dominionism in America & Manifest Destiny…then I knew something was ‘off’ for sure.
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They spoke about scripture, but rarely quoted it. How can you actually defend & hide the word in your heart when you’re ecumenical and writing to people with several dozen different Bible texts? And if the authors really called attention to the scriptures themselves, then they exposed their own biases against the Antiochan stream of texts.
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Now they quote scripture more, but it’s almost always either the NKJV or the ESV. Bible is the key.
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Even the T.R. thing is off base in the revisionist history manner described above, and the further afield they went in the representation of their case & apologetics into philosophy, making claims on second hand knowledge etc, the easier it was for Romanists, and Alexandrian/gnostic preferring people to expose their ignorance, confuse & make them look like fools.
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We don’t have a T.R. and the fact is that God preserved his word actively in believing people & the texts they died to preserve, never forcing them on anyone. It was & is a special, hands-on, superintending miracle of God fulfilling Psalm 12 for such a time as this, quick & powerful.
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Math is built into EVERYTHING….physical & biological, language and all science, demonstrating the evident truth & Law of God in the creation. You see it naturally as you read through the scriptures, & get a taste, but I looked in vain for a ‘Christian’ curriculum that truly used the numbers in scripture for jumping off points for teaching computing & logic.
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Early on there were some that used the generations in Genesis 5, but that only exposes the truth & superiority of the King James & Masoretic text, since the fake Septuagint & Alexandrian stuff gets the math wrong. Usshur’s Chronology is helpful, and Floyd Nolen Jones pointed out the basic arithmetic errors of the Septuagint which helped me in rejecting the versions more and more.
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And Peter Ruckman was a genius at pointing out the bad philosophy & its source in those matters, & showing the spiritual significance of numbers in the King James Bible. It’s truly amazing, so fulfilling & bolsters faith as you find those things.
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Once folks are ignorant of the Bible, they start attacking any objective truth like math & arithmetic, hard objective science, because a true understanding of arithmetic & mathematics gives a level of certainty, critical thinking & context, objective truth right & wrong, to the plebes/laity that nicolaitans & sorcerers/witches of craft don’t want them to have. It points them to God, not them & their idols…..and a full understanding proves that biblical faith is anything but some blind leap. It actually exposes the blind leap error of unbelief, the clay feet of their science falsely so-called idol that just doesn’t add up.
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Once upon a time, in a place that was no place, & in a time that was no time: nothing exploded, & everything was.
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And even their unnamed ‘Designer’ stuff falls short & allows for other gods and christs. Like the peoples’ unbelief & idolatry, the calf that just leapt from the fire (like Egypt’s worship of that aspect of the fallen cherub –& ‘modern’ science) & the leaven of Aaron’s hypocrisy…these things given us for ensamples 1 Cor 10 and Revelation 18:4 KJB.
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Ex 32:21 ¶ And Moses said unto Aaron, What did this people unto thee, that thou hast brought so great a sin upon them?
Ex 32:22 And Aaron said, Let not the anger of my lord wax hot: thou knowest the people, that they are set on mischief.
Ex 32:23 For they said unto me, Make us gods, which shall go before us: for as for this Moses, the man that brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we wot not what is become of him.
Ex 32:24 And I said unto them, Whosoever hath any gold, let them break it off. So they gave it me: then I cast it into the fire, and there came out this calf.
Ex 32:25 And when Moses saw that the people were naked; (for Aaron had made them naked unto their shame among their enemies:)
Ex 32:26 Then Moses stood in the gate of the camp, and said, Who is on the LORD’S side? let him come unto me. And all the sons of Levi gathered themselves together unto him.
Ex 32:27 And he said unto them, Thus saith the LORD God of Israel, Put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbour.
Ex 32:28 And the children of Levi did according to the word of Moses: and there fell of the people that day about three thousand men.
Ex 32:29 For Moses had said, Consecrate yourselves to day to the LORD, even every man upon his son, and upon his brother; that he may bestow upon you a blessing this day.
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Ex 32:30 ¶ And it came to pass on the morrow, that Moses said unto the people, Ye have sinned a great sin: and now I will go up unto the LORD; peradventure I shall make an atonement for your sin.
Ex 32:31 And Moses returned unto the LORD, and said, Oh, this people have sinned a great sin, and have made them gods of gold.
Ex 32:32 Yet now, if thou wilt forgive their sin—; and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written.
Ex 32:33 And the LORD said unto Moses, Whosoever hath sinned against me, him will I blot out of my book.
Ex 32:34 Therefore now go, lead the people unto the place of which I have spoken unto thee: behold, mine Angel shall go before thee: nevertheless in the day when I visit I will visit their sin upon them.
Ex 32:35 And the LORD plagued the people, because they made the calf, which Aaron made.
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Revelation 18:4 And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.
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Even unbelievers like Charlotte Iserbyt pointed out & proved how John Dewey & that whole crew affected that by controlling teacher education, methodology and curriculum development, giving statements & examples from lower level cronies who took exception to what they were doing, repented & came out to warn. Her book, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of the American People is still pretty available, online & otherwise, & the segment on math would apply.
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People like her, who’s ‘darling Daddy’ was a Yale bonesman….didn’t go beyond naming Dewey to noting that he was a member of the Humanist Society, & mentored & promoted by such, which purposely changed its reputation as a metaphysical/spiritual & philosophical society to one of ‘science’ that was supposedly objective & utterly neutral, ‘secular’ with nothing spiritual about it. Impossibility, since there is nothing neutral, nonetheless…
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Mark 9:40 For he that is not against us is on our part.
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Mark 14:56 For many bare false witness against him, but their witness agreed not together.
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Luke 9:50 And Jesus said unto him, Forbid him not: for he that is not against us is for us.
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They made it a philosophical, dialectic issue of ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ via gnostic & Augustinian teaching: making separation between the ‘spiritual kingdom’ and the ‘physical kingdom’…..supposedly allowing for different rules & laws to hold in the two realms. So you can play by the world’s rules and still be ‘spiritual’ & supposedly godly & biblical, though that’s not what the Bible says.
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My husband is continually bemoaning the folly of engineers who have no idea how their ideas actually work out (or don’t) in real life….and he has actually had engineers visiting a facility say things like: So that’s what it looks like, or ‘how it works’. All they know is the virtual reality of blueprints & designing software.
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That sort of virtual detachment & reality is what many are living in. Not only biblically ignorant, but of objective truth & reality.
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It’s a symptom of idolatry and opening oneself up to lies and devils: they work incrementally & exponentially. Like Jesus taught in Matthew 12 & Luke 11, of people who clean up their lives & cast out a devil in their own strength or climbing up some other way, only to have that spirit find seven spirits even more wicked to return with him to that clean & refurbished ‘home’ later.
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Jesus also cast the seven devils out of Mary Magdalene (Mark 16:9, Luke 8:2), and we have the parables of the leaven, the unnatural growth of the mustard seed into a tree into which the fowls of the air came (Matthew 13, Luke 13, 1 Cor 5, Galatians 5, & more…compare with ‘hold of every foul spirit, & a cage of every unclean and hateful bird’ Revelation 18:2)
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Intelligence & IQ isn’t the matter, the spirit received & served is. The deceiving and being deceived.