Posted on 05/10/2010 1:30:02 PM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
And then there was the insomniac dyslexic agnostic who would lie awake at night wondering if there was a Dog.
As background, “whole word” English instruction is an article of faith with socialists, and one of its primary inventors was Noam Chomsky.
At the time it was first foisted on students in the 1960s, black students were almost on a par with white students in their English language skills. But they turned out to be far more vulnerable to its ill effects, and their English language abilities plummeted. Within just a few years, black students ranked at the bottom of English language proficiency. And in schools where they teach “whole language”, black students remain at the bottom.
The “whole language” true believers were not unsettled by this in the least. They used the typical excuses that:
1) Whole language instruction had been underfunded.
2) Whole language had to be used universally to show its superiority.
3) Whole language had been sabotaged by those who supported phonics.
Which are pretty much the arguments they use for all other socialist schemes that don’t work.
Importantly, whole language had its most ardent believers among “ivory tower academics”, with no experience in teaching children English, only theories.
Tragically, even though they have clutched to their failed beliefs as ardently as Soviet communists embraced communism, and are now in their 40th+ years of failure without a single success, their efforts are now to *expand* the failure to other parts of the curriculum.
Especially mathematics. The latest project to ruin children’s education was innovated by the University of Chicago School Mathematics Project, and is called “Everyday Math”.
Advocated by the same kind of starry-eyed idealists, in short order, it has already caused widespread revulsion by parents, appalled that their children’s math skills had suddenly collapsed. They are having to purchase traditional mathematics tutoring to get their children back to the proficiency they should have had.
To show how profoundly awful “Everyday Math” has performed, its publisher provided 61 pieces of evidence of its effectiveness to the US Department of Education. 57 of these did not meet the minimum standards of scientific evidence, and only one of the remaining four showed any positive effect. Based on these four, the DoE rated it as having a “potentially positive effect.”
They determined that a student trained in “Everyday Math” could be expected to perform at or near the 56th percentile in mathematics. What everyone else could call “C-” or “D+”.
Probably because it hasn’t been given enough funding, needs to be required of all students to show how much better it is, and has been sabotaged by those who “cling” to traditional mathematics instruction.
Uh-huh. And a skunk is just a socialist house cat.
I grew up in New Jersey, where this story took place, and I can tell you that phonics was banned from the public schools at least 35 years ago. Kids were being taught how not to read using flash cards with words/pictures on them in the public schools. I went to catholic grade school and there phonics was still the approach. By high school you could easily pick out the kids who went to catholic school by the way they read aloud, fluidly and without interruption or assistance. The kids who went to public school read okay until they saw an unfamiliar word and their brains just shut down. The teacher would have to tell them the word.
These educational “experiments” really p*** me off, because to the experimenters, the students are just rats in a maze. To us parents, it’s our childrens’ lives at stake. When I had a child, I wouldn’t tolerate the whole word approach to reading, and the teachers I worked with were unified in agreement with me. I am thankful for that.
They were happy to see me so often we could recognize each other in a store (I think my kid hated that!). If you have a teacher who doesn’t want to know you, the parent, you have to get in his/her face.
I’m fascinated by talk of too much homework. Your comment jibes with my sense that homework is just another trick: even as kids are deliberately confused, the educators can say, hey, we tried, your children are dumb, that’s not our fault.
A short smart lesson is always better than a long, incoherent lesson.
Yes. That’s what Blumenfeld is saying in the quote from his book of essays. Not just the dumbing-down project. But the make-America-Socialist project.
Blumenfeld is one of the few people who argue that the dumbing down was deliberate and was ideologically motivated. I agree with him. Google, for example, “30: the War Against Reading.” It’s fairly long but all the key quotes are there from all the leading trouble-makers.
I think you’re right about Spanish. I know just enough to cause trouble but have had several Hispanics comment on my good pronunciation. I was surprised.
Back to phonics. In kindergarten our talkative DD memorized the little books they were supposed to read and teacher never guessed what was going on. First and second grade were disastrous. In 3rd grade, her 60-something teacher said she used a different approach and emphasized phonics. We also agreed DD needed to be tested for dyslexia, which she does have.
She is now a voracious reader. Her reading tutors in school have all emphasized phonics and it has helped her immensely.
The boys, however, learned to read all right with the school’s blended approach. But they both had older teachers who supplemented with phonics.
Yes, there’s a wonderful bit of satire early in “To Kill A Mockingbird” where Scout goes off to her first day of school...only to find the teacher is horrified that this little girl can read. The nitwit teacher specifically says that Scout’s father has done a terrible thing and has made the teacher’s job much more difficult! Now, the teacher moans, she will have to undo all that bad teaching—and start over.
Harper Lee perfectly nailed the lunacy of Dewey’s education ideas.
Yes, agree. It’s been my impression that “progressive” ideas hurt the poor and the minorities and not-so-smart MOST OF ALL. This is the sickest aspect of left-wing sensibility. We want to help X, they say. And thus X is truly, profoundly, forever ruined.
Reminds me of the New York Times, circa 1935, supporting Communist Russia even as Stalin was sending millions of people to gulags.
Reminds me of the NEA saying they care about children even as they push Whole Word, Reform Math, and the rest of the gimmicks.
The best analysis I’ve seen of this ideological myopia is Orwell’s exploration of his second law, Ignorance Is Strength.
So do I. It's been apparent to me for years that university schools of education and teacher's unions had formed an unholy alliance with Marxist radicals like Bill Ayers. All of us who warned against student political indoctrination until now have been derided as paranoid. But hey, the scheme worked for Stalin and Mao, the radical role models.
Thanks for the Blumenfeld reference. I'll check it out.
It’s way past time to empty out the government indocrination centers.
Which socialist scheme has worked for black people?
I have to wonder how much the modern teaching methods have held down kids with things like dyslexia. I learned to cope with both dyslexia and ADHD (it was only called "hyperactivity" back then) without special classes. My son, with many of the same problems, didn't do so well--he had special education until I got fed up with it when he was in middle school, and it did not help him one iota. It did, however, make him very dependent and not self-sufficient.
I’ve collected a number of excellent lectures, given by Samuel Blumenfeld, at various home schooling seminars..
Blumenfeld exposes the agenda of the early proponents of the Whole Language movement, which, contrary to some reports, did not start in the 1960’s; but rather, began to gather steam around the turn of the 20th century..
These educators were dyed in the wool Socialists, out of the University of Chicago... their methodology first permeated the Teachers Colleges, particularily in the Mid West...
Speaking personally, I was exposed to the Look Say (Whole Language) methodology in the Dick and Jane Books..in 1955.
If it had not been for my Grandmother, who taught me how to sound out words...I would never have learned how to read. I would have joined the multitudinous ranks of the Functionally Illiterate.
At any rate, Blumenfeld has done the historical Research..these lectures are invaluable as a resource to fully understand what the Left has done to our children.
Anyone who listens to these lectures will come to see that the only thing that Conservatives MUST do is take our children OUT OF THE PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM. We can do a better job homeschooling, educating our children, than the public schools can ever do.
Here are the lectures, in Mp3 format (they are joined together in Zipped files, to make it easier to download.) Here’s the link =
http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=ae0f1a52cdf6bd4175a4fc82078ae6c8dda4e223c272b95cf7e866bfb1230ce0
When I met Sam Blumenfeld some years ago, I thanked him for teaching my little girl to read. I used Blumenfeld’s book “ALPHAPHONICS”...my daughter was four years old at the time, I spent 20 minutes per day with her and this book..at the end of almost 5 months, she could READ ANYTHING I gave to her.
“ALPHAPHONICS” works! Instead of spending thousands of dollars, and years teaching students reading basics...this book costs 25 dollars and within a few months... ANYONE can learn how to read with “ALPHAPHONICS”.
Here’s Sam Blumenfeld’s Website for more information = http://www.howtotutor.com/
Thanks for this post. Blumenfeld is a great man and America’s premier educator.
As a practical matter, I still believe we must also think in terms of improving the public schools. One easy way is to tell the people there about Blumenfeld. If every school teacher read “Victims of Dick and Jane” or heard these lectures, you would see a huge improvement.
After a quick look, there’s many sites that back up your
claim that Noam Chomsky was indeed one of the movers
behind the “Whole Language” disaster. ... It might be
of interest to know that his advanced linguistic theories
deny the existence of syllables (that’s my recollection of
what a graduate student in linguistics told me some years
ago) and also, IIRC, phonemes. My informant left the program and
went abroad to truly learn a desired 2nd language in Asia,
thereby being separated from kith and kin for nearly ten
years. The latter’s opinion on Chomsky is not complimentary
nor is the ex-student; none of him would countenance the
least discussion of his political beliefs.
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