Posted on 09/13/2004 10:11:18 PM PDT by JohnHuang2
Monday, September 13, 2004
By Vox Day
© 2004 WorldNetDaily.com
The Los Angeles Daily News recently lamented the tremendous increase in "functional illiteracy" among the working population of Los Angeles County. In reporting the results of a recent study, it said:
In the Los Angeles region, 53 percent of workers ages 16 and older were deemed functionally illiterate, the study said ... It classified 3.8 million Los Angeles County residents as "low-literate," meaning they could not write a note explaining a billing error, use a bus schedule or locate an intersection on a street map.
While the article took note of the wasted "hundreds of millions of dollars spent in public schools over the past decade," it blamed the terrible results on an influx of non-English speaking immigrants and a 30 percent high-school dropout rate.
But the dropout rate can't possibly explain the low level of literacy, because if the public school system was even remotely competent, the children would be reading adequately long before they ever reached high school.
Long-time readers may recall a column titled, "A Tale of 2 Children," wherein I compared two 3-year old children, one of whom was being taught to read by his parents and one who was destined for public school. The two children are now 5 years old, and I recently examined their progress.
The child in kindergarten is not yet reading, but he has learned his complete alphabet now. The homeschooled child, on the other hand, surprised me by reading at an error-free fifth-grade level on the San Diego Quick Assessment test. I verified his competence by asking him to read selections from C.S. Lewis' "Prince Caspian" to me, a book with which he was previously unfamiliar. While he occasionally stumbled on words such as versification and centaur, (he pronounced them "versication" and "kentaur"), his comprehension was reasonably good as well.
Suddenly, it was not so hard to understand how homeschooled children, on the average, test four years ahead of their public-schooled counterparts.
The problem with public schools and reading is not hard to grasp. Whole language, the favored method, is a disastrous approach to reading that is destined for failure. Children who learn to read while being taught this method learn to read in spite of it, not because of it. Anyone who speaks Japanese and has learned both kana (phonetic) and kanji (whole language) can testify to the ease of the first and the extreme difficulty of the latter.
It's a pity that the Daily News does not have access to studies tracking the reading ability of children who are schooled at home in Los Angeles County. It would be interesting to see how well those children read compared to these illiterate workers, particularly immigrant children taught at home, because as hard as it may be for the Daily News to imagine, people who speak other languages, even Spanish, have been known to be able to read. I can't confirm this, but I have even heard rumors that there are reputed to be one or two authors, such as the suspiciously foreign-sounding Arturo Perez Reverte, who actually write in Spanish, if you can believe anything so outlandish.
The truth is that it is extremely simple to teach any normal child to read. All it requires is a consistent 15 minutes a day between the ages of three and five. If a child is capable of rote memorization, he is capable of learning the alphabet and the basic phonics, and reading will follow within months. The fact that the public schools so regularly fail at this simple task is not indicative of anything but the absolute incompetence of the public-school system – an incompetence that is not only designed into the system, but is its very raison d'etre.
One need only look at an elementary school's curriculum to realize that the bulk of a child's education necessarily comes from outside the school environment. It may come from parents, peers or the television, but very little of it comes from the free day-care centers that are the public schools.
Fred Reed has a simple answer for America's education problem. It is an inventive, capitalist solution involving the intimate interaction of cement and potassium cyanide with the teaching colleges, and bounties on certified teachers. But, as he has said himself, America isn't interested in solutions that will work – much better to wring our hands, hope for the best and condemn yet another generation to illiteracy, ignorance and idiocy.
when I tutored latino children in computers in San Francisco Bay area,they could hardly read nor write neither english nor spanish- what a disaster of bilingual education.
Public education is a form of child abuse.
ditto! I homeschool 3 girls now. Was 4 but one just graduated with flying colors! One of the most rewarding things I've ever done was teach my youngest to read! I loathe the public school system!!
Statistics are easily found on the comparison of homeschooled children to public education children by going to the the Home School Legal Defense Association webiste.
www.hslda.com
I HAVE TO ALLOW THE GOVERNMENT TO TAKE MY EDUCATIONAL DOLLARS (through taxes), BUT I WON'T ALLOW THEM TO TAKE MY CHILDREN!!
I am the daughter of an educator. My father taught in a one room school for 3 years, then 5th grade for about 12 and 15 as a principal before retiring a few years ago. I can tell you that he had his reservations at first, but saw how well the kids were doing and how poorly the public school system was doing and turned to my way of thinking. I do believe, however that the biggest problem in the public school system is the parents and students. There is no longer any discipline, etc. at home or at school. It has forced the administration and the teachers to become "parents" in a way, and tied their hands behind their backs in the process so that they are unable to do the things they need to do. This and religious reasons are the reasons I homeschool.
He's certainly right about how easy it is to teach a child- last night, my 3 year old daughter sat beside me on the sofa and began (of her own volition!) writing shaky, but recognizable letters on her magna-doodle to show me. We haven't even started trying to teach her to write!
Two days ago, she and I were playing a video game that involved picking up numbered color splotches and placing them on the corresponding number in the picture- she faultlessly pointed out each number, with no hesitation, and didn't need to be asked. A month ago, she couldn't do it!
For anyone else with a small child, I highly recomend Dr. Suess's ABC book as a nightly bedtime read- mine has it memorized, and sometimes reads it to *me*!
LOL! The idea that foreigners might be literate ... without the NEA or anything ... I love Perez-Reverte's novels.
The author is dead-on. Homeschooling is far from perfect (including at my house), but one of the outstanding successes is that children learn to read, fluently and with comprehension. Reading just isn't hard. My 2-year-old son already knows all the letters and numbers, and is starting to learn phonics, purely from being in an environment with reading going on constantly.
2 points:
* LA illiteracy is as much an immigration problem as anything else.
* All kids learn better and more when parents are actively involved, no matter what the educational situation.
Homeschooling statistics "self select" for kids with involved parents, and so it is not statistically relevant to compare homeschooled kids with the general population of non-homeschooled kids. The act of homeschooling does not make any kid smarter in and of itself. The act of not Homeschooling doesn't hamstring any kid in and of itself.
There literally is no solution in LA.....if you apply stringent educational standards, you will fail vast numbers of hispanic kids. This is not a reason for not doing so, but speaks to the political reality. Parents want their kids to graduate from high school, regardless of whether they can read or not. The LAUSD is only too happy to oblige.
I HAVE TO ALLOW THE GOVERNMENT TO TAKE MY EDUCATIONAL DOLLARS (through taxes), BUT I WON'T ALLOW THEM TO TAKE MY CHILDREN!!
It's time we stopped them from taking the former as well.
Do you get it yet? Government schools were designed to prevent learning.
The particular utopia American believers chose to bring to the schoolhouse was Prussian. The seed that became American schooling, twentieth-century style, was planted in 1806 when Napoleon’s amateur soldiers bested the professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena. When your business is renting soldiers and employing diplomatic extortion under threat of your soldiery, losing a battle like that is pretty serious. Something had to be done.The most important immediate reaction to Jena was an immortal speech, the "Address to the German Nation" by the philosopher Fichte—one of the influential documents of modern history leading directly to the first workable compulsion schools in the West. Other times, other lands talked about schooling, but all failed to deliver. Simple forced training for brief intervals and for narrow purposes was the best that had ever been managed. This time would be different.
In no uncertain terms Fichte told Prussia the party was over. Children would have to be disciplined through a new form of universal conditioning. They could no longer be trusted to their parents. Look what Napoleon had done by banishing sentiment in the interests of nationalism. Through forced schooling, everyone would learn that "work makes free," and working for the State, even laying down one’s life to its commands, was the greatest freedom of all. Here in the genius of semantic redefinition1 lay the power to cloud men’s minds, a power later packaged and sold by public relations pioneers Edward Bernays and Ivy Lee in the seedtime of American forced schooling.
Prior to Fichte’s challenge any number of compulsion-school proclamations had rolled off printing presses here and there, including Martin Luther’s plan to tie church and state together this way and, of course, the "Old Deluder Satan" law of 1642 in Massachusetts and its 1645 extension. The problem was these earlier ventures were virtually unenforceable, roundly ignored by those who smelled mischief lurking behind fancy promises of free education. People who wanted their kids schooled had them schooled even then; people who didn’t didn’t. That was more or less true for most of us right into the twentieth century: as late as1920, only 32 percent of American kids went past elementary school. If that sounds impossible, consider the practice in Switzerland today where only 23 percent of the student population goes to high school, though Switzerland has the world’s highest per capita income in the world.
Prussia was prepared to use bayonets on its own people as readily as it wielded them against others, so it’s not all that surprising the human race got its first effective secular compulsion schooling out of Prussia in 1819, the same year Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, set in the darkness of far-off Germany, was published in England. Schule came after more than a decade of deliberations, commissions, testimony, and debate. For a brief, hopeful moment, Humboldt’s brilliant arguments for a high-level no-holds-barred, free-swinging, universal, intellectual course of study for all, full of variety, free debate, rich experience, and personalized curricula almost won the day. What a different world we would have today if Humboldt had won the Prussian debate, but the forces backing Baron vom Stein won instead. And that has made all the difference.
The Prussian mind, which carried the day, held a clear idea of what centralized schooling should deliver: 1) Obedient soldiers to the army;2 2) Obedient workers for mines, factories, and farms; 3) Well-subordinated civil servants, trained in their function; 4) Well-subordinated clerks for industry; 5) Citizens who thought alike on most issues; 6) National uniformity in thought, word, and deed.
[Has it worked, I ask you?]
The area of individual volition for commoners was severely foreclosed by Prussian psychological training procedures drawn from the experience of animal husbandry and equestrian training, and also taken from past military experience. Much later, in our own time, the techniques of these assorted crafts and sullen arts became "discoveries" in the pedagogical pseudoscience of psychological behaviorism.
Prussian schools delivered everything they promised. Every important matter could now be confidently worked out in advance by leading families and institutional heads because well-schooled masses would concur with a minimum of opposition. This tightly schooled consensus in Prussia eventually combined the kaleidoscopic German principalities into a united Germany, after a thousand years as a nation in fragments. What a surprise the world would soon get from this successful experiment in national centralization! Under Prussian state socialism private industry surged, vaulting resource-poor Prussia up among world leaders. Military success remained Prussia’s touchstone. Even before the school law went into full effect as an enhancer of state priorities, the army corps under Blücher was the principal reason for Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, its superb discipline allowing for a surprisingly successful return to combat after what seemed to be a crushing defeat at the Little Corporal’s hands just days before.3 Unschooled, the Prussians were awesome; conditioned in the classroom promised to make them even more formidable.
The immense prestige earned from this triumph reverberated through an America not so lucky in its own recent fortunes of war, a country humiliated by a shabby showing against the British in the War of 1812. Even thirty years after Waterloo, so highly was Prussia regarded in America and Britain, the English-speaking adversaries selected the Prussian king to arbitrate our northwest border with Canada. Hence the Pennsylvania town "King of Prussia." Thirty-three years after Prussia made state schooling work, we borrowed the structure, style, and intention of those Germans for our own first compulsion schools.
Traditional American school purpose—piety, good manners, basic intellectual tools, self-reliance, etc.—was scrapped to make way for something different. Our historical destination of personal independence gave way slowly to Prussian-purpose schooling, not because the American way lost in any competition of ideas, but because for the new commercial and manufacturing hierarchs, such a course made better economic sense.
This private advance toward nationalized schooling in America was partially organized, although little has ever been written about it; Orestes Brownson’s journal identifies a covert national apparatus (to which Brownson briefly belonged) already in place in the decade after the War of 1812, one whose stated purpose was to "Germanize" America, beginning in those troubled neighborhoods where the urban poor huddled, and where disorganized new immigrants made easy targets, according to Brownson. Enmity on the part of old-stock middle-class and working-class populations toward newer immigrants gave these unfortunates no appeal against the school sentence to which Massachusetts assigned them. They were in for a complete makeover, like it or not.
Much of the story, as it was being written by 1844, lies just under the surface of Mann’s florid prose in his Seventh Annual Report to the Boston School Committee. On a visit to Prussia the year before, he had been much impressed (so he said) with the ease by which Prussian calculations could determine precisely how many thinkers, problem-solvers, and working stiffs the State would require over the coming decade, then how it offered the precise categories of training required to develop the percentages of human resource needed. All this was much fairer to Mann than England’s repulsive episcopal system—schooling based on social class; Prussia, he thought, was republican in the desirable, manly, Roman sense. Massachusetts must take the same direction.
The Underground History of American Education
John Taylor Gatto
I'm not that optimistic.
Well, one school superintendent in CA recently admitted that his students were NOT taught to read correctly in his district's schools. He said this while being questioned about the poor reading scores.
I think having a decent reading program is even more important than parental participation. When I was going to school, there was very little parental participation, yet the majority of students learned to read.
For the most part, lack of parental participation is just another excuse. Several years ago, it was too much television. What's it going to be two years down the road?
California's reading scores took a slide into the dumpster when they introduced "whole langague" instruction, which treats words as pictograms. There are just so many pictograms that you can cram into your head.
"Public education is a form of child abuse."
Homeschooling is fine.....but I would suggest that you get outside help when instructing your kids on the art of debate
"I think having a decent reading program is even more important than parental participation. "
There is no greater factor in educational success than parental participation and active involvement.
We can talk about reading programs, and they are important, but not more important than having parents that are actively involved in their kids education.
"It's time we stopped them from taking the former as well"
This is fine for a stump speech, but how, as a practical political matter, do you accomplish this?
This is fine for a stump speech, but how, as a practical political matter, do you accomplish this?
Dump their Tea into the harbor
I have got to relay a story...
Yesterday Dad came home and said, "OK so next year we can send the girls to school and they can learn about how 'Heather has two Mommies'". I was shocked!!
Here he had been listening to NPR and he was flabergasted to hear how deep the Homosexual agenda had sunk into the Public Schools. I had been telling him but this hit home!
It nlead to a discussion on what is wrong with PS. We agreed that if the Public School Administration would get back to teaching the three R's and the teachers were allowed to discipline (and not push their agenda) the schools would be much better.
Thanks again to all the FReepers and Dear God for helping me convince Dad to let me homeschool.
(Currently with a 6 year old 5/9th through 3rd grade and a 4 year old 5/9ths through 1st grade)
LOL! I'm glad he heard that ... I've noticed that men sit up and take notice when the issue is the promotion of homosexuality!
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