Posted on 09/21/2004 1:12:43 AM PDT by JohnHuang2
Let me know what you think. 8-)
I can't believe it got that bad after I hit middle school and high school... then again, Clinton was president. I guess I can.
Congrats on getting a good teacher for your kid. They're harder to come by as you hit high school, though I did have a former tank commander from the Gulf War as my AP Government teacher, and a National Guardsman currently in Iraq as an AP US History teacher.
It varies by locality.
This may be more than you wanted, but here's the brief history.
Until the early 1800s, all children learned by phonics.
Some guy (in Germany I believe) came up with the idea of learning to read by memorizing entire words. It's a method appropriate to a pictographic language like Chinese, but utterly inappropriate for a letter-based/phoneme language like English. The method was a failure and disappeared for a time.
The idea kicked around in various pedagogical circles for a century. Horace Mann bought into it, I believe.
John Dewey, a socialist, pushed whole language at the Columbia Teachers College in the 1920s and moved it into the pedagogical mainstream. He knew that it didn't work. But he promoted the idea because he didn't want children to learn how to read. He wanted schools to "socialize" children, that is, to disabuse them of their parents "superstitious" (i.e., religious) beliefs. A child who could read independently, and hence to think independently, did not serve his ends.
Columbia Teachers College has always been the preeminent teachers college in America, and his ideas quickly spread, although many of those who now advocate whole language do not know its nefarious history.
The Dick and Jane books trace their origin to whole language, as do Dr. Seuss books. The vocabulary in Dick and Jane books was limited to 50 words or less, so that children could memorize entire words. Words were also repeated endlessly for the same reason. "Look Jane, look!" "See Spot." "See Jane see Spot."
Dr. Seuss was instructed by his publishing company to limit his vocabulary to 50 words or less. He came up with "The Cat in the Hat."
Today, teachers colleges and educational "experts" generally push whole language. This has been a boon to private companies like "Hooked on Phonics" who clean up the mess made by whole language. Dyslexia is also associated with whole language.
Today, there is no overall pattern. Some schools teach whole word, some phonics, some both.
Politics and phonics
Samuel BlumenfeldLast week, George W. Bush, speaking on education, said he'd like to see children of three years' age learn to read using phonics. He cited a study by the National Institutes of Health that recommended the teaching of phonics. But Reid Lyon, who oversees NIH's reading initiative, said that his experts view phonics as only one component of reading instruction. Newsweek quoted a NIH researcher as saying, "We couldn't figure out where he was coming from."
Mention phonics, and you hit a raw nerve among establishment experts. You would have expected them to commend Bush for his interest in the subject. Instead, he got an immediate negative response. Why?
The simple truth is that phonics has been politicized by the left ever since it became identified with conservative educational principles and practices. But this is by no means a recent development. It really all started back in 1898 when John Dewey wrote his famous essay, "The Primary-Education Fetich," in which he advocated shifting the emphasis in primary education away from the development of academic skills, particularly reading, to the development of the social skills. This was necessary if the education system were to be used to bring about a socialist society where collectivist values would be favored over individualistic values.
Dewey had been experimenting along these lines at the Laboratory School set up by him in 1896 at the University of Chicago. In 1898 he wrote,
It is almost an unquestioned assumption, of educational theory and practice both, that the first three years of a child's school-life shall be mainly taken up with learning to read and write his own language. ... It does not follow, however, that because this course was once wise it is so any longer. ... The plea for the predominance of learning to read in early school life because of the great importance attaching to literature seems to me a perversion.Dewey recommended a radical reform of primary education and the adoption of teaching methods that would gradually lower the literacy level of the American people. High literacy created individuals with independent intelligence who could think for themselves. Dewey and his colleagues wanted children to become dependent on the collective. He wrote,
Change must come gradually. To force it unduly would compromise its final success by favoring a violent reaction. What is needed in the first place, is that there should be a full and frank statement of conviction with regard to the matter from physiologists and psychologists and from those school administrators who are conscious of the evils of the present regime.In 1908, a young professor of psychology, Edmund Burke Huey, answered Dewey's call for an authoritative book that would put a scientific spin on the new teaching method. The book, "The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading," became the bible of the new progressive educators. Huey wrote,
It is not indeed necessary that the child should be able to pronounce correctly or pronounce at all, at first, the new words that appear in his reading, any more than that he should spell or write all the new words that he hears spoken. If he grasps, approximately, the total meaning of the sentence in which the new word stands, he has read the sentence. ... And even if the child substitutes words of his own for some that are on the page, provided that these express the meaning, it is an encouraging sign that the reading has been real, and recognition of details will come as it is needed. The shock that such a statement will give to many a practical teacher of reading is but an accurate measure of the hold that a false ideal has taken of us, viz., that to read is to say just what is upon the page, instead of to think, each in his own way, the meaning that the page suggests.That just about sums up the philosophy of reading that has produced the literacy disaster that afflicts America today. One can find the same illogical thinking iterated by today's teachers of reading -- from the colleges of education to the primary classrooms.
Phonics teaches a child to read what the author wrote, not what he thinks the author wrote. Today's anti-phonics, whole-language teachers basically adhere to Huey's view of reading. Indeed, they've added their own twist to the philosophy. In a book entitled "Whole Language: What's the Difference?" published in 1991, three whole-language professors wrote,
Whole language represents a major shift in thinking about the reading process. Rather than viewing reading as "getting the words," whole language educators view reading as essentially a process of creating meanings. Meaning is created through a transaction with whole, meaningful texts. It is a transaction, not an extraction of the meaning from the print, in the sense that the reader-created meanings are a fusion of what the reader brings and what the text offers. ... In a transactional model, words do not have static meanings. Rather, they have meaning potentials and the capacity to communicate multiple meanings.No wonder children are having such a tough time learning to read in American schools, and no wonder parents want to get back to phonics. Indeed, the whole-language teachers of the '90s sound just like Huey in 1908. And the reason why they will continue to oppose phonics is because there is a socialist agenda behind the whole-language movement. The authors of the above book also wrote in the same book that "The whole language theoretical premise underlying which topics are pursued and how they are treated is All knowledge is socially constructed. Therefore all knowing is political. ... Whole language is gaining momentum when disparities between economic classes are widening, when the number of homeless people are increasing, when freedom to criticize is threatened by right-wing groups such as Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia." You really cannot understand what all of that has to do with learning to read unless you understand how the left wants to use reading instruction as a tool of socialist indoctrination. A more explicit anti-phonics view was given by whole-language advocates in an article appearing in Education Week of Feb. 27, 1985:By limiting reading instruction to systematic phonics instruction, sound-symbol decoding, and literal comprehension; and by aiming its criticism at reading books' story lines in an effort to influence content, the New Right's philosophy runs counter to the research findings and theoretical perspectives of most noted reading authorities. If this limited view of reading (and, implicitly, of thinking) continues to gain influence ... the New Right will have successfully impeded the progress of democratic governance founded on the ideal of an educated -- and critically thinking -- electorate.If you translate "democratic governance" as socialism, then you understand why the left is so threatened by "literal comprehension." They don't want children to know what they're reading. They want them to feel it, guess it, twist it, invent it. Little did George W. know what he was stepping into when he mentioned phonics.
Meanwhile, Kerry has to figure out who he is and why he's running.
It's amazing to think that just six weeks before the Presidential election a candidate has yet to show why he's running. How the heck did he get nominated in the first place. Grasping straws, I guess.
Any DONKEY can knock down a barn...
But it takes good men to BUILD one.
I think this quote is borrowed from a TN-born Texan: the late Sam Rayburn, Democrat to the core.
Bookmarked for the history lesson.
Thanks.
Bookmarked for the history lesson.
Thanks.
But Dr. Suess was not responsible for the "whole word" debacle. In fact, his books are great for practicing phonics -- the very title The Cat in the Hat is a phonics exercise! And nobody is going to understand the names of the strange creatures in those books without it: "Does your house have a Zans for cans? You should!"
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