Posted on 03/29/2003 4:46:58 PM PST by Lizavetta
Educators are worried by a general decline in reading skills among Israeli youth, and blame a teaching method imported from the U.S. Is the remedy a back-to-basics approach?
Y. a 16-year-old girl from Jerusalem, was sent to see Dr. Nurit Elhanan-Peled, a psychologist and literacy expert, for some remedial help after the school system determined that she had great difficulty reading. Y., who came to Israel from the former Soviet Union, was referred to Elhanan-Peled after her teachers noticed, for example, that she didn't immediately catch on that the word malta'i refers to someone from Malta or that the word galuti refers to a Jew who lives in the Diaspora (gola in Hebrew).
It only took one meeting for Elhanan-Peled to see that Y. understood very well whatever she wanted to understand and that she had no learning disorder. "I gave her Erich Segal's book `Love Story' to read and she came back and told me that she wasn't going to read it because it's a stupid book. I asked her to show me the stupidest thing in it and she pointed to the opening lines: `What can you say about a 25-year-old girl who died? That she was beautiful. And brilliant. That she loved Mozart and Bach. And the Beatles. And me.' I asked her why she thought it was so stupid and she explained: `Because you die at the end, not at the beginning.' And she'd been told that she was dyslexic. She wasn't dyslexic at all. She read when she wanted to. I've had a lot of cases like that. That's why the Psychological Service doesn't send me dyslexics for testing anymore, because I kept telling them that the kids they sent to me weren't dyslexic."
Every few years, the school system seems to agonize over the best method for teaching Israeli children the fundamentals of reading, writing and reading comprehension, and how to make teaching the Hebrew language a more attractive and interesting profession. This is no easy task: Hebrew is one of the least popular subjects among Israeli schoolchildren. Last month, the Mutagim Institute conducted a poll for the Teachers' Federation in which middle-school students were asked to rank their favorite subjects. Hebrew and grammar came in last. Only 1 percent of students ages 10-14 and 6 percent of students ages 8-9 picked Hebrew as a favorite subject.
Unsurprisingly, this attitude is also reflected in students' achievements in Hebrew. In 1996, the Ministry of Education conducted a nationwide test of reading and reading comprehension for grades four and eight. The results were sobering: 14 percent of fourth-graders from the top socioeconomic decile and 38 percent from the lowest socioeconomic decile did poorly at reading comprehension; the overall failure rate was 28 percent. The eighth-grade averages were even worse: 49 percent had poor reading comprehension of a literary text, 30 percent had poor writing ability and 25 percent had poor knowledge of the language.
This resounding failure and the ensuing public pressure propelled the Education Ministry to take action. In October 2000, Knesset Education Committee chairman Zevulun Orlev appointed a committee headed by Prof. Rina Shapira to examine the issue of reading and language instruction. The committee's findings were practically a forgone conclusion. The key word that appeared in them was "reform."
In July 2001, when it recommended its reforms, the Shapira committee said the culprit was the early-reading teaching method known as Hasafa Ke'mikhlol (Whole Language Method), which was imported to Israel from the United States in the 1980s. In this method, the pupil first learns/guesses entire words and only afterward learns the consonants, vowels and syllables of which they are composed. Compare it to a building whose exterior is slapped together all at once and not built up brick by brick, and it's easy to see why the building collapses and why the method did not prove effective.
Whole Language, as far as I can see, should be renamed Whole Failure. Wherever it goes, children become illiterates.
Addendum: Listen to their advice and do the opposite.
"The problem is that the system aspires to mediocrity instead of excellence,"
That's the problem with school systems in general as of late. They lower the quality of education to the least common denominator so the "mentally challenged" (not "mentally disabled", there is a difference) children don't feel "outclassed" by their smarter peers. The other side to this is that the "gifted" students fall asleep in class, don't do homework, and get crappy grades because they're bored as f**k.
""The idea of striving for excellence was sacrificed on the altar of egalitarianism. This was a terrible mistake. In studies that have been done in countries where there is a drive for excellence, there was shown to be more homogeneity, and the overall average went up."
Egalitarianism, that is, rewarding the stupid for achieving what is really very little and punishing the smart through prolonged boredom and classification as "failures" by society. Yup. Definitely imported from the United States, I'm sad to say. :/
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