Posted on 08/17/2002 5:05:28 AM PDT by JohnHuang2
In a few short weeks, many thousands of black children will enter first grade in public schools all over America where, inside of a year, many of them will become full-fledged reading failures and, thereby, future members of the black underclass.
There is no reason why anyone with an education should be relegated to the underclass. But that's the rub. The system will pretend to educate, while systematically using teaching methods, such as whole language and invented spelling, that create reading disability and dyslexia, thus putting that child on the road to academic failure.
Thus, intelligent children who, with proper instruction, would otherwise become truly literate are relegated to the junk heap of our society because of a perverse elite that is hell-bent on dumbing down the nation. Inner-city black children suffer the most because their parents are least able to understand what is happening to their children in the public schools.
In America, we compel children to be subjected to wholesale educational malpractice with hardly a complaint from our intellectual establishment. The only people who genuinely care are so-called right-wing "extremists" who write books critical of the system, which are never reviewed by the academic community.
Here's what Professor Anthony Oettinger of Harvard University, a rabid advocate of dumbing down, told an audience of corporation executives in 1982:
The present "traditional" concept of literacy has to do with the ability to read and write. But the real question that confronts us today is: How do we help citizens function well in their society? How can they acquire the skills necessary to solve their problems?
Do we, for example, really want to teach people to do a lot of sums or write in "a fine round hand" when they have a $5 hand-held calculator or a word processor to work with? Or, do we really have to have everybody literate – writing and reading in the traditional sense – when we have the means through our technology to achieve a new flowering of oral communication?
Of course, the original purpose of universal compulsory education was universal literacy. However, the academic elite are now asking whether or not everybody ought to be literate. But every parent who puts a child in a public school expects that school to teach their child to read in the traditional sense. But now we are dealing with teachers who ask "do we really want to teach people to do a lot of sums or how to read?"
But make no mistake about it. Even though they have no intention of teaching those children how to do sums, or write in a fine round hand, or read and write in the traditional sense, they still want them in the classroom for 12 years. What for? To turn them into abject failures.
Regardless of whether the child will be going to a better public school outside his or her neighborhood or to a charter school, chances are very good that he or she will be trained to read by one of the whole-language programs that produce reading disability and dyslexia.
How can this be, you might ask. Hasn’t whole language been thrown out and replaced by intensive, systematic phonics? Unfortunately, not. The educators may not call the reading program whole language, but you can be sure that it will be whole language in a new disguise. The new program is generally referred to as “A Balanced Approach.” It is all part of the dumbing-down agenda, which is the basis of our dumbed-down curriculum.
The reason why the schools are not teaching reading by way of intensive systematic phonics is because there are virtually no primary teachers capable of doing so. Their training at college emphasized whole-language instruction. Therefore, even if they wanted to teach intensive systematic phonics, they would not know how to do it.
The American public-school system has become a sadistic trap for the unwary. It turns some teachers into sadists, who gain secret pleasure in the knowledge that they are destroying the intellect and spirit of millions of young Americans. And, unfortunately, there is nothing in President Bush's education reform that will change this. Thus, the only solution for parents is to get their kids out and either teach them at home or put them in a private school they can trust.
I was not a special ed teacher, but I am dubious of this distinction. If someone can understand the speech of others (ie--can hear and understand the teacher), there's no apparent reason, IMO, that they couldn't "sound out" words. I don't oppose including picture flash cards, but at the early stages of learning to read, the alphabet sounds and "sounding out" must be mastered--particularly with the average reader rather than a natural one. Even the natural reader ought to have these skills...he may someday want to learn Spanish or Russian.
With a phonics program, visuals are and should be included. Children should start reading simple phrases aloud immediately, and lots of coaching over unfamiliar words builds confidence and skills. Spelling drills and tests bore teachers, but they do not bore children as much as we'd like to believe (so that we'd then have an excuse to eliminate those drills and tests). Little stories with rhyming and alliteration are surprisingly effective. I do not believe reading education is mysterious ... but as RR said, what is simple is not necessarily easy.
It's like the freakin' Bataan death march.
All of these kids would have been better off if their schools had burned down over the summer. Then they would know that they don't know, rather than thinking that they know when they don't.
There was an explosion of dyslexia diagnoses in California when the state implemented a systematic whole language curriculum. The article also mentions that there is a high correlation between dyslexia and ADHD. 75% of children diagnosed with ADHD are dyslexic.
This link explores the link between sound recognition, phonemes and brain activity.
According to Mr. Blumenfeld (and it seems true in my experience as a home-schooling dad) -- you can teach a ready child to read in about 30 hours. It takes Japanese kids 4-6 years to memorize enough ideographs to read a Japanese newspaper. Now, if we teach English as though it were Japanese, we can stretch out a one-week project into many years of job security for "educators." The people who profit from the problems they create.
It is not uncommon to find a family where one child has ADHD, another dyslexia or learning difficulties, a third dyspraxia and it is quite common for an individual to suffer from more than one of these conditions. In fact:* "As many as 65% of children with ADHD also struggle with at least one other learning disorder, and sometimes bipolar disorder and/or Tourette’s Syndrome (TS) [14]
* 50% of dyspraxic children also have ADHD [14]
* Some 30 to 50 percent of children with dyslexia have ADHD and vice versa. (The Dyslexia Research Institute puts this figure at 60%)" [14]
* It is estimated that 60% of people with Tourette’s Syndrome (TS) have ADHD and 50% have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and that there is a high association of these disorders in their family histories [15].
I was not a special ed teacher, but I am dubious of this distinction. If someone can understand the speech of others (ie--can hear and understand the teacher), there's no apparent reason, IMO, that they couldn't "sound out" words.
Did you ever teach a child with articulation problems? Not phonics, I hope.
If you have a kid with a chronilogical age of 6 and mental age of 8 years, that child should be reading above grade-level. But some can't read. Just as some people see things backwards, some don't distinguish sounds nor are they able to remember the sequencing of sounds. They are going to have a problem learning to read with the phonics method. They may learn all the auditory/visual symbols but they can't remember sounds in an order.
Sorry not to respond to you sooner but I was out of town for the weekend.
I am a speech therapist.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.