Let's have a debate.
"Be it resolved: you can't claim to care about children and their education, and then turn around and make sure they will never read. Not unless you are a hypocrite."
I agree with that totally. 100%. I will argue in the affirmative. Seems to me it's an open-and-shut case, not even requiring debate.
Or is there someone who will take the other side?
Only, so far as I can tell, the entire Education Establishment.
Didn't they claim to care about children and their education? Didn't they then turn around and make sure that children would never read, in many millions of cases?
In doing that, they surely revealed themselves to be huge phonies.
Wait a minute, you might object. True, they did claim to care about children's education. But they certainly did not turn around and make sure that children would be illiterate. Why, that's too horrible to even contemplate.But then you have the inconvenient evidence: 50 million functional illiterates. That's about 1 million people a year that the public schools turn into non-readers, mostly forever.Are you thinking that this is an accident, like cosmic rays, changing climates, asteroids, earthquakes, or swine flu epidemics, just one of those nasty things that sweep back and forth through our society for no reason?
No, no. That completely overlooks the central fact of American public education for the last 75 years. The schools insisted on teaching kids to read with a technique known as Look-say or Whole Word. Basically, the kids are supposed to memorize words as graphic designs, which is exceedingly difficult to do, especially in large quantities.
Rudolf Flesch, in 1955, wrote a whole book on this method's many flaws. Here's a short, informal way to understand the central problem:
Imagine you live in a house with 200 dogs, each very distinctive. Do you think you could get to the point where you can name them automatically? Robert... Bojangles... Cass... Lucifer... Socks... Nero....Just for simplicity's sake, could you name them at the rate of one a second? That's not reading speed; it's slow. But it is convenient and easy to grasp. Name one dog a second as your move through the house. Can you do it?
The truth is, you can know somebody's name for years and still not be able to bring it up. You can see a favorite celebrity; and his name might escape you for many seconds. If any delays occur, reading is slow or stopped.
But the real problem occurs when you consider that the number 200, if we're discussing the English language, is tiny, just the beginning. Imagine trying to go from 200 dogs to 2,000 dogs. Even if your life depended on it, could you do that? Or 2,000 paintings. Or 2,000 celebrities. Or 2,000 sight-words. (All essentially the same challenge. You have to memorize a design or shape. Imagine the struggle.)
Fact is, almost nobody can memorize tens of thousands of sight-words (a/k/a whole-words and Dolch words). But the Education Establishment breezily claimed 50,000 was quite doable, and forced this method on the schools. Fifty thousand!?!
A hoax? A sick joke? A new pinnacle of incompetence? A naked attempt at dumbing down the country? Whatever it is, this is a method that clearly cannot work and should never have been used. Even professors of education, if they were candid, would confess: this thing is impossible; why did we stick with it so long? Now the older professors of education have to pretend that nothing untoward happened for the past 75 years. Meanwhile, the younger professors have to pretend that their mentors are innocent.
It's really quite a circus. You have 50 million proven cases of child abuse. That's the three-ton gorilla in the scene.
Top-level people had to know all along this scam wasn't working. The stats were clear. But the so-called educators went right on pretending to care about your child's education even as they went right on pretending the child was learning to read. That's a lot of bluffing.
It continues today.
Be it resolved: because they pretended to care about the education of children but used a bogus reading method that virtually guarantees illiteracy, the Education Establishment should be regarded as this country's biggest phonies.
Anyone care to take the other side? Are there other phonies just as bad?
CODA: some may object that in using Salinger's picture, I am guilty of deception, of bait and switch. Yes, in a way. But it gives you a chance to experience what kids feel when they are told that Whole Word will enable them to do read...But it doesn't.
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(Bruce Price is an author, artist and education activist. He founded
Improve-Education.org in 2005. This site has many articles about reading. See, for example, "42: Reading Resources." The three YouTube videos also deal with reading.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwObPTGql...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuihhEpQE...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfzo02gWq....