Speaking of dumbing down our children...
"Those who can read, but don't, are no better of than those that can't."
The site:
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/bluesky_excomm/19990915_xex_politics_and.shtml
The article"
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>
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Politics and phonics
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By Samuel L. Blumenfeld
© 1999 WorldNetDaily.com
Last 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.
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[/quote]
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John/az
"The middle of the road between the extremes of good and evil, is evil. When freedom is at stake, your silence is not golden, it's yellow..." RKBA!
www.quixtar.com
referal #2005932
"Those who can read, but don't, are no better of than those that can't."
The site:
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/bluesky_excomm/19990915_xex_politics_and.shtml
The article"
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Politics and phonics
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Samuel L. Blumenfeld
© 1999 WorldNetDaily.com
Last 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.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[/quote]
------------------
John/az
"The middle of the road between the extremes of good and evil, is evil. When freedom is at stake, your silence is not golden, it's yellow..." RKBA!
www.quixtar.com
referal #2005932
