In January of this year I wrote a post (Above) on two of the current trends in Education that seem designed to dumb-down our children. The main subject of the post was the marginalization (Actually dismissing with contempt) of the Phonics system that not only has been time-proven in teaching people to read, but is actually the only way in which a alphabetic reading system can be taught if one has any reasonable expectation of success.
The above post provides a brief history on early writing systems and describes how they lead up to the alphabets that we have today. It also explains how systems such as alphabets, as they reduce the amount of symbols from hundreds or more to just over two dozen, are far more conducive to education; they provide a means by which a student can learn all the necessary sounds in a brief period of time. Once this is accomplished, a student can learn to string the sounds together in order to learn how to read. Although I noted that, after many years of reading, people naturally being to recognize most words by sight, even adult readers still need to apply phonics to new or complicated words. Learning words before learning how to actually read them is simply putting the cart before the horse. It not only defeats the purpose of learning to read, it also does not work.
My position was that this trend was primarily the consequence of yet another attack on Western Culture, History, and its style of learning. The following post (Below) from American Thinker, though, makes a powerful argument that this tragedy, which has produced full K-12 generations of former students that have a very difficult time reading material that is far from difficult, has an even darker design. The writer theorizes that Progressives (Leftists), starting in the 1930's, had every intention of reducing people to a level of perpetual ignorance. I can't find fault with his opinion nor with the history that he cites in support. In order to be sold on the Progressive/Leftist agenda, the people not only had to be kept away from material that would give them cause to question the party line as fed to them in schools, they also needed to be unable to read it on their own. History, the ancient classics, writers such as John Locke, Tocqueville, Montesquieu, our Founding Fathers, and the similar works of others are all anathema to the Left and had to be beyond the reach of the young.
John Henry Newmann, a Anglican Convert to Catholicism, once said that "To be deep in History is to cease to be a Protestant". Whether or not one agrees with Cardinal Newmann, the same principle applies to Marxist thought. Leftists, although they revel in their own delusions, are not ignorant of this fact.
The people needed to be unread and unable to think critically for Leftist thought to be able to take root. It is the polar opposite of a vegetable garden. Instead of properly preparing the soil so that desirable plants can flourish, the ground is purposelessly left untilled and unfertilized, hard-baked in the sun, and unwatered so that only junk weeds can grow. Many young people, or even those in their 20's or 30's today, not only have no knowledge whatsoever of the wide array of factors that came together to create the society in which we live, they truly cannot apply themselves to think subjects through to their logical conclusions.
Excerpts from American Thinker:
Italics are mine.
They had power by the 1930s, and their first big move was to throw phonics out and introduce Whole Word, which requires children to memorize words as diagrams. It seems to me a particularly revealing move. From that time forward, our public schools have churned out more than 50 million functional illiterates. We have one million dyslexics, with some estimates much higher. We have a vast decline in culture, in general knowledge, and in ordinary common sense. (If people still have any of that, it's arguably because they are constantly interacting with movies and TV; most of this so-called entertainment is more sophisticated than most of the so-called education served up in our public schools.)
And all this decline was accomplished by a simple device: our collectivist educators, having climbed their way to the top, refused to let the peasants learn to read.
The reason for using Whole Word never seemed to have anything to do with helping the Low. A cursory look at literacy statistics proves that this method is a bust and generally hurts the slower students most. The real agenda always seemed to be making sure that the Low stay low, and in creating an economic and cultural disaster zone where the Middle can sign up new recruits and continue their assault on the High. Indeed, the Middle use their control of education primarily to wean the Low away from supporting the High. Education today is a war of propaganda against the status quo, until the High give up. Isn't this what we are seeing?
The Education Establishment pushed Look-say, Sight Words, Whole Language, and Balanced Literacy (all these are the same thing under different names) in an endless rolling barrage unlike anything seen since the trench warfare of World War I. Phonics had to be obliterated. Whole Word had to be enforced, by whatever claims, weird jargon, repackaging, and outright lies were necessary.
So I propose that reading theory -- perhaps I should say false reading theory -- provides a miniature diorama of George Orwell's analysis. Our Middle are Socialists, and once they were on the move circa 1931, they showed, at least in education, their true colors. I think it's fair to say that Obama and his far-left friends would like to move to the top. Obviously, this is bad news for the High. But this essay is about the Low. The warning is clear. The Low should not be so foolish as to expect much of anything. The people at the bottom will be kept there, ignorant, on welfare, and for sure hardly literate.
In short, the peasants never get an even break.
In 1911, G. Stanley Hall, one of John Dewey's mentors, went so far as to extol illiteracy: "It is possible, despite the stigma our bepedagogued age puts upon this disability, for those who are under it not only to lead a useful, happy, virtuous life, but to be really well-educated in many other ways." [And what, pray tell, are those "many other ways"? I think that I know what he means]
And so we see that in reading -- theory, methods, and results -- we can read the contempt of Socialists....."
There is more of this incredibly insightful post on the link
No comments:
Post a Comment