Wednesday, September 22, 2004

WHERE THE ANTI-PHONICS NONSENSE ALL STARTED

At Wundt's psychological laboratory in Germany around a century ago

Wundt, with his laboratory and machines, was certainly trying to better himself and win for his discipline a new kind of legitimacy. It was just for that reason that he attracted so many students, many of them Americans who came home to found schools of educational psychology and psychological testing and to impress upon our whole system of schooling the indelible mark of clinical practice. One of them was a certain James Cattell, who, while playing with some of Wundt's apparatus, made a remarkable and portentous discovery. Here, in brief, is the story, as told by Lance J. Klass in "The Leipzig Connection" (The Delphian Press, 1978), a useful little book on the influence of Wundt in the history of American educationism:

One series of experiments Cattell performed while at Leipzig examined the manner in which a person sees the words he is reading. By testing adults who knew how to read, Cattell "discovered" that individuals can recognize words without having to sound out the letters. From this, he reasoned that words are not read by compounding the letters, but are perceived as "total word pictures." He determined that little is gained by teaching the child his sounds and letters as the first step to being able to read. Since individuals could recognize words very rapidly, the way to teach children how to read was to show them words, and tell them what the words were. The result was the dropping of the phonic or alphabetic method of teaching reading, and its replacement by the sight-reading method in use throughout America.


The consequences of Cattell's "discovery" have surely been enormous, for they include not only the stupefaction of almost the whole of American culture but even the birth and colossal growth of a lucrative industry devoted first to assuring that children won't be able to read and then to selling an endless succession of "remedies" for that inability

..... our educationists prefer not to treat the multiplication table as something that just has to be learned. They rather think of multiplying as a desirable "student outcome," a "behavioral modification" of one who does not know how to multiply. This would be only a harmless playing with words if it weren't for the fact that not all students learn to multiply with equal ease. If we simply think of the multiplication table as a set of numbers that must be learned by brute force, we can demand more force of those who fail to learn. If we think of the ability to multiply as a "behavioral objective," an appropriate response to stimuli, then the student who doesn?t learn to multiply must drive us to seek other stimuli and perhaps, in stubborn cases, to decide that learning the multiplication table has only limited value for the student outcome of multiplication. From such a view, other follies may flow.

The folly at hand, the word-recognition teaching of reading, is the result of just such tormented thinking. It is perfectly true that people who can read do not stop to sound out letters. That, therefore, is an attribute of readers. So, to the mortally wundted, the path to reading requires the not sounding out of letters as a student outcome, and student behavior must be modified accordingly. Thus, the rare and pesky student who has learned the sounds of some letters must be discouraged

More here.




BRITAIN: DESTROYING EDUCATION BY LITIGATION

"I love my job as a head teacher. It is really satisfying to be responsible for young people and to guide them in realising their potential. But sadly my time is increasingly occupied by lawyers and I have to divert an ever growing proportion of my budget away from staff, books and equipment towards defending and insuring against legal actions.

Head teachers do, on occasion, have to exclude pupils. Parents are sometimes reluctant to believe that their child can do any wrong. In one case, a parent having chosen my school, which advertises discipline and strong sanctions, stated that discipline should not be imposed in any circumstances. He complained that there was nothing wrong with his son using school computers to download pornography, but that it was wrong for me to impose a temporary exclusion on his son for doing so. The parent brought in his solicitor, which, under our insurance policy, meant that we too had to seek and pay for legal advice.....

In two cases my decisions have been overruled by panels that had little understanding of current education. In the first case, a panel member asked me how many O-levels the pupil had gained and was very offensive when I could not answer because O-levels were abolished years before the pupil had even entered secondary education. Another panel member opined that students did no work in the lower sixth and thus bad behaviour was to be expected. Even if this had been true in the past, the current system of AS- and A2-levels requires dedication throughout the course, with public examinations at the end of the lower sixth year. Needless to say, the panel member had no knowledge of the current system.....

Risk assessment procedures and second-guessing by parents make it increasingly difficult to organise study visits at home and abroad. If, like many schools, we reduced the number of visits or stopped them completely, then the losers would be the pupils who benefit so greatly from these experiences. All these visits are voluntary and so, if parents are anxious, their children do not have to take part.

So far as organising trips is concerned, our increasingly risk-averse, bureaucratic and lawyer-plagued culture means that many children are already being deprived of opportunities. One local authority (not mine) issued a diktat stating that every visit had to be accompanied by a first-aider and that if a party was subdivided into groups then each section must have its own first-aider! Obviously a first-aider goes out on a geography or a biology field visit, but a visit to a London museum is very different, and even one first-aider is unnecessary because such institutions have good first aid facilities.....

We carry insurance, which is becoming increasingly expensive, and is now a serious drain on our budget. We cannot afford to do without it. However, our insurers are very helpful, and so far our students are still able to undertake a range of activities.

The Prime Minister said that his priority was `education, education, education'. Sadly, it seems that what he really meant was `litigation, litigation, litigation'. Is it any wonder that while universities have to abandon courses in physics and chemistry because of lack of demand, they are overwhelmed with applications from would-be lawyers?"

More here.




A good comment from Bill's Comments: "Wendy McElroy has an article in Fox News Opinion concerning the testing for mental health in the public schools. What she describes is scary. Not because of the current reality, but because of what it portends in the future. The most common technique the liberals and the left use today is, "It's for the children." Children's "rights" trump parental rights. The goal is to gain control over our children and through them in time over society. More and more, rulings in the courts are going against the parents and in favor of the state. Programs for children are not predicated on proper research but on feel-good, wishful-thinking ideas of so-called professional educators and developmental experts".



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