Posted on 01/20/2008 7:28:45 AM PST by rellimpank
A letter-writer recently objected that I used great libertarian Rose Wilder Lane as a "sole source" for the fact that American schooling was taken over, in the late 19th century, by statists enamored of the Prussian compulsion model, aiming to create a docile peasant class by crippling the American intellect -- making reading seem real hard, for starters, by replacing the old system in which delighted kids learned to combine the sounds of the Roman letters, with a perverted "whole word" method better suited to decoding hieroglyphics.
In July 1991, John Taylor Gatto, New York's Teacher of the Year, quit, saying he was tired of working for an institution that crippled the ability of children to learn. He explained why in an essay published that month in The Wall Street Journal.
Let's look at that essay, and see if we can find our "second source":
"Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history," Mr. Gatto begins. "It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents.
"Socrates foresaw if teaching became a formal profession, something like this would happen. Professional interest is served by making what is easy to do seem hard; by subordinating the laity to the priesthood. School is too vital a jobs-project, contract giver and protector of the social order to allow itself to be 're-formed.' It has political allies to guard its marches, that's why reforms come and go without changing much. ...
(Excerpt) Read more at lvrj.com ...
bumpity bump
whew!
The nanny-statists will protest using a libertarian as a source for anything.
Repeat until it sinks in!
My 6-year-old is a "reading education specialist." He has a box of colored, magnetic letters, and two little brothers. The 4-year-old knows all the capital and lower-case letters, numbers, colors and basic phonics. (For all I know, he can read words, too - I figure out that my sons can read when they show up reading my mail to me.) The boy who's almost two knows all the capital letters in English, some of the colors, and lower-case letters in Greek.
Aside from rolling in the mud and jumping off things in their superhero capes, playing letters and numbers is their favorite thing to do.
I read a book called “The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson”. In it, it contains a letter written to a young friend, Mr. Peter Carr. He advises his young friend on his education saying “ I advise you to begin a course of ancient history, reading everything in the original and not in translations.” Jefferson then outlines the books his young protegee should read and in the order that they should be read.
When Jefferson talks about reading the works in the original he is talking Greek, Latin and in some cases Hebrew.
I would argue that the well educated of Jefferson’s day far exceed what we commonly call “well educated” today.
Probably best to leave those who can't read by 4 or 5 to go on to the public schools since they really aren't all that intelligent when you get right down to it.(/sarc but in some cases true).
Certainly in many ways. Some subjects, of course, didn't exist in Jefferson's time.
Boys who attended college in the colonial period would often start at 14 or 15, able to read Greek, Latin, and Hebrew.
It’s true that some people aren’t as intelligent as others. However, if the goal is to assist people in developing their abilities, such as they are, to the fullest, our public school system wouldn’t be the means I would recommend.
But you overlook one wee little thing...for most of the education majors, reading IS hard.
The lowest SAT scores of any major are typically the education majors.
Most of them probably never learned to read at a high school level until their senior year...of COLLEGE./mild sarc>
Cheers!
That's a sad thought, grey_whiskers.
btt
Sounds like normal little boys to me.
Aside from Pat, they’re pretty normal. I think it’s normal for children to want to learn to read, and generally not hard for them to do so.
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