K-12: Illiterate New World

American Thinker.com ^ | March 30, 2018 | Bruce Deitrick Price

[Kaslin]

Aldous Huxley devised a single beautiful image for capturing all of these hopes and fears: a hi-tech assembly line where infants were manufactured to specification.  In particular, oxygen levels were adjusted to create babies of very low, low, medium, and very high intelligence.  This image, this metaphor, was stunning in its concreteness.  A huge industrial operation, all clean and shiny, all stainless steel and glass, did what nobody had thought of doing before: control human intelligence in embryo.

It turns out there is an activity in the real world, in real society, that is exactly parallel.  That was the creation of readers to order.  By the simple device of depriving some children of certain key information, they were stunted, no longer able to become professors, more or less predestined for low-level jobs.

As Huxley in the year 1931 was doing the final edit on his book, this country's Education Establishment built a new sort of assembly line for producing flawed children.  Instead of withholding oxygen, this factory withheld the alphabet.  Parents were told that the ABCs are not essential and could be ignored.  As one famous expert announced dogmatically, "[c]urrent practice in the teaching of reading does not require knowledge of letters."  Really?

It turns out there is an activity in the real world, in real society, that is exactly parallel. That was the creation of readers to order. By the simple device of depriving some children of certain key information, they were stunted, no longer able to become professors, more or less predestined for low-level jobs.

[BobL]

Ping!

[dr_lew]

... starting with learning the alphabet at an early age ...

The irony is that "alphabet" is, in essence, Greek. "Alpha Beta" is entirely analogous to our usage of "ABCs". Don't know the point here, except that there is no end to learning.

[Mr. Blond]

Bravo!

[Lizavetta]

By the time I was finished in second grade, still being taught with phonics as well as cursive handwriting, I was reading at a COLLEGE level.

I'm sure you read quite well, given your phonics training. But you and I both know that 2nd graders, which are around 8 years old, are not capable of reading or comprehending legitimate college material.

Unless you're thinking of what currently passes for college material. Like the current SATs, like the current "reading levels", like students who cannot add or subtract or divide or multiply or write being admitted to 4-year universities under the remedial or "emerging" programs, everything has been watered down to accommodate what the government schools have produced.

[Trillian]

I taught my kids to read using phonics. They are well ahead.. I think public schools intentionally dumb kids down and don’t bother teaching them. I was well ahead of other students growing up and my teachers were awful to me.

[BobL]

I don’t think there’s much benefit in knowing the alphabet...except as a communication tool. What REALLY counts is are the sounds (phonics), and learning them, which is what the Left spends all of their time trying to prevent or at least delay, in American kids (and quite successfully, as in our public schools).