[rellimpank]

--the weekly Vin--

[steveyp]

bumpity bump

[BenLurkin]

[tacticalogic]

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.

The nanny-statists will protest using a libertarian as a source for anything.

[Tax-chick]

Professional interest is served by making what is easy to do seem hard;

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.

[Cacique]

btt