A friend of mine, an attorney, was appointed to a committee to create standard forms for the state bar association to promulgate for practitioners to use when dealing with a new statutory process. The committee was comprised of attorneys of varied backgrounds and several judges. Being apparently the only person on the committee with a private school primary education, she soon found herself continuously correcting phrases in the verbiage in the forms, which included syntax and grammar errors. It got so bad that some on the committee began to resent her interjections and she finally requested to be excused from participation on the committee. Rather than appreciating the expertise she offered, the committee chose to forge ahead in ignorance. The best and brightest, no less.
7th grade.
About 1960.
We had English grammar and sentence construction (diagramming) infused into us for a whole year!
That has served me well, to this day.
Phonics works. All of my siblings and I learned to read with phonics before starting first grade, most of us by age 4.
Focus on phonics to teach reading is ‘failing children’, says landmark study
That's just one example, I can find dozens more.
In a more common sense era, American schools used rote memorization exclusively and anyone who managed to make it past third grade was more literate than half of high school graduates today who've been "schooled" with phonics.
As for the author's claim that, "English is a vast language. Memorizing it one word at a time is purest folly....", where is it written that you need to know, less have to MEMORIZE the entire language? The majority of the most highly educated Americans only has the command of +/-5% of the more than 1 million English words anyway. And phonics is destined to fail you because English is a higgledy-piggledy conglomeration of Angle, Saxon, Jute, Frisian, Latin, Old Norse, and Norman French. The language today is a logical disaster because it was largely frozen in time in 1453 when William Caxton began operating the first movable type printing press in England.
Plus we have "loan" words that have come to us in the last couple of centuries through commerce and military intrigue from Spanish, German, French, Italian, Yiddish/Hebrew and Hindi. If phonics were ever going to work (which it wasn't) you first would have to know the linguistic origins of every word, which leads directly back to -- you guessed it -- rote memorization.
That's why the old bromide was "The Three Rs," not "the P and Two Rs."
I’m not sure I agree with the article.
I’m Israeli and leaned English in state schools. I do reasonably well. Sure people can tell on FR that my English is not necessarily American English, but mutual comprehension is seldom a problem unless I don’t understand and idiom or I try to translate a Hebrew idiom or saying without context.
With the exception of new immigrants and some educationally recalcitrant Arab groups, I don’t know if any group that is not reasonably fluent in English. Indeed, with new immigrants (chiefly Russian and Ukraine) the problem is not speaking English, it’s that they get along by speaking English and don’t learn Hebrew, which really limits their job and social prospects.
Older students keep telling me their teachers insist on guessing from texts and looking for clues when words are unknownI asked an Eng Dept. Chair at a large No.VA public school why his department doesn't teach grammar. He replied that kids need to learn language "holistically" as opposed to doing boring grammar exercises.
“You have to ask yourself what kind of people run our school system? Well, they’re very practical people pursuing the wrong goals. Essentially, they are focused on social engineering goals.”
They are not “practical” in any relevant sense; they are not educated in any relevant sense; and they are not intelligent or moral in any relevant sense. The people in the schools are, on the whole, inferior minds that have been indoctrinated in the evil ideologies of the left and who are daily committing educational, moral, spiritual, and, increasingly, physical child abuse. What parents should have done long ago, and what they can do now, is take their children out of the little whited sepulchres known as government schools. They cannot be reformed, although I know that that has been your belief. Do you still that now now in the face of the government schools promoting, in addition to profound illiteracy, gender ideology, CRT, and the chemical and surgical mutilation of children? Placing a child in a government school is child endangerment. Teaching phonics is a very good thing, but the evils of government schools go far beyond the choice of the correct reading pedagogy.
We'll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes,
But the plural of ox becomes oxen, not oxes;
One fowl is a goose, but two are called geese,
Yet the plural of moose should never be meese;
You may find a lone mouse or a nest full of mice,
Yet the plural of house is houses, not hice.
If the plural of man is always called men,
Why shouldn't the plural of pan be called pen ?
If I speak of my foot and show you my feet,
And I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet ?
If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth,
Why shouldn't the plural of booth be called beeth ?
Then one may be that, & three would be those,
Yet hat in the plural would never be hose;
And the plural of cat is cats, not cose.
We speak of a brother & also of brethren,
But though we say mother, we never say methren.
Then the masculine pronouns are he, his & him,
But imagine the feminine: she, shis & shim !
Let's face it - English is a crazy language.
There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger;
Neither apple nor pine in pineapple.
English muffins weren't invented in England .
We take English for granted,
But if we explore its paradoxes,
We find that quicksand can work slowly,
Boxing rings are square;
A guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.
Why is it that writers write, but fingers don't fing,
Grocers don't groce & hammers don't ham ?
Doesn't it seem crazy that ...
You can make amends but not one amend ?
If you have a bunch of odds and ends ...
And get rid of all but one of them,
What do you call it ?
If teachers taught, why didn't preachers praught ?
If a vegetarian eats vegetables,
What does a humanitarian eat ?
Sometimes I think all people who speak English
Should be in an asylum for the verbally insane.
In what other language do people recite at a play,
And play at a recital ?
We ship by truck but send cargo by ship ....
We have noses that run & feet that smell;
We park in a driveway & drive in a parkway.
And how can a slim chance & a fat chance be the same,
While a wise man & a wise guy are opposites ?
You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language
In which your house can burn up as it burns down;
In which you fill in a form by filling it out,
& in which an alarm goes off by going on.
And in closing ....
If Father is Pop .....
How come Mother's not Mop ? ? ? ?Gallagher and English language
Then he made fun of words that are spelled the same but pronounced differently: good and food; bomb, tomb and comb; home and some; worse and horse; laughter and daughter; ache and mustache; beard and heard; go and do.
Why should I be serious about the language when the language isn’t serious enough to make sense?
I was one of those 1959 - 1960 kids who learned to read with Dick and Jane, Tip and Mitten in a rural Georgia county in a first through twelfth grade school.
Many years later my mother told me, after she began teaching there at the same school, that several of the old spinster teachers that I had through fifth grade had been hired, when the male teachers went to fight in WWII, with only two year teaching certificates, which were "grandfathered" to continue teaching with no requirement to upgrade their credentials.
I'll never forget when one of the fifth grade teachers was my first and second grade Sunday school teacher. One of the other kids in the class asked what something in our Sunday school lesson meant. The teacher said she didn't know. My mother was enrolled in Berry Collège at the time and had explained footnotes to me. I told the teacher that the footnote explained what it meant but the fifth grade teacher did not understand what a footnote was and looked at me like I was speaking Greek.
Fat chance that my first grade teacher would teach Phonetics in 1960. I hated and despised my first grade teacher but that's another story altogether.