Sunday, June 29, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

COLUMN: Vin Suprynowicz

'Complex facets of instructional presentation'

In the Review-Journal's June 23 editorial, "The kids can't read," after summarizing Nevada's dismal, worst-in-the-nation eighth-grade reading scores, we stated: "Whatever Nevada's public school systems are doing in an attempt to teach our children to read is not working. Teaching kids to read English is a skill that was perfected by folks without college degrees, centuries ago. Hiring scores of folks with advanced degrees to glom up the system with trendy new methods of 'pedagogy' has not only been no help, it has been demonstrably counterproductive."

As if in answer to our prayers, comes now a letter from one Aaron Severson, admitting and exposing the kind of claptrap to which our schools have fallen prey, and to which we alluded -- the notion that you can't teach children to read merely by having them memorize their alphabet song and then instructing them in the sound each letter makes, at which point it's time to start asking, "Now, can you think of any words that start with that 'd' sound?"

No, no, no. The kind of folks who taught Tom Jefferson and James Fenimore Cooper had no idea what they were doing; they were mere rural bumpkins. Without benefit of Ph.D.s in "education" how could they possibly have inculcated literacy in their young charges?

Mr. Severson writes: "I was very surprised to learn that teaching kids to read is a simple technique we have mastered for a couple hundred years now. Apparently reading instruction `is a skill that was perfected by folks without college degrees centuries ago.' Please forgive me if I've misunderstood, but it seems that the Review-Journal is suggesting that in the olden days `folks' could teach a kid to read as easily as they'd pump a well for water or light their kerosene lamp. ...

"I can picture the two cowboys now. 'Hey Merl, why dotcha rotate them wagon wheels an' I'll learn little Johnny how to read.' Apparently our education system was working just fine before people committed the foolish error of dedicating their lives to the complex facets of instructional presentation, student assessment, and curriculum planning. ...

"Teaching students to read is not a skill. It's a process facilitated by educators and concerned parents. The ability to read evolves over an extended period of time. And, as far as I am aware, it hasn't been 'perfected' by anyone. ..."

To answer this unusually clear statement of the typical "professional educator's" view of the native intelligence and child-rearing prowess of us retarded cowpokes, I don't know how much better qualified an expert we could find than John Taylor Gatto, who has been named on multiple occasions the "Teacher of the Year" in both the city and the state of New York.

In his new book, "The Underground History of American Education," Gatto demonstrates that public schooling hasn't improved literacy -- it's considerably eroded it.

"By 1840" (more than a decade before the opening of the first tax-funded schools on the modern model, in Massachusetts) "the incidence of complex literacy in the United States was between 93 and 100 percent." Gatto writes.

"By 1940 the literacy figure for all states stood at 96 percent for whites. 80 percent for blacks. ... Six decades later, at the end of the 20th century, the National Adult Literacy Survey and the National Assessment of Educational Progress say 40 percent of blacks and 17 percent of whites can't read at all. Put another way, black illiteracy doubled, white illiteracy quadrupled," despite the fact that "we spend three or four times as much real money on schooling as we did 60 years ago. ..."

How did that happen?

"During World War Two, American public schools massively converted to non-phonetic ways of teaching reading," Gatto explains.

In 1882, Gatto reminds us, fifth graders read in their "Appleton School Reader" the original prose of such authors as William Shakespeare, Henry Thoreau, George Washington, Sir Walter Scott, Mark Twain, Daniel Webster, Lewis Carroll, and Tom Jefferson.

Yet by 1995, a student teacher of fifth graders in Minneapolis was writing to the local newspaper: "I was told children are not to be expected to spell the following words correctly: back, big, call, came, can, day, did, dog, down, get, good ... Is this nuts?"

These disastrous impacts on our society are not merely Mr. Gatto's opinion, mind you -- they stare us in the face, unmistakable, every time a modern "high school graduate" tries to count change or spell the words in a classified ad, every time the majority of science graduate students in a major American university is found to be foreign-born.

The make-work Tartuffian mummery invoked and championed by Mr. Severson, which pretends that reading can only be taught via "complex facets of instructional presentation, student assessment, and curriculum planning," has not only done no good -- it has caused severe and irrefutable harm to the nation.

The kids can't read.

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal and author of the books "Send in the Waco Killers" and "The Ballad of Carl Drega." His Web site is www.privacyalert.us.