Literacy
failures continue to compound with each generation as mis-educators focus on
everything except the core problem: The
Devastation of Language and Literacy.
The vast
majority of Americans no longer Hear, Speak, Spell, Read, or Write English with
competency, let alone with skill. The destruction of Americans’ ability to
precisely understand and use their own language is at the root of every problem
that faces our nation: school failure; dearth of general knowledge;
limited horizons; shallow, inaccurate thought processes; poor communication
skills; unemployability; criminality; and the development of this shallow,
polarized society in which we live. Still teachers are wasting precious
educational time, and damaging young brains, with flashcards and sight word memorization.
We have no
reason to expect any noticeable change, whether a Hobby Educator, or a Degreed
Educator, is at the helm of the money wasting, regulation imposing, U.S.
Department of Education. The True Educators have mostly died off or been
spiritually beaten into silence. Thus far, no one in power has been
willing to 1) accurately identify the Core Problem and its breadth, 2) agree
to fund only proven traditional methods, and 3) demand absolute use of
successful teaching methods. Only by doing these three things can America
solve the Core Problem at each level and thus RESET the
learning and intellectual abilities of all Americans:
Preschool; Elementary; 6-12th Grades,
and Adult.
The Goal
should be Life Learning Until America Is Re-Educated!
Most
modern teachers in America have never taught any child to be a great
reader. My very wise educator mother always maintained that, “Children,
who do learn to read in today’s schools, learn in spite of the instruction.” I have to agree
with her. My own son, by the school’s own testing, was reading at the 11th grade
level in Second Grade BUT he was forced to use First Grade basal readers in the
classroom because that was the level of the lowest child. He was not allowed
to check out chapter books from the school library because the school rule was
that children could not check out chapter books until Third Grade, no matter
their reading level. It is not politically correct to be a very intelligent child in today’s public schools.
When I think about Education, with all of its frustrations,
failures, and Stupid Decisions, I must state again that America never needed a
federal Department of Education to dumb America down to this, its most
incompetent level ever. The U.S. Department of Education has served to
hog tie and distract Local Districts from fully and skillfully educating
Americans to the high standards that American teachers taught to before that
Federal Department, and its State Offshoots, came into existence.
My opinions were confirmed when I saw Laura, a local waitress
who I have known nearly twenty years but see infrequently with little time to
chat. Then recently, Laura waited on our table and I was able to ask,
“How are those reading boys doing?”
Laura responded, “Awesome! My older boy graduates this
year and is being recruited by several universities. We are most
interested in Iowa State, however, because my family is in Des Moines. My
younger son is a Wizard! He wants to attend a university in
California. His goal is to work for Apple so he can show them where they
are making mistakes.” Big smile. Ah…successful children
coming out of the public schools… although that might not have been the case.
It was
several years ago that Laura stopped by my table to say, “The school wants to
put one of my boys in special education, and the other is not learning to read
well, either. Can you help?” Laura was too busy to talk right then
so I promised to put some materials together. A few days later, I stopped
to give her some things to have her boys do: letters to move around to
use the Code In Which English Is Written; a set of phonogram
cards to teach the sounds represented in that CODE; some simple practice
stories with those phonograms underlined. Laura was not working that day
so I scribbled a very few notes on the only paper I had, 3 2×2
Post-a-Notes. Four months went by before I next saw Laura, and she
was ready to return my materials. She said that they were no longer
needed and thanked me warmly.
Laura reported that both boys were now in the top reading groups
in their classes. The principal had asked her what she had done to cause
that rapid change so she suggested that he “Call Linda Taylor.” “Had he
called?” she asked me. No, he had not called and still, a decade
later, no one from the district has ever called.
Through
the years, I would occasionally hear about Laura’s boys. Once, she shared
that her husband was funny-frustrated because the boys were reading nasty
messages on bathroom walls as their family traveled. Each year, I learned
that the boys had again won city-wide essay
writing contests. I also heard when the boys went on to compete at
regional and higher level essay competition. Now suddenly, at least in my eyes, the older son is
shopping colleges with his graduation less than two (2) months away! Special
Education? Thank goodness Laura saved her sons from the Black Hole of Special Education!
So, who taught those two boys to read well and thus set the
stage for them to actually learn subject matter and develop a high rate of
overall literacy? A) a caring mother using a few simple materials
and a few hastily scribbled instructions, OR B) teachers who had had at
least several expensive, time-consuming, state-mandated, “education” courses at
university?
Honest, non-brainwashed individuals will acknowledge that it was
the mother who taught those boys to read and prepared them for a Life of
Literacy and Learning.
Will Betsy
DeVos, or any other appointed figurehead or hobby educator, be able to
understand that difference, and the importance of that difference? Are
mis-educated “educators” even capable of realizing the difference between
a real education brought about by skilled,
insightful, accurately trained teachers, and the pretense of an education brought about by
overregulated and undereducated teachers and administrators following the Pied
Pipers of consultants and textbook publishers? Throughout my decades
working in public schools, I almost always observed that such individuals do
not even understand why they are failing children in generation after
generation and have little interest in learning about what actually
works. Educators would rather chase fads and brass rings or fall back on
the use of damaging sight word memorization because their training universities
provided them with no other tools.
In his
book, The Americans: The Colonial Experience, Daniel
Boorstein explains that “Through learning to read, write, and speak a common
language many peoples were amalgamated into a single nation. …Declaring
teachable rules of language…helped dissolve class distinctions and has kept one
more avenue open in a mobile society. Who could have predicted that a
free and equalitarian society would be promoted by a pedantically precise
standard of language?” Today’s educators cannot even determine the
solution to the problem when there are a couple hundred years of evidence
available to prove that “a pedantically precise standard of language” did,
indeed, bring about universal literacy in America.
Linda
Schrock Taylor [send her mail] is a reading specialist, writer,
and retired teacher. She is the author of Read Better! For Adults and Teens, a manual for
those wanting to read better with greater ease and more efficiency. The book
includes short important lessons for use of the code in which English is
written, followed by 80 practice stories arranged incrementally, ranging in
difficulty from mid-elementary through college levels, with graded scoring for
charting progress. Linda is now writing Spell Better, her second in a series
for teens and adults. Visit Linda’s website to see lesson samples: http://www.ReadWriteSpellBetter.com.
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