Aldous Huxley's Brave New
World appeared in 1932. Everyone at that time was
dazzled by the technocratic skills of the Ford Motor Company, able to turn
out identical cars by the millions on highly efficient assembly lines. In
Huxley's novel, the calendar counts years A.F. – After Ford – and God's new
name is Ford.
The zeitgeist was obsessed with control. Ideologues liked
the possibility of more precise social engineering. Communists in
particular were focused on planned societies and central economies, with
super-smart experts sitting around a table and deciding what every citizen
could do and could not do. Psychiatrists likeIvan Pavlov wanted
to show how drastically you could manipulate cognition and personality.
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?
Instead of the alphabet (twenty-six fairly simple objects that can
be memorized in a month or two), children in this new factory were told to
focus on complete words. Instead of memorizing B, for
example, you had to memorize BEACH. Just five letters, but a hugely
complex design – and there were more than 200,000 of them. Parents were
told their children could routinely memorize these visual designs with
"automaticity." That's like instant recall. The child was
supposed to know hundreds and then thousands of these designs with perfect
accuracy. In reality, virtually no child could do this, except the few
with photographic memories. So in practice, the factory created millions
of non-readers and weak readers.
In this ruthless new factory, the obsession with power and control
was the same as in Huxley's factory. Humans would be conditioned and
engineered to be what the controllers wanted. This creepy, highly
invasive scheme was a brilliant "success," once it's understood that
the new goal was limited literacy. Anyway, that was the predictable
result. Reading levels dropped from 1931 onward. Several decades
later, the country had tens of millions of functional illiterates. T hose are
people who memorize several hundred sight-words with good accuracy, and
probably hundreds more with medium or low accuracy. Reading as
traditionally understood – a
skill both easy and fun – was extinct for a great percentage of the
population. What this bold new factory was creating was damaged readers,
like the embryos that didn't get enough oxygen.
This scheme was wildly improbable from the first day. What
sort of unconscionable people would dare to perpetrate it? That the
citizenry could accept it was improbable. How many semi-literate people
would the society tolerate? That so-called "experts" could put
this scheme over on the public remains unlikely to this day. It's
probably not doable unless the Education Establishment has the support of
certain unions, certain government agencies, certain foundations, certain
universities, and much of the media. There is a big silence. How
will the public learn the truth if the controllers make sure it's well hidden?
(Check the archives of the New York Times. You will not find
insight into why sight-words can be considered a dubious development.)
Hardly 20 years after the introduction of this brave new
illiteracy, the situation was already so bad that Rudolf Flesch felt compelled
to write a book explaining what had happened to the country (Why Johnny
Can't Read, 1955). Many millions of Americans felt compelled to read
the book. Almost everyone knew that something had gone horribly wrong. It continues to go
wrong today.
In Brave New World, the controllers are always
smugly pleased with their factory. The same sort of people seem to be
controlling K-12 education for the past century.
Bruce Deitrick Price's new book is Saving K-12.
He deconstructs educational theories and methods on Improve-Education.org.
Support his work on Patreon.