The Children Are Our Future

12 Replies to “The Children Are Our Future”

1. frequently stressed that English was ‘not a phonetic language’ and that children did not need to be told the separate letter sounds. ‘Surely we don’t have anyone here who is old-fashioned enough to tell children the sounds of the letters!’ teased one consultant.
   –
   These same idiots are now tenured english professors, and their books are in the dustbins of crap history.
   What freaking dumb asses we had as far back as 1970.
   My wife had to re-teach our children basic english.
   Stupid Stinking Hair Headed Hippie Bastards..

2. English is not a phonetic language.
   A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling
   by Mark Twain
   For example, in Year 1 that useless letter “c” would be dropped to be replased either by “k” or “s”, and likewise “x” would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which “c” would be retained would be the “ch” formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform “w” spelling, so that “which” and “one” would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish “y” replasing it with “i” and Iear 4 might fiks the “g/j” anomali wonse and for all. Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez “c”, “y” and “x” — bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez — tu riplais “ch”, “sh”, and “th” rispektivli. Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
   English is neither purely phonetic nor purely arbitrary, but a mix of both. As with so many things, it requires a lot of drill and rote memorization.

3. My oldest has gone through this and survived with some help from my wife and me. We have two others that we’ll have to instill white privilege.

4. I often had students who couldn’t compose a comprehensible, yet simple, sentence. Reading their lab reports was often quite painful as a result.
   At the same time, I had a lot of students, many of them recent high school graduates, who were functionally innumerate. Topics that I learned 45 years ago, such as fundamental algebra and basic trigonometry, were beyond them. Most couldn’t multiply, let alone divide, two numbers without a calculator. I guess they didn’t learn to do it using pencil and paper.
   Yet, I was required to mass-produce silk purses from all the raw material I was given. In other words, I was constantly pressured to pass as many of them as possible.
   We frequently voiced our concerns to the institutional administration and all we got were vague promises that it would pass them on to the provincial government. (Yeah, right.)
   The educational system is broken but, unfortunately, there are many in it who have a vested interest in keeping it that way, profiting handsomely from that state.

5. “As with so many things, it requires a lot of drill and rote memorization.”
   It would then take even more drill and wrote memorization to be capable of reading important history works like the Magna Carta, Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, or the Confederation Act of 1867 in their original languages if the written language were to be changed so much as Samuel Clemens or Thomas Jefferson had suggested.
   Communist Revisionists would have a field day re-writing all the old timey laws, Charters, and contracts to benefit their agenda that only highly schooled Lawyers(who are already becoming a kind of elite cloistered priesthood) can, as a sub-set of society, read with understanding today.

6. Of course, Mark Twain’s little essay was satire. He was an able user of the languages as it is. During Twain’s life there was, in fact a movement for American spelling “reform”. IIRC, Daniel Webster was prominent in it. They did manage to get rid of the “ou” construction in words like “colour” and “neighbor”. I remember reading an issue of Popular Science published in the early 1930’s, wherein the word “boulder” was rendered as “bowlder”. Thankfully, that one bit the dust.

7. Public schools = Child Abuse
   it’s that simple.

8. Although our kids went to regular schools, we taught them enough at home, especially reading and mathematics, that they are now successful adults. I now work two days per week as a volunteer teaching high school kids, whose parents relied on the school system, to read. They come to high school not knowing what a hyphen is where a word is broken and if I write something instead of printing, they are lost completely. Kids are victims of the publish or perish academia which led to rubbish being adopted because it was “the latest theory”.

9. Education’s become a money racket for experts, both actual and self-appointed.
   At the place where I used to teach, we had all sorts of weirdos and charlatans coming through and offering their “solutions” to teaching. I had the misfortune of attending some of the courses they ran and they were total rubbish and a complete waste of time.
   During my last two years, I was required to overhaul my course outlines to conform to what was the adopted institutional standard. The person overseeing that project was a staff member who just happened to be working on her doctorate in education. There was a persistent rumour that this overhaul was actually her thesis research topic.
   I quit before it was done.

10. I cannot help but conjure an image of Monty Pythons The Meaning of Life … when the Catholic mother drops another baby on the kitchen floor of their squalid apartment … and the father says that unfortunately we cannot afford another mouth to feed … so … “It’s medical experiments for the lot of ya”. The American Public school system has been running “medical” (educational) experiments on the nations children … ever since I was born 6_ years ago … and it appears as though they are all CRAP “scientists” (Teachers). My wife teaches 1st grade in beautiful downtown Oakland. And she HAS been ORDERED to teach all 7 of those idiotic techniques, to the entire exclusion of phonics. My wife cares too much for her pupils, so she sneaks in her own phonics system for the children to “supplement” the dumb-assed curriculum. She now has a system where she can track each one of her pupils reading progress online … which also spies on and reports when the children are/aren’t reading. Her classes always out perform every other one in the district … even though her classroom has become a dumping ground for the most “needy” children in the school (she’s the only one who can handle them). Her success is all down to teaching phonics and sounding-out words. Not that there isn’t some value in those 7 reading techniques … I dare say that I use each one of them in the course of my regular reading, but they are accessory to the fundamentals of reading. No fundamentals … alphabet, phonics … and they are worthless. And don’t get me started on the “Common Core” math she has to teach … and (partially) grade. Ugh. Good thing MacDonalds orders are all calculated by computer. But still ! I would count my change

11. Educators have been pushing their pet doctrines on people for a long time. I remember some of those early experiments while I was still in elementary school 50 years ago.
    I’m a phonics kid, though my mother taught me to read by taking the telephone book and going through the Yellow Pages with me or using the ads in the bus when we took public transit.
    Fortunately, the school system where I grew up avoided New Math.

12. I think most adults probably read by word recognition. Problem is, that evolves out of years of practice at figuring out new words the first time you encounter them. If you know your phonics, which is how I was taught to read back in the early 70’s, you can always decode those unfamiliar words. It also helps to have literate parents with broad vocabularies to expose you to a correct (if funnily accented) version of the language at home.