| Friday,
September 3, 2004 In another conference someone said:
A reading guru told me that "dyslexia" is just
the term used for "reading troubles" and doesn't indicate one particular
cause -- it's more like "fever"
than "measles".
This prompted a long reply that on reflection I think belongs here:
All true. Like lumbago means ache in the lumbar regions and says nothing
about causes, dyslexia describes the symptom "has problems reading" and says
nothing about why.
There is a cross wiring difficulty in something like 3% of kids which
causes them to confuse p and q and b and d. You might call this "true
neurological dyslexia." The right kind of neurological cross training takes
care of most of that. Roberta taught in schools for the gifted as well as
regular schools, but eventually became the reading teacher of last resort
for the Los Angeles County Juvenile Justice System. Because my wife got
illiterate kids, many were diagnosed as "dyslexic" which really meant "It
isn't MY fault I couldn't teach this poor protoplasm to read! Pass the
problem to someone else or I call the CTA shop steward oops professional
representative." So the kids were moved elsewhere, unable to read; some were
lucky enough to become criminals sent to Kirby Center where they fell into
Roberta's capable hands.
Of the ones Roberta got, 6,000, she taught all but one to read. It took
about 6 months on average although I gather some caught on faster. These
ranged in age from about 10 to 15 or 16. They mostly insisted they didn't
want to learn (translation: "I can't do it so I will no longer try") and all
did learn: the learning itself is rewarding once the kid realizes it is
possible. Some of them went on to junior college. These were not
particularly bright kids, but they were not stupid, either. We see some of
them to this day. One is an usher at the Music Center; reads tickets and
finds seats for people....
True neurological dyslexia is extremely rare, and even that can be
overcome with TRAINING AND SKILLS such as tracing the letters with your
fingers, "writing in the air" and other such multi-sensory training methods.
I leave the methodology to people who know: which turns out to be a rare
skill because most professors of education have never tried, and thus don't
know about it.
One test for "dyslexia": can the kid look at a word and say the letters
(the names of the letters) one at a time in the right order? If so that
ain't dyslexia. If not, is it letter recognition problems (drill, drill,
drill and learn skill)? Or needs spectacles (a surprising number of
Roberta's dyslexic kids had seen a psychologist but not an optometrist).
And there are those who are partly deaf, but that wasn't diagnosed.
In Roberta's reform school when she found they needed glasses or hearing
aids the County provided them (once the need was known) and that cured the
"dyslexia" in those cases.
Dyslexia is mostly maestragenic: the teacher caused the disorder, and
once that diagnosis was pronounced, no one tried to teach the kid, so the
prophecy is self-fulfilling.
If you want to help the US, start by insisting that Head Start be changed
to teach the kids to READ before the regular NEA bureaucracy gets hold of
them and ruins them. If they can read they have a chance. If they get to
school and are called dyslexic their only hope is to get put into a reform
school where there is a teacher like Roberta Pournelle; and there are not
many like that.
At the moment, Head Start is forbidden to teach children to read. It is
not, says the NEA, "developmentally appropriate". Newt Gingrich tried to
change the Head Start law to insert the words "nothing in this act shall be
construed as prohibiting the teaching of reading and reading skills" but he
was unable to do so; there was considerable opposition. I leave it to you to
figure out why.
Note this isn't "teacher bashing." Most teachers have never learned that
nearly all kids can learn to read. They are taught that "dyslexia" is
common, and can be diagnosed; and of course it is a self-fulfilling
diagnosis. Most professors of education and instructors in teacher colleges
don't know any of this either. As Jane Jacobs says, we are entering a Dark
Age in which we not only have forgotten much we once knew, but we have
forgotten that we ever knew it: this despite printing presses and the
Internet.
Reading is a SKILL. It has little to do with "education". The
President last night talked about education as the key to success. He's
wrong. This is not Lake Woebegone, and all the children are not above
average. Those below average are not stupid, but they do not need
"education" -- training in learning how to learn -- but SKILLS: actual hands
on useful skills, things that can be learned by rote and drills and then
that knowledge can be expanded. Plumbing. Electrical wiring. Carpentry.
Fixing automobiles. There are many useful skills, for which people are
deservedly paid more than most intellectuals; but our entire system of
education, to the extent that it works at all, is aimed at producing
educated people, intellectuals, as if all the children are above average.
No child left behind is a silly concept: carried to extreme, are we left
behind if we are unable to attend California Institute of Technology or get
a Ph.D. in Astronautical Engineering from MIT? Of course NASA
restricts entry into space to intellectuals, rather than allowing skilled
young riggers to go up and do a real day's work; but that's just part of the
silly notion we have about the superiority of intellectuals over people who
do actual skilled labor. Or unskilled labor for that matter.
Our school system is designed to keep the jails full and produce lots of
people unable to do anything but cheap day labor. If that is not their
purpose, tell me what you would change to make it more likely that the
prison guards will have work and there will be a supply of unskilled labor?
Enough. I have expanded a lot on the answer I wrote for the other
conference; this has become pretty near the essay I promised on education
and skills. More another time. I have a column to do.
===========================
=============================
WHAT IS A NEOCON?
While we are at it, in another conference there was a discussion
of "neo-conservatives", with one well known writer insisting that he had
never heard anyone call himself a neo-con. Exchanges (in which I didn't take
part) went on for a while until finally this was said of the term
"neoconservative""
The rise of a faction who believe that all
America's troubles are the fault of a cabal of sinister Jews manipulating
our nation's foreign policy to serve the cause of Israeli fanatics?
I replied:
Now that is a silly way to put it, probably done deliberately, but it may
not serve a useful purpose this time.
The neo-conservatives were formerly liberals, and some were Trotskyites;
many were disciples of Leo Strauss. This isn't condemnatory it's merely
descriptive. Over time Commentary Magazine, edited by Norman Podhoretz,
became one of the influential anti-communist magazines; and over time
liberal anti-communism as personified by Scoop Jackson and for that matter
at one time the Americans for Democratic Action got absorbed and destroyed:
the liberal establishment resented those people, and marginalized them.
Commentary, published by the American Jewish Committee, saw that the USSR
was a real threat to Jews and Israel, and seeing what happened to liberal
anticommunists, began to move to the right. Being intellectuals, they also
had considerable cultural affinity with the intellectual conservatives like
Kirk. Buckley established National Review as a nominally Catholic
Conservative magazine with people like Kendall and Possony and Kirk, but
there was also Meyer and Burnham who were men of the right, and Burnham was
an ex-communist and in some ways a neo-con.
Podhoretz and his magazine formed a powerful intellectual weapon for
anti-communism, and neo-conservatives were people who didn't want so much to
be associated with the Old Right, and weren't libertarians, and drifted
toward Commentary. Meyer had his "fusionism" which was an attempt mostly to
bridge the gap between old line Conservatism of the Burkean variety as
exemplified by Kirk and Cole (Kirk and Cole founded Modern Age, as an
example) and the Libertarian wing. Straussians, meanwhile, played a
Machiavellian role and I don't mean that as insult: it stems from their
drift toward power and their belief that they have some secrets of
statecraft.
So long as the USSR was the common enemy all was well. The neo-cons were
willing to play along with the notions of limited government as long as the
end result was anti-communism and the defense of Israel. The Catholic
Conservatives were all for defending Israel as a steady ally in the Cold
War, even when things like the Liberty Incident very much strained that
alliance. This continued even to the First Gulf War -- when the neocons
found that the old line conservatives weren't interested in conquest in the
Middle East, didn't want an empire there, weren't interested in On To
Baghdad and On To Damascus, and really thought there might be some conflicts
between American objectives and Israeli objectives. The despicable way that
the State of Israel treated Christians in the occupied territories didn't
help as the stories filtered back: Eastern Rite Roman Catholics got more of
a voice in the Vatican with the present Pope and their stories began to come
out.
Then Weekly Standard discovered "National Greatness" as a goal, and
explicitly said so; and that put the fat in the fire and the cat among the
pigeons, because national greatness is precisely not in the old conservative
agenda. In the US there has been an imperial strain, but it was populist not
conservative: Daniel Webster was afraid of taking the West and Manifest
Destiny precisely because it would upset the balance between the States and
the Union (Webster from New Hampshire: Live Free or Die!) and so were many
of the Old Right. Conservatives in England tended to be Imperial; but not in
the US, where the balance between the Feds and the States was considered
more important.
The Neocons tend to put international interests first, and believe, I am
sure sincerely, that the fate of the US is bound up with the fate of the
Middle East; that salvation for the US can come only by saving Israel.
One can believe that without supporting the national greatness that the
neocons have also espoused; and without supporting Sharon's Greater Israel.
There was an uneasy peace for a long time between Israel and the Arab world,
until the occupation; and Israel has always had the option of building a
fence along the Green Line (with modifications for security) and
unilaterally withdrawing. They could have given the land back to Jordan in
exchange for a peace treaty. But the settlers and internal Israeli politics
have prevented that and it will not happen.
But I cannot think that the US has a vital stake in that any longer. For
the price of the Iraqi War I could have built 100 1000 megawatt nuclear
fission plants fueled with the fissionables recovered from the dismantled
weapons (fuel grade is 10% enriched; weapons grade is 90%; you get a Lot of
Fuel from a bomb) as well as gone a long way to cheap access to orbit:
energy independence. The neocons are terrified of US energy independence
because they see rightly that the US not dependent on Middle East Oil will
not keep troops over there.
Now there is a cultural affinity between Israel and the US. It would be
stronger if the Israelis had made friends with the Christian Arabs
particularly in Bethlehem and made advocates and friends of the Vatican
instead of being universally disliked by nearly every Vatican official I
know, not for being Jewish but for being oppressors of the Church.
The neocons reached a high water mark when they inveigled National Review
to allow the egregious Frum to denounce many anti-war conservatives as anti-semites,
and then allowed him to flip off Stephen Tonsor in his answer to his
critics. Tonsor may be an irascible old SOB but he is a well known and
admirable man, perhaps a bit personally sensitive to his rank, but it's
deserved.
But that was a high water mark. Among other things it took much of the
sting out of the charge of anti-semitism because it was so patently absurd
when applied to many of those he smeared with it.
The identification of neo-cons with Jewish interests is as much theirs as
anyone's; it comes with wanting to use the anti-semitism weapon.
We in the US hope that our Moslem citizens are Americans who go to mosque
rather than a church, and that our Jewish citizens are Americans who go to
Temple rather than a church. We have always insisted that all ties other
than sentiment to "The Old Country" are severed when becoming an American.
But then, until recently, it was possible to study to be an American, and to
understand what that means. In today's culture wars "diversity" is
antithetical to that notion. But that is another story for another time.
Neoconservatives, at least those who adhere to The Weekly Standard, may
or may not be mostly Jewish, but that is not the reason for their divergence
from the old Conservative Movement, which to this day retains many Jewish
adherents; it is their adoption of the "national greatness" position and
their abandonment of the notion of limited government. There might be
compromises on foreign policy: after all, no one in the Old Right would be
unhappy if Iraq became a law abiding member of the liberal democratic family
of nations. Astonished, yes, but not unhappy. I'll be the first to cheer if
we can bring that off.
Neo and old conservatives can agree that the War on Terror needs to be
won; we can disagree on tactics, and whether pre-emption is a good idea, and
if it is, where (I'd have put the effort into Afghanistan to finish that war
before invading Iraq, I would, I would). These are matters for discussion.
But compromises on the notion of limited government are something else
again. I'm all for national greatness if that means the Congress builds
Shakespeare Theater and an Opera House in the District of Columbia (it has
the undoubted Constitutional power to do such things) and returns us to a
500+ ship Navy; I am not for National Greatness if it means idiocies like
"No Child Left Behind" and the Americans with Disabilities Act and thousands
of other intrusions of Washington into the lives of the citizens. From what
I read in Weekly Standard, there is no act of "National Greatness" its
editors won't agree to.
Sorry to be so long winded.
Friday TOP
Current Mail
|
CLICK HERE for
a Special Request. 
