We don’t need preschool we need competent teachers

View 802 Thursday, December 19, 2013

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

What we have now is all we will ever have.

Conservationist motto

If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan. Period.

Barrack Obama, famously.

Cogito ergo sum.

Descartes

Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum. Cogito,

Ambrose Bierce

Catching up a little, but tomorrow I have an auditory appointment in the hopes of finding hearing devices that will work for me. I have had bad hearing since 1950, and after the radiation treatment in 2008 it became dramatically worse, and has been deteriorating ever since. I have known I needed hearing aids since 1975 but the problem is that I have a very irregular pattern: I hear some frequencies quite well, so anything that amplifies everything caused some sounds to be very loud, and what I hear isn’t intelligible. It has strained Roberta’s indulgence for decades. Now I am told there are new devices that will work for me, some developed by the VA. We will see. Tomorrow I try anyway.

I was going to do an essay on the futility of pre-school education as an attempt to “solve the education problem” or “clean up the education mess” or even “Avoid the impending education catastrophe”. All of it is summed up in one statistic> In Illinois, a high spending state on education – at least money goes into the system – the number of kids in fourth grade who read at grade level is said to be 60% although some put it as low as 40%. This is an average among all students. Other states have about the same results.

This is a disaster, and adding pre-school isn’t going to solve it, because what it means is that we have at least a 50% illiteracy rate. Half the kids CAN’T READ by fourth grade. That means that instead of learning history or math or mechanical drawing or biology they will primarily be taught remedial reading, which is harder and harder to do as they get older because the teachers don’t know how to do it, and the professors of education who don’t teach people to read – they teach people how to teach people to read – generally have no experience in actually reaching reading and work from inadequate theories.

My mother in rural Florida in the 20’s taught first grade. I asked her if any of her first grade students did not learn how to read. She said, well there were a few, but they didn’t learn anything else either. The notion that a child of normal or dull normal intelligence – in other words 85 to 90% of the students – would not learn to read in first grade had not occurred to her. They were expected to learn to read, and the teachers taught them to read. It’s hard work but it can be done for every kid of normal to dull normal intelligence. Once they learn to read they can read anything, and “reading at grade level” has no meaning. “Understanding at grade level” does mean something; but for children who can read it means they can read, slower with “big words” (like, as Dr. Seuss says, Constantinople and Timbuktu) and faster with Hop on Pop and Green Cheese and Ham and Horton Hears a Who, and very slowly with words like omnicompetent and polymorhhochromatic (and no I don’t know what that last one means either but I can read it).

By fourth grade kids ought to be reading real stories, and real history, some poetry and they ought to be finding out their potential – will they be intellectuals learning symbol manipulation (what we call geek smart) or learning skills in manipulating objects or people, teachers or mechanics or bookkeepers or clerks – but they sure shouldn’t be spending time learning to read.

Now if the preschools were to teach kids to read before the regular teachers get hold of them, they might so some good, but that won’t happen because the same professors of education who can’t do in 2013 what the Florida Normal School at Gainesville taught high school grads to do in two years, namely teach those students how to teach first graders to read, will be put to teaching four year college graduates; and the incompetence of the Education Department Professors at reaching teachers to teach reading has been adequately demonstrated.

It’s a national disaster and throwing more money into the system to hire deans and sub deans and administrators and assistant associate deans and all the rest of it which now requires the middle class to go into debt for life to do what my wife and I did on our own, get through college, will only increase the debts and the costs. It won’t do any good.

Teach your own kids to read before the system gets to them. Of course it also means they will have to learn things in school that the teachers won’t have time to teach because the upper grade teachers will be struggling with the half the kids who can’t read at grade level. Smart kids are on their own. The good news is that you can teach them to read early –I learned at age 3, but that was unusual; but all the kids in my first grade school at St Anne’s on Highland Ave in the Normal district of Memphis learned to read by the end of First Grade.

We don’t need pre school we need first grade teachers who understand that first graders can learn to read if only they are taught to do it, and all the theories about why they haven’t learned are worthless. But then I have been saying that for about Sixty years. Sigh.

Allowing a true 50% illiteracy rate in effect condemns half the population to being hewers of wood and drawers of water. No republic can afford to waste half the population. We are in thrall to politicians elected by teacher unions who have made it impossible to fire teachers for incompetence. Hell, in Los Angeles we can’t fire them for anything: the man who fed his pupils cookies smeared with his own semen was allowed to resign with pension. No one gets fired. Can’t allow that.

And the remedy is not to create new jobs for more teachers. The remedy is to insist that the education establishment get out of the way since it will neither lead nor follow.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.