| Monday
January 2, 2005 See Urgent Worm Warning
in yesterday's view.
On Education
There was a posting in another conference that got my blood roused. I
doubt anything I say is new to any of you, but it is worth repeating. First
the article that roused my ire:
Mysterious IQ Drop for College Graduates
Literacy experts and educators say they are stunned by
the results of a recent adult literacy assessment, which shows that the
reading proficiency of college graduates has declined in the past decade,
with no obvious explanation.
"It's appalling -- it's really astounding," said
Michael Gorman, president of the American Library Association and a
librarian at California State University at Fresno. "Only 31 percent of
college graduates can read a complex book and extrapolate from it. That's
not saying much for the remainder.". . .
The test measures how well adults comprehend basic
instructions and tasks through reading -- such as computing costs per ounce
of food items, comparing viewpoints on two editorials and reading
prescription labels. Only 41 percent of graduate students tested in 2003
could be classified as "proficient" in prose -- reading and understanding
information in short texts -- down 10 percentage points since 1992. Of
college graduates, only 31 percent were classified as proficient -- compared
with 40 percent in 1992. Schneider said the results do not separate recent
graduates from those who have been out of school several years or more.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/
content/article/2005/12/24/AR2005122400701.html
I replied:
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/Reading.html
Roberta Pournelle's reading program will teach ANYONE above the
intellectual level of a chimpanzee to read English. By READ I mean be able
to see a word and pronounce it, so that "reading vocabulary" is the same as
"speaking vocabulary". I have said this before, but it bears
repeating: if you can read, you can read anything. There is no such thing as
"reading at grade level." Children can read or they can't read, and all this
prattle about grade level is merely a way for teachers to feel good about
having failed to teach the children to read.
Most illiterates have a perfectly useful speaking
vocabulary. They just haven't learned to read. If you observe 4th and 5th
graders stumbling through science and history and civics classes (assuming
there are such classes; many schools have abolished them) you will quickly
discover that the problem is that they can't read. They know the words, or
many of them, but they don't recognize them because they haven't encountered
them before and the words are ideograms.
Learning to read ideograms takes far longer than learning phonetics.
English is at least 90% phonetic (that's pretty generally agreed even among
that anti=phonics "experts") and of the 10% not phonetic there are still a
number of phonic cues. "Though the rough cough plough me through" is a typical
scare sentence used by the anti-phonics people, but in fact it's pretty easy
to learn to read it; if you know how to pronounce any of the words and you
have heard the others -- except for plough most are fairly common words --
you can glean the sense of the sentence even if you are down at the IQ 85
level.
In rural Florida in the 1920's my mother taught first grade. Her pupils
were farm laborer kids. (It was a segregated school, so she did not get any
blacks, but she did get immigrant laborer children).
She used to tell me that every one of them learned to read by the end of
first grade. When I questioned her more closely, she said, "Well there were
one or two over the eight years I taught who didn't learn to read in first
grade, but they
didn't learn anything else, either."
Precisely. For any kids of dull normal intelligence and up, they can and
should learn to read in first grade, and by read, I mean be able to
pronounce any word they encounter including diethyldimethyltoluene. They
won't know what that means (nor do I expect anyone here to know); but they
can read it just as everyone here can read it.
Reading is not an activity confined to high IQ, and being able to read
allows far more "late bloomers" to catch up. It allows real subject matter
from 3rd grade on. In Memphis and Capleville schools (Tennessee schools in
general) economic geography was mandated in 4th grade during the 1930's. We
learned the capitals of all the states, something of their economy, and such
things as "Name the principal products of Ecuador" as well as being able to
locate the Latin American countries and the US states on a blank map. So far
as I know, every student in 4th Grade in Capleville consolidated (3 & 4th
grades in one room, with one teacher, about 30 students per grade, I think
34 in 4th and twentysomething in third) learned all that content, something
of Tennessee government, etc. Somewhere in there we got Tennessee history
one year and US history another year. I won't say our education was
splendid, but it was good enough to prepare me for the rigorous education I
got at the hands of the Christian Brothers (no lay teachers at all) in high
school.
The reason college students have trouble abstracting complex texts is
that they can't read the texts very well. By the time of college they have
learned enough to be able to get through the words, but in their formative
years -- 4th through 9th grades -- they got no practice in reading for
comprehension because they were spending their time learning the ideograms.
It is very hard to comprehend complex ideas if you are guessing at words.
The authors (assuming there was an author; modern school texts are not so
much written as compiled by a committee) have chosen words with care, or at
least some do, expecting the reader to know what word was chosen, but
without systematic phonics instruction the student is still guessing all the
way into college.
Yet all children can be taught to read English by the end of First Grade.
WHAT MAN HAS DONE MAN CAN ASPIRE TO, and what our education system once
accomplished it could accomplish again.
It requires two things: immediate return of discipline and control to
principals who can delegate to teachers; and demanding that all the children
learn to read in first grade.
That can be done. It won't be, but it can be done.
For discussion see
mail.
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