In a post entitled
Post-Literacy In Michigan, brought to my attention by
A conservative blog for peace, James Fulford takes on this state Democrat-sponsored plan:
An iPod for every kid? Are they !#$!ing idiots? Elected officials coming up with counter-productive ways to spend tax-payers' money does not surprise me, but something in the article did. Included in the post is this frightenigly prophetic excerpt from a 1953 novel,
Null-ABC by John Joseph McGuire and H. Beam Piper, in which the author is wrong only about the century:
So a Twenty-second Century high school was a place where a teacher carried a pistol and a tear-gas projector and a sleep-gas gun, and had a bodyguard, and still walked in danger of his life from armed ‘teen-age hooligans. It was meaningless to ask whose fault it was. There had been the World Wars, and the cold-war interbellum periods—rising birth rates, huge demands on the public treasury for armaments, with the public taxed to the saturation point, and no money left for the schools. There had been fantastic “Progressive” education experiments—even in the ‘Fifties of the Twentieth Century, in the big cities, children were being pushed through grade school without having learned to read. And when there had been money available for education, school boards had insisted on spending it for audio-visual equipment, recordings, films, anything but textbooks. And there had been that lunatic theory that children should be taught to read by recognizing whole words instead of learning the alphabet. And more and more illiterates had been shoved out of the schools, into a world where radio and television and moving pictures were supplanting books and newspapers, and more and more children of illiterates had gone to school without any desire or incentive to learn to read. And finally, the illiterates had become Illiterates, and literacy had become Literacy. [bold mine]
The author is clearly right about the "teen-age hooligans" and the "huge demands on the public treasury for armaments," but what is most prophetic is the illiteracy resulting from "that lunatic theory that children should be taught to read by recognizing whole words instead of learning the alphabet." These words describe with accuracy the
Whole Language Ideology that has taken over American schools.
I refused to buy into it during my master's program, afer reading of a little black girl "in the literature" who was shocked to learn that her idiosyncratic spellings, which her teachers had allowed, were not the standard spellings. Although the bright girl eventually figured out the scam of which she was one of countless victims by herself, her "teachers" were less inteliigent. "Why didn't they correct me?" she asked. They were afraid to damage her self-esteem by telling her that she spelled a word wrong; and after all, what are "right" and "wrong" but value judgments?
Veritas? Quid est veritas?[I'm sad to say the methodology has come to Korea; my wife was taken to task by a fellow mother for trying to teach our daughter the Korean alphabet using phonics. I instructed my wife to ignore that busybody's folly and to continue just as she had been doing.]
I am convinced that the above is the single greatest,
i.e. most sinister, accomplishment of
Cultural Marxism, brought to our shores by the
Frankfurt School and based on the teachings of
Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), who theorized that for the Revoultion to succeed in the West, the culture had to be erased. What better way to erase a culture than to erase its memory, which is what books are?
The
Whole Language Ideology─
The Cambodian Killing Fields of education─ is a case study in everthing that is wrong with the modernist mindset, which throws out several millenia of (mostly successful) experience for some new theory or idea that intuitively feels good.
Labels: Commies, Corea, Decline and Fall, Education
What I saw was 
A number of samurai who chose non-violence in spite of their fighting skills are among 188 mostly lay Japanese martyrs expected to be beatified in November, according to Tokyo-born Cardinal Stephen Fumio Hamao.