Joanna -------------------
A few years ago a man in Oakland beat his three-year old boy to death because the child could not be made to read and write. It was reported and received as a heinous crime, which it was.
I have thought of this story lately as I note how lenience toward the venality of the ruling class is inevitably balanced by the unrelenting punishment of the lower classes who, it is intimated by this severity, would not be poor were they not lazy and shiftless.
The universal educational standards now trumpeted by the Obama administration require children in kindergarten to read and write. If you have not raised a child, taught a child to read, or remember the process you underwent, let me get a little more detailed. We're speaking of four and five year olds learning to read and write one of the most difficult languages in the world. I have a Ph.D. in English and started working on letter and sound recognition with both my very bright children when they were two and a half. I also read to them every night. By the time they were in kindergarten they could read a word here and there, but no way could it be said that they could read and write English. By first grade they were fine.
I submit that what the DC bureaucrats are proposing to do is not much different from the father who beat his son to death. At least he had the excuse of ignorance. They have no excuse. If their proposal becomes law, an entire generation of children will be battered into believing that they are stupid and cannot learn because they are unable to master a task for which they are developmentally unsuited.
This trend, of forcing children to learn material for which they are not ready, is not restricted to reading. When my father was in school, it was not supposed that anyone could deal with calculus before college. He took a degree in automotive and aeronautics engineering in Paris, learned calculus in college, and found it very difficult. In the early seventies, when I was going through high school, the most highly rated academic high school in Los Angeles, they began to experiment with teaching calculus in the 12th grade. They assigned us the best math teacher they had, lowered the grading scale because the subject, after all, was very hard, and taught calculus to 25 out of a graduating class of 1000. Today in the Oakland Unified School District, calculus is taught in the eleventh grade, and the grading scale is not modified. In order to teach calculus in the eleventh grade you must teach all previous math courses and least one year earlier.
It can be argued that since it is possible for some students to learn calculus in the eleventh grade, this shows that imposing harder and harder tasks on students is a way of improving education. I would argue rather that it is a way of turning education into a form of torture. Calculus is not a rite of passage and it is not an instrument of torture. It is one of many mathematical techniques that a student interested in a career in science must master. Mastering it at sixteen is not better than mastering it at seventeen or eighteen or thirty five.
A bureaucrat might believe that success in education is measured by how early you can teach a subject. But a teacher knows that a good education results in students learning to love the subject matter and wanting to explore its mysteries long after class ends. This will not happen if learning is so fraught with anxiety that the student wishes for nothing more than that it will come to a quick end.