Wojtek
On Sun, Mar 21, 2010 at 8:23 PM, Joanna <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
> I'd like to develop the following post for a little opinion piece to be
> submitted to my local paper (SF Chron) or perhaps The Nation. I welcome any
> comments to help me improve it.
>
> 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.
>
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