ACTA's Must-Reads
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Quote of the day
In an article in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education, Harvard University press editor Lindsay Waters reflects on our attitudes toward reading, with particular emphasis on our misguided ideal of speedy reading, our short-sighted assumption that elite academic study has little if anything to do with early reading instruction, our attraction to dangerously uninformed intellectual trends, and the power of Oprah to put her finger on the problems Americans face today:
You can kiss your graduate programs in English lit goodbye if we all don't help get the grade schools in order. I know thinking about preschoolers is not in the job description of most academics, but get over it. We need to think about what's going on in our feeder schools. We need to think about what our fellow humanists, the grade-school and preschool teachers, are doing. We should not be afraid to take the lead from Oprah, who in July asserted her intention to deal with this issue in the "first ever summer reading issue" of her magazine. "I can't imagine where I'd be or who I'd be had reading not been such a fundamental tool in my life," she wrote in asking readers to ponder, and comment on, what they know about reading. Report after report testifies to declining literacy in America. Some of the decline is due to the neglect of our least-advantaged children, but some of it is due to the willful embrace of methods for teaching reading that are inimical to reading in depth.What happens when we have children speed up learning to read, skipping phonics and diagramming sentences? I believe it's hard to read Milton if you have not learned to take pleasure in baroque sentence structures. When John F. Kennedy became president, much was made of the fact that he was able to read so quickly, and people became intrigued with how he'd learned to speed-read thanks to the Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics. Thank God he had learned to think slowly by the time of the Cuban missile crisis.
Read the whole thing, as they say -- and read it slowly.
Posted by acta online at February 5, 2007 11:00 AM
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Comments
"We need to think about what our fellow humanists, the grade-school and preschool teachers, are doing."
Fellow humanists? If only. They're products of the ed-school factories. Good luck knocking any sense into those bastions of the bizarre. And try getting around the ed-school-teacher union-state/local school board monstrosities.
Listen to what math professors say about K-12 math teaching. And how nobody gives a damn what they think about math education. Listen and weep.
Posted by: Mike at February 6, 2007 03:26 PM
DEFINE 'READING'
Unfortuantely, there are people who, even if struck in the face with 1,000,000 pieces of empirical evidence --
http://www.victimsofcommunism.org/
-- would continue to defend their dogma.
All the time in the world would not change that.
So -- the world will move on, without such individuals. As Mick and Keith once wrote, "time waits for no one -- and it won't wait for me."
(Also, they wrote, "you can't always get what you want/but if try sometime/you get want you need." How true.)
Posted by: B.D. at February 6, 2007 06:18 PM
Report after report testifies to declining literacy in America.
This is simply false (and, I would guess, made up and asserted as fact). It certainly doesn't inspire confidence in anything else she says.
Posted by: JSinger at February 9, 2007 03:46 PM
"This is simply false (and, I would guess, made up and asserted as fact)."
Your statement is more than a little ironic.
See, e.g., http://nces.ed.gov/naal/
Posted by: Federal Dog at February 9, 2007 04:34 PM