the blumenfeld education letter november_1993

8/7/2019 The Blumenfeld Education Letter November_1993

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The BlumenfeldEducation Letter

Vol. 8 , N o. 1 1 (Letter 87)

"My People Are Destroyed For Lack Of Knowledge" HOSEA 4:6

November 1993EDITOR: Samuel l. BlumenfeldThe purpose of this newsletter IS10 provide knowledge for parents and educators who want to save the children of America

from the destructive forces that endanger them OUI children in the public schools are at grave risk In 4 ways academically,spirituony, morcltv, and physically - and only a well-Lnformed public Will be able to reduce these risks.

'Without IIISIOn, the people peri sh '

Debunk ing W hole-Language My ths About New Zealand

Whenever whole-language advocatesare asked where whole language has beenused successfully and produced wonderlulresults among children, they invariably citeNew Zealand, that legendary welfare para-dise in the South Pacific. For example, MarieCarbo, in her attempt to discredit Prof. JeanneChall's pro-phonics book, Learning to Read:The G reat D ebate,in an article entitled "De-bunking the Great Phonic; Myth," (P h i D e ltaKappan,Nov. 1988), wrote:

Currently, th e u . s . ranks a dismal 49th in liter-acy out of 159 members of the United Nations. Thecountry that ranks first, New Zealand, teaches read-ing through the whole-language approach, whichintegrates literature, story writing. and the arts----andalso incorporates some phonics, when needed.

By contrast, phonics ha s been emphasized inmany American classrooms for the past 20 years ....If phonics is so effective and so much of it has b e e ntaught for the past 20 years,one might reasonably askwhy the U.S. ranks 49th in literacy.

It's amazing how ignorant a professor

of education can be when it comes to teach-ing reading. First, what Ms. Carbo fails to ac-knowledge is that phonics taught within thecontext of a look-say or whole-word readingprogram is practically useless, because chil-

dren who develop a holistic reflex acquire ablock against seeing words phonetically.They can only use their phonetic knowledgeif they make a conscious effort to do so, andsight readers usually don't. Second, phonicsin whole-language is taught as phonetic dues,as one of the many strategies used in whole-word or sight reading, and it is taught only"when needed." Children are encouraged toguess the word rather than sound it out, anda good guess, even if phonetically incorrect,is considered preferable if it relates to the

"meaning" of the text. For example, theauthors of Evaluation: Wlwle l.i ln guage , Wlw leChild (Scholastic, 1988) write (p. 19):

The way you interpret what the child does willreflect what you understand reading to be. For in-stance, if she reads the word f e a t h e rfor f a t h e r ,a phon-ics-oriented teacher might be pleased because she'scome close to sounding the word out. However, ifyou believe reading is a meaning-seeking process,you may be concerned. that she's overly dependent onphonics at the expense of meaning. You'd be happierwith a miscue such as daddy, even though it doesn'tlook or sound. anything like the word in th e text. Atleast the meaning would be intact.

In other words, children are taught thatphonics is less useful than guessing in trying

The Blumenfeld Education Letter is published monthly. Sources of products and services described are not necessari ly endorsedby this publication. They are intended to provide OUI readers with information on a rapidly expanding field of educational activity.Permission to quote is granted provided proper credit is given. Original material is copyrighted by The Blumenfeld Education Letter,Subscription Rate: 1 year $36.00. Address: Post Office Box 45161.Boise, Id ah o 8 3711.Phone (208) 322-4440.


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to figure out a new word.Third, whatever phonics is taught in a

whole-word or whole-language program istaught in a fragmentary, piecemeal way rightup to the sixth grade so that the student

never does get the opportunity to under-stand the alphabetic system as a system ordevelop the needed phonetic reflex.

As for New Zealand's alleged high rankon the literacy scale, a well-researched, re-vealing article in the June 1993 issue of Northand South, a prestigious magazine publishedin New Zealand, demolished that myth onceand for all. The article, "Our TIliteracy:Read-ing the Writing on the Wall" by [enny Cham-berlain, states:

ages of less than 10 years.In 1992 a staggering 17,(0) young people (one

third of school leavers) went straight from schoolonto unemployment benefit with no post-secondaryeducation-a national tragedy.

No one is monitoring the number of adolescentswho slide through secondary education and leaveschool unable to read and write adequately, yet ourpolytechnics and universities ar e now having to redi-rect funding into basic literacy and numeracy tuitionin leaming-support units. Most units report thatnumbers of students requiring this help are increas-ing.

People in th e employment industry increas-ingly despair of the illiteracy of the young people theytry to match with the positions employers offer. SaysKathy Kostyrko, president of the 75-agency NationalAssociation of Personnel consultancies: "Youngpeople coming out of school can't spell, can't write

and can'tthink

for themselves. We put them throughour tests and they don't get a look in the door. Every-one in industry feels the same."

New Zealand's illiteracy is a huge nationalproblem bubbling away under the lid of our compla-cency, a problem we mistakenly believe we can ig-nore but which is about to boil up and burn us anymoment.

So if New Zealand has a "huge" readingproblem virtually as bad as ours, where dothe whole-language people get this idea thatNew Zealand is the utopia of literacy?Chamberlain explains:

In part our reputation is based on a 1970interna-tional reading survey of 15 countries in which our 14and 18-year-olds ranked top. But this survey is nowvery out of date.

In other words, Ms. Carbo is using 1970data to argue against the teaching of phonicswhen it was probably phonics which permit-ted those 14 and 18-year;Jld New Zealan-

ders to become the good readers they were.

The Reading War in N ew Z ealand

It is the introduction of whole languageinto the schools of New Zealand which hasbrought about the present literacy crisis inthat country, Chamberlain writes:

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It's a phrase heard so often it now passes forfact-fuat New Zealand is a "highly literate' nation.... It's a comfortable thought-a nation of 3.4 millionpeople who rate among the world's most proficientreaders and writers. .. . So it seems churlish, unpatri-otic even to reintroduce an offensive term into thevocabulary. The word is illiterate and contrary topopular belief that's what we are becoming.

It's a lmos t as though we've made a national pactwith each other to ignore our illiteracy. We want tobelieve that we're a nation of bookworms, so wedisregard the sig ns that it's there among our veryyoung.. our adults, our unemployed and in theworkforce-a ball and chain dragging down theperfonnance of a nation ....

A national SUIVey, along the lines o f tho se con-ducted in Britain (1987)1 Canada (1987) and Australia(1989), has never been done in New Zealand, thoughARl..A, th e Adult Reading and. Learning AssistanceFederation, is currently pressing hard for one. Infor-mation on illiteracy is gathered piecemeal by inter-ested groups but nobody puts it a ll to ge th er to makea picture----ifthey did it would be composed of factslike these:

Despite the enormous emphasis placed on read-ing in primary schools our current teaching methodfails 25 per cent of new entrants. One in foUr six-year-olds requires remedial help after one year at school. Arecent ARIA survey on w o rkplace literncy revealsbetween 20 and 22 pe r cent of the New Zealandworkforce are not coping well with the literacydemands of employment.

In 1987 a J u s t i c e Department survey of 19 pris-ons showed that 47.8 pe r cent of inmates had. reading


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There is a reading war going on in this countryiring waged between, on the one hand, teachers andReading Recovery teachers who use the contextual or"whole language" approach (the way most of ourprimary school children learn to read) and, on theother, by the phonics faction. The latter are led by a

small group of reading experts who dare to challengethe whole-language devotees and say that youngchildren would catch on to literacy earlier if contex-tual teaching were balanced by teaching the old ABCway---sounding out the letters an d letter clusters sothat young readers have the code which helps themunlock words for themselves.

The whole-language method (whereby childrenare immersed in books and the experience of readingand infer the letter-sound rules by which language isconstructed rather than sound them out in a formalway) gradually took hold in the New Zealand educa-tion system from the 1970s and was part of the holisticand progressive education policy adopted at the time.

The Reading Recovery scheme, also whole-lan-guage based, is nationally coordinated from well-appointed headquarters at th e Auckland College ofEducation. Devised by renowned reading expertMarie Oay in the early 70s, it's the jewel in the ACOEcrown and the tutors (currently 35 of them) who go onto teach Reading Recovery teachers are trained here.The Reading Recovery scheme is implemented. in 61per cent of state schools with six-year-olds and coststhe country $10.4 million annually.

It has brought New Zealand and in particular

the Auckland College of Education a great d.eal of at-tention and international kudos over the last fewyears. The scheme was exported to Ohio in 1984,adopted in Surrey, Britain, in 1990 and in September1992 was being trialled in 20 London education au-thority areas. Hundreds of American teaclh.ers visitthe college each year to learn about it and we trainoverseas Reading Recovery tutors here.

"But I don't think we do as good a job in the firstyears of school as we could;' says Auckland Univer-sity education lecturer Tom Nicholson. ''New Zeal-and is keeping a top place in international surveys butonly by having a huge ambulance at the bottom of the

cliff in the form of Reading Recovery. Twenty-fiveper cent of six-year-olds go through Reading Recov-ery and if there was 100 per cent coverage that per-centage would be higher ....

William Tunmer, Massey University professorof education, believes that increasing the phonicscontent of lessons would reduce time spent in Read-ing Recovery by 33 per cent. A study done in the stateof Rhode Island in 1990/91 by Massey doctoral stu-dent Sandra Iversen, a Reading Recovery tutor em-

ployed by Rhode Island to implement Clay's readingprogramme there, showed that the time spent inReading Recovery by students could be reduced byalmost 40 per cent by increasing the phonics contentof the lessons.

Claire Aumonier, Home Schooling Associationnational counsellor (an estimated 3000 New Zealand

children are currently being schooled at home), saysthat children she sees,most of whom are very bright,come out of school with an anxiety about learning toread: ''Because it's contextual they don't see and feelthemselves learning and they feel insecure about theprocess. They then attach the insecurity to othersubject areas. My way of teaching reading is steepedin phonics. It makes them secure and gives the toolsto create words, They know why cat is cat and that'swhy they can read catastrophe." Aumonier says ittakes her three months to teach a child who can't evenread "in" or "on" to read fluently and that it is an"absolutely fascinating process which they just love".

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that New Zeal-and's reputation for being a world leader in readingreally rests on a now superceded 23-year-dd surveyand superb marketing. . ..

Cas hing In On the Myth

With American educators embarkingby the planeload on whole-language pil-grimages to Auckland, some enterprising

New Zealanders were bound to se e "gold inthem thar suitcases." Chamberlain tells usabout one entrepreneur who has made afortune selling whole-language materials toAmericans. She writes:

Wendy Pye, of Wendy Pye Enterprises, is NewZealand's major children's book exporter. The read-ers (first reading books) and television programmesproduced by her company are based on the NewZealand whole-language reading method-the foun-dation of Clay's Reading Recovery system which hasbeen described by Pye's editorial and educationaldirector Brian Cutting as "really hot property in theUS". New Zealand's credibility in the reading fieldgives Pye 's readers ready acceptance in the UnitedStates. Cutting. before he was recruited by Pye, wasa senior lecturer at the Auckland College of Educa-tion.

The leading whole-language guru in

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New Zealand is John M cCaffery, senior lec-turer in reading and language at the Auck-land College of Education. According to M c-Caffery, literacy is:

a social, cultural, pol itical process which is con-textuallybound. We now know there is IV such thingas universal literncy. You can no longer preparepeople to go out into the world as fully functionalliterate people. Our definition of what literacy is iskeeping up with changes in society and being in aposition to prepare children for t h em . What we nowunderstand is that there is no such thing as literacy.There are a whole lot of literacies that are valued bypeople. The forms are specific to occupations andlevels.

That sounds a lot like what is being pre-

pared for American children in Outcome-Based Education: functional literacy for aspecific occupation but not for the lifelongenjoyment of books or as a means of access tothe wisdom of mankind. Functionalliteracyignores the written word's spiritual dimen-sion and reduces man to a functioning ma-chine, trained as a "worker," and brain-washed to accept his or her status in the newpyramidal hierarchy of the New World Orderruled by the universitarian elite. Mr.McCaf-fery's definition of literacy agrees very nicelywith what Harvard professor Anthony Oet-tinger told a group of Telecom executives in1981:

The present "traditional" concept of literacy hasto do with the ability to read and write. But the realquestion that confronts us today is: How do we helpcitizens function well in their society? How can theyacquire the skil ls necessary to solve their problems?Do we really want to teach people to do alot of sumsor write in "a fine round hand" when they have a five-dollar handheld calculator or a word processor towork with? Or do we reallyhave to have everybodyliterate-writing and reading in th e traditional sense-when w e have th e means through our technology toachie ve a rew flowering of oral communication? It isth e traditional idea that says certain forms of commu-nication, such as comic books, are "bad." But in themodern context of functionalism trey may not be allthat bad.

Thus our top educators and academi-cians now believe that our public schoolsshould abandon imparting traditional highliteracy in favor of a stunted, comic-bookform of literacy which enables individuals to"function" in society, as a cog in the ma-chine. And that's what whole-language iscalculated to do: dumb-down the generalpublic so that it becomes manipulable by theruling elite. literacy researcher T. G. Sticht,who now works for labor Secretary RobertReich, clearly expressed this view in 1987when he said:

Many companies have moved operations toplaces with cheap, relatively poorly educated labor.What may be crucial, they say, is the dependability ofa labor force and how well it can be managed andtrained-not its general educational level, although asmall cadre of highly educated creative people isessential to innovation and growth. Ending discrimi-nation and changing values are probably more im-portant than reading and moving low-income fami-lies into the middle class.

In other words, the idea of universal lit-eracy, that is, literacy for the heart and mind,literacy that nourishes the soul, is now passeas far as the public educators are concerned.If you want your child to acquire that kind ofliteracy, that lifelong love of books, that loveaffair with the written word, you will have toimpart it at home or enroll your child in aprivate school that also believes in that tradi-tional kind of literacy.

These days, children probably learnmore phonics at home than they do at school.ill fact, one whole-language teacher by thename of Martha A. Bergstresser Ramos re-cently complained about that in an articleentitled "Sounding off on 'sound it out.'"She wrote:

Reading anthologies nowadays reflect currentreading research and have teacher instructions thatinclude encouraging students to integrate picture,context, and graphophonemic cues. It seems appar-

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ent that for at least 20 years the words "sound it out"have not been presented as a technique for teachers tolearn and use-yet the phrase lives on.

Last year I had an enlightening experience witha first-grade Reading Recovery student. For weeks Ihad been modeling word identification strategies, Iasked him, ''Did you get your mouth ready and think

what would make sense? Have you checked thepicture? Did you check to see if it looks right? Whatdo you se e about this word that you already know?"And yet, when I asked him, "What can yo u do tofigure out the word?" he always answered, "Sound itout!"

One day, in desperation, I asked him, "Who t e l l syou to sound it out?"

"My dad," he said.I should have known. We are not our students'

first or only teachers, and this is one reason that th ephrase lives on from generation to generation. . . .

[W]e must enlist parents as our teaching allies.

We do not want the techniques parents use to helptheir children read to conflict with the reading strate-gies we are teaching at school. To ensure that parentsare helping rather than hindering may require extraparent meetings, seminars, training sessions, and in-formational bulletins sent home....

We may never be able to discover when peoplestarted saying "Sound it out." Some teachers mayeven choose to continue asking children to soundthings out.

I believe, however, that this phrase has outlivedits usefulness, and perhaps we should all begin to say"Think it out" instead. Then we must give children allthe strategies and tools they need for applying theirthinking skills to the task of reading.

Ms. Ramos, who is a reading specialistfor the Northside Independent School Dis-trict in San Antonio, Texas, has performed amost useful service. She has provided thebest evidence from an educator that theschools are now doing everything in theirpower to make sure that children do notdevelop the needed phonetic reflex and,

ins tead, are forced to look at our written andprinted language as an ideographic system,to be "thought out" rather than sounded out.What she fails to understand is that ours is analphabetic reading and writing system, andthat the only way anyone can become profi-dent in using it is to develop the neededphonetic reflex. Without it.:one becomes a

crippled, handicapped reader unable to useour alphabetic system as it was designed tobe used.

Britain 's Secret EducationEstablishment

F ights Conservative Reforms

The following is from the SundayTelegraph (London), June 27, 1993:

Ministers are to be asked to bar civil servantsfrom attending secretive meetings with senior educa-tionists who are accused of undermining John Pat-ten's school reforms,

The chairm an of th e Conservative back-bencheducation committee is to write to Mr Patten, theEducation Secretary, to demand action on the AllSouls Group, whose members include a number oftop-ranking officials and which meets three times ayear in Oxford.

Senior figures in the Prime Ministers DowningStreet policy unit are said to be deeply concernedabout the activities of the organisation, which listsamong its members the permanent secretary at theDepartment for Education, Sir Geoffrey Holland.

Its convenor is Nick Stuart, who was deputysecretary at the department until last year and whohas now b e e n moved to the Department of Employ-ment. ...

Regular attenders include the chief inspector forprimary schools, J im Rose, and the chief inspector offurther education colleges, Terry Melia, a formersenior chief inspector of schools. ...

Meetings take place under Chatham HouseRules, which ban those who attend from talkingabout what they have seen or heard. No records orminutes are kept, and the membership, which is byinvitation only, has never before been published ....

Sir Rhodes Boyson, an education minister un-der Margaret Thatcher, said it represented the forceswhich were working against the Government's aimson education. 'These are meetings of the counter-revolution:' he said.

Sheila Lawlor, deputy director of the Centre forPolicy Studies, said that Conservative education re -forms were being subverted by the educational estab-lislunent. "The spiritof reform has been underminedat each stage. But this is a very powerful world, andif these people didn't meet in Oxford they would still

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find ways of watering down Government policy,"she said.

A second article in the same newspaperstates:

John Patten wasn't there. Neither was any othergovernment minister. But a lot of men and womenwho matter in education were. This was th e shadowy"education Establishment" holding one of its clan-destine thrice-yearly meetings, gathering in an oak-panelled Oxford room.

Under the auspices of th e All Souls Group, someof the most powerful people in the world of educationmeet to exchange views on the issues of the moment.

Many believe it is here, rather than at the De-partment for Education, that crucial questions aboutschools are raised. One member, who did not want tobe named, said that the group had caused frustration

to successive Education Secretaries."One of the reasons why Margaret Thatcher got

so infuriated with the educational establishment wasthat it seemed to have a private core which she couldn'tge t her teeth into, and half her civil servants seems tobe involved," he said.

Anyone who discloses details of who was pres-ent or what was said risks being black-balled. Nominutes are kept, no papers or public statements everemerge, and the membership list has never beforebeen published. It includes many top civil servantsand leading members of Government educationquangos.

Over Saturday evening sherry in the gardens ofRhodes House, Oxford, and later over dinner, thegreat and the good speak frankly together aboutgovernment policy-and they rarely have anythingcomplimentary to say.

They ar e protected by Chatham House Rules,which dictate proceedings are off the record. Thosewho do not share the group's Left-wing views are oc-casionally invited to speak, but rarely receive a sym-pathetic hearing.

Each memb e r is free to bring a guest, and theresult is a volatile mixture of the most powerful andthe most radical in today's educational world....

The All Souls Group was founded in 1941by afriend of Rab Butler, then education minister, andwas credited with having a major influence on thewriting of the 1944 Education Act.

Since those days, the political pendulum hasswung from the Left, but in the group little haschanged ....

Membership is by invitation and the criteria areshrouded in mystery. Names are pu t forward by

members, and a fte r the y have attended a meeting adecision is made on whether they have anything tocontribute .... There are about 50 active members and,once in, few leave.

C omm e n t :Does such a secret education es-

tablishment exist in the United States? Un-doubtedly it does among the top foundationheads, top professors of education, and topeducational operatives in the state and fed-eral governments. They are the ones whodecide on policy and coordinate its implem-entation throughout the United States.Otherwise, how explain the implementationof Outcome-Based Education in state afterstate as if orchestrated by a central control?How explain the widespread use of wholelanguage in teaching reading when we knowthat it produces crippled readers? Howexplain this orchestrated hostility againstintensive phonics among educators?

As for the actual formation of an educa-tion establishment in the U'S, it seems tohave started with a confidential meetingcalled the Oeve1and Conference organizedin 1915 by Prof. Charles Judd, head of theUniversity of Chicago School of Education.

Judd, who got his Ph.D at Leipzig underProf. Wilhelm Wundt, was spearheading themovement to reform education in the psy-cho-progressive mold. David Tyack writesin his book Managers o f Virtue (p. 132):

[ludd] had a vision that both the structure of theschools and the curriculum needed radical revision,but that change would take place "in the haphazardfashion that has characterized our school history unlesssome group gets together and undertakes, in a coop-erative way, to coordinate reforms,"

Judd urged the members of the Cleve-land Conference to jump into the breach andundertake "the positive and aggressive taskof . . . a detailed reorganization of the mate--rials of instruction in schools of all grades."One of the most important reforms promotedby Judd was in the teaching of reading. It

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was his protege William Scott Gray whoproduced the Dick and Jane look-say read-ing program that began America's down-ward slide into illiteracy.

Among the 19 members who attendedthe first Cleveland Conference were JamesR. Angell, a Leipzig alumnus who becamepresident of the University of Chicago andlater president of Yale; Leonard Ayres, di-rector of the Russell Sage Foundation; Abra-ham Flexner of the Rockefeller Foundation;Paul Hanus, director of the Harvard Gradu-ate School of Education; Paul Monroe,founder of the World Federation of Educa-tion Associations; Edward L. Thorndike,father of educational psychology at Teach-ers College, Columbia University; and Ell-wood P. Cubberly of Stanford University'sSchool of Education.

Among others who joined in later yearswere Lyman Bryson of CBS, John Gardner ofthe Carnegie Corporation, James BryantConant of Harvard, and Ralph Tyler of Stan-ford whose pioneering work in psychologi-cal testing helped Benjamin Bloom designOutcome-Based Education. David Tyackwrites (p. 132):

Having no constitution, no minutes, no officerssave a "factotum," no bylaws, no "public 'life," theconference was described in 1949 as a dub whose"sole obejct is to make it possible for forty or fifty mento meet once a year and talk about whatever they areinterested in for ten or a dozen hours in session and anunpredictable :number of hours in lobbies or bed-rooms." Members had a chance to "learn about thenews behind th e news," to get to know leaders in avariety of fields, to share information about neweducational programs or jobs or foundation grants ornew government programs or regulations. \Vhen the

Commonwealth Fund decided to give large sums foreducational research, for example, its officer MaxFarrand outlined the funding program to conferencemembers first.

tematives for parents is to get their childrenout of th e government schools and intohomeschooling or a decent private school.

Incidentally, the Chatham House Rulesmentioned in the S un da y Tele gra ph ,whichmeans that all conference proceedings areoff the record, refers to Chatham House, thehome of the Royal Institute of InternationalAffairs (RnA), the British counterpart of ourCouncil on Foreign Relations (CPR). AndOxford, where the All Souls Group meets, isalso where BillOinton studied on his RhodesScholarship. The scholarships were foundedby Cecil Rhodes, who made his fortune ingold and diamond mining in South Africa inthe 1880s and formed a secret society in 1891with an elite membership to promote theinterests of the British Empire.

Professor Carol Quigley, Bill Clinton'smentor at Georgetown University, wrote abook about the secret society entitled TheAng lo -Ameri can Es tab li shmen t.Quigley wrote:

The Rhodes Scholarships, established by theterms of Cecil Rhodes's seventh will, are known toeveryone. VVhat is not so widely known is thatRhodes in five previous wills left his fortune to forma secret society, which was to devote itself to the

preservation and expansion of the British Empire.And what does not seem to be known to anyone is thatthis secret society was created by Rhodes and hisprincipal trustee, Lord Milner, and continues to thisday ....

This society has been known at various times asMilner's Kindergarten, as th e Round Table Group, asthe Rhodes crowd, as The Times crowd, as the AIlSouls group, and as the Oiveden set. (p, ix)

The scholarships were merely a facade to con-ceal the secret society, or, more accurately, they wereto be one of the instruments by which the members ofthe secret society could carry out his purpose. (p, 33)

The group obviously failed in its mis-sion to preserve the British Empire, but theRhodes Scholarships continue to be awarded.Rhodes died in 1902, and the country ofRhodesia, which was named after him, hasbecome Zimbabwe. Are the Rhodes Scholar-ships now being used. to recruit the future

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And now you know why the educationestablishement is so unresponsive to paren-tal wishes and why the only educational al-


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leaders of the New World Order? It seemsthat way, doesn't it?

Vi t a l Re a d i n g

Ed School Follies: The Miseducationof America's Teachers by Rita Kramer (TheFree Press, 228 pages, $2295)

Reviewed by Edward Rauchut"The worst of the ed schools are certifi-

cate mills where the minimally qualified in-struct the barely literate in a parody of learn-ing," and the rest are not much better, RitaKramer writes in her most recent book, E dSchoo l F ollie s:The Miseducation o f America'sTeachers. No book in recent memory pro-vides a more romprehensive report on teach-ers and the schools that train them.

Ms. Kramer visited education schoolsacross the country, interviewed professorsand students, sat in on classes and askedsome fundamental questions: Why did youdecide to become a teacher? What are schoolsfor? What is the teacher's function?

The answers she received reveal a de-

pressing consensus. "Nowhere in Americatoday," Ms. Kramer writes r "is intellectuallife deader than in our schools, unless it is inour schools of education. II

The education majors Ms. Kramer ob -served were clearly in over their heads. Aneducation professor at the State Universityof New York told her: 'We can't presumeour students know anything."

Another, at Eastern Michigan Univer-sity, said: "Young teachers today are just not

well educated enough to do the job we'reasking of them. . . . They're ignorant, naive,they have low abilities. Let's face it, educa-tion is what you go into if you can't get intoanything else.""' A professor of education at Texas South-ern University made a similar point "Theproblem is that our teachers don't know

enough math and science to teach it to theirpupils. They themselves are the products ofthe system that requires little of its highschool graduates and little more of its bacca-laureates."

What, then, can these education majorsteach? Certainly not subject matter. As onestudent at the State University of New Yorkput it "Liberal arts is not what we're inter-ested in. Here you want to start learningabout your life.... Weve been doing liberalarts all our lives in schooL Now I want tolearn about teaching little children."

A professor of education at PeabodyCollege, on the campus of Nashville's Van-derbilt University, told his class to teach

social studies: "As long as it's not just facts,dates. As long as it's dealing with concepts.How nations do problem solving." The deanof education at Peabody said that "what youneed to teach is not history of literature, buthow to think"

But at the present time, as Ms. Kramerwrites, "knowledge-real knowledge in theform of facts, not thinking skills or feelings ofself-worth-is about the least concern of theprofessional education industry. . . . As

though anything really creative could go onin an empty head. But what choice is therewhen teachers themselves don't know beansabout anything?"

So what the prospective teachers end uplearning, and ultimately teaching, is a politi-cal agenda consisting of sentiment and level-ing equality.

/I All in all, Ms. Kramer writes, because"what matters is not whether or not anyonehas learned anything, but that no one fails topass, the threshold is lowered as required foralmost anyone to get by. ... Meanwhile, anycriticism of this state of affairs is met with thecharge of elitism, or, worse still r racism."

(Edward Rauchut is an associate profes-sor in the school of professional studies atBellevue College, Omaha, Nebraska.)

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the blumenfeld education letter november_1993

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