Since you are connected to teaching home schooling can you tell me why we don't teach like the above now? I read George Orwells Politics and the English Language and really enjoyed it. I don't see why I wasn't given that essay and a copy of Elements of Style then told to write. With enough practice I expect anyone would write well.

So, is there a reason school is not taught in the old way? [edit: That is, is there any reason to believe that any of the people who influence state curriculum just want "to produce docile factory workers"?]

See

http://learninfreedom.org/readseri.html

(I see the link began having DNS problems just as I posted it; it should be live later.)

for more about better reading instruction, and see

"Pulled Away or Pushed Out? Explaining the Decline of Teacher Aptitude in the United States" (American Economic Review, 2004)

for negative selection for academic ability in United States teacher training.

"Lacking a direct measure of aptitude, we link people to the mean combined SAT scores of their college and then divide them into six groups: those from colleges with SAT scores in the top five percentiles, the next 10, the next 15, the next 20, the next 25, and the bottom 25 percentiles. The SAT cut-points are constant over time so that aptitude is defined in absolute terms. The aptitude groups are finer at the top of the distribution because previous research suggests that the top quartile accounts disproportionately for the decline in teacher aptitude."

Whoever wrote this should lose their tenure immediately.

But what specifically are you disagreeing with in the paragraph you kindly quoted?

I'm not saying that it's impossible, but basing an entire paper on this premise without any supporting evidence is completely ridiculous. So far as I've seen there is zero evidence that this is true.

After some Googling, it seems that this measure of teacher quality is attributed to:

http://ideas.repec.org/a/ilr/articl/v55y2002i4p686-699.html

I don't have access to the paper, but from the summary I see no evidence that this measure has any empirical support.

I notice that he is at odds with Kohn on whole language, and I would tend to agree with Kohn, but other than that Gatto seems factually accurate.

I'm not sure why he claims people don't read whole words. We read groups of letters not the letters themselves.

Relatedly, I met a man who claimed to be a speed reader. When pressed he insisted it was true and that he read lines and paragraphs at a time with good retention and understanding. He went on saying he and a group of kids had been taught to speed read by their elementary school principal for his PHD thesis.

Thank you for the interesting information tokenadult.

That's exactly his point, that because less than 1% of schools adopted whole language instruction it is numerically impossible for whole language to be responsible for the decline in reading comprehension.

How does he back up that claim? I encountered quite a few school districts that claimed to be providing "whole language" reading instruction (including my alma mater school district, then, where I had been taught to read with phonics three decades earlier) in the 1990s. I'm going to check what the current vogue is here, but I know it's not working well.

I haven't done much research on teaching literacy, so I'm really just relaying his argument.