Underground History of American Education

Re:Underground History of American Education by Alex3917 on Thursday April 02, 2009 @09:16PM (#544320)

Do you know of anything that Gatto specifically gets wrong, or do you just that that Underground History would leave one with a less useful understanding of our educational system than, say, Equality and Achievement?

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Underground History of American Education by Radix on Thursday April 02, 2009 @10:42PM (#544404)

He says this on section 14: Until 1965 no one bothered to check Cattell’s famous experiment with the tachistoscope. When they did, it was found Cattell had been dead wrong. People read letters, not words.

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Underground History of American Education by tokenadult on Thursday April 02, 2009 @11:00PM (#544425)

I've read a fair amount of the eye-tracking literature, and it's true that people read letters or (small) groups of letters if they are reading.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Underground History of American Education by delackner on Friday April 03, 2009 @01:52AM (#544569)

I haven't read any of the literature, but can't both claims be true? Experienced readers may mentally first become aware of whole words or blocks of words, but they could easily just not be aware of the finer-grained eye movements that are going into that perception.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Underground History of American Education by Radix on Friday April 03, 2009 @02:38PM (#545332)

Well, it looks like you're right. Which makes reading more complicated than I had thought. Please mod me down for being incorrect.

Thank you for the interesting information tokenadult.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Underground History of American Education by tokenadult on Thursday April 02, 2009 @09:39PM (#544344)

I've read some Kohn over the years (I especially liked his article about homeschooling in Atlantic in 1987 or so), but there simply isn't an empirical defense to be made of "whole language." All the best readers I know started out with something like what would be called code-intensive, phonics-first reading instruction.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Underground History of American Education by Alex3917 on Thursday April 02, 2009 @09:50PM (#544352)

"All the best readers I know started out with something like what would be called code-intensive, phonics-first reading instruction."

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Underground History of American Education by tokenadult on Thursday April 02, 2009 @11:05PM (#544430)

because less than 1% of schools adopted whole language instruction

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Underground History of American Education by Alex3917 on Thursday April 02, 2009 @11:22PM (#544447)

I don't remember offhand, but it comes from a chapter in his book The Schools Our Children Deserve. There is a whole chapter devoted to whole language, so the cite would be pretty easy to find.

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

[ Parent | on HN ]