Time was — and not long ago — that news from the nation’s
schools was nearly all bad: falling scores, unruly students
assaulting teachers, unions thwarting reforms, bureaucrats weaving
ever more red tape.
Lately one report after another suggests that common sense is
returning to education. Some examples:
• Last week at my alma mater, the University of
California, Berkeley, the chancellor apologized profusely in public
for a “failure of oversight” in the case of a graduate student in
the English department who planned to teach a fall course on “The
Politics and Poetics of the Palestinian Resistance” He had appended
this warning to the class description, “Conservative thinkers are
encouraged to seek another section.”
The student-teacher, one Snehal Shingavi, is a leader in an
organization calling itself Students for Justice in Palestine,
which recently occupied an academic building on campus.
Once the news of Shingavi’s “warning” became public, there was a
coast-to-coast outcry. Chancellor Robert Berdahl’s response was
quick and clear: “It is imperative that our classrooms be free of
indoctrination — indoctrination is not education,” he said. Cal
has come a long way from the Sixties when “free speech” meant you
were free to express yourself so long as you mouthed the Marxist
pieties of the day. Apparently, Mr. Shingavi won’t be teaching his
propaganda course.
• In Saratoga Springs, New York, five-year-old Kayla
Broadus committed the heinous crime of saying grace before downing
her snack-time cupcake and milk. She even joined hands with the
children on either side of her. Alert teacher Lori Maragno hushed
Kayla when the little girl said, “God is good. God is great. Thank
you, God, for my food.” The teacher had nipped this incipient
establishment of religion in the nick of time. Lest any other
toddler try such tricks, the school board issued a press release to
the effect that children are prohibited from praying aloud in
school.
Kayla’s mother did not roll over. She sued the school board,
with the help of the tenacious religious-freedom-rights
organization, the Rutherford Institute. The school board had not
bargained on dealing with a nest of hornets which, figuratively, it
got when Rutherford signed on. It is now talking about an
out-of-court settlement. Dominus vobiscum, Rutherford and
Mrs. Broadus, and pace, school board.
• As any employer whose business requires writing can
attest, the nation is dealing with a generation loaded with people
who cannot spell or parse a sentence. It’s not that young people
going into the work force are stupid. Rather, most were taught
reading by a method that ignores spelling and grammar. It is called
“Whole Language.” In the early stages, this method sought to engage
children’s interests by putting words into simple stories. It was
supposed to draw out their “creativity” and make learning a
“joyous” experience. How did it work?
California, which has the nation’s largest public school system,
was by the mid-Nineties close to the bottom for reading scores.
Fifty-six percent of the kids were reading below a basic level,
according to state Board of Education member Marion Joseph.
Children whose parents were college-educated didn’t fare much
better than the student universe: 49 percent of them were reading
below par. “It’s not about poverty or class or race,” says Ms.
Joseph. “It’s about curriculum.”
What California is doing about this is bringing Phonics back
into the classroom. Beginning in September, it will offer two
curricula which emphasize phonetic skills, involving the systematic
sounding out of vowels and consonants and their interaction. While
this may be neither joyous nor free-wheelingly creative, it gets
results. Two years ago in Los Angeles, schools with the poorest
reading scores were ordered to adopt the phonics method of teaching
reading in the first two grades. First-grade scores went from the
42nd percentile nationally up to the 56th; second-grade scores went
from 32nd to 37th.
Meanwhile, across the continent in Gaithersburg, Maryland, high
school English teacher Robyn Jackson is introducing her students to
diagramming sentences. This process, nearly universal through the
Sixties, places the subject (noun) and predicate (verb) of a
sentence on a horizontal line, with various modifying words
slanting off. It helps the student visualize the components of a
sentence. Its objective is clarity in writing. Nearly a century
ago, journalist Ambrose Beirce declared, “Good writing is clear
thinking made visible.”
The National Council of Teachers of English decided, back in the
Seventies, that sentence diagramming should go the way of the dodo
bird. It was infatuated with the Whole Language approach to
teaching reading, and grammar stood in the way. According to New
York University scholar Diane Ravitch, the idea was to “let less
motivated students express their thoughts on topics that interested
them, such as skate boarding…and not discourage them by
correcting their spelling and grammar until they had gained
confidence in their ability to put words on paper.”
If the teacher had to teach one student this way, she had to
teach all. Hence, the dumbing down of reading, spelling, and
grammar across the nation.
Ms. Jackson — and a growing number of other teachers — are
digging out old grammar books in order to teaching diagramming.
Some of their students like it; some don’t; but all of them are
learning how the language is put together.
Peter Hannaford’s column appears every
Monday.
