Not Teaching Disciplines Fails Students

A woman recently told me, during casual conversation, that her fifthgrade daughter had just been assigned to write a one-page report on how she feels about her family tree.

“How she feels about it?” I asked, incredulously, at which the mother confirmed that yes, I’d heard her right the first time.

Notwithstanding the absurdity of the assignment, I couldn’t help but wonder how a teacher would grade such a paper. Would she give it an A if the child felt passionately about her family tree, but only a C if the child’s feelings were lukewarm? What if the child said she thought family trees were dumb and therefore felt nothing whatsoever about hers? Would that brief, bold admission constitute grounds for giving the child an F?

I thought back to my grade school years. Had my fifth-grade teacher made an assignment on the same topic, she would not have been interested in my feelings. Rather, she would have expected me to write a report on the most interesting person on my family tree or the first person on the tree to become an American or some such tangible thing. If I had emoted about the tree itself, she would have told me to redo the assignment, with penalty.

“I’m not interested, Mr. Rosemond, in your feelings,” she would have said. “I’m interested in your ability to search out information and organize your findings and ideas on paper.”

Such was the state of language arts instruction in 1957, before teachers were persuaded that requiring children to learn proper rules of grammar, punctuation and composition was not only unnecessary, but downright “coercive,” thus damaging the student self-esteem.

In the 1980s, the “whole language” movement swept public education, its advocates maintaining that if children learned to speak without being taught rules of speech, they should be taught to read and write similarly.

Phonics instruction, according to one WL backer, was “heartless drudgery.” Yet another claimed that requiring children to learn rules of grammar and discern the author’s meaning from a text was “pernicious.” Such disciplines, said WL fans, stifled creativity and disallowed students from bringing their “own meaning” to what they read and about which they wrote.

Critics argued that WL predisposes significant numbers of children to reading problems, that it was an “illiterate” approach to language arts instruction, but to no avail. On many an occasion, their traditionalism was mocked.

Of all the states, California embraced WL with the greatest zeal, but its Department of Public Instruction is now repenting. And well it should, given that California fourth-graders came in dead last in a 1994 national assessment of reading abilities. (Nationally, 40 percent of fourth-graders fail to qualify at the basic proficiency level.)

One California school system conducted a two-year study which compared phonics to whole language, finding that by the end of second grade, phonics students scored more than a year above WL students in word recognition, comprehension and vocabulary. As a result, a state reading task force emptied both barrels at WL, and Superintendent of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin has ordered an end to the WL experiment and an immediate restoration of phonics and grammar to the language arts curriculum.

For some odd reason, educators around the country look to California to take the lead in educational “reform.” It seems, then, that the blind have been leading the blind. Nonetheless, California’s bold move is certainly a giant step in the right direction, given that the one right direction for American public education is backward. Those of us who have long maintained that America’s schools were a whole lot better, albeit not perfect, in the 1950s than they are today can only hope this is the start of something good.

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