Perhaps It's Time to Give the Alphabet Another Chancel
Few Americans fifty years old and up remember schoolmates in the early grades who couldn't learn to read. They went through high school without ever hearing of "remedial reading" courses, and certainly, if they went to college or law school, they would have been astounded at the existence of advance students unable to put an English sentence together, or even to comprehend the meaning of English sentences written by others. If the deans of the law schools of Columbia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Stanford universities found students in this sad state of ignorance, they kept it to themselves. In those days even the village idiot learned to read. He might move his lips while doing, it, but he could read.
Now, after decades of supposedly scientific testing and investigating by psychologists, pedagogues and "achievement" measurers, we find colleges, professional schools, employers and parents raising the roof because too many young people can't read. Reading is supposed to be such a difficult "skill" that many children are not permitted even to try to master it. If they flunk their ''readiness test," they are forced to sit in gloomy isolation while their classmates struggle with this mystery. Defenders of the prevailing method, pushed to the wall, take refuge in remarkable observations such as, "There is no reason why everybody should read any more than that everybody should play the piano!"
What happened? Perhaps the origin of this extraordinary retreat is best summarized by Mortimer Smith, editor of the Bulletin of the Council for Basic Education, in a useful little book titled, A Citizens Manual for Public Schools. "During the last thirty years or so," reports Mr. Smith, "one, school of reading specialists, drawn largely from the educational-psychology departments of our schools of education, has come to dominate almost completely the teaching of reading in public schools. These specialists maintain that reading must start with whole sentences and then be broken down to phrases and words., This is done by memorization with the aid of pictures and context clues."
Undoubtedly some children learn to read by this "look and say" method. Others, when confronted with the picture of a dog, are as likely to say "bowwow" or "cocker spaniel" as "dog." Since they have not been taught that the letters D, 0 and G have any phonic significance, there is no reason why their response to the picture of a dog should be anything in particular.
In Reading, Chaos and Cure (McGraw- Hill), Sibyl Terman and Charles Child Walcutt, the former a teacher of "remedial" reading, the latter professor of, English at Queens College, New York, point out that "a first-grade child has, by conservative count, already memorized 10,000 words. He has been working at this task all his waking hours for six years, and he has learned all these words by ear. . . . The second step-from the spoken word to the printed word-is not arbitrary; it is logical and simple; it consists of learning the alphabet, learning that letters are sounds and then getting the key of how letters are blended into sounds and words. . . . A child who knows hat and cat and bat-and knows his letters- will not have to sound out fat when he sees it printed."
The "look and say" educationists ignore this natural process and, in the words of Terman and Walcutt, "the child is asked to begin all over again, and to repeat the feat of memory that accumulated his 10,000-word 'ear' vocabulary. After he has learned these words-as-pictures for a year or two, his teachers begin to analyze them and deduce the phonic pictures from them."
In other words, the child finally gets the news that words are composed of letters which indicate sounds and, when put together, add up to the words he has already learned by ear. Of course, as the progressives point out, phonics will not supply the pronunciation of every English word ("I knew there was a new way to weigh a gnu"), but not even the "conformation" of such exceptions would prove ,much either.
A revolution against this method will take time. After all, it's five years since Rudolf Flesch, in Why Johnny Can't Read (Harper), blew the whistle on the antireading educationists. However, there are already "long leaps forward" here and there. For example, in New Castle, Pennsylvania, Glenn McCracken, an English teacher in the public schools, has been carrying on a "revolutionary" experiment in the teaching of reading. What the experiment comes to is a modification of the look-and-say method through the introduction of phonics, plus the use of film strips. In The Right To Learn (Regnery), Mr. McCracken reports that pupils who have been told they are not ready to read learn quickly by this method. Other systems, such as the Hay-Wingo method, have done a lot to remedy the damage in some favored areas.
School administrators are conscious, of public attitudes and, when the sounds of revolt are loud enough, they will permit American children to learn to read. Recently a professor of education actually urged parents to encourage young children to learn to read before school age! Something has to give somewhere, and the sooner the better.
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Nehru's "Neutralism" Bit the Dust When Kerala, Repudiated the Reds
The big news in the Kerala election last February was not the rout of the Communists, who got only twenty-eight seats in the 126-member Kerala legislature. What really happened has been largely ignored by the Indians and foreign press. It was the rout of neutralism under the nose of Prime Minister Nehru, neutralism's chief advocate.
In early 1957 the Communists were voted into power in Kerala, the smallest, most literate and most Christian state of India. After two years of Communist misrule, violence and plunder of the exchequer, as was reported in The Saturday Evening Post- COMMUNIST BY CHOICE, by Arthur Bonner, May 31, 1958- the people so hated the Communists that they rose in a mass upsurge. After a forty-eight-day-long turmoil throughout Kerala, the Delhi Government deposed the Communists from power and imposed the president's rule on Kerala. A few months later came the historic elections which brought the landslide victory over Communism in the first state to adopt it voluntarily.
One question is, what made the initial Communist success possible? It was the apathy of the voters, about one third of whom did not care to vote. The people, languishing in the hypnotic sleep of neutralism, failed to make a firm and determined move against Communism. Nehru's decade-long chanting of neutralism had soothed the natural' antagonisms of the people and, while they drowsed, the ever-wakeful Communists moved in.
What made the later Communist defeat possible? The people rose up from their neutralist lethargy and voted in unprecedented numbers, setting a new Asian record in the percentage of, votes polled-more than 85 per cent. There was a complete division of the vote between those favoring a firm stand against Communism and those favoring Communism. No Keralans supported the tightrope walking and sitting on the fence which are the characteristics of neutralism. A "look at the record" was enough to dispel indecision on the issue.
Present-day neutralism is bankrupt in another sense also; for, as Kerala has shown, neutralism has no base among the people. It is an unnatural philosophy imposed upon them by leaders from above. President Sukarno of Indonesia and other leaders around India should not miss its real significance.
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