I suspect there are people who can work around this limitation in some way or can find new words or ways to explain what they’re thinking, but I also suspect that such individuals are very, very rare.

Ironically, I’ve always wondered the opposite–how can people think only in words. There are other modes of thought than language, like the spatial thinking essential to mathematics, physics, and engineering or the aural thinking of musicians. Tempel Grandin’s Thinking in Pictures is an interesting attempt by a high-function autistic engineer to explain her visual thinking to people who primarily think in words.

The GED is just a piece of paper, but many people learn a lot while preparing for it

We don;t just have a crisis in reading, we have a crisis in thinking.

Jim, I don’t disagree, but I’m not sure what you’re suggesting we do differently. Frankly, I learned to think by reading and following the arguments of others who knew how to think. As Brian intimates, how does one structure a symbolic argument (as all arguments are) without proper language skills? Thinking is verbal. Yes, there are some helpful rules of logic and knowledge of logical fallacies that clarify thinking, but how can one acquire those things if one doesn’t read well?

About your reading program. . .

By the way, 6 year olds are not allowed recess because of their “scientifically based” reading block or 90 uninterrupted minutes of shouting out unison letter sounds like a boot camp – no art, no music, often no PE. Your idea of the ideal program is SOOoooo inhumane. You won’t get readers, but you’re going to find you get a new product that you never bargained for.

Hmmm. I’m not sure where I said it was a good idea to deprive young bodies of physical exercise or cut out arts and music out. Nor do I see where I suggest drill and kill approaches like shouting out letter sounds. If you can find where I said those things, I’ll withdraw them. But I don’t think I said those things.

And why would intensive pre-school, designed to help kids actually have a fighting chance to become lifelong learners who can read extremely well, be inhumane?

You can’t think something if you lack the language skills and vocabulary to describe the thought. So, in some sense, how creative and thoughtful people can be is limited by having the words to describe and explain their creativity.

I suspect there are people who can work around this limitation in some way or can find new words or ways to explain what they’re thinking, but I also suspect that such individuals are very, very rare.

I also don’t believe for a second that software and testing are sufficient answers to the reading dilemma. Unless you’re going to make sure that every Game Boy, cell phone, and iPod in America have them loaded and that kids can’t access their distractions without doing the exercises.

There’s nothing wrong with on-line education if it’s done thoughtfully. But, like all education, it requires thoughtful engagement by both instructor and student.

We don;t just have a crisis in reading, we have a crisis in thinking. Hoop jumping is much easier to create and assess. That’s why we have had NCLB foisted on us as the panacea for our educational ills. America’s chief problem is a lack of thinking. I began to see this in the 1970’s when most of my students could do little more than create versions of things they’d seen on TV when I asked them to be creative….

I’m haunted by the line from Yeats: “The best lack all conviction/While the worst are filled with passionate intensity….”

Daddy or the Man du jour, is a avid sports fan, not invested in the children he or some other source has spawned. Or worse. . . actually, ususally worse. He loves the titty bar , his guns or the casino as much as the Steelers.

Momma is desperate to keep someone around, renouncing her maternal authority to someone who might help out with the rent sometimes. Her idea of a weekend outing is the local discount store screaming at the kids from time to time with her hear glued to a cellular. They are not discussing educational reform.

The kids think Flaming Cheetos are Cheerios, Saw II-XXI is the film realization of life, fuck is the word to use when you can’t think of another (and it’s easy to paint).

I teach school – 30 years now. I am in a district rife with paper educated people who haven’t got a CLUE. (the degree is just a matter of taking out enough loans to buy the certificate. there IS no minimum requirement, really. get YOUR phd on line.) They are outnumbered only by those who are on the take with public money. whew! No oversight.

Listen, friends. You won’t get apples from a russian olive tree. I don’t care how much money you throw at it (and into the pockets of your friends or the local bottom feeders). You gotta burn that sucker down to its roots and hope it hasn’t already choked out all the apple trees that USED TO LIVE in the orchard.

We should be very, very worried.

About your reading program. . .

By the way, 6 year olds are not allowed recess because of their “scientifically based” reading block or 90 uninterrupted minutes of shouting out unison letter sounds like a boot camp – no art, no music, often no PE. Your idea of the ideal program is SOOoooo inhumane. You won’t get readers, but you’re going to find you get a new product that you never bargained for.

Yup, you should be worried.

Sorry to hear about your wife. I hope everything works out.

My son spent time being a tutor for Soutside Chicago kids. They were middle school age, and whether he hadn’t the skills to help, or whether they were beyond help, I don’t know. I do know that he left the process badly discouraged.

Good for you for doing what you can. Keep up the good fight.

I, myself mentored 12 year olds who were disadvantaged. One of them I helped and made a significant impact. The other two…..were dismal failures. The kid I helped was smart, but had no positive infulences. He ended up in the service, and has a good gig on a submarine. The other two had no real intelligence, but plenty of attitude. Their role models were gangsters, or gangstas….as they put it. I plan on trying to take on a tough nut and seeing how I can do, as I hope not to repeat the mistakes I made with the two failures. I’ll have to wait to see how this all plays out as soon as some medical issues with my lovely wife are resolved.

I agree with kids needing to read at level by 4th grade. Past that is too late in most cases. We read stories to our kid from when he was a year old, and that spurred a decent reading habit.

I hear your point, but frankly, if a kid gets past the fourth grade without reading at a fourth grade reading level, the jig’s pretty much up. There are exceptions, of course, but the odds against kids learning to read competently after that time are very long.

If I were to volunteer anywhere, I would insist on teaching only young children. Triage, you know.

Bravo for your wife. If just 10% of the population were to mentor just one kid each, it would be like sending in a whole army.

Jeff

I have a couple of friends who moved here from China. I go fishing with them all of the time. They are good, hardworking, proud people from the countryside. They have very limited English, and can’t read. Their three kids are all in college, one in medical school. All of their Chinese friends are expecting the same thing from their kids.

Yeah. It’s not a single factor issue. I know some people like that, too, but I also know Asians who speak nothing but their native language in the home, get DVDs for their kids to watch in their native language, and have kids who are struggling in school. The difference seems to be when the kids started playing with English speaking kids, how often, and what sorts of families those English speaking kids came from. I know two sisters from the same family whose English language skills are as different as night and day. The younger one, who started out in this culture as an infant, is far more advanced, academically, than her sister.

Aside from the government taking the low scorers away from their parents and shuttling them into an expensive program, I fear that there is little that can be done for those kids.

Exactly! That’s what I was suggesting, only as a sort of mega-preschool. I think the expense is minimal compared to the long-term costs in GDP, tax revenues, and social ills like crime.

Perhaps if readers of this site were to join a Big Brothers/Sisters program, they could help a kid. You get more out of it than you put into it, and it only requires a few hours a week.

My wife has done that, and every little bit counts. But it’s not enough. It’s like sending a squad of light infantry to land on Normandy Beach and march on Berlin.

I have a couple of friends who moved here from China. I go fishing with them all of the time. They are good, hardworking, proud people from the countryside. They have very limited English, and can’t read. Their three kids are all in college, one in medical school. All of their Chinese friends are expecting the same thing from their kids.

I agree that the parents(with limited skills) of the kids over here might be beyond help, and do hope that their kids will be able to do better. Aside from the government taking the low scorers away from their parents and shuttling them into an expensive program, I fear that there is little that can be done for those kids.

I did a little mentoring on the side(and plan on doing it again), and had limited success with 1 out of 3 of the kids who were assigned to me. Limited success is still success, and does make a difference in someone’s life. Perhaps if readers of this site were to join a Big Brothers/Sisters program, they could help a kid. You get more out of it than you put into it, and it only requires a few hours a week.

Actions speak louder than words.

Jeff

JSO – yeah, absolutely, and the most painful point you make for me personally is the idea that in order to fix high school you have to start in pre-school. Except for me, it’s always been if you want to fix college you have to start in pre-school. These days the graduating college seniors I see are maybe – maybe – on the level of sophomores, although probably not that. As a college professor it drove me nuts having to suspend college education to conduct remedial junior high language workshops. There are a number of reasons I’m not a professor anymore, and this is way up toward the top of the list.

Fundamental skills. Building blocks. Right – language is the tool upon which all other things are built, just like education is the core foundation for every other important thing a society wants to accomplish.

Well said.

Why should the government steal from me via taxes, and spend that money on schools that don’t work?

In no way did I mean to imply that all public schools aren’t working, nor did I mean to imply that all teachers, principals, etc. aren’t doing their jobs. I think they’re generally (with notable exceptions) doing a good job with what they have to work with.

In my school district, we have one high school that consistently turns out scores of kids who go on to the finest universities in the world, but 20% of its students are struggling English learners. The school has 28 AP courses, and any student who maxes out the curriculum can attend the local, flagship state university for free. But that doesn’t help that lower 20%, who take remedial courses and are just trying to get enough skills and credit hours to graduate, IF their parents don’t move on during their high school careers (which happens more often than not).

This high school is doing a great job, but like physicians who are dealing with diseases they can’t cure, they cannot save everyone.

Schools should be subject to free-market competition like everything else. If people weren’t taxed so heavily, they could afford private schools.

In my school district, students can attend pretty much any public school they want, including a number of charters, focus schools, and strand schools. Schools that lose too many students tend to be closed or have their principals and/or teachers replaced. So, this mirrors the free market.

The problem is that, while some schools have flourished and others have languished, the overall achievement in the school district has remained flat. This is because parents of high-performing students are choosing schools based on standardized test scores, and those scores tend to be closely linked to socio-economic status. In other words, the reason some schools are getting good test scores is because they have good students. The district is simply pushing the good students to the “good” schools, resulting in improved test scores for them and lower ones elsewhere.

Consumers aren’t choosing by quality of school, but by the socio-economic status of its students.

No. 1: The newbies expect to not work weekends and punch out at 5 Monday through Thursday and at 3 on Friday.

No. 2: Weak vocabularies. They do not have sufficient knowledge of words to make fine distinctions in meaning.

I see this over and over in entering freshmen: They don’t read enough, and it shows.

Thanks.

I personally believe that it’s child neglect if a parent allows education to be swept under the rug.

I agree Jeff, but sometimes it’s not just “allowing it to be swept under the rug.” Parents who, themselves, have limited vocabularies and terrible reading skills have no means of passing better vocabularies and skills on to their children from an early age. Even if they want to, they can’t give what they don’t have.

Most of them are probably beyond help, but their children aren’t. I think that’s where we should be focusing our efforts, on young children.

We’re raising generations of kids to be increasingly less literate, less thoughtful, less critical, and less capable, and not realizing until it’s too late what a horrible nightmare this will cause.

I personally believe that it’s child neglect if a parent allows education to be swept under the rug.

Jeff