"The rhythms and emotional weather" of learning by heart

"'It is we, not the Victorians, who are weakly sentimental when it comes to educating children,' writes Michael Knox Beran in the Winter [2004] issue of City Journal, tracing the growth of public education theory and practice in America from its sturdy Emersonian roots in the nineteenth century to its mushy Deweyesque fruits today, we blogged in our post "Don't trust children with edge tools," illustrated with "Kittie and Mousie, Lesson IX" (illustration above, link no longer active) from McGuffey's Second Eclectic Reader, 1879.

"Possibly at the end of another huge taxpayer-subsidized study, educators will discover that learning history makes for better-informed citizens -- extraordinary! -- or that memorizing poems and such is not only good training for a student’s memory but also gives students the gift of possessing those works -- their rhythms and emotional weather -- at their fingertips," writes the silver-tongued Roger Kimball, delighting us with the rhythms and emotional weather of his words:

Under the splendid headline “English as a proficient language,” The Oregonian reports that some 9,000 students passed the state English examination last year, up from 4,000 the year before. Why the dramatic improvement? Because, say “educators” (don’t you love that word?), “a new way of teaching that has swept Oregon” classrooms teaching English as a Second Language. The novelty? “Schools have begun explicitly teaching the grammar, rules and structure of English. And they are doing it in a carefully ordered way, making sure that students don’t miss any of the building blocks of how English verbs are conjugated, words are ordered, conversations are expected to proceed and sentences are constructed” . . .

“For a long time,” said one “educator,” “we just read to them and exposed them to English and figured they would pick it up just like native speakers do.” No doubt it took a large, multi-year government grant to figure out that, if you want to teach most people a language, you actually have to teach them the language.

That's the trouble with "educators." Even a nine-year-old child who reads Science News for Kids would know that "people have a tough time learning new languages as they grow older, but infants have the ability to learn any language, even fake ones, easily." We had thought that was common knowledge but suppose it depends upon what your definition of common is. Who is educating the "educators"? you ask. For some answers beyond the usual teachers' union politics, let us return to "Stealth education," our post of four years back, written in the context of news about a textbook consultant who had praised Pakistan's madrassa schools as "proud symbols of learning":

It isn't just infidel-hating Wahhabists who are trying to brainwash our children, of course, but interest groups of every stripe.  We've blogged about these issues before, here and here and here, noting that textbook companies and educators take the path of least resistance, responding to the squeakiest wheels. As George Archibald in The Washington Times put it,

"Publishers acknowledge having buckled since the early 1980s to so-called multicultural 'bias guidelines' demanded by interest groups and elected state boards of education that require censorship of textbook content to accommodate feminist, homosexual and racial demands."

The words of Emerson, quoted here awhile back, still resonate:

Don’t trust children with edge tools. Don’t trust man, great God, with more power than he has, until he has learned to use that little better. What a hell we should make of the world if we could do what we would!

That's what comes of leaving education in the hands of the "educators." Still, we agree with Roger Kimball that "For now, we should render thanks for the pioneering discovery that if you wish to teach someone a language, your best bet is to teach them the language. What an insight!"

Comments

[goomp]

Here's to more of such enlightenment of those who would be educators.

[John F. MacMichael]

I saw that story in The Oregonian. It made me wonder if this radical new strategy of teaching English by actually teaching English might be applied to native English speakers as well. Probably not.