Let's not forget the role of industrialization in the decline of
literacy rates in England and probably America as well. The Industrial
Revolution pulled people from farms to factories/cities; once they were
there and dependent on a wage for their living, ruthless, unrestrained
capitalism exploited the labor of women, children, and men, depriving
them of time and energy to become literate and use that literacy in the
advancement of their own workers' rights.

This may seem unconnected to the debate over the quality of schools, but
it's not. _One_ of the many factors militating against success in our
schools is the pressure young people feel to work during their high
school and college years. (I'm sure the problems with education start
much earlier in many communities; this is just one factor.) This has
been on my mind a lot recently because my own students constantly
complain of how hard it is to fit their schoolwork around their work
schedules. I used to survey my classes regularly and most were working
20 hours a week or more, many 30 hours and more a week.

I know many of them need the income to get themselves through college,
but many are just supporting the lifestyle to which they have become
accustomed -- a late-model car, fashionable clothes and hair, evenings
out at movies, restaurants, and bars, ski vacations and Mexican spring
breaks. For those who must work to live, they are in a terrible hurry to
get their degree done so that they can get out into the workforce; they
compromise the quality of their education in their rush to complete the
degree while working full- or nearly full-time.

Another parallel to the impact of industrialization on literacy is the
effect of our current 'productivity boom' on family relations and the
amount of time parents spend with their children (helping them with
homework, reading to and with them, engaging them in thoughtful
conversation). In most families, the lone parent or both parents work;
work is steadily eating into our time with downsizing,  unpaid overtime,
cell phones and home computers, the timeless global village in which one
stock market opens when another closes. Even affluent parents often
spend little time with their children, and when they do, it is often in
front of the TV set; meals are taken with the TV blaring in the background.

I won't argue with the proposition that a lot is wrong with education at
all levels. But success in school is hard to achieve if there isn't
strong support from the surrounding community and the home. A capitalist
society views education pragmatically, as producing a workforce that can
keep profits high. There's not going to be a love of intellectuals,
because intellectuals sooner or later point out the flaws of free-market capitalism.

I'm also quite intrigued by Mr. Reis's comments about motivation to
learn--that in early America, people learned because they wanted to. I
don't know how we can ever sort this out, since patriarchal parenting
styles usually left children little choice in how their lives were run.
Does it matter what the engine supplying the motivational force is? One
reason the schools swung away from traditional education was that the
traditional methods were often stultifying, punitive, and detached from
the real world to which the content of subjects such as mathematics and
grammar would be applied. I experienced this first hand as a child in
Catholic school (yes, the horrid schools in which motivation was fear of
the nun's rod. One of my teachers actually had a 1x2 that she whacked
across the knees of disobedient or inattentive students. The two
emotions I associate most strongly with my grade 1-8 schooling are
terror of punishment and boredom due to lack of a sufficient
intellectual challenge.) As usual, the pendulum swung too far in the
other direction, making (I feel) many of the accusations of negative
effects of 'touchy-feely' 'self-esteem-based' education true.

We need a balanced approach that preserves positive motivation while
encouraging children to develop the self-discipline necessary to learn
the complex knowledge our world now supplies. Simply returning to the
inhumane teaching methods of the past, based on shame, fear, and the
notion of children as inherently unruly and defective, will only spawn
another reaction down the line. Children, we now know, are learning
machines. They are programmed to investigate the world, form hypotheses,
test them, and revise. Set them into conditions which pique their
curiosity and make them feel safe in experimenting with knowledge, and
our worries will be over. Of course, they need resources as well--safe
schools, good materials, competent teachers, and efficient
administrators. Now there's Utopia for you!

Many feel that this thread is too far removed from the purpose of this
list. I say it is intimately connected to the purpose of the list. Yeah,
there are no tips in the above for 'what to do on Monday', but there's
no reason why the list cannot host such tips together with 'theory'. One
of the dialogues we are engaged in is how to improve language arts
teaching so that kids understand language and are comfortable expressing
themselves in the prestige dialect of English. Returning to the 'shame'
version of grammar, according to which users of double negatives and
'seen' as past tense are 'bozos' (to quote one of ATEG's 1998 convention
speakers) is not exactly a positive motivational strategy. We have to
admit that current grammar materials perpetuate the traditional
educational mission of denigrating the working classes and eliminating
all trace of working-class or 'wrong' ethnic identity from their
language behavior. How many children fail to become literate because the
methods used to train them make them feel bad about themselves? Stupid
and inferior to middle-class children in their classes? Teachers who
misunderstand reading miscues and misinterpret nonstandard English as
diminished mental capacity feed the cycle of lowered expectations. Add
to this the many other disadvantages of schooling in poor communities,
and you've got a tough row to hoe to get a lot of kids a decent education.

The factors that downgrade education vary across communities. And within
any community, downgraded education cannot be attributed to the lack of
grammar or the failure to teach Shakespeare alone. A host of problems
plague education in rich and poor communities alike, and these problems
lie in the surrounding culture as much as they do in the school. And I
mean the culture of the affluent, not just the culture of the so-called
'disadvantaged'. The simple formula of returning to 'the canon' and
disciplinarian forms of education isn't the magic bullet. It didn't do
the working classes much good up to the 1960's (regulation of working
conditions and prosperity raised living standards at least as much as
universal education). Does anyone really believe that the majority of
people who graduated high school in the 1950's, who went on to work as
typists, car assemblers, or textile workers, went around quoting
Aristotle? Would they, after 10 years on the assembly line or running a
car dealership, have been able to parse a sentence or name the Roman emperors?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Johanna Rubba   Assistant Professor, Linguistics
English Department, California Polytechnic State University
One Grand Avenue  • San Luis Obispo, CA 93407
Tel. (805)-756-2184  •  Fax: (805)-756-6374 • Dept. Phone.  756-259
• E-mail: [log in to unmask] •  Home page: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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