Dear ATEG members,

Please let us not descend into hyperbole and insult. This is a list for people who have an interest in education and scholarship. If it reverts into one of character assassination and politics, it will become a thing dead and useless. Is anyone out there monitoring these posts?

To Judy, I offer my own assurance and confidence in her often proven high capacity for scholarship,intelligence, and analytic abilities; those of us who have met her and who have read her postings to this list could know no less.

Regarding Mr. Dewey, I think it is hardly productive to reduce his prodigious contribution to both American education and society to the epithet, 'thug'; let's not engage in reductive reasoning.

Again, I urge all of us to stop these polemics and return to useful matters.

Happy Holidays,

Paul E. Doniger
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Robert Reis 
  To: [log in to unmask] 
  Sent: Friday, December 22, 2000 2:01 PM
  Subject: Re: What did Dewy think about Grammar?


  My, my, poor Judith, your post is proof of your incapacity to read and analyze articles written at an adult level. In fact, I can see no evidence in your post that you read Mr. Gatto at all. Those of us who know how to use WEB search engines can find numerous articles by Mr. Gatto. They are easily available. I even provided the occasional link in prior posts. It is hardly my fault of you think of thugs like Dewey as heroes. 

  Cheers,

  R.E.Reis

  This is ignorant polemical reductive trashing of independent thinking,
  contrary to the implication of the below, and of the work done to build
  an intellectual "conversation" by major figures in the relatively short
  history of this great nation.

  Mr. Gotto and I presume Mr. Reis blame progressivism and socialism for
  bureacracy, a REAL laugh -- as if industry were untroubled by
  bureaucracy. And more to the point, as if the rich getting richers, the
  widening class divide, the poverty, hunger and homelessness greater in
  the U.S. than in any other industrialized nation, were unproblematic.
  Grammar -- REAL grammar -- has nothing to do with it. I've exhausted my
  tolerance for these intrusions into ATEG discussion.

  my first flame, & my last, thanks to filters.
  Judith

  At 10:05 PM 12/21/00 -0600, you wrote:
  >>>>
  <excerpt>

  In 1896 the famous John Dewey, then at thoe University of Chicago, said
  that independent, self-reliant people were a counter-productive
  anachronism in the collective society of the future. In modern society,
  said Dewey, people would be defined by their associations--not by their
  own individual accomplishments. It such a world people who read too well
  or too early are dangerous because they become privately empowered, they
  know too much, and know how to find out what they don't know by
  themselves, without consulting experts.

  Dewey said the great mistake of traditional pedagogy was to make reading
  and writing constitute the bulk of early schoolwork. He advocated that
  the phonics method of teaching reading be abandoned and replaced by the
  whole word method, not because the latter was more efficient (he admitted
  that it was less efficient) but because independent thinkers were
  produced by hard books, thinkers who cannot be socialized very easily. By
  socialization Dewey meant a program of social objectives administered by
  the best social thinkers in government. This was a giant step on the road
  to state socialism, the form pioneered in Prussia, and it is a vision
  radically disconnected with the American past, its historic hopes and
  dreams.

  Dewey's former professor and close friend, G. Stanley Hall, said this at
  about the same time, "Reading should no longer be a fetish. Little
  attention should be paid to reading." Hall was one of the three men most
  responsible for building a gigantic administrative infrastructure over
  the classroom. How enormous that structure really became can only be
  understood by comparisons: New York State, for instance, employs more
  school administrators than all of the European Economic Community nations
  combined. <bold><bigger><bigger><bigger>

  Public School Nightmare: Why fix a system designed to destroy individual
  thought?</bigger></bigger></bigger>

  by John Taylor Gatto
  </bold>


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  </excerpt>
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    ----- Original Message -----
    From: Judith Diamondstone
    Sent: Friday, December 22, 2000 10:00 AM
    To: [log in to unmask]
    Subject: Re: What did Dewy think about Grammar?





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