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 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/