Robert, Are you suggesting that we teach without pay? I'm not sure that your reading of the history of public education is quite accurate. I also doubt that many students "master" literacy quickly -- especially in a visual society like ours (this fact is not the fault of teachers, by the way). Mastery is not acquisition (or vice versa)! Most emphatically, however, I must disagree with your statement that "we" want to do things wrongly. Please don't speak for all of us. I think most teachers, and certainly the teachers on this list, very much want to do things rightly; that's why this organization came into being in the first place. "Sweeping generalizations are never true." Paul E. Doniger ----- Original Message ----- From: Robert Reis To: [log in to unmask] Sent: Tuesday, December 12, 2000 7:00 PM Subject: IN ANSWER TO GRETCHEN'S QUESTION You and I are confronted with a great mystery: we had a perfectly literate country before 1852 when, for the first time, we got government schooling shoved down our throats. How we achieved this amazing literacy is wrapped up in the secret that reading, writing and numbers are very easy to learn -- in spite of what you hear from the reading, writing and number establishments. We aren't in the mess we're in today because we don't know how to do things right, but because "we" don't want to do them right. The incredibly profitable school enterprise has deliberately selected a procedure of literacy acquisition which is pedagogically bankrupt; thousands of years ago Socrates predicted this would happen if men were paid for teaching. He said they would make what is easy to learn seem difficult, and what is mastered rapidly they would stretch out over a long time. http://www.oz.net/~baraka/jtg4.htm ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Get more from the Web. FREE MSN Explorer download : http://explorer.msn.com