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 -----
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