For those not interested in this thread, don't read -- delete.
I can't comment on the accuracy of the numbers he cited, but Robert Reis
has a point, though I would characterize it differently than he did. The
colonial & early American public was apparently quite literate; they read
for practical purposes; they wrote to communicate across great distances;
they wrote for civil purposes (to inform others, to register opinions)
not only in letters & broadsides but also in newspaper editorials. They
generally didn't sign their name -- that came later. They spelled
inventively. There was no protest against regionalisms -- regional
differences were presupposed. (This from research by Shirley Heath &
others during the 80s.) When higher levels of schooling were opened to
'the masses,' that's when "standards" and not mere schooling [through
college] became the gateway to legitimacy. And it should not be
trivialized, that the main purpose of schooling has been to discipline
the masses, to control their time and inculcate values; never to "uplift"
more than a few.
My point: Access to higher education by 'the masses' introduced those
standards (the Committee of 10) that Reis bemoans as lacking in the
schools today. The high rate of literacy in early America correlates with
a lack of standards.
At 08:03 PM 12/13/00 -0600, you wrote:
>>>>
Actually, Alexis de Tocqueville ran into internationally famous
female American authors in 1831 on his visit that resulted in his rather
famous book and judging from the ACT and SAT scores the descendents of
slaves are not universally receiving the best education possible in many
urban public schools.
Finally, when I quote someone and show a link to the article it is to
give others the opportunity to check out the entire article for
themselves.
Mr. John Taylor Gatto is an interesting source with quite a lot of
challenging observations
on the educational scene.
Cheers
R.E.Reis
----- Original Message -----
From: Herb Stahlke
Sent: Wednesday, December 13, 2000 12:01 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: IN ANSWER TO GRETCHEN'S QUESTION
Robert,
Where do you get these misconceptions! We had a perfectly
literate country before 1852? Women were not educated. It was a
crime to educate slaves. The poor did not get educated in most
communities. Illiteracy was rife.
You've also taken Socrates seriously out of context. He was
speaking in a culture in which literacy was limited to the elite.
Athens was a strictly statified society in which the lower classes
were educated only if those in the upper classes wanted a
particular person educated. Further, his criticism was aimed at
the Sophists, not at teachers in the sense we think of them.
These were people who were paid as long as they pleased their
employer, and they didn't teach in anything like what we would
consider schools.
Herb Stahlke
<<<<<< [log in to unmask] 12/12 9:59p >>>
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<
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