----- Original Message -----

From: [log in to unmask]>Judith Diamondstone

To: [log in to unmask]>[log in to unmask]

Sent: Friday, December 22, 2000 7:50 AM

Subject: Re: What did Dewy think about Grammar?

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:
>>>>

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.

Public School Nightmare: Why fix a system designed to destroy individual thought?

by John Taylor Gatto




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