----- Original Message -----From: [log in to unmask]>Robert ReisSent: Friday, December 22, 2000 2:01 PMSubject: Re: What did Dewy think about Grammar?My, my, poor Judith, your post is proof of your incapacity to read and analyze articles written at an adult level. In fact, I can see no evidence in your post that you read Mr. Gatto at all. Those of us who know how to use WEB search engines can find numerous articles by Mr. Gatto. They are easily available. I even provided the occasional link in prior posts. It is hardly my fault of you think of thugs like Dewey as heroes.
Cheers,
R.E.Reis
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:>>>><excerpt>
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. <bold><bigger><bigger><bigger>
Public School Nightmare: Why fix a system designed to destroy individual
thought?</bigger></bigger></bigger>
by John Taylor Gatto</bold>
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----- Original Message -----From: Judith DiamondstoneSent: Friday, December 22, 2000 10:00 AMSubject: Re: What did Dewy think about Grammar?