POSTED ON BEHALF OF DOUG

Nonsense. phonics is a tool in the tool box, it is not banned, Canadians are in the top 3 nations of the world in the reading of 15 year olds and the highest post secondary graduation rate in the entire world by far.

Phonics per se may not be banned in Ontario, but there is not one systematic phonics program approved for use on the Trillium List, nor is systematic phonics promoted, nor are teachers trained in how to teach this way.  Jo-Anne can tell you that.

The difference between disability and lack of skills?

Its rather hard to dance on the line of 19th century learning knowledge versus the 21st century learning knowledge. Horace Mann, would be hanging his head in shame if he was living today, or be pushing the latest offering of whole language, to replicate another generation with poor reading and writing skills. “Horace Mann felt that a common school would be the “great equalizer.” Poverty would most assuredly disappear as a broadened popular intelligence tapped new treasures of natural and material wealth. He felt that through education crime would decline sharply as would a host of moral vices like violence and fraud. In sum, there was no end to the social good which might be derived from a common school (8, Cremin).”
http://www3.nd.edu/~rbarger/www7/mann.html

Doesn’t the above sound a lot like the current progressive educators entrenched in the ivory towers of the public education system?  Take a look at another essay called, Horace Mann’s Views on Reading.  http://www.historyliteracy.org/scripts/search_display.php?Article_ID=247

Its sufficient to say since Horace Mann, the progressive educators entrenched in the ivory towers of the public education system, have been busy over the centuries to prove Horace Mann’s reading theory correct. A man that is still revered in the holy circles of the public education philosophers. All thanks to another 19th century man - “Specifically, his legacy to later educators was his emphasis on children’s holistic physical, mental and psychological development; his emphasis on empirical learning; his reforms of elementary and teacher education; and his anticipation of child-centered progressivism.”
http://education.stateuniversity.com/pages/2319/Pestalozzi-Johann-1746-1827.html

What of the children under Pestalozzi and his followers? Suffice to say, the children who were experiencing difficulties in learning were written off as non-academics, and were more or less thought of as being less intelligent. However, there was a small percentage of rebels within the upper crust of society in the 19th century that took offense to the child centered education philosophies, pedagogy instruction, and reading instruction.

One of the rebels was Samuel Orton - “Working in the 1920s, Orton did not have access to modern brain scanning equipment, but he knew from his work with brain damaged adults that injuries to the left hemisphere produced symptoms similar to those he observed in children. Many of the children Orton studied were also ambidextrous or had mixed handedness….. Some of Orton’s theories about brain structure and organization would later be confirmed by modern brain researchers, such as Dr. Albert Galaburda, who compared the brains of deceased dyslexic and non-dyslexic adults in the late 1970s.”  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Orton

Of course, we are know how Orton’s research was dismissed by the early 20th century progressive educators entrenched throughout in the ivory towers of the public education system. Dismissed, because it would undo the work of the great heroes of the progressive educators, going all the way back to Pestalozzi. But more importantly, the shared beliefs dating back to the 19th century, that has been passed down from one generation to the next in the education faculties, that the learning of knowledge should be restricted to the minority who have demonstrated early on, intellectual powers. The political powers of the day brought it hook, line and sinker, and Horace Mann led the charge in United States.

Now in 2013, with mountains of evidence that whole language is really bad for children, the evidence in neuroscience has build a very fat file of working theories that are dismantling the progressive education theories rooted in the 19th century knowledge matrix.

Below a short video on the research - “As scientists work to figure out exactly what causes dyslexia, they’re getting help from an unlikely group of kids. Children who were born deaf.”  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9IQ9eaG5jM

By the way, the Canadian public schools are doing a very poor job on the kids with the cochlear implants. Whole language really does impede the reading processes for this set of kids as well. The neuroscience evidence is overwhelmingly stating, that reading instruction should always be systematic phonetic instruction for all children. Unfortunately, the 19th century beliefs of how children should learned are still with us in 2013 - the kind that limits a child’s education to what the educationalist elites have willed it to be.

That said, the cure for reading struggles with or without a disability - is excellent systematic phonetic instruction. However, the educationalists in the ivory towers of the public education system and educator faculties are still insisting that children’s education must be limit to the 19th century beliefs of the learning knowledge matrix.

POSTED ON BEHALF OF DOUG

ancy, where is this generation of kids with weak reading skills. We are top of the world. Canadians never read better than they do today, there was no golden age from 1945-60, never existed.

Adult literacy data shows that every decade we go back in time adult illiteracy was worse, there are no countries that do better.

You can cling to your myths but they ARE myths.

Please don’t site that 40% figure again, it provokes laughter. Nobody takes that the least bit seriously.

Could we do better? Everybody can always do better but ECE, ending poverty, aboriginal education, and small classes for the poor are the key.

Go and check out the universities - at least 40 % and its climbing - first year students are in need of upgrading in math, the sciences and English skills

As for colleges, ditto where there is 1 to 2 year programs of taking high school all over again, but this time at the students’ expense. The knowledge and skill gaps of students have widened over the decades, and its all because of a public education system rooted in the 19th century knowledge and beliefs matrix.  All thanks to the 19th century progressive educators/philosophers who keeps on being rescued by the 21st century educationalists.

Doug, your next trip is to take a look at special supports and services at the post-secondary level. There is some pretty piss-off former public education students, who can’t access special supports and services, because of the dodgy and sloppy documentation of the public education system. Another $2000 is dropped at a private provider for a proper diagnoses, specifying in detail as required under law and to meet the criteria for entry and the student grants under both the federal and provincial governments.

Another consequence of whole language instruction, along with the other educational changes of dropping spelling, grammar, etc.,  (Mann has a lot to say about spelling instruction and how useless it is) - is that the powers to be within the public education system doesn’t really test for basic reading, writing and numeracy skills. Therefore no data is collected and tracked, that results in a wide latitude of and deliberate intent of manipulation of data to dovetail with the latest pedagogical practices rooted in the 19th century knowledge framework and the 19th century educationalists ideologies of learning.

“Adult literacy data shows that every decade we go back in time adult illiteracy was worse, there are no countries that do better.”  Its the old tired refrain, and was even used as a line of defense in the Moore supreme court case by both the school board and ministry of education. After all can’t have ALL children becoming good readers and writers, because it would put an end to the 19th century education philosophers and educationalists, their ideologies/belief systems that 50 % of children will never reached average levels of reading and writing.

As such, there is much truth of Malkin’s post - “It seems like such a minor thing, almost hairsplitting, but for millions of North American children the ban of systematic phonics alters their life trajectories significantly - and not in a good way. ”  All the evidence is in the data streams, the Moore court ruling and other dismal stats, but more importantly starting in grade 1, after the fun and games of early education are finished with, the serious business of shutting, nailing and sealing the future doors of students by their social-income zip code. What better way to do it, is to used whole language instruction? 

I made no mentioned of percentages in my first post, Doug. Instead, another article from the folks at the Brown Centre Chalkboard.

“My hope is that readers of this Chalkboard post will be skeptical when encountering deeper learning in the future.  I will describe two examples of deeper learning that readers should find troubling.”
http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/brown-center-chalkboard/posts/2013/05/29-deeper-cognitive-learning-loveless

All about the ideologies of the 19th century knowledge matrix, the educationalists and their theories of learning. The subjects - Grade 1 math and PISA.
The comments are quite revealing.

Disability or lack of skills?  A little of both…....made all that much easier by the educationalist elites and their peculiar ideas rooted in the 19th century knowledge matrix, that fluency and efficiency in learning doesn’t matter anymore in the 21st century. The current crop located in the ivory towers of the public education system are so very anti-knowledge, like their counterparts in the 19th century.

Doug, you should do some reading in the essays and papers by other intellectual heavyweights, why the public education system across the globe moved to inventive spelling, the dropping of grammar and standard algorithms starting in the 1970s. Even I noticed it big time when I was training employees who were 10 years younger or more than myself, in the skill of adding up large columns of numbers, and other basic arithmetic procedures. The amazing thing about it, the most common refrain when I was training them was: “Why wasn’t it taught to us in school?” It never once happened concerning employees in and around my age.