Trends and Harm

Cynthia Haven has noticed an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education on the tyranny of trendy ideas. The article is amusing, the trendy ideas are properly silly, but some of them have little relevance for those of us outside the academy. Some of them make me think of a summer thunderstorm--underneath there is violent weather, two miles away one hears the sound and gets a bit of wind, and twenty miles away nobody knows that it happened. I'm sure that Project 2021 was a big deal in Austin, but did anyone outside the academy hear of it in Norman or Baton Rouge?

On the Fourth, we had friends over for dinner. At some point one of the conversations turned to reading. One man's sister has been fighting with her son's school districts over reading instruction. The sister finds that "whole-language" instruction is not teaching her son to read, and pushes for phonics. A woman in the conversation had been through the same quarrel as a teacher in Brooklyn, almost fifty years ago. This surprised me. I don't follow trends in elementary education, and the last time I noticed, phonics seemed to be making a comeback. But it appears that the contention between "whole-language" and phonics never really ends, just has one or the other on top for a while.

What is taught in the schools of education affects large numbers of children. It could be a child's chance, as it was mine, to arrive in sixth grade just at the New Math does. Or as it was my brother's chance, to arrive in the parochial schools when they set phonics aside for whole-language. Some of those children will take no harm, as we took none. Others will be promoted without mastering the skills said to be taught, or just alienated by busy work that teaches them nothing.

 The tyranny of trendy ideas that should be overthrown, and probably never will be, is the tyranny of trendy ideas about elementary education. Americans are simply too willing to believe that there is something other than tedious, painstaking work that will teach their children to read, write, and reckon. I know that I say this often; but those who disagree needn't worry--many more qualified, many famous persons have said this for years with no effect.