Open History→Ch 3-5

More Chapters! Check them out at openhistory.education.

Chapter 3 is one of the most interesting ones and covers both the existence of mass functional illiteracy, and how it came about over the past 100 years via reading pedagogy getting sabotaged. Since the 1920’s schools largely switched to methods that didn’t involve teaching the alphabet, didn’t involve learning how to sound out words, and instead just had them memorize “sight words” and created closed systems of reading material that used restricted vocabularies so it looked like kids were making progress in reading despite only being able to read 1,000+ words when their spoken vocabularies would include 10,000+ words. Non-phonetic methods never totally took over, it seems like at any decade since 1920, 30%-70% of schools would be using non-phonetic methods, and it would follow cycles where public awareness of the fact that schools were abdicating the primary responsibility of teaching kids to read (a responsibility that edu professionals since John Dewey have largely decided is not actually their core responsibility, with full awareness that they were in opposition to what the public wanted from them) would cause some increased phonics instruction, but within 15 years a new non-phonetic method would be invented (really just a re-brand of old stuff) and would gain traction.

If that all sounds totally insane, it is! It’s just also what’s been happening.

We’re currently in a swing back towards phonics, largely due to the both the 2022 hit podcast “Sold a Story”, also the fact that with remote schooling over the pandemic more parents got to literally see how their kids were being taught and said “what the actual fuck?” While it’s always good to see an increase in phonics instruction, it seems like people are still collectively too freaked about by the massive culpability that this whole mess implies and probably aren’t going to be able to take measures strong enough to permanently fix this. So stay strapped.

Onto the other chapters!

Chapter 4 is some of Gatto’s personal reflection on his time as a teacher and what he encountered on the ground level in NYC schools in the 60’s thru the 80’s.

Chapter 5 explores the “true believer” mindset of edu reformers. The later sections, starting at “An Insider’s Insider”, are the most interesting to me, documenting how compulsory schooling laws faced “strenuous opposition everywhere” and reformers understood they’d have to boil the frog to achieve the total control over children’s time that they wanted.

That’s all for this week,

Stay Lucky