Re[4]: phonics politics
FM (FM_+a_CC_+lFM+r%Carnegie who-is-at mcimail.com)
Sun, 12 May 96 23:41 EST
Ken, you are certainly right that it is hard to have an "academic"
discussion of complicated educational issues in a public, political
forum, particularly in the current climate. I spend a lot of my time
lately trying to figure out how to report about such issues honestly
in a way that will advance public understanding and have some chance
of affecting the practice of schools and policymakers. Some of my
colleagues insist that you can only fight bumper stickers with bumper
stickers, but I am afraid that that is a prescription for, at best,
winning a few battles but loosing the long-term war. Winning in the
long run requires, of all things, education, and, in spite of Stone,
"development." It strikes me that our public discussion of most
issues suggests that we are collectively hardly at the stage of
concrete operations, and certainly not up to formal operations and the
ability to focus on multiple dimensions or variables or to handle
interacting systems. If we have any hope of changing that situation,
I think we need to model respect for evidence and complexity. I think
in the particular instance that we would do better to recognize that
reading is not word recognition _or_ meaning construction, it is both,
and we all have a lot to learn about how to strike a practical balance
and how to produce materials that will help teachers in their day to
day balancing act. I don't see why whole language proponents need to
charicature the views of people who take a mixed view. It's no less
unfair than the simplifications you have been subjected to. My guess
is that we will preserve more of "meaning" by accepting, and by
insisting that we all along have accepted, that there are component
skills that require explicit attention, identification, and exercise
as well - preferably in context, and that what is important is
energetic and thoughtful efforts to work out the balance in practice;
to see if we, and students, are doing better; and to rebalance until
we get it pretty right. We don't need to accept the canard that
schools are a total disaster, but we would be foolish to pretend that
there aren't students in trouble or that we couldn't do better. I
want my kid to know that Pogroms happened, and could happen again, but
he can't function day-to-day treating every conflict and complexity as
though they are coming for him.
Fritz Mosher