Interesting story on how Ben Franklin learned to be such a great writer. The main "ingredient" in his writing "recipe" was that he read often and a lot!
"If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write something worth reading or do things worth the writing."
France, Spain, England, Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany - he hit them all. And his fame reached even further. His ideas were talked about in Sweden, Russia, China, and North Africa, all during his lifetime.
It was Ben who discovered the Gulf Stream. He also invented swim fins, the odometer, and bifocals. And it was Ben who came up with Daylight Savings Time, as a joke for a Paris newspaper. (He never realized it would catch on.)
But for all his accomplishments, there's one thread that's common to all of them. The man could write like a dream.
His writing is what helped pass on his legacy as a founding father. It's what made him one of the most persuasive diplomats in U.S. history. And it's one of the main reasons we remember so much of what he did today.
"Either write something worth reading or do things worth the writing," he once said. Well put. And he did both. Which is why I'm evoking the spirit of Ben Franklin in today's article, so he can teach us what he learned.
See, before Ben became one of America's best-known and most influential writers, he wasn't much of a writer at all.
Or at least that's what his father thought.
At one point, he scolded Ben for what he felt was the low quality of writing in letters written to a friend. The letters, he told Ben, "lacked eloquence."
So Ben set out to make a change. He invented a precise system for teaching himself to write better, which you can find outlined in his famous autobiography.
Here's how it works...
1. Role-Model Reading
Before Ben wrote, he read. Often and a lot. He'd pick out a piece of writing he admired and actually wanted to imitate, and study it, front to back. He made notes on the outline and structure of paragraphs. He memorized phrases. He noted the general themes in the piece. That taught him the style used by the authors he admired.
You can do this just by digging into the magazines and books you already like to read. Not reading them the way you once did, flipping the pages. But really reading. Study them for structure. How do they start? What's common between one article or chapter and the next? And what's not? Spend at least 30 minutes a day doing this. You'll be shocked at how much better your writing will become.
2. Flattering by Imitation
This was one of Ben's favorite tricks. I'm predicting it's the one you'll talk about one day when you're teaching someone else how to write. It's simple. Just take one of those pieces of writing you admire and copy it. Literally. By hand. Word for word. You'll pick up nuances you didn't notice when you were reading it. And, except for a sore elbow, it'll give you a painless education.
Of course, Ben took this exercise even further: "I took some of the papers, and, making short hints of the sentiment in each sentence, laid them by a few days, and then, without looking at the book, try'd to compleat the papers again."
That is, he not only studied the original and copied it, he actually tried to reproduce its key themes from memory... in his own words.
Where he made mistakes, he'd fix them. But sometimes he found that just by rethinking the original ideas, he found ways to improve upon them. And this happened more and more often as he wrote.
Again, you can do the same thing. Take a few short magazine articles. Study them until you've soaked up the core ideas. Then, on a blank sheet of paper, try to write out the same ideas from memory, but in your own words. You'll be surprised by what you remember. You'll be even more surprised by the new ideas that pop into your head as you write.
3. Organizing a Mental Toolbox
The real power of a good solid piece of writing is the part you DON'T see - the underlying outline.
Ben saw that too.
He found, in his early rewrites of others' works, that his thoughts got jumbled and confused. So he took his paragraphs and copied them on separate pieces of paper. Then he reassembled them in an order closer to the original outline.
You can take an outline from an article you like and use that to build a new article, even one about a completely unrelated idea. It's amazing how facts and details come together when you have a structure to hang them on.
I do this all the time.
When I'm researching, my notes come at random. The more I research, the more the framework takes shape. When I understand the idea I'm writing about, I stop to sketch out the outline.
I actually have a program on my Mac that helps me do this - a feature in the Mac version of Microsoft Office called "Notebook Layout." It looks exactly like a school notebook with tabbed pages. I type in my notes as they come. When I'm done, I drag and drop the tabs to reorganize the pieces according to my outline.
Having an outline in advance lets you focus on gathering up ideas and details freely, because you know you have a tool to help you sort them out and put everything into place.
If you don't have a program to help you do this, try using a handwritten outline and index cards.
Ben Franklin put his writing self-improvement system to good use. In his lifetime, he wrote thousands of articles, letters, and persuasive pitches for his ideas. Some helped sell Franklin stoves. Others helped sell the leaders of Europe on supporting young America.
Mastering the printed word was the key to his success. It could be yours too.
Is exposure to too much technology affecting our children's ability to read?
An Associated Press article, "Scientists ask: Is technology rewiring our brains?" highlights the life of a 19-yr-old computer enthusiast who spends 6 to 12 hours online daily. He admits that he spends a lot of time online with his friends, but insists that they lead totally normal and perfect socials lives. But, I have to ask, when does he have the time for reading books, let alone obtaining the ability to read literature requiring deep thought and reflection?
Excerpt from article:
"Life in the age of Google may even change how we read.
Normally, as a child learns to read, the brain builds pathways that gradually allow for more sophisticated analysis and comprehension, says Maryanne Wolf of Tufts University, author of "Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain."
She calls that analysis and comprehension "deep reading." But that takes time, even if it's just a fraction of a second, and today's wired world is all about speed, gathering a lot of superficial information fast.
Wolf asks what will happen as young children do more and more early reading online. Will their brains respond by short-circuiting parts of the normal reading pathways that lead to deeper reading but which also take more time? And will that harm their ability to reflect on what they've read?"
All textbooks are written from a point of view. The question is, which view? Now we have some answers that should give pause to Christians and others who seek the truth in academic subjects.
Q: You say American textbooks are "flawed," with many the product of "shoddy scholarship." But isn't there also a problem with the way the books are published and sold?
A: Textbooks are adopted at a statewide level in 21 states, including California and Texas. Developing a textbook and getting it adopted in these two major states is so expensive that only those competitors with the deepest pockets stand a chance to succeed.
Three mega-publishers control the K-12 market, meaning that more and more titles are concentrated in fewer hands. Errors in one book now stand a greater chance of replicating themselves across other books because they may originate from the same source.
Q: So how do special interests get their point across?
A: Through the state adoption process and local district textbook selection. It is so expensive to get a book into a classroom that publishers will do their best not to offend various user groups along the way. Publishers' timidity and their reluctance to offend any group result in the dumbing-down of lessons to the lowest common denominator.
Shoddy scholarship also plays a role. Editors and publishers are simply not as vigilant as they should be, and are also under the impression that "experts" from university faculty are unbiased resources.
Q: So they're not real experts?
A: Sometimes the well-credentialed scholars whose names appear as authors of the textbooks have little if anything to do with the actual writing or content of the book.
Prestigious names may have been at one point associated with the publisher. They may have provided an initial outline, provided a cursory read of the material, perhaps an edit, or they may simply have used their scholarly reputation to lend legitimacy to the textbooks.
The workhorses who actually write the text — whether they're in-house writers or employees of a textbook development agency — may have a great deal or little expertise. Publishers also use "chop shops," or development agencies, for a section or an entire book. Staffed mainly with educational specialists and writers, the agencies follow standards and guidelines supplied by the publishers, but subject-matter experts in history, religion, civics and so on can be notably absent.
Q: How can parents get involved if they have concerns about a textbook?
A: We strongly recommend that parents, educators and elected officials pay much closer attention to what is presented in social studies textbooks.
By Maria Glod
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 19, 2008; A06
Students in the $6 billion Reading First program have not made greater progress in understanding what they read than have peers outside the program, according to a congressionally mandated study.
The final version of the study, released yesterday by the U.S. Department of Education, found that students in schools that use Reading First, a program at the core of the No Child Left Behind law, scored no better on comprehension tests than students in similar schools that do not get the funding.
"It is a program that needs to be improved," said Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst, director of the Institute of Education Sciences, the department's research arm. "I don't think anyone should be celebrating that the federal government has spent $6 billion on a reading program that has had no impact on reading comprehension."
Whitehurst said the study showed some benefits. First-graders in Reading First classrooms were better able to decode, or recognize, printed words than students in schools without the program. Decoding is a key step in learning to read.
Reading First, though popular with educators, has been tarnished by allegations of conflicts of interest and mismanagement in recent years. Federal investigators have found that some people who helped oversee the program had financial ties to the publishers of Reading First materials.
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings has assured lawmakers that measures were taken to prevent future management troubles.
"Reading First helps our most vulnerable students learn the fundamental elements of reading while helping teachers improve instruction," Spellings said. "Instead of reversing the progress we have made by cutting funding, we must enhance Reading First and help more students benefit from research-based instruction."
The study, among the largest ever conducted by the department, tracked the progress of tens of thousands of students in 248 schools nationwide over three academic years. The students took a widely used reading comprehension test, and researchers observed classrooms.
Reading First, which requires schools to use instructional techniques supported by scientific research, provides grants for reading instruction. It focuses on five areas: awareness of individual sounds, phonics, vocabulary, reading fluency and comprehension.
Our teens are losing the idioms and historical markers of American culture, a new study finds.
Big Brother. McCarthyism. The Patience of Job. All references to common historical knowledge that bind us together as Americans. These are no longer being taught or referenced in our schools.
Parents, it's up to you to teach your children. The next generation depends on you!
College environments today are a lot different from yesteryear. For those who have an idyllic vision of what your child will be experiencing, you need to read Susan Kinzie's 2005 Washington Post article.
Here's a small sample:
"The number one medication in college is antidepressants," said Richard Kadison of Harvard University, whose book about the growing mental health crisis at colleges was published last year. "It's surpassed birth control pills."
At Georgetown this fall, a student drowned in an accident in the Potomac River and a senior died in a fire at his apartment. A student was killed at Johns Hopkins University this winter, just months after another was stabbed to death. And the body of a University of Maryland student was found floating in the Anacostia River this semester, days before a senior died in a fire.
"We have an idealized notion that this is a carefree time," said Linda Clement, vice president for student affairs at U-Md. For many, college is the best time in life -- the most fun, the most exploratory, the most illuminating -- but it brings challenges, too.
Kevin Kruger used to have that job at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and he was always on edge, he said. Any late phone call would trigger a surge of adrenaline. "When the phone rings, you don't know what's on the other end . . . suicide, rape, knifing, fight. . . .
"I can't even begin to count the number of times at 3 in the morning I threw on jeans, drove to campus, dealt with whatever was there, maybe 10 minutes after a student was stabbed. Or a kid up on a tower trying to jump off the tower."
Deans of student life came along early in the 20th century when university presidents didn't want to deal with disciplinary problems, said Kruger, who is associate executive director of NASPA Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education. As colleges grew, the deans acted like parents, setting strict rules: Girls visiting boys must keep their feet firmly planted on the floor at all times. Then came the 1960s and '70s, drugs and Vietnam and the sexual revolution, and students demanded to be treated as adults.
The job isn't getting any easier, for a bunch of reasons: Overprotective parents. Terrorist threats. Lawsuits. And teenagers who get to campus already burned out from stressful high schools.
Most schools are reporting increasing numbers of students seeking counseling, and more freshmen arrive already taking psychiatric medications.
Some of those increases come because students today are more likely to report problems and ask for help and schools are more likely to offer and promote counseling.
But psychiatric drugs such as Prozac that popped up in the 1980s and '90s have changed the culture of campus life; they've made it possible for many teenagers who wouldn't have made it to college in the past to get in.
In the past 25 years or so, Kadison said, the likelihood of suffering depression on campus has doubled, serious thoughts about committing suicide have tripled and sexual assaults have quadrupled.
Now, one in 10 students seriously considers suicide in college. Nearly half get so depressed that they can't function, according to the American College Health Association, and every year, about 1,400 college students die from injuries related to drinking alcohol.
An important aspect that a reading instruction program must have is getting children to pay attention. That's why Orton-based The Writing & Spelling Road to Reading & Thinking is an effective method. Through use of memory devices like Socratic questioning and a mnemonic marking system, children are trained to listen and focus on the learning process.
Here is some additional information taken from an excerpt of New Scientist magazine, 28 May 2005, page 28:
PAYING attention is a complex mental process, an interplay of zooming in on detail and stepping back to survey the big picture. So unfortunately there is no single remedy to enhance your concentration. But there are a few ways to improve it.
The first is to raise your arousal levels. The brain's attentional state is controlled by the neurotransmitters dopamine and noradrenalin. Dopamine encourages a persistent, goal-centred state of mind whereas noradrenalin produces an outward-looking, vigilant state. So not surprisingly, anything that raises dopamine levels can boost your powers of concentration.
One way to do this is with drugs (My comments: Not recommended!) such as amphetamines and the ADHD drug methylphenidate, better known as Ritalin. Caffeine also works. But if you prefer the drug-free approach, the best strategy is to sleep well, eat foods packed with slow-release sugars, and take lots of exercise. It also helps if you are trying to focus on something that you find interesting.
The second step is to cut down on distractions. Workplace studies have found that it takes up to 15 minutes to regain a deep state of concentration after a distraction such as a phone call. Just a few such interruptions and half the day is wasted.
Music can help as long as you listen to something familiar and soothing that serves primarily to drown out background noise. Psychologists also recommend that you avoid working near potential diversions, such as the fridge.
There are mental drills to deal with distractions. College counsellors routinely teach students to recognise when their thoughts are wandering, and catch themselves by saying "Stop! Be here now!" It sounds corny but can develop into a valuable habit.....
George Orwell worried about polluted language misleading people, but Nicholas Lemann believes polluted information is more dangerous. Read his thought provoking essay, "The Limits of Clear Language."
One passage regarding the manipulative nature of using emotional language I thought was important:
"There is nothing wrong with Orwell’s advice in “Politics and the English Language”: simple is better than complicated; concrete is better than abstract; careful is better than sloppy; think before you write. The experience of the last few years would lead me to add that in political language, function is far preferable to emotion: the words used to denote something the government does should have to do with the activity itself, not the values it is meant to embody or the feelings it is meant to activate. (The war in Iraq, yes; Operation Enduring Freedom, no.)"
The focal point of the essay is this:
"To my mind, an even more frightening political prospect than the corruption of language is the corruption of information. Language, especially in the age of the Internet, is accessible to everybody. Some users of language are more powerful than others, some are more honest than others, and some are more adept than others—but the various ways of speaking about politics can at least compete with each other in the public square, and we can at least hope that the more honest and clear ways will triumph in the end. Information, on the other hand, is much less generally accessible than words. When the process of determining whether the facts of a situation have been intentionally corrupted by people in power (whether, let’s say, Saddam Hussein had the ability to produce nuclear weapons, or whether a new drug has harmful side effects), there often is no corrective mechanism at hand, as there is in cases of the intentional corruption of language. Intellectual honesty about the gathering and use of facts and data is a riskier and more precious part of a free society than is intellectual honesty in language. We ought to guard it with the same zeal that animates Orwell’s work on political speech."
"The attrition rate among those who are admitted to four-year colleges in this country is high. More than half drop out before graduation. Many of those who go on to graduate do just enough to get through. And many, if not most, students do not feel they were well prepared in high school for college work. Their English courses are particularly troublesome because they do not know how the literary texts they are assigned to read matter in general, or how these texts might matter to them personally if they could in fact read them. They do not enjoy literary analysis and find the search for “hidden meanings” mystifying. They do not know how to write formal English. Nor do they tend to understand what their humanities professors are talking about when they engage in the kind of theorizing that constitutes academic discourse in the humanities today. These are among the chief problems faced by those who teach literature at the college level..."
"How could students today come to college English classes prepared to argue about the interpretation of a text when, as I found in a review of K–12 English standards in 50 states, most states' literature standards betray the heavy hand of two major academic theories on reading and teaching literature: reader response and the new historicism (Stotsky 2005). The first compels equal respect for each student's subjective interpretation of a text, while the second is obsessed with the context and author of a text, not the text itself. The influence of reader response theory alone on at least two generations of elementary and secondary English teachers has been an unmitigated disaster, and its bitter fruits must be apparent in every college English class.
An English professor cannot expect students to argue about any one interpretation of a text when they have been taught for 12 years by teachers dutifully following a state dictate that says they are to “respond to literary works on the basis of personal insights and respect the different responses of others” ( Montana ) or “understand that a single text will elicit a wide variety of responses, each of which is valid from a personal, subjective perspective” ( Delaware ).
Nor can college students easily engage in an argument with a critic about a literary work they are studying when they have not learned that they must first read and try to understand what the author wrote.
.... It is almost impossible to undo in a few undergraduate English courses all those years of mistraining in literary study in K–12 with the solution he offers."
Reggio Schools in Italy are the current fad that is attracting the attention of our country’s pre-schools and government schools. Every year, 500 Americans visit Italy to experience the schools that have “captivated educators across this country.”What’s the big deal?They “eschew traditional lesson plans and instead encourage 4- and 5-year-olds to develop their own projects.” This is exactly the methodology of our “progressive” American school system that has contributed to its demise. Even the article admits that academically, Italian children are no better than Americans when it comes to their abysmal achievement results (15th place) as compared to other industrialized countries. Read article here.
What we have here is the same, old, tired, child-directed methodology that has been the bane of Western education for decades. This has been an outgrowth of the “naturalism” philosophy that began in the early 1800’s. According to E.D. Hirsch in his article, “Why Do We Have a Knowledge Deficit?” the idea of “naturalism” has led to the application in our schools, where children should be allowed to “develop” and “grow” “naturally,” which is best exhibited by the child initiating and conducting his own learning. Thus, we have whole-word reading “instruction” by which children learn to read – yes, that’s right - by simply reading! In addition, “facts” are no longer important, rather a child’s “experiences” are what counts. Little or no formal teacher-instruction or the learning of “mere” facts, but natural, child-directed learning “experiences” are now the norm.
In an abstract to a study on dyslexia, brain researchers in Washington , through use of a "3-week instructional program that provided explicit instruction in linguistic awareness, alphabetic principle (taught in a way to maximize temporal contiguity of grapheme–phoneme associations), decoding and spelling, and a writers’ workshop," showed us the importance of explicitly teaching the elemental sounds that go with written letter combinations like ea, eu, eigh, igh, ph, etc. before trying to read them in words via books or spelling lists:
To explore brain connectivity, the researchers worked with 18 dyslexic children (5 girls and 13 boys) and 21 children (8 girls and 13 boys) who were good readers and spellers. All of the children were of normal intelligence and were in the fourth through sixth grades.
The children had to judge whether groups of pink highlighted letters in pairs of nonsense words could or could not represent the same sound. For example, the letters ea and ee in "pleak" and "leeze" could have the same sound but the ea and eu in "pheak" and "peuch" could not. The children's brains were scanned and then those with dyslexia participated in a three-week program that taught the children the code for connecting letters and sounds with an emphasis on timing. Then the children's brains were scanned again.
Following the treatment, the fMRI scans showed that the patterns of temporal connectivity in brains of the dyslexic children had normalized and were similar to those of the good readers and spellers. In particular, the researchers found that connectivity appeared to be normal between the left inferior frontal gyrus and the right inferior frontal gyrus. The left inferior frontal gyrus is believed to control the functional language system, especially for spoken words, while the right inferior frontal gyrus may be involved in controlling the processing of letters in written words. Prior to the treatment these two areas were overconnected and the left inferior frontal gyrus also was overconnected to the middle frontal gyrus, which is involved in working memory that requires temporal coordination.
"These results might mean that after special teaching the children with dyslexia activated letters in written words first and then switched to sounds in spoken words rather than simultaneously activating both letters and sounds," said Richards. "The overconnection between the language conductor and working memory at the same time may be a signal that working memory is overtaxed. When language processing is more efficient after treatment, working memory does not have to work as hard.
"There is this myth that English is an irregular language," added Berninger. "That's not true. We have a set of alternative ways of spelling the same sounds but this not taught explicitly.The way phonics is often taught over focuses on single letters and not the letter groups that go with sounds as well. Teaching children with dyslexia to read requires a different approach, one that stresses knowledge of spelling-sound relationships with a twist that tweaks the letter and sound processes to get connected in time in the brain."
Here's a book review by a daughter of Trivium Pursuit's Harvey and Laurie Bluedorn on yet another book by early 20th century author Allen French:
"A review of the book, The Colonials: Being a narrative of events chiefly connected with the Siege and Evacuation of the town of Boston in New England, written by Allen French, published in 1902.
The year: 1772.
The setting: by the shores of Lake Huron in Michigan.
The characters: a young woodsman named Francis Ellery with his companion Benjy; a young English lieutenant; a young Indian captive, Alice Tudor; and an Indian named Anneb.
Frank wants to go to his home in Boston to get his inheritance from his dishonest uncle and see his younger brother, but he meets Alice, and she pleads with him to take her away from her captor Anneb and back home to her family in England. Frank bargains with Anneb for Alice. Anneb is a kind Indian and agrees to let Alice go as long as the English lieutenant will take her back along with Frank. The lieutenant is all too happy to have the girl to take care of -- too happy. He has villainous plans, but Frank and Benjy guess his plans and there is a fight in the lieutenant's cabin. The lieutenant is wounded in the forehead, and Benjy is wounded. At this moment the Indian Anneb shows himself in the door. He has guessed that those he had given Alice in the care of would fight over her, so he takes Alice and disappears with her into the night. Frank escapes with the wounded Benjy before he can be caught by the lieutenant's soldiers, but it is too late for Benjy, for the wound he received was a mortal wound. Before he dies, Benjy tells Frank that if he goes after the girl there will be nothing but trouble. But Frank remembers how Alice had pleaded with him and cannot bear the thought of her living her life with the Indians. He follows her and her captor into the wilderness. When he finally catches up with Anneb, his family, and Alice, he finds them nearly starving. Anneb (the only one fit to hunt for food) had broken his leg and the rest could not find food to eat in the cold winter. Frank stays with the Indians and Alice through the winter to hunt for them. Then an evil Indian (who was formerly known to Aneeb) wants Alice for a wife, and comes to their cabin. Of course Frank and Anneb will not give Alice up to him. The Indian returns a few days later with several other Indians, and the fight is on. All of the Indians are killed and Frank and Alice barely escape before their cabin is burned. Then begins the long track to the nearest friendly fort. Frank has no more bullets for his gun, and both Alice and he are nearly starved. There is one last piece of food, and Frank eats it so he will have the strength to pull Alice on the sled to the fort. He has the strength to pull her there, then collapses. Several days pass and Frank is still alive, although he looks as if he is dead. The men at the fort have contacted Alice's brother and decide to tell Alice that Frank is dead so that they can reunite her to her brother before he leaves for England. Truly believing that Frank is dead, Alice leaves. The men at the fort start to dig a grave, for they believe that they will need it soon. But will they?
The next part of the book begins several months later, in Boston. The city is full of British soldiers, and the war is pending. A stranger arrives in Boston and takes over as manager in the Ellery rope works. Everyone seems to like this stranger. He is so honest and upright.
Here this review must stop, or else I will give away the exciting story that then unfolds in Boston.
This book is one of the best books that I have read (or actually, heard, for Mom read it out loud to us). It is well written, the language is not too simplistic, it gives a good account of the history that was going on at that time, and, last but not least, it is a very captivating and exciting story that will not let you go until the end. I would recommend it for ages ten and up.
A homeschooling mom complained to Harvey and Laurie Bluedorn that several of her children were not thinking deeply enough despite the fact that they were being educated at home (For those who think that home education is an automatic ticket to well educated children, think again).
Here is the the Bluedorn's insightful response:
"Concerning the problem of not thinking: people who do not read, and who spend their free time watching television and movies, playing video and computer games, or who otherwise spend their time seeking entertainment, will not be able to think critically. Documentation for this is given in Jane Healy’s two books, Endangered Minds: Why Children Don’t Think and What We Can Do About It and Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect Our Children’s Minds for Better and Worse. For one who is truly taught to think, thinking becomes his way of life" (Emphasis mine).
According to a National Endowment for the Arts press release today, reading trends amongst the American public, especially our children continue to deteriorate. The executive summary can be read here.
From the full report itself, here are the results of one study on the leisure time of American children ages 6-17. In this age group, children spend an average of 11 minutes a day reading for pleasure. Relative to reading, they spend 2x as much time on computer activities, 3x as much time on sports activities, 4x as much time on visiting and socializing, 5x as much time on playing, and 11x as much time on watching T.V.
Couple this result with the fact that only one half of 9 year olds, less than one of every three 13 year olds, and about one in five 17 year olds read for fun almost every day, and we have a disturbing scenario of our future generations being illiterate and uninformed, having to rely on talking heads for their information and knowledge of the world.
Now, lest we want to hide behind the fallacy that children are reading significantly more for school, check this out. For 9 year olds, only one in four students read more than twenty pages per day both in school and for homework; and for 13 year olds, only one in four students read more than twenty pages per day in school and for homework. For 17 year olds, who we think would have significantly more students reading more than 20 pages, still only less than one in four students do, which is less than the number of 9 year olds who read more than 20 pages each day!
What the report shows in general, is that elementary students are doing better in reading, while middle school and high school students are declining. My thesis is that due to the forcing of schools to teach some phonics and the proliferation of inane, manufactured, simplistic, common word books being mass produced specifically for boosting test scores in the lower grades, these elementary students only appear to be doing better. The reading results begin to deteriorate in 4th grade and then, accelerate as the proliferation of multi-syllable words and complex sentence structure intensify, with a complimentary lack of vocabulary development as class instruction naturally seeks the lowest common denominator of student ability.
Bottom line: Parents need to make sure their children receive exemplary reading instruction that carries them past basic phonics into instruction in more difficult syllabication skill, vocabulary development, and syntax. Orton-based Spalding reading instruction curricula, like The Writing and Spelling Road to Reading and Thinking, are among the best I've seen to give our children the most complete and comprehensive exposure to proper English language instruction.
In Albert Jay Nock's 1931 article, "The Theory of Education in the United States," he touches upon the state of English courses in our American universities over 75 years ago, and shows how important it is today (even more so!) to have a complete understanding and knowledge of English and its literature before sending your children to the university of their choice:
With regard to "courses in English," I suspect that if you have not already done some such thing, there is a surprise in store for you when you make an estimate of the number of them that our institutions offer annually. I suggest that you look into the matter, and meanwhile I shall not anticipate your findings, being desirous that they should make their own impression on you and carry their own intimations. I therefore say only that there are a great many such courses, whereas forty years ago no such thing was known. Why should this be so? Forty years ago, our English-speaking students learned English quite informally; it was our own tongue, we were bred to a native idiomatic use of it, such a use as none but a native can ever possibly acquire. To say that English was not taught in our higher institutions means merely that everybody taught it. No matter what the stated subject under discussion might be, if we expressed ourselves inaccurately, loosely, unidiomatically, we heard about it at once and on the spot, and in terms that forcibly suggested a greater carefulness in the future.
As for English literature, it was our literature, our concern with it was proprietary, everything in it was open to us, and the critical judgment, the standards of taste and discrimination that we applied to it, were such as had been bred in us by our long acquaintance with the literatures of Greece and Rome. No one dreamed of teaching English literature; indeed, I do not see how it can be effectively taught in any formal fashion, how a really competent acquaintance with it can be brought about in any other way than the way by which it was brought about in us.
Why, then, is it that "courses in English" should hold so large a place in the newest type of institutional organization? They do so. for a very simple reason. Under the conditions that we have been describing, great masses of ineducable people come into our institutions. They must be kept there, and must nominally be busy with something or other as a pro forma justification for keeping them. Therefore something has to be found for them, to do that they can do, and this is a hard matter because they can do almost nothing. One thing they can do, albeit after a very poor fashion, is to read; that is to say, they can make their way more or less uncertainly down a printed page; and therefore "courses in English" have come into their present extraordinary vogue. Well, here is a small garland of windflowers culled by an instructor from the work, not of primary-school children, but of university students, chiefly upperclassmen, who were busy with "courses in English":
"Being a tough hunk of meat, I passed up the steak."
"Lincoln's mind growed as his country kneaded it."
"The camel carries a water tank with him; he is also a rough rider and has four gates."
"As soon as music starts silence rains, but as soon as it stops it get worse than ever."
"College students, as a general rule, like such readings that will take the least mental inertia."
"Modern dress is extreme and ought to be checked."
"Although the Irish are usually content with small jobs they have won a niche in the backbone of the country."
The instructor who reported these efforts went on to show how Shakespeare fared at the hands of their authors:
Edmund in King Lear "committed a base act and allowed his illegitimate father to see a forged letter."
Cordelia's death "was the straw that broke the camel's back and killed the king."
Lear's fool "was prostrated on the neck of the king."
"Hotspur," averred a sophomore, "was a wild, irresolute man. He loved honor above all. He would go out and kill twenty Scotchmen before breakfast."
Kate was "a woman who had something to do with hot spurs."
Also Milton:
"Diabetes was Milton's Italian friend," one student explained.
Another said: "Satan had all the emotions of a woman and was a sort of trustee in heaven, so to speak."
The theme of Comus was given as "purity protestriate."
Mammon in Paradise Lost suggests that the best way "to endure hell is to raise hell and build a pavilion."
The newest type of institutional organization has obliterated the lines that formerly marked off the units of our system and bounded their respective bailiwicks. Each unit is doing a little of everything, a little secondary-school work, a little college work, a little vocational work, and what not. Certain new units also have been knaved up out of this hodgepodge to do likewise a little of everything; the "junior college," for example.
Some years ago I visited an old acquaintance in the Middle West, who was teaching English in a huge swollen institution that went by the name of a state university. I looked in on one of my friend's classes in "English composition," and found him engaged on a kind of thing that by the very handsomest concession was only eighth-grade work; and his students were dealing with it in a manner that an educable eighth-grade pupil would regard as disgraceful. These students were not eighth-grade pupils; they were adult persons, ranking bona fide as part of a university population, and eligible for a degree authorized by a university.
The outcome of our theory in this particular may be clearly seen by another reference to the undergraduate college, as occupying a middle ground among our institutions. Not long ago I visited an undergraduate college — not one of those connected with Columbia University — and on casually looking into matters there, I told the president that I was surprised to see the college doing so much work that belonged far back in the grade school. He said it was unfortunate, but it could not be helped; students came there with these holes in their preparation that had to be filled up. I observed that the undergraduate college was perhaps hardly in a position to afford these diversions from its proper business, and that it seemed likely to suffer from them. "Yes," he said, "but don't you think we ought to do something for these poor fellows who come to us so imperfectly prepared?"
"Certainly I do," I said. "Fire them."
"Ah, yes," he replied, "but then, you see, we should not have any students and would have to shut up shop."
I hinted as delicately as I could that this might not be in the long run an absolute misfortune; as I remember, I may have quoted Homer's pertinent line on the death of Patroclus. He admitted the force of this, but said, "We are doing a poor job, I know, but we are doing something as best we can, and I think a little better than most institutions of our kind; so we hope it is worthwhile."
At the other end of the line, this college was doing quite a thriving business in preprofessional and prevocational training. Having asked about this, I was told that the lads were in a hurry to get on with their vocations and did not feel like spending time on any work that had not a direct vocational bearing; if such work were insisted on, they would simply leave, and go to some other place where the requirements were more generous. Here you may quite see what it is that obliterates the lines between the units of our system, and also where the responsibility for that obliteration and its consequences really lies. If you will permit the expression, the college passes the buck to the secondary school; and there is a measure of justice in that. The school, also with a measure of justice, replies, "If you are not satisfied with the way these men are prepared, why do you admit them? We cannot consider your requirements alone; we have very many diverse demands made on us, and must do the best we can to meet all of them." The vocational or technical school, the office or the factory — postcollegiate conditions generally — say to the college, "We cannot altogether accommodate ourselves to your ideas; if these young men are in such a pucker to get on in the world, it is your business to start them right, according to the conditions that actually exist"; and there is a measure of justice in that, too. Responsibility, clearly, lies nowhere in the order of our institutions; it runs back to the acceptance of an erroneous theory. All this ludicrous state of things that we have been examining is the inevitable result of trying to translate a bad theory into good practice.
According to a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) survey three years ago, fewer that half of all American adults are now reading literature, which continues the downward trend over the last 20 years. The most significant change is in the 18-24 age group, where a 28% precipitous drop occurred over the last 10 years. Check out all of the sobering survey results here.
