The coach who said this would not only be discriminating but sound in his judgment.
There would be no point in trying to instruct you in the art of tennis while you were sufering from all these disabilities. The educational psychologists have made this sort of contribution. They have diagnosed the disabilities which prevent of hinder a person from learning how to read, better than the coach, they have devised all sorts of therapy which contribute to remedial reading. But when all this work is done, when the maximum in therapy is accomplished, you still have to learn how to read or play tennis.
The doctors who fix your feet, prescribe your glasses, corect your posture, and relieve your emotional tensions cannot make you into a tennis player, though they transform you from a person who cannot learn how to one who can. Similarly, the psychologists who diagnose your reading disabilities and presecribe their cure do not know how to make you a good reader.
Most of this educational research is merely preliminary to the main business of learning to read. It spots and removes obstacles. It help cure disability, but it does not remove inability. At best it makes those who are abnormal in one way or another more like the normal person whose native gifts nmake him freely susceptible training But the normal individual has to be trained. He is gifted whth the power to learn, but he is not born with the art. That must be cultivated. The cure of abnormality may overcome the inequalities of birth or the accidents of early development. Even if it succeeded in making all men approximately equal in their initial capacity to learn, it could go no further. At that point, the development of skill would have to begin. Genuine instructioin in the art of reading begins, in short, where the educational psychologists leave off.
It should begin. Unfortunately, it does not, as all the evidence shows. And, as I have already suggested, there are two reasons why it is not. First, the curriculum and the educational program in general, from grammar school through college, is too croweded with other time-consuming things to permit enough attention to be geven the basic skills. Second, most educators do not seem to know how to teach the art of reading. The three R's exist in the curriculum today only in their most rudimentary form. Theya re regarded as belonging to the primary grades, instead of extending all the way up to the bachelor's degree. As a result, the bachelor of arts is not much more competent in reading and writing than a sixth-grader.
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I would like to discuss these two reasons in a little more detail. With respect to the first, the issue is not whether the three R's belonging in education, but to what extent they belong and how far they must be developed. Everyone, even the most extreme progressive educator, admits that children must be given the basic skills, must be taught to read and write. But there isn't general agreement about how much skill is the absolute minimum for an educatted man to possess, and how much educational fime it would take to give the minimim to the average student.
Last year I was invited to participate in a national boradcast on the Town Meeting hour.
The subject was education in a democracy. The other two participants were Professor Gulick of Columbia and Mr. John Studebaker, national commissioner of education. If you heard the broadcast, or read the pamphlet containing the speeches, you observed that there appeared to be agreement all of us about the three R's as indispensable traininf gor democratic citizenship.
The agreement was only apparent ans superficial, however. For one thing, I meant by the three R's, the arts of reading, writing, and reckoning as these should be possessed by a bachelor of those arts; whereas my colleagues meant only the most rudimentary sort of grammar-school training. For another thing, they mentioned such things as reading and writing as only a few of the many ends which education, especially in a democracy, must serve. I did not deny that reading and writing are only a part and not the whole, but I did disagree about the order of importance of the several ends. If one could enumerate all the essentials which a sound educational program consider, I would say that the techniques of communication, which make for literacy, are our first obligation, and more so in a cemocracy than in any other kind of society, because it depends on a literate electorate.
This is the issue in a nutshell. First things should come first. Only after we are assured that we have adequately accomplished them is there any time or energy for less important considerations. That, however, is not the way things are done in the schools and colleges today. Matters of unequal importance are given equal attention. The relaitvely tirvial is often made the whole of an education program, as in certain colleges which are little better than finishing schools. What used to be regarded as extracurricular activity has seized the conter of the stage, and the basic curricular elements are piled up somewhere in the wings, marked for cold storage or the junkman.
In this process, begun by the elective system and completed by the excesses of progressive educatioin, the basic intellectual disciplines got pushed into a corner or off the stage entirely.
In their false liberalism, the progressive educators confused discipline with regimentation, and forgot that true freedom is impossible without a mind made free by discipline. I never tire of quoting John Dewy at them. He said long ago: "The discipline that is identical with trained power is also identical with freedom... Genuine freedom, in short, is intellectual; it rests in the trained power of thought." A discipline mind, trained in the poer of thought, is one which can read and write critically, as well as do efficient work in discovery. The art of thinking, as we have seen, is the art of learning through being taught or through unaided research.
I am not saying, let me repeat, that knowing how to read and learning through books are the whole of education. One should also be able to carry out investigation intelligently.
Beyond that one should be well informed in all the areas of fact which are a necesary groundwork for thinking. There is no reason why all these things cannot be accomplished in the educational time at our disposal. But if one had to make a choice among them, one should certainly place the primary emphasis on the fundmental skills and let information of any sort take send place. Those who make the opposite choice must regard an education as a burden of fact one requires in school and tries to carry around for the rest of life, though the baggage becomes heavier as it progressively proves less useful.
the sounder view of education, it seems to me, is one which emphasizes discipline. In this view, what one gets in school is not so much learning as the technique of learning, the arts of educating oneself through all the media the environment affords. Institutions educate only if they enable one to continue learning forever after. The art of reading and the technique of research are the primary instruments of learning, of being taught thnings and of finding them out. That is why they must be primary objectives of a sound educational system.
Although I do not disagree with Carlyle that " all that a university or final highest school can do for us is still what the first school began,—teach us to read," I do agree with Professor Tenney of Cornell that if the school does teach students to read, it has placed in their hands "the primary instrument of all higher education. Thereafter, the student, if he so wills, can educate himself." If the schools taught their pupils to read well, they would make students of them, and students they would be out of school and after it as well.
Let me call your attention, in passing, to a fault of reading which many persons commit, especially professors. A writer says he thinks sonething is of primary importance, or more important than something else. The bad reader interprets him as saying that nothing else but the thing he stresses is important. I have read many reviews of President Hutchin's Higher Learning in America which have stupidly or even viciously mistaken in his insistence upon literacy as indispensable to liberal or general education for an exclusion of everything else. To affirm, as he does clearly, that nothing else comes first is not to deny that other things come second, third, and so forth.
What I have been saying will probably be similarly misinterpreted by the professors o
r the professionals in education. They will probably go further, and charge me with neglecting "the whole man" because I have not discussed the discipline of emotion in education and the formation of moral character. Every character that is not discussed is not necessarily denied, however. It that were the implication of omissions, writing about any one subject would involve infinite possibilites of error. This books is about reading, not about everything. The context should therefore indicate that we are primarily concerned with intellectual educatiion, and not the whole education.
If I were asked, as I was from the floor on the night of the Town Meeting broadcast,
"Which do you consider the most important to a student, the three R's or a good moral character? I would answer, as I did then:
The choice between the intellectual and the moral virtues is a hard one to make; but if I had to make the choice, I would choose the moral virtues always, because the intellectual virtues without the moral virtues can be vicious misused, as they are misused by anyone who knoelwdge and skill, but doesn't know the ends of life.
Knowledge and skill of mind are not the most important items in this life. Loving the right things is more important. Education as a shole must consider more than man's intellect. I am saying only that , in so far as it concerns then intellect, there is nothihg more important than the skills by which it must be disciplined to function well.
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I turn now to the second reason why the schools have failed in the matter of reading and writing. The First reason was that they underestimated the importance and extent of the task, and hence misconceived the relatively greater time effort which must be devoted to it than to anything else. The second is that the arts have been almost lost. The arts I am referring to now are the liberal arts which once were called grammaer, logic, and rhetoric. These are the arts which a B.A. is supposed to be a bachelor of, and an M.A. a master. These are the arts of reading and writing, speaking and listening. Anyone who knows anything about the rules of grammar, logic, and rhetoric knows that they govern the operations we perform with language in the process of communication.
The various rules of reading, to which I have already more or less explicitly referred, involve points of grammar or logic or rhetoric. The rule about words and terms, or the one about sentences and propositions, has a grammatical and logical aspect. The rule about proof and other types of argument is obviously logical. The rule about interpreting the emphasis a writer places on one thing rather than another entails rhetorical considerations.
I shall discuss these different apspects of the rules of reading later. Here the only point is that the loss of these arts is in large part responsible for our inability to read and toteach students how to read. It is highly significant that when Mr. I.A. Richards writes a book about Interpretation in Teaching, which is really a book one some aspects of reading, he finds it necessary to resuscitate the arts, and to divide his treatment into three main parts: grammar, rhetoric, and logic.
When I say that the arts are lost, I do not mean that the sciences of grammar and logic, for instance, are gone. There are still grammarians and logicians in the universities. The scientific study of grammar and logic is still pursued, and in some quaters and under certain auspices with renewed vigor. You have probably heard about the "new"
discipline which has been advertized lately under the name "semantics." It is not new, of course. It is also as old as Plato and Aristotle. It is nothing but new name for the scientific study of the rinciples of linguistic usage, combining grammatical and logical considerations.
The ancient and medieval grammarians, and an eighteenth-century writer such as John Locke, could teach the contemporary "semanticists" a lot of principles they do not know, principles they need not try to discover if they would and could read a few books.
It is interesting that, just about the time when grammar has almost dropped out of the grammar school, and when logic is a course taken by few college students, these studies should be revived in the graduate schools with a great fanfare of original discovery.
The reivval of the study of grammar and logic by the semanticists does not alter my point, however, about the loss of the arts. There is all the difference in the world between studying science of something and practicing the art of it. We would not like to served by a cook whose only merit was an ability to recite the cookbook. It is an old saw that some logicians are the least logical of men. When I say that the linguistic arts have reached a new low in contemnporary education and culture, I am referring to the practice of grammar and logic, not to acquaintance with these sciences. The evidende for my statement is simply that we cannot write and read as well as men of other ages could, and that we cannot teach the next generation how to do so, either.
It is a well-known fact that those periods of European culture in which men were least skillful in reading and writing were periods in which the greatest hullabaloo was raided about eh unitelligibility of everything that had been written before. This is what happened in the decadent Hellenictic period and in the fifteenth century, and it is happening again today. When men are incompetent in reading and writing, their inadequacy seems to express itself in their being hypercritical about everybody else's writing. A psychoanalyst would understand this as a pathological projection of one's own inadequacies on to others. The less well we are able to use words intelligibly, the more likely we are to blame others for their unintelligible speech. We may even make a fetish of our nightmares about language, and then we become semanticists for fair.
The poor semanticists! They do now know what they are confessing about themselves when they report all the books they unable to understand. Nor does semantics seem to have helped them when, after practicing its rituals, they still find so many passages uninteligible. It has not helped them to become better readers than they were before they supposed that "semantics" had the magic of "sesame." If they only had the grace to assume that the trouble was not with the great writers of the past and present, but with them as readers, they might give semantics up or, at least, use it to try to learn how to read. If they could read a little better, they would find that the world conatined a much larger number of intelligible books than they now suppose. As matters now stand for them, there are almost none.
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The fact that the liberal arts are no longer generally practiced, in school or out, is plain from its consequence: namely, that students do not learn to read and write, and teachers do not know how to help them. But the cause of this fact is complicated and obscure. To explain how we got the way we are today, educationally and culturally, would probably require an elaborate history of modern times from the fourteenth century on. I shall be content to offer two incomplete and superficial explanations of what has happened.
The first is that science is the major achievement of modern times. Not only do we worship for all the comforts and utitlties, all the command over nature, which it bestowes, but we are captivated by its method as the elixir of knowledge. I am not going to argue(though I think it true) that the experimental method is not the magic key to every masnsion of knowledge. The only point I wish to make is that, under such cultural auspieces, it is natural for education to emphasize the kind of thinking and learning the scientist does, either to the neglect or to the total exclusion of all others.
We have come to disdain the kind of learning which consists in being taught by others, in favor of the kind which discovering things for ourselves. As a result, the arts appropriate to the first kind of learning, such as the art of reading, are neglected, while the arts of independent inquiry flourish.
The second explanation is related to the first. In the age of science, which is progressively discovering new things and adding to our knowledge every day, we tend to think that the past can teach us nothing. The great books on the shelves of every library are of antiquarian interest only. Let those who wish to write the history of our culture dabble in them, but who are concerned to know about ourselves, the aims of life and
society, and the world of nature in which we live, must either be scientists or read the newspaper reposrts of the most recent scientific meeting.
We need not bother to read the great works of scientists now dead. They can teach us nothing. The same attitude soon extends to philosophy, to moral, political, and economic problems, to the great histories that were written before the latest researches were completed, and even to the field of literary criticism. The paradox here is that we thus come to disprage the past even in fields which do not employ the experimental method and cannot be affected by the changing content of experimental findings.
Since, in any gemeration, only a few great books ge written, most of the great ones necessarily belong to the past. After we have stopped reading the great ones of the past, we soon do not even read the few great ones of the present, and content ourselves with second- and third-hand accounts of them. There is a vicious circle in all this. Because of our preoccupation with the present moment and the latest discovery, we do not read the great books of the past. Because we do not this sort of reading, and do not think it is important, we do not bother about trying to learn to read difficult books. As a result, we do not learn to read well at all. We cannot even read the great books of the present, though we may admire them from the distance and through the seven veils of popularization. Lack of exercise breeds flabbiness. We end up by not being able to read even the good popularizations as well.
The cicious circle is worth looking at more closely. Just as you cannot improve your tennis game by playing only against opponents you can readily beat, so you cannot improve your skill in reading unless you work on something that taxes your effort and demands new resources. It follows, therefore, that in proportion as the great books have fallen from their traditional place as major sources of learning, it has become less and less possible to teach students how to read. You cannot cultivate their skill abouve the low level of their daily practice. You cannot teach them how to read well if, for the most part, they are not called upon to use the skill in its highest forms.
HOW TO READ A BOOK Page 8