8/12/2019 1988 Issue 9 - The Decline of Education in America: Illiteracy - Counsel of Chalcedon

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The ecline

o

Education

in

America

llillitlrSLcw

1988

l

.

by

Robert Smith

The early Bible Commonwealth,

which was to later become the United

States

of

America, was a network

of

democratic communities -- small repub

lics -- linked by a common Christian

ideology, overseen by a Governor and a

representative legislature which exer

cised civil authority

by

the higher laws

ofGod. Into this framework was nestled

the common schools, the original pub

lic schools, found

in

New England and

adjoining areas into which New Eng

landers migrated. The Puritans created

town schools to insure continuance

of

the Biblical commonwealth by rearing a

literate community. Biblical literacy

was necessary since Biblical authority

ruled the community. Hebrew, Greek

and Latin were studied in the New Eng

land wilderness to enhance the commun

ity

's understanding

of

the sacred Scrip

tures.I

Americans continued as a highly liter

ate, educated people into the early years

of

the

new

nation. The

Federalist

papers

were circulated among the common

peo-

ple as popular arguments for the Consti

tution. (Today, university students com

plain over having to read such difficult

material.) A treatise was written at the

request of Thomas Jefferson in 1800,

giving an account

of

the literate

prowess

of

Americans. "Most young

Americans can read, write, and cipher.

Not more than four in a thousand are

unable to write legibly-- even neatly

. . England, Holland, .and Protestant

Cantons

of

Switzerland more nearly ap-

Robert Smith Is

a Presbyterian

layman who

beads

the

Christiau Food

Mission

n

Laurel,

Mississippi. . .

proach the standard

of

the United States,

because in those countries the Bible is

read; it

is

considered a duty to read it to

the children. . . . In America, a great

number ofpeople read the Bible, and all

thepeople read a newspaper. The fathers

read aloud to their children while break

fast is being prepared newspapers

of the United States are filled with

all

sorts

of

narratives - comments on mat

ters political, physical, philosophic;

infonnation on agriculture, the

arts,

travel, navigation. . . . extracts from all

the best books in America and Europe.

u

William McGuffey was born in 1800

on

the Ohio frontier to Scottish Presby

terian parents and was to become

kno\vn in his day

as

"the schoolmaster

of the nation." As an education re

former,

he

introduced a graded reading

series filled with stories.

He

believed

the Bible was God's

word

and deserved

the central place in American education.

The

McGuffey Eclectic Readers, four

levels, were used to teach children how

to read and write and spell. John H.

Westechoff l l writes,

It

is estimated

that

at

least 120 million copies

of

McGuffey's Readers were sold between

1826 and 1920, placing their sales in a

class with the Bible and Wesbster's

Dictionary."

John Dewey was born in 1849 and .

. became the head of

the

Education

Department at Columbia University in

New York. He is the originator

of

what

is called "progressive education."

Dewey, in direct contrast to McGuffey,

was an atheist who developed the

Department

of

Education at Columbia

University into the model for teacher

education departments at colleges and

universities across m e r i c In the ab

sence

of

moral absolutes, the Bible,

God and the soul; Dewey believed

students are left to clarify in their minds

their

own moral code of ethics. Dewey

Wrote in 1898, "The plea for the pro

minence

of

learning to read in early

school life because

of

the great im-

portance attached to literature seems to

me a perversion." Public education be

gan its shift from McGuffey's Christian

philosophy to Dewey's atheistic philo-

sophy in the 1900's.3 ,

Iti the .1800's the Rev. Thomas H.

Gallaudet, the famous teacher of the

deaf and dumb, invented a method to

teach deafmutes how to read The

scheme involved a purely sight method

consisting

of

pictures juxtaposed with

whole words. Traditionally schools had

employed phonics or the phonetic

method to teach nonnal children to read.

Children were fnst taught the alphabet,

then the sounds the letters stand for, and

in

a

short

time they became independent

readers. Gallaudet thought his method

could be adapted for use by normal

children so he wrote a little primer on

that concept.4

In 1837 the Boston Primary School

Committee decided to adopt Gallaudet's

primer. By 1844 the results were so

disasterous, that the whole-word method

was thrown

out

of the schools to signal

a return to phonics. Latet, in the early

1900's, progressives such as John

Dewey, along with other socialis

educators, namely James M. Cattell and

EdwardL.Thorndike revived the whole

word method. The progressives stoOd

on the work of a student

of

a fellow

socialist, G. Stanley Hall. The student

was Edward Burke Huey, who wrote

The Psychology and Pedagogy o

Reading in 1908. The central agrurnen

of

the book was a promotion of inac

curacy in reading as a desirable trait

Promotion of whole-word by the pro

gressives led to its adoption in some of

the small private schools, only to be

later dropped by many after the negative

results became apparent.

The frrst use

of

the whole-word

method on a

l r g ~

scale took place in

the public schools

of

Iowa. It wasn't

long before the schools there were

plagued with reading problems. This

came

o the attention

of

Dr. Samuel T

Orton, a europathologistand professor

at Iowa State University. In his article,

P a g e 6 ~ ~

The Counsel or Chalcedon, September,

1988

8/12/2019 1988 Issue 9 - The Decline of Education in America: Illiteracy - Counsel of Chalcedon

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The Sight Reading Method of Teaching

Reading

as

a Source

of

Reading Dis-

ability

he

explained how the whole

word method

of

teaching reading could

cause learning disabilities and be n

actual obstacle

to

reading progress. The

date was 1929.5

By the 1950's whole-word

had

suc

cessfully been ushered into the public

schools by progressives, causing

Rudolf Flesch to write, in 1955, his

expose on the decline of reading skills

across the country. In Why Johnny

Can't Read, a best-seller, he worte

of

the whole-word method: The teaching

of reading all over the United States in

all the schools, in all the textbooks -

- is

totally wrong and flies in the face

of all logic and common sense." Karl

Shapiro, the eminent poet-professor

who had taught creative writing for

more than twenty years

at

the Univer

sity of California at Davis, told the

California Library Association in 1970:

"What

is

really distressing

is

that

this

generation cannot and does

not

read.

I

am

speaking

of

university students in

what are supposed to be our best univer

sities. The illiteracy is staggering. .

We are experiencing a literacy break

down which is unlike anything I

know

of

in

the

history of1etters."

Our nation's children spend more

time in school and the government

spends more and more money

on

educa

tion to

no

avail. The decline in literacy

is obvious and marked. The Bureau of

Education reported in 1910 that out

of

children between the ages of 10 to

14

only

22

out of a thousand could neither

read nor write. Several states, including

Massachusetts, were reported

to

have

only 1 illiterate child out of a thousand

in this same age group.6 The Boston

Globe reported in 1984 that about 40%

of that city's population is believed to

be functionally illiterate.

At

least a

million students presently emerge from

high school each year as functional illi

terates.? "What has gone wrong?" peo

ple ask.

Samuel Blumenfeld, a proponent of

intensive phonics, who has taught

in

the public schools, reports that the

Soviet Union has virtually eliminated

illiteracy in their country. The teaching

method they employ is "intensive

phonics."8 Marva Collins

is

a black

educator who taught for 16 years in the

public school system of Chicago before

deciding she had hadenough. In Septem

ber

of 1975

in her dining

room she

began what was to become the Westside

Preparatory School.

Mrs.

Collins'

school has taught dozens of black

children, whom the public schools had

labeled as unteachable, how to read and

write. The school's teaching methods

are individual attention and "systematic

intensive phonics."

I

spoke recently

with an educator in Atlanta

who

teaches

in a Christian school there. She related

how it is often necessary to "re-train"

students coming from the public

schools who are very

poor

readers. The

school employs intensive phonics to

improve their reading skills.

The de-valuing ofphonics in the pub

lic schools has been detailed

in

this

article while other problems have cer

tainly contributed as well to education's

decline. We have not spoken of parental

apathy, class size, godless textbooks,

violence and vandalism, and the NEA

hierarchy as obstacles to good teachers

and good teaching.

We

have not spoken

of the humanism, socialism, behavior

ism, psychological manipulation, and

unscriptural evolution, which has slow

ly crept into schools to hinder the pro

clamation

of

the

truth.

Who then is to blame for the mess

our children are in? According to Scrip

ture the responsibility for education of

children lies not with the school

or

the

state

but

squarely on the shoulders

of

the parents. Children

are

a gift from

God to parents for them to raise into a

godly vocation. Parents should be vigi

lant

of their children's education. Par

ents must

do

what is necessary

to

see to

it

that their children are well-educated

and grounded in Scripture as our Puritan

ancestors taught and practiced.

It

is also clear that the key to

breaking the cycle

of

poverty begins

with literacy and education. There is no

substitute for Christian education as our

present statist system is proving every

day. Our children are lost, the poor are

condemned to poverty unless the door

of

opportunity is unlocked with the key

of literacy.

We

must return to godly ed

ucation, to Scriptural literacy.

1. Samuel L. Blumenfeld, N.EA.

Trojan Horse in American Education

(Boise, Idaho: The Paradigm Com

pany, 1985)

2. DuPont de Nemours, National

Education in the United States

of

America (Newark, Delaware: University

of

Delaware Press, 1923)

3.

Dr. Paul A. Kiene , William

McGuffey and John Dewey, The Chris-

tian Educator (September, 1987): 5

4. Samuel L Blumenfeld, Who

Killed Excellence. The Counsel of

Chalcedon (December, 1985)): 6

5. Blumenfeld: N.

EA

Trojan Horse

in American Education

6. School and Society (January 30,

1915): 179

7. Boston Globe (March

11,

1984)

8.

Blumenfeld: N.E.A. Trojan Horse

in American Education

0

Join us in the

Worship of God

halcedon

Presbyterian

hurch

Sunday School - 9:45 a.m.

Worship Service - 10:55 a.m.

Sunday evening - 5:55 p.m.

Thursday Bible

Study - 7:30 p.m.

1 ~ 1 1 J ] o ~ j l l ( o r ~ c t a f t .

J Jlf

jlilinistct

11\).

t U J a p u ~ J ~ O . I : } C f S

~ s s ~ i a t e

f f l i n t s t ~ t

The church is located

at

7901 Roberts

Drive (comer of Roberts Spalding,

one-half mile south of the Northridge

exit

off

highway 400)

Dunwoody, Georgia

(404)

396-0965

The Counsel of Chalcedon,

September,

1988

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