SCREWING WITH DICK AND JANE
Teaching Reading In America

”Something strange is going on in schools and has been going on for quite some time. Whatever it is does not arise from the main American traditions. As closely as I can track the thing through the attitudes, practices, and stated goals of the shadowy crew who make a good living skulking around educational "laboratories," think tanks, and foundations, we are experiencing an attempt, successful so far, to reimpose the strong-state, strong social class attitudes of England and Germany on the United States – the very attitudes we threw off in the American Revolution. And in this counter-revolution the state churches of England and Germany have been replaced by the secular church of forced government schooling.

We have here part three, the third chapter of John Taylor Gatto’s monumental “THE UNDERGROUND HISTORY OF AMERICAN EDUCATION”, serialized on Lew Rockwell dot Com. He calls this chapter EYELESS IN GAZA. You can read it here: http://www.lewrockwell.com/gatto/gatto-uhae-3.html

Gatto’s book is the most riveting thing I have read this year. And yes, I know that I have not yet given you Chapter Two, which came out two days ago because I ain't read it yet. Tomorrow, probably.

Mr. Gatto was taught to read by his foreign-born mother. He learned phonetically sitting on her lap. My father, New Hampshire born, taught me to read. Phonetically. Sitting on his lap. It was such a natural process….every day we went through the comics in the local paper. Sunday was an especial treat since the comics seemed to go on forever. I was reading early in my third year.

Then came school. Kindergarten was no problem. I was ill with Polio much of that year and so didn’t get to class all that much. But first grade was something of a shock.

Our teacher was a young girl just out of college. The war had been over for less than a year and America was booming. It was even an exciting time to be a kid except when it came to reading.

By October I had been placed in the lowest of three classroom reading groups. I couldn’t read, not according to accepted orthodoxy, anyway. The family story is that Ms Teacher told my Mother that I was retarded which caused a physical confrontation. Old Mom was a tigress when it came to defending her cubs.

One day, still early in the year, teacher was throwing whole words on a screen with a device called ‘a tachistoscope’, which I learned only this evening was invented in the eighteenth century….to teach whole word reading. The word SOMETHING flashed, and I blurted out without raising my hand, “S O M E SOME T H I N G THING SOMETHING”, pronouncing each letter, then each syllable, then the entire word. I didn’t do it the whole word way, I used my father’s phonetic method.

The rest of the day is a blur. Apparently it was too much for Miss whatever-her-name-was, she went ballistic. But the next day I was in the principal’s office reading out loud to that sweet lady from a book that was several grades above the little red beginner DICK AND JANE. From that moment on, I was in the highest group and no longer considered '‘retarded'’ by a young kid who could not have been more than twenty-two.

So much for my story. Please read Mr. Gatto’s excellent piece. Hope you get as caught up in this book as am I.

Who needs politics when you have a tachistoscope???