Yesterday, I posted about author Hilary Layne's argument that the whole-language method supplanting phonics as the favored method of teaching reading to young children is the principal reason that late Millennials and Gen Z Americans have such difficulty understanding what they read. In the video that I embedded, she maintains that whole-language instruction led directly to teaching critical literacy rather than critical thinking, which in turn led to a generation and a half of American college graduates unable to comprehend anything more advanced than the instructions on a Kraft Mac & Cheese box.
I agree that young (i.e., under-30) people today have an alarming lack of critical thinking skills, but after chasing down Layne's sources, I have some...concerns.
First, whole-language seems to have fallen out of favor, and phonics is back in. It appears that this shift occurred in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Yet reading comprehension scores continue to fall, and young people continue to believe before learning rather than the other way around.
Second, I started to read one of the sources Layne mentioned several times, Charlotte Iserbyt's The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, and I have some...serious concerns.
Iserbyt was nuts. Not "mentally ill and needs medication" nuts; no, she was "John Birch wasn't right-wing enough" nuts.
Her preface started fine, though it seemed a bit alarmist in the first few paragraphs. Then I got into the second page and I wondered if I was reading a pamphlet from the 1950s. My brow had already furrowed a bit at "brainwashing by our schools and universities is what is bankrupting our nation and our children’s minds," but then I got to "The brainwashing for acceptance of the “system’s” control would take place in the school—through indoctrination and the use of behavior modification, which comes under so many labels: the most recent labels being Outcome-Based Education, Skinnerian Mastery Learning or Direct Instruction" and I uttered my first confused "huh?"
Oh, but wait. It got better from there:
In the 1970s this writer and many others waged the war against values clarification, which was later renamed “critical thinking,” which regardless of the label—and there are bound to be many more labels on the horizon—is nothing but pure, unadulterated destruction of absolute values of right and wrong upon which stable and free societies depend and upon which our nation was founded.
In 1973 I started the long journey into becoming a “resister,” placing the first incriminating piece of paper in my “education” files. That first piece of paper was a purple ditto sheet entitled “All About Me,” next to which was a smiley face. It was an open-ended questionnaire beginning with: “My name is _____.” My son brought it home from public school in fourth grade. The questions were highly personal; so much so that they encouraged my son to lie, since he didn’t want to “spill the beans” about his mother, father and brother. The purpose of such a questionnaire was to find out the student’s state of mind, how he felt, what he liked and disliked, and what his values were. With this knowledge it would be easier for the government school to modify his values and behavior at will—without, of course, the student’s knowledge or parents’ consent.
I ask my friends who are K-8 teachers: did shadowy state authorities make you send them copies of these "hello my name is" assignments before you returned them to the kids? Or did you, you know, just get to know the students better?
She then goes on a rant about "the Hegelian dialectic," or at least a version of the same that I didn't quite get when I encountered Hegel in college*, culminating in the paragraph where I actually exclaimed "what the actual fuck" in my office†:
This war has, in fact, become the war to end all wars. If citizens on this planet can be brainwashed or robotized, using dumbed-down Pavlovian/Skinnerian education, to accept hat those in control want, there will be no more wars. If there are no rights or wrongs, there will be no one wanting to “right” a “wrong.” Robots have no conscience. The only permissible conscience will be the United Nations or a global conscience. Whether an action is good or bad will be decided by a “Global Government’s Global Conscience,” as recommended by Dr. Brock Chisholm, executive secretary of the World Health Organization, Interim Commission, in 1947—and later in 1996 by current United States Secretary of State Madeline Albright.
Only when all children in public, private and home schools are robotized—and believe as one—will World Government be acceptable to citizens and able to be implemented without firing a shot. The attractive-sounding “choice” proposals will enable the globalist elite to achieve their goal: the robotization (brainwashing) of all Americans in order to gain their acceptance of lifelong education and workforce training—part of the world management system to achieve a new global feudalism.
The socialist/fascist global workforce training agenda is being implemented as I write this book.
Ohhhh kaaaayyyy...
The historically literate reader will be shocked—shocked, I tell you!—to learn that Iserbyt worked in Reagan's Department of Education, where it seems even they had enough of her after a couple of years.
If Iserbyt's book significantly influenced Layne's video essay, perhaps I need to apply some of that critical thinking I learned from my government minders in the 1970s and 1980s and re-evaluate Layne's conclusions.
I may have more to say about this tomorrow, after I flip to the later chapters of Iserbyt's book to see if she was perhaps being satirical. Sadly, I suspect not.
* Hegel was describing the process, not suggesting it as a form of advocacy.
† I was listening to Mozart at the time so my door, thankfully, was closed.