Public Education

[Smallc]

Both the UN and the CIA rate Canada's literacy at 99%. I have a hard time believing that more than a few people leave school unable to read given the importance that is placed on language arts and the programs that exist such as reading recovery (an amazing program btw...what it can d is beyond imagination) and speech therapy. I just finished school no all that long ago and I have also taught classes. Kids can read...I have no doubt about that.

People may not write the same way they did in the past, and they may not read the same way as in the past, but the skills that are needed seem to be there.

Edited May 15, 2009 by Smallc

[Molly]

I truly wish I agreed with you, but I don't.

A literacy rate of 99% is, beyond any shadow of doubt, based on something other than measured literacy. Likely school attendance in this case, but school attendance is by no means a guarantee of literacy.

Attention is paid to language arts for the class, but not so much language arts for the individual child. Some get lost in the shuffle, especially if they don't have a grimly determined parent/advocate. Remedial programs are expensive, and kids who are missed are often percieved to BE, rather than to HAVE a problem, and the inclination is to blame rather than to assist.

[Molly]

That link I offered poses the question: 'Define literacy.'

It's an interesting challenge.

After much reflection, I decided that literacy demands the ability to gather MORE information from the written word than you would from the same thing, spoken. I say 'more', because the written word is not bound by time. It can be considered, and re-read until understanding is complete.

It doesn't demand fluency, but it does demand the ability to analyze to full understanding.

[Smallc]

Attention is paid to language arts for the class, but not so much language arts for the individual child.

You couldn't be more wrong on that. Programs exist and are used...for all students. As I have said, I have no doubt that people who today finish even middle school can read and write.

[Oleg Bach]

No they can not - they can text ...they can not write - and they are not family orientated - and most think that family is one mother and one dog and one child... no matter what - secularism and a very sinister family service act - has ruined society..all the education in the world will not correct what has been done - welcome to the brave new world of low quality and equality.

[BubberMiley]

No they can not - they can text ...they can not write

Looking at your spelling and punctuation, I wonder how you would know.

[DrGreenthumb]

I think that anyone who claims that school is somehow easier now than it was in past generations is fooling themselves. They must not have tried helping their kids with their math homework lately. My grade 7 and 8 girls are doing math that we never even looked at till grade 11 or 12.

In grade 5 my middle daughter built a circuit from an old computer power supply and a rheostat and a potentiometer that she used to demonstate Ohm's law.

If anything I think the teachers today rely too much on computers and lessons dowenloaded off the internet. My kids spend hours every night solving math problems that the teacher downloaded and printed off for them. They never dictate notes anymore just give handouts. Maybe if the teachers had to spend the time to come up with their own math problems and figure out their own answer key they wouldn't over assign so much. Kids should have more time to be kids, they have their whole lives to be slaves to work.

[wyly]

I'm delighted with my kids education, the quality of instruction is great. If any kid has trouble functioning in the adult after their basic education (high school)is complete the kid and his/her parents have to take responsibility.

[Pliny]

I'm delighted with my kids education, the quality of instruction is great. If any kid has trouble functioning in the adult after their basic education (high school)is complete the kid and his/her parents have to take responsibility.

Well, that sort of let's the teacher off the hook doesn't it? And puts the responsibility squarely where it should be - with the parent and the child himself. Golly gosh. How simple. Problem solved.

Do you think we should start rationing education to those children whose parents take responsibility for their childrens' education? Do you feel the teacher's union would be upset if parent's instead of teachers were responsible for our children's education?

It seems teacher's don't like to fail just as much as their students. And, like their students, find it difficult to accept their failures. The student's can blame learning disabilities or their parents and the teachers can blame the students or their parents.

Someone needs to take the blame, don't they?

Anyway, after having read the thread, Molly is about closest to my perception of the school system.

[Oleg Bach]

You can not if you are the average middle income parent to actually have control over the education of your child - the system has an agenda and the only ones free of it are those who are upper income...who educate their children privately. Public education teaches tolerance and non-discrimination - so the kids of today tolerate the worst of evils - they do not discriminate and decide what is good for them or who is good for them or not - the population is slowly being debased - It's utlitarianism.

[Oleg Bach]

You can not if you are the average middle income parent to actually have control over the education of your child - the system has an agenda and the only ones free of it are those who are upper income...who educate their children privately. Public education teaches tolerance and non-discrimination - so the kids of today tolerate the worst of evils - they do not discriminate and decide what is good for them or who is good for them or not - the population is slowly being debased - It's utlitarianism.

[Smallc]

Yes, because those of us who have, you know, worked in the school system have no idea what it's like.

[Machjo]

when it comes as an epiphany to the 8-year-olds I'm helping that letters are actually representatiions of sounds.... these things do not suggest 'improved overall literacy' to me.

Letters are representations of sounds in English? You're kidding, right? In that case, could you teach me the rules to pronounce the words of the following poem accurately:

I take it you already know

Of tough and bough and cough and dough?

Others may stumble, but not you,

On hiccough, thorough, lough and through?

Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,

To learn of less familiar traps?

Beware of heard, a dreadful word

That looks like beard and sounds like bird,

And dead: it's said like bed, not bead -

For goodness sake don't call it deed!

Watch out for meat and great and threat

(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt).

A moth is not a moth in mother,

Nor both in bother, broth in brother,

And here is not a match for there

Nor dear and fear for bear and pear,

And then there's dose and rose and lose -

Just look them up - and goose and choose,

And cork and work and card and ward,

And font and front and word and sword,

And do and go and thwart and cart -

Come, come, I've hardly made a start!

A dreadful language? Man alive!

I'd mastered it when I was five!

[Machjo]

http://www.spellingsociety.org/news/media/poems.php

This site is full of examples of why many can't spell. Quite simply, English spelling has not kept up with changes in pronunciation over the years. Either that, or we could look at it in reverse and say that pronunciation has changed too quickly over the years. The spellings of English words today still reflect pronunciations of centuries ago.

[Pliny]

Yes, because those of us who have, you know, worked in the school system have no idea what it's like.

True.

[Smallc]

True.

Haha....good one

[Pliny]

Letters are representations of sounds in English? You're kidding, right? In that case, could you teach me the rules to pronounce the words of the following poem accurately:

That doesn't refute the fact that letters are a representation of sounds. Vowels all represent several sounds alone and in combination with other letters, consonants generally just one or two.

Cute poem though.

[Machjo]

That doesn't refute the fact that letters are a representation of sounds. Vowels all represent several sounds alone and in combination with other letters, consonants generally just one or two.

Cute poem though.

You're right, Pliny. I should have said that English spelling is by no means phonetic. No, I take that back. You're partially right. Let's look at the gh. In older forms of English, it represented a voiced velar fricative. Some names of Arabic and Persian origin in modern English using the same sound will sometimes keep the gh spelling referring back to the older sound. In many words though, that gh no longer represents any sound, but stands merely as a reminder of its past.

We find the same with ph in photograph. Phonemically, it could just as easily be spelt fotograf, but keeping the ph stands as a reminder of the Greek letter phi in the original. So in some cases, the spelling represents not pronunciation, but root significance and recognition for those who know the original language. Seeing that Latin and Greek are no longer taught any more than Old English is, all these exceptional spellings thus become nothing more than meaningless, irrational gibberish.

[Martin Odber]

Personally I feel our schools are business's. Like most business's they are geared to acquiring and maintaining funding. They attempt to provide education based on what is funded, in the most financially feasible manner. Teachers, are often victims struggling to provide quality education while grossly underfunded. A great deal is often sacrificed to meet budget objectives. It is not uncommon to learn that our children are "slipping through the cracks" of the systems in place.

The expected place for a child to have the best chance is often in a privately funded school. The more heavily funded the private school the more likely the child will receive a globally competitive high quality education.

Something to note? Historically, in tribal times the rites of passage to adulthood were granted to a societies youth when they were fully equipped to look after themselves in the world they lived in without that societies help. For example, when a youth was able to kill big game on their own and provide for themselves, then only would they be considered a societal equal.

Nowadays, mandatory schooling ends in Canada at Grade 12, and sometimes before in the wake of dropouts.

A grade twelve education however DOES NOT ensure that a child has the means to achieve gainful employment. In fact a grade twelve education in our society barely qualifies our children to push a broom. To be even mildly competitive a youth on average needs some sort of university diploma, and this they currently MUST achieve on their own, via incurring debt or other.

Are we as a society doing our youth the justice our forebears did us? Not even!

Possible solutions?

* adapting our current educational system to ENSURE that each and every child receive additional training in some trade that while it may not be their highest potential reached, will ensure that when they leave mandatory schooling they ALL have a marketable financially sustaining trade whereby to support themselves. If the child then decides I don't want this trade I want to go on to learn something else, that option is open, but at the very least, they won't leave high school to stagnate.

* another solution might be for Canadians to begin seeing our success's or failures as a nation rather than as individuals. To ask our educators, what will it take for our average child to be globally competitive, self sustaining and upwardly mobile in today's society.. and then implement these things into our mandatory educational systems

*the most feasible answer, would be to open a referendum on this polling all Canadians, and acting on what we all feel is the most viable solution considering the alternatives rather than leaving it to a few businessmen to decide whats right for us all, and then crying when its just more of the same old same old bandaid solutions we are used to

regards,

Martin

www.canadianreferendumparty.com

[Molly]

Cute poem, Machjo, but I VEHEMENTLY disagree with your shockingly low linguistic expectations.

If no one ever needed more from a language than simple technical information, or the ability to order a hamburger, then we could dispense with words almost entirely, and go with pictographs, saving huge effort. Much of our basic communication could readily be achieved with grunts and gestures.

However, if one wishes to communicate more complex ideas, then a simplistic, mechanically-created language is a dreary and ineffective tool.

The beauty of having the roots of words visible in their spellings is that nuance, implication and even whole meaning is revealed by it. In it's simplest version, 'Numo-' has a different meaning than 'pneumo-'. In your hope and effort to stamp out the complexities of language, in order to make the rudiments more available to dunderheads, you offer to stamp out higher order language use.

You offer to make EVERYONE as linguistically empoverished as the slowest, least effective user of those languages.

No thanks.

[Machjo]

Cute poem, Machjo, but I VEHEMENTLY disagree with your shockingly low linguistic expectations.

If no one ever needed more from a language than simple technical information, or the ability to order a hamburger, then we could dispense with words almost entirely, and go with pictographs, saving huge effort. Much of our basic communication could readily be achieved with grunts and gestures.

However, if one wishes to communicate more complex ideas, then a simplistic, mechanically-created language is a dreary and ineffective tool.

The beauty of having the roots of words visible in their spellings is that nuance, implication and even whole meaning is revealed by it. In it's simplest version, 'Numo-' has a different meaning than 'pneumo-'. In your hope and effort to stamp out the complexities of language, in order to make the rudiments more available to dunderheads, you offer to stamp out higher order language use.

You offer to make EVERYONE as linguistically empoverished as the slowest, least effective user of those languages.

No thanks.

What low linguistic expectations? Have you ever tried to function in English in parts of central Quebec? I know French fluently, but that hadn't stopped me at times from pretending, just to satisfy my curiosity as to how far I could go in English. And guess what. Most of them functioned in English about as well as you just described above. If you want the opinion of an expert on this subject, look at the video at the end of this text. The speaker, Claude Piron, is a professor of linguistics at the University of Geneva, and was an interpretor from English, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, and Mandarin Chinese into French at the UN General Assembly and other international organizations, and he's a native speaker of both French and Esperanto. So I'm guessing he knows more than most about what he's talking about.

You also seem to assme that a language needs to be unnecessarily complicated in order to be complex. I can prove you wrong on that with one simple example:

Let's suppose we replaced mice with mouses, or the plural aircraft with aircrafts. Would they in any way reduce our ability to express the plural? On the contrary, in the case of aircraft above, it would make the language not only easier and more consistent, but more precise and thus capable of even greater complexity.

Also, have you ever been to an international conference? I have, to a few of them. And inmost cases, a few interpretors were needed for more than a few languages, in spite of the fact that most had studied English for years. What awaste. You forget that a language is only as useful as we manage to master it.

As for impoverishing everyone linguistically, that's ludicrous. I speak one constructed language, and it has not stopped me from learning other more difficult languages. In fact, if anything, it helped to boost my confidence in language learning, and thus motivate me to learn other languages. In fact, we might take us two as examples. I know a constructed language and you don't. Yet, I also know three other languages, two completely fluently, and one well enough for fluent daily conversation, one Germanic, one Romance, and one Sino-Tibetan. I can also read Arabic and Persian with extreme difficulty in the standard script (and time permitting, intend to learn them further). This, by the way, is also backed by research, the link to which I'll include below too.

Looking at it that way, then, forcing pupils to learn French or English as their first second language could not only not benefit them, but even harm them. After all, by failing to learn their second language, they not only fail to learn their second language, but have their confidence in language learning destroyed in the process. Should their first second language be an easy second language, not only do they succeed in learning their second language, but could also have their confidence in learning a third language boosted.

What's the point of such complicated English if few can learn it? And especially in a democratic system of government, where all citizens are supposed to have equal access to knowledge, and especially in a country where higher education isn't free. You're views seem quite Anglo-centric in their ignorance of the difficulties inherent in learning English for other Canadians and the concequences on their quality of life, ability to find work, access to knowledge, ability to communicate with their co-citizens, and access to democracy, etc.

Andhere are the links:

http://www.internacialingvo.org/public/study.pdf

[Machjo]

And may I add, their ability to read, wirte and understand contracts and defend themselves and their legal rights in a court of law. This right should not limit itself to native English-speaking Canadians, but to all Canadians.

Sure we have official bilingualism, but that might not help a native who's weak in both official languages, or a French Canadian trying to sign a contract in English Canada where government doesn't guarantee official bilingualism in the private sector.

By the way, I'm not a native English speaker either.

[Pliny]

You're right, Pliny. I should have said that English spelling is by no means phonetic. No, I take that back. You're partially right. Let's look at the gh. In older forms of English, it represented a voiced velar fricative. Some names of Arabic and Persian origin in modern English using the same sound will sometimes keep the gh spelling referring back to the older sound. In many words though, that gh no longer represents any sound, but stands merely as a reminder of its past.

We find the same with ph in photograph. Phonemically, it could just as easily be spelt fotograf, but keeping the ph stands as a reminder of the Greek letter phi in the original. So in some cases, the spelling represents not pronunciation, but root significance and recognition for those who know the original language. Seeing that Latin and Greek are no longer taught any more than Old English is, all these exceptional spellings thus become nothing more than meaningless, irrational gibberish.

"Velar fricative" I am always happy to learn new words and these were two I hadn't heard before. I looked them up in the dictionary and one thing I make sure to do is look up the root of the word. English is a conglomeration of languages, it's words come from different languages. The derivative of the word is, I find, very important to understanding it and it often gives me further insight into other words that may have origins in the same derivative. Both "velar" and "fricative" have a Latin root velar stems from velum meaning a Veil, covering or sail and refers to the soft palate, fricative from the same root as "friction", fricare meaning to rub.

What you are suggesting is a modernization of the spelling and an update of sounds that letters represent, phonetics essentially. I believe the relegation of our phonetic structure to being meaningless, irrational gibberish in building the English language is not dissimilar to what lost the technology of building the pyramids.

There is a reason for things and a lack of understanding of them makes them appear meaningless if one cares to find out though, it mysteriously develops rational meaning.

[Molly]

To change 'mice' to 'mouses' would cost us the music, and the delight of this sentence:

"I think mice are rather nice."

.. a sentence that has inspired countless children to want to know MORE.

Knowing the mechanics of a language is not 'knowing' that language.

[Smallc]

There;s nothing wrong with the English language. Some words can be difficult to spell, but it can be manipulated to produce music and peotry that are very melodic. I have always been able to write well....but I can't spell. I consider that to be a failing that I have, and I don't blame it on the education system. Heave knows, they tried to teach me to spell.