51.Frank
Had A Dog; His Name Was Spot: The Underground History of American Education by
John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Frank
Had A Dog; His Name Was Spot
Two flies now enter the reading ointment in the persons of
Horace Mann and his second wife,
Mary Peabody. There is raw material here for a great intrigue novel: in the
early 1830s, a minister in
Hartford, Thomas Gallaudet, invented a sight-reading, look-say method to use with the deaf. Like
Jacotot, Gallaudet was a man of unusual personal force and originality. He served as director
at the asylum for the education of the deaf and dumb in Hartford. Deaf mutes couldn't learn a sound-symbol
system, it was thought, so
Gallaudet devised a sight-reading vocabulary of fifty whole-words which
he taught through pictures. Then
his deaf students learned a manual alphabet which permitted them to indicate letters with their fingers
and communicate with others.
Even in light of the harm he
inadvertently caused, it's hard not to be impressed by Gallaudet. In Gallaudet's system,
writing transmuted from a symbolic record of sounds to a symbolic record of pictures.
Gallaudet had reinvented English as ancient Babylonian! One of his former teachers, William
Woodbridge, then editor of the American Annals of Education, received a long, detailed letter in which
Gallaudet described his flash-card
method and demanded that education be regarded as a science like
chemistry: "Mind, like
matter, can be made subject to experiment." Fifty words could be
learned by memory before
introducing the alphabet. By removing the "dull and tedious" normal
method, great interest "has
[been] excited in the mind of the little learner."
Historically, three important threads
run together here: 1) that learning should be scientific, and learning places a laboratory; 2) that words
be learned ideographically; 3)
that relieving boredom and tedium should be an important goal of
pedagogy. Each premise was soon
pushed to extremes. These themes institutionalized would ultimately require a vast bureaucracy to enforce.
But all this lay in the future.
Gallaudet had adopted
the point of view of a deaf-mute who had to make his way without assistance from sound to spoken
language. Samuel Blumenfeld's analysis of what was wrong in this is instructive:
It led to serious confusions in
Gallaudet's thinking concerning two very different processes; that of learning to speak one's native language
and that of learning to read it.
In teaching the deaf to read by sight he was also teaching them language
by sight for the first time. They
underwent two learning processes, not one. But a normal child came to school already with the knowledge of
several thousand words in his speaking vocabulary, with a much greater intellectual development which the sense
of sound afforded him. In learning
to read it was not necessary to teach him what he already knew, to repeat
the process of learning to speak.
The normal child did not learn his language by learning to read. He learned to read in order to
help him expand his use of the language.
In 1830, Gallaudet published The Child's
Picture Defining and Reading Book, a book for children with normal hearing, seeking to generalize his
method to all. In its preface, the book sets down for the first time basic whole-word protocols.
Words will be taught as
representing objects and ideas, not as sounds represented by letters.
He who controls
language controls the public mind, a concept well understood by Plato. Indeed, the manipulation of language
was at the center of curriculum at the Collegia of Rome, in the Jesuit academies, and the private schools
maintained for children of the
influential classes; it made up an important part of the text of
Machiavelli; it gave rise to the
modern arts and sciences of advertising and public relations. The
whole-word method, honorably
derived and employed by men like Gallaudet, was at the same time a tool to be used by any regime or
interest with a stake in limiting the growth of intellect.
Gallaudet's primer,
lost to history, was published in 1836. One year later, the Boston School Committee was inaugurated under
the direction of Horace Mann. Although no
copies of the primer have survived, Blumenfeld tells us, "From
another source we know
that its first line was, Frank had a dog; his name was Spot." On
August 2, 1836, Gallaudet's primer
was adopted by the Boston Primary School Committee on an experimental basis. A year later a
report was issued pronouncing the method a success on the basis of speed in learning when compared to the alphabet
system, and of bringing a
"pleasant tone" to the classroom by removing "the old
unintelligible, and irksome mode
of teaching certain arbitrary marks, or letters, by certain arbitrary
sounds."
A sight vocabulary is faster to learn
than letters and phonograms, but the gain is a Trojan horse; only after several years have passed does the sight
reader's difficulty learning words
from outside sources begin to become apparent. By that time conditions
made pressing by the social
situation of the classroom and demands from the world at large combine to make it hard to retrace the
ground lost. Mann endorsed
Gallaudet's primer in his Second Annual Report (1838). His endorsement, Gallaudet's general fame
and public adulation, erroneous reports
circulating at the time that mighty Prussia was using a whole-word
system, and possibly the prospect
of fame and a little profit, caused Mann's own wife, Mary Tyler Peabody — whose family names were linked to a
network of powerful families up and down the Eastern seaboard — to write a whole-word primer. The Mann
family was only one of a host of
influential voices being raised against the traditional reading instructions in
the most literate nation on earth.
In Woodbridge's Annals of Education, a steady tattoo was directed against spelling and the
alphabet method.
By the time of the Gallaudet affair,
both Manns were under the spell of phrenology, a now submerged school of psychology and the brainchild of a
German physician. Francois Joseph
Gall, in working with the insane, had become convinced he had located the physical site of personality traits
like love, benevolence, acquisitiveness, and many more. He could provide a map of their
positions inside the skull! These faculties signaled their presence, said Gall, by making bumps on
the visible exterior of the cranium. The
significance of this to the future of reading is that among Gall's
claims was: too much reading causes
insanity. The Manns agreed.
One of Gall's converts was a Scottish
lawyer named George Combe. On October 8, 1838, Mann wrote in his diary that he had met "the author of
that extraordinary book, The
Constitution of Man, the doctrines of which will work the same change in
metaphysical science that Lord
Bacon wrought in natural." The book was Combe's. Suddenly the Mann project to downgrade reading acquired
a psychological leg to accompany the
political, social, economic, and religious legs it already possessed.
Unlike other arguments against
enlightenment of ordinary people — all of which invoked one or another form of class interest — what
psychological phrenology offered was a scientific argument based on the supposed best interests of the child.
Thus a potent weapon fell into
pedagogy's hands which would not be surrendered after phrenology was
discredited. If one psychology
could not convince, another might. By appearing to avoid any argument from special interest, the scientific
case took the matter of who should learn what out of the sphere of partisan politics into a loftier realm of
altruism.
Meanwhile Combe helped Mann line up his
great European tour of 1843, which was to
result in the shattering Seventh Report to the Boston School Committee
of 1844. (The Sixth had been a
plea to phrenologize classrooms!) This new report said: "I am
satisfied our greatest error in
teaching children to read lies in beginning with the alphabet." Mann was attempting to commit Massachusetts
children to the hieroglyphic system of
Gallaudet. The result was an outcry from Boston's schoolmasters, a
battle that went on in the public
press for many months culminating (on the schoolmaster's side) in this familiar lament:
Education is a great concern; it has
often been tampered with by vain theorists; it has suffered from the stupid folly and the delusive wisdom of
its treacherous friends; and we
hardly know which have injured it most. Our conviction is that it has
much more to hope from the
collected wisdom and common prudence of the community than from the suggestions of the individual. Locke
injured it by his theories, and so did Rousseau, and so did Milton. All their plans were too splendid to be true.
It is to be advanced by conceptions,
neither soaring above the clouds, nor groveling on the earth — but by
those plain, gradual, productive,
common sense improvements, which use may encourage and experience suggest. We are in favor of
advancement, provided it be towards usefulness.... We love the secretary but we hate his theories. They
stand in the way of substantial
education. It is impossible for a sound mind not to hate them.
The
Pedagogy Of Literacy
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