51.Frank Had A Dog; His Name Was Spot: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

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