Why Did Teachers Adopt Poor Teaching Methods?

Readers must ask themselves why it is that the educational establishments have, for so long, refused to teach reading using the best methods. And part of the answer to this is as follows.

1. The vast majority of 'research' conducted by educationalists is nothing more than politically-correct hokum. It is not 'research' and it is not scientific. It is, by and large, waffle and drivel. 

To give readers some idea of how bad this is, here is an anecdote.

When I first embarked upon my research for a PhD in the area of brain functioning and language development - some 28 years ago - I was somewhat put out by the fact that the research in the reputable experimental Psychology journals in my particular area was a bit thin on the ground, to say the least. There were, perhaps, some 50 papers in all that were relevant to me in association with the development of reading skills. And there were about 50 papers that purported to be relevant to the topic but were, in fact, too tenuously connected to the issue to be of much value.

I was positively overjoyed, therefore, when I ventured into the library of the university's Educational Department and found row upon row of journals and books entirely devoted to 'Reading Research' and 'Language Development'.

For about two weeks, I read paper, after paper, after paper. I studied the experiments, the protocols, the methodology, the Maths. I looked very closely at all the books.

And, in summary, about 99.99% of what I read was utter garbage.

It was so bad that, without exaggeration, I was almost put into a state of shock.

It was so bad that, without exaggeration, I was almost put into a state of shock. Never before in my life had it ever occurred to me that such wishy-washy balderdash could be sitting on the shelves in a library of a prestigious Education Department and that it was actually dominating the way that the nation's children were being taught.

It was like discovering that the nation's Office of Medical Health was testing pills solely by asking people to describe how they felt about their colour.

And a lot of people who now sit at the top of the educational hierarchy have taken part in the production of this balderdash, and probably often gained promotion on the basis of it, and so, needless to say, they are somewhat resistant to the notion that they, the 'experts', might have been wrong for all of these years.

2. The feminist and Marxist influences within the educational departments of universities are not directed at helping children to learn. The feminist aim is to hold back the boys relative to the girls, and the Marxist aim is to make everyone the same by keeping everyone at the lowest level.

In general, the aims of numerous educational establishments within our universities are more often political rather than educational. And their resistance to anything that will improve the educational standards of children is partly due to the fact that the better is the system, the wider will be the performance gaps between the children and, hence, the resulting adults.

Look at it like this. 

If the speed limit is 30 miles per hour, then it does not really matter what size is the engine of your car.

If the speed limit is 150 miles per hour, then it does.

And Marxists do not like the thought of some children driving faster than others - so the speed limit is kept at 30.

The feminist influences - which are extremely powerful - are always to the detriment of boys

3. The feminist influences - which are extremely powerful - are always to the detriment of boys. For example, in the UK, currently, some 18% of young men are functionally illiterate. They cannot read or write properly. And one of the reasons for this is because the feminist-indoctrinated teaching establishments managed to persuade teachers to adopt a very inferior method for teaching reading. 

It is sometimes described as the Look-Say method.

The idea behind this was to give girls an advantage over boys by teaching all the children to approach their learning through more holistic, right-brained methods as opposed to allowing them to use their left-brained functions - logic, analysis, sequential processing etc.

The fact that this policy continued to result in a deterioration of language skills for both the girls and the boys over three decades was immaterial to the feminist groups, whose only concern was that girls would be better off educationally than boys. And this is why governments both in the UK and the USA are nowadays trying to force - with difficulty - the educationalists to teach reading using more effective phonological methods.

And it is worth pointing out that even in the area of Mathematics the feminist influences continue to be detrimental to the boys.

For example, in the case of some new basic Maths procedures now being taught in the UK, the children who will be the most successful with them will be those whose handwriting is neater, who have fewer laterality problems, and who are more compliant, more focused and more organised when it comes to keeping pencil on paper. 

In none of these areas do younger boys do well when compared to the girls.

To give you some feel for this; a rough equivalent in, say, Geometry, would be for the children now to be assessed on how accurately and painstakingly they draw a triangle to work out its angles, instead of using algebra and the mathematical relationships of Sin, Cos and Tan to figure them out.

What the feminist-controlled educational academics are purposely doing through their universities is  bringing in new teaching methods in Maths to ensure that the girls outperform the boys. The progress of all the children will be retarded when it comes to basic Maths, but it is the boys who will lose out the most.

And this is not just a coincidence - a happenstance. 

 no departments are more ridden with this sex-discriminatory ideology than are those in the world of education.

We already know that feminist ideology pervades nearly all government departments. And no departments are more ridden with this sex-discriminatory ideology than are those in the world of education.

And if you doubt this, just imagine what an outcry there would be if it was the case that girls were significantly less able to manipulate their writing implements but that, henceforth, the Maths curriculum was being altered to favour the boys who had better skills in this area.

(Penmanship There are exceptions, but here is the rule: Boys are graphologically challenged. That males have many more problems with penmanship than females is "not even a question," according to University of Maryland special education professor and distinguished scholar Steve Graham. "It is one of the better established facts in the literature." Professor Christina Hoff Sommers)

Teachers are not rocket scientists.

4. Teachers are not rocket scientists. They will listen to what they are being told by the university professors when they are in training, and they will have trust in what they are being taught by them. If the professors themselves are bathed in ignorance when it comes to understanding complex processes (such as those involved in learning, perception, memory etc) which most of them are, and/or they are far more concerned about politics than about anything else, there is not much hope that the student teachers are going to learn anything of value from them.

The consequence is that on entering the profession the teachers end up employing teaching strategies that are partly based on the wooly nonsense that they have been taught, and partly based on their own whims. And, having become accustomed to both of these things, and the freedom that this gives them, they are somewhat reluctant to accept that there are specific ways of teaching certain topics - such as reading - that are particularly beneficial for the children.

...................

Hurrah!

At last!

Teaching Reading Using Phonics Eleven-year-olds in Clackmannanshire, Scotland, who used the "synthetic phonics" method were three years ahead in reading. ... A seven-year study by Hull and St Andrews universities also found pupils were on average almost two years ahead of others in Scotland at spelling. 11/02/05

Well.

What a surprise!

The failure of the teaching profession to employ phonic methods for teaching reading over the past few decades has resulted in inestimable damage.

Despite all the evidence (and there are mountains of it) accumulated over the years demonstrating that non-phonic techniques were decidedly inferior methods for both sexes - but particularly for boys - the educationalists demanded that phonics were not taught at school.

Not mentioned in the above article was the finding that an 18-week phonically-structured approach to reading led to the children immediately being 7 months ahead compared to where they would otherwise have been, and that by the time they were 11 years old this lead had increased to three years.

(This would have happened because by learning the phonic approach children can develop their own reading skills as time goes by.)

Furthermore, not only were the boys now found to be equal with the girls when it came to reading performance, they had actually edged ahead of the girls when it came to spelling.

But the most important thing that readers must understand is that the diabolical way in which reading has been taught for the past three decades led to a large decline in the reading skills of both boys and girls, and that the feminist-indoctrinated teacher-training colleges nevertheless insisted on pursuing this course exactly because the boys would be significantly disadvantaged compared to the girls.

Some of you might think that this claim is an exaggeration. But it isn't.

Think about it.

For over three long decades the educational establishments have watched the reading ages of children decline following the politically-correct exclusion of the phonic method for teaching reading.

Why was there no outcry?

Well. The reason that there was no outcry was because the boys were performing worse than the girls.

But can you just imagine what kind of almighty hoohah would have been created had the girls been doing worse than the boys under this method of teaching? We would never have heard the end of it. And the government would have been forced to do something about the situation.

The teachers would have dropped this 'new' method of teaching reading like a shot.

Don't ever kid yourselves that feminism is about 'equality' or making the world a better place.

It is nothing of the sort. It is an ideology based almost entirely on male hatred. And feminists will do almost anything to disadvantage males relative to females, even if both genders have to lose out; in this case, in their education.

Here is just one tiny example of this which I have taken from Melanie Phillips' brilliant book called All Must Have Prizes.

She is quoting Margaret Meek whom she describes as "the immensely influential educationalist from the London Institute" - a woman who was very much involved in determining how reading should be taught.

"The powerful literacy of the great literate tradition in English is still exclusive. Those who complain about standards sit within it and know that their education keeps them in the top stream."

 one damn good way of scuppering the patriarchy is, of course, to deny a decent education to those who might eventually be its main supporters; i.e. boys.

In other words, a main priority of this highly influential educationalist was to dumb down the syllabus and, I imagine, to help scupper the "patriarchy" - as has been the attitude of thousands of feminist-indoctrinated academics in the teacher-training colleges for three decades. And one damn good way of scuppering the patriarchy is, of course, to deny a decent education to those who might eventually be its main supporters; i.e. boys.

The degradation of the education of boys was no accident.

(The vast majority of teachers themselves, of course, have been mostly unaware of this 'conspiracy'.)

In the 1960's, there was increasing belief in the notion that boys were more left-brained, and that they approached the learning of reading by using a sequential, phonetic route. Girls, on the other hand, were believed to be more right-brained, and they would therefore attend more to the overall shapes of words when learning to read.

(One piece of evidence for this notion was that men who had suffered damage to the left sides of their brains were more handicapped thereafter with respect to language than were women with similar damage. It was concluded that women used more of their right hemispheres for language processing.)

The feminists thought that the holistic approach to teaching reading would therefore be better for girls than for boys, and so they ensured that schools adopted this method. And the fact that the reading standards of both the boys and the girls suffered as a result made no difference at all to them.

Indeed, they even refused to talk about the issue - an issue that they walled off in a politically-corrected zone and which they used to protect by their usual tactic of intimidation should anyone question their alleged wisdom in this area.

And the reason for this intransigence became clear to me the more that I read about what was going on in the world of education and why.

Provided that the boys would be relatively disadvantaged compared to the girls, the state teaching establishments were happy.

Provided that the boys would be relatively disadvantaged compared to the girls, the state teaching establishments were happy.

Well, with any luck, the demand for the proper teaching of reading will now be so great that the teacher-training colleges will be unable to continue with their destructive agenda in this area.

But we must not become too complacent, because there are a whole fistful of areas in education wherein boys will continue to be purposefully disadvantaged by the educationalists - with Mathematics now being an area that is almost dying a death in the west because it is being taught so badly; once again, in order to keep the boys down.

This is not an exaggeration.

This is something that is as clear as daylight to anyone who has looked closely at what has been going on in the world of education.

For the past three decades, just about every single card in the educational book has been played specifically to disadvantage boys relative to girls, regardless of the cost to all children and to society as a whole. 

2005

New Teaching Reading Approach The government has promised a review of teaching reading in England's primary schools, particularly looking at a method called "synthetic phonics". But what exactly is it? 4/06/05

(Also see AH's Lerning to Reed.)

15/02/03

How Much Lower Can They Get?

I am always going on about the appalling standards of education that now prevail in the west thanks to the educationalists adherence to the worthless ideology of Marxist-inspired political correctness.

The article that follows gives you some feeling for what nowadays counts as education in America's Universities.

USA About a week before the commencement of classes, I took a trip to the campus bookstore. There, I discovered that, of the sixteen books I was required to purchase for my history courses, ... Some of the titles included Engendering America; Gendered Pasts: Historical Essays in Femininity and Masculinity in Canada; Major Problems in American Women's History; and Loom & Spindle or Life Among the Early Mill Girls. J.D. Cassidy - 8 min

And lest some readers reckon that I am often being far too harsh upon the teaching profession, below are some anecdotes, drawn from personal memory, that I promise you are completely true. 

Further, I have not chosen these anecdotes because they are extreme or rare. I have chosen them for the very opposite reasons - because they reflect pretty much what has been the norm in the UK. (Matters have improved slightly in the past two or three years - but not by much!)

The following are examples of questions that bright middle-class children aged above 10.5 years (6th Grade) living in wealthy middle-class areas and attending state schools failed often to answer correctly. (In terms of intelligence levels, I am only talking here about children in the top 10% and higher.)

How many letters are there in the alphabet?

Which letters of the alphabet are vowels?
How many letters are there in the alphabet?
Say the alphabet. 
How many months are there in one year?
Say the months of the year. 
How many minutes are there in one hour?
How many grams are there in one kilogram?
What is the area and perimeter of a rectangle measuring 3cm by 5 cm?
How do you spell the words, tomorrow, father, babies, Saturday?

Here are examples of questions in Maths for which they often would have to use their fingers.

What is 6x2?
What is 7+3?
What is 8-3?
What is 5x10?

If you spent 80p in a shop and gave the shopkeeper £1, how much change would you expect to receive?

And remember that these were bright, well-off, middle-class children over the age of 10.5 years. 

And to give you some further feel for this, children of the same intelligence levels being educated in the private sector (in the same wealthy middle-class areas) would have answered correctly almost without hesitation all the above questions by around the age of 8.5 years.

As a further anecdote, a few years ago, I was talking to a Deputy Headteacher of a state school who was studying closely the effects of some traditional school practice work in Maths being given to children in the private sector. Having seen the results, he eventually admitted quite openly that he would 'love' to be able to use this approach in his own school but, quite simply, he could not do this because it would not be 'politically correct' and, further, he would not even dare suggest such a thing to his colleagues.

readers must understand what this man was actually saying.

And readers must understand what this man was actually saying. Despite the fact that he knew that the children in his school would benefit significantly from doing some of this more traditional work, even as a Deputy Headteacher he dared not even suggest the idea to his colleagues.

Politics first. Education last.

Here is another anecdote.

Somewhere around 1986, as the educational standards in the UK continued to decline and decline while the Tory government and the teaching profession denied hotly that there was any such decline, I found myself talking to a Professor of Physics at Brunel University here in London.

She admitted to me the following. 

The standards had declined so significantly that the undergraduates had to spend their first year learning the Maths and the Physics that, in earlier times not long gone, they would already have learned at school.

"Why doesn't anyone admit to these falling standards? Have you told anyone in the media about what is going on?" I asked.

"No," she replied. "If we did this then we would have to admit that we were lowering our own standards and it would taint the University."

"And has the actual standard of the BSc declined as a result?" I asked. "Or do the students just end up with lower-graded degrees at the end?"

 "We can't give out lower grades because students will be put off from coming here."

"What do you think?" she replied. "We can't give out lower grades because students will be put off from coming here."

In summary: Political correctness in education means covering up the truth about what is going on; i.e. lying.

13/10/03

An Educational Book Publisher Writes

An educational book publisher writes ... "Novels were turned down because they didn't agree with the feminist political agenda, and political correctness meant that infant schools were buying the complete fiction catalogue of The Women's Press. "You do have to ask what on earth were four-year-olds going to do with titles like The Lesbian Mother's Handbook. Link now defunct

Also see,

Learning To Read

Did you know that, in the UK, the Chairman of the Parliamentary Education Committee and the Equal Opportunities Commission have both stated that boys should not be given extra help in their education despite the fact that they are performing poorlly compared to the girls?

Stop Helping The Boys