Apr

26

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are; you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by itslef but the wrod as a wlohe. [Internet meme].

The realization that visual literacy is contextual, that individual words can retain their integrity of meaning, even with multiple misspellings, if their sentence structure remains intact was an offshoot of Chomsky's revelation about universal grammar. Unfortunately, it led to conclusions and results far more vicious that his political theories have. Beginning in the 1970s the professional education establishment decided that reading could be taught by words rather than syllables, and that spelling was optional. The tedious repetition of the alphabet and the learning of words through syllables could be dispensed with, and the social tyranny of "proper" English could be overthrown. What this marvelous theory of "whole word" education failed to consider was that language first enters the brain through the ear and not the eye. Learning to read is a matter of attaching symbols to sounds. What the theory also ignored was that the writing systems that had a symbol for every syllable — cuneiform, hieroglyphs, Chinese — were inordinately difficult compared to alphabetical ones — and that no writing system, not even Chinese, was purely ideographic — i.e. with each symbol representing a word.

The result was that the mega industry of pre-school, Head Start, et. al. — the educational-civil servant complex — had produced a literacy rate lower for the country than it had been in 1820, when there was no public education at all. In deciding to throw away the alphabet and the wonder of its extraordinary fuzzy logic (26 characters being able to symbolize millions of syllable sequences), the whole-word theorists were following the logic of Chomsky's original bias against commerce itself. After all, our American alphabet has its origins with the Greek traders and pirates who took up Phoenician alphabetic writing as a way of keeping tallies on their inventory and plunder and placing orders for the next trade.


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