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AMERICA'S SECRET ESTABLISHMENT -- AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ORDER OF SKULL AND BONES |
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Memorandum Number Two: The Look-Say Reading Scam A tragic failure of American education in this century has been a failure to teach children how to read and write and how to express themselves in a literary form. For the educational system this may not be too distressing. As we shall see later, their prime purpose is not to teach subject matter but to condition children to live as socially integrated citizen units in an organic society -- a real life enactment of the Hegelian absolute State. In this State the individual finds freedom only in obedience to the State, consequently the function of education is to prepare the individual citizen unit for smooth entry into the organic whole. However, it is puzzling that the educational system allowed reading to deteriorate so markedly. It could be that The Order wants the citizen components of the organic State to be little more than automated order takers; after all a citizen who cannot read and write is not going to challenge The Order. But this is surmise. It is not, on the basis of the evidence presently at hand, a provable proposition. In any event, the system adopted the look-say method of learning to read, originally developed for deaf mutes. The system has produced generations of Americans who are functionally illiterate. Yet, reading is essential for learning and learning is essential for most occupations. And certainly those who can read or write lack vocabulary in depth and stylistic skills. There are, of course, exceptions. This author spent five years teaching at a State University in the early 1960s and was appalled by the general inability to write coherent English, yet gratified that some students had not only evaded the system, acquired vocabulary and writing skills, but these exceptions had the most skepticism about The Establishment. The Order comes into adoption of the look-say method directly and indirectly. Let's start at the beginning. The Founder Of Deaf Mute Instruction Look-say reading methods were developed around 1810 for deaf mutes by a truly remarkable man, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet. Thomas H. Gallaudet was the eldest son of Peter Wallace Gallaudet, descended from a French Huguenot family, and Jane Hopkins. Jane Hopkins traced her ancestry back to John Hopkins and the Reverend Thomas Hooker in the seventeenth century, who broke away from the Congregational Church to help found Hartford, Connecticut. This parallels the story of the Lord family (see Volume One). The Lords also traced their ancestry back to Hopkins and Hooker and the Lords founded Hartford, Connecticut. And it was in Hartford, Connecticut in 1835 that a printer named Lord produced Thomas Gallaudet's first look-say primer, Mother's Primer. Gallaudet's original intention was to use the look-say method only for deaf mutes who have no concept of a spoken language and are therefore unaware of phonetic sounds for letters. For this purpose, Gallaudet founded the Hartford School for the Deaf in 1817. The Gallaudet system works well for deaf mutes, but there is no obvious reason to use it for those who have the ability to hear sounds. Anyway, in 1835 Mother's Primer was published and the Massachusetts Primary School Committee under Horace Mann immediately adopted the book on an experimental basis. Later we shall find that Horace Mann ties directly to The Order -- in fact, the cofounder of The Order. On pages 73-74 we reproduce two pages from the second edition of 1836, with the following directions to the teacher: "... pointing to the whole word Frank, but not to the letters. Nothing is yet to be said about letters ..."
IF YOU KIN REED THIS THANK A TICHUR
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THE MOTHER'S PRIMER. Why did Horace Mann push a method designed for deaf mutes onto a school system populated with persons who were not deaf mutes? There are two possible reasons. The reader can take his or her pick. First, in 1853 Mann was appointed President of Antioch College. The most influential Trustee of Antioch College was the co-founder of The Order -- Alphonso Taft. Second, Mann never had a proper education and consequently was unable to judge a good method from a bad method for reading. Here's a description of Mann's school days: "The opportunities for the lad's schooling were extremely meager. The locality enjoyed the reputation of being the smallest school district, with the poorest school house and the cheapest teacher in the State." Mann's teacher was Samuel Barratt and we quote: "In arithmetic he was an idiot. He could not recite the multiplication table and could not tell the time of day by the clock ... Six months of the year he was an earnest and reliable teacher, tasting nothing stronger than tea, then for another six months he gave himself up to a state of beastly drunkenness . . ." By 1840 there was a backlash, and the look-say system was dropped in Massachusetts. The Second Attempt Towards the end of the 19th century The Order came on the scene -- and the look-say method was revived. The youngest son of Thomas Hopkins and Sophia Gallaudet was Edward Miner Gallaudet. Two of his sons went to Yale and became members of The Order:
Then the method was adopted by Columbia Teachers' College and the Lincoln School. The thrust of the new Dewey-inspired system of education was away from learning and towards preparing a child to be a unit in the organic society. Look-say was ideal for Deweyites. It skipped one step in the learning process. It looked "easy," and de-emphasized reading skills. The educational establishment rationalized look-say by claiming that up to the turn of the century reading was taught by "synthetic" methods, i.e., children were taught letters and an associated sound value. Then they learned to join syllables to make words. This was held to be uninteresting and artificial. Educational research, it was claimed, demonstrated that in reading words are not analyzed into component letter parts but seen as complete units. Therefore, learning to read should start with complete units. Education The educational establishment argues today in the 1980s that, based on further experimental testing, it is easier for a child to read the line "the rocket zoomed into space" than "the cat sat on the mat." The first line has "contrasting visual structure" and the second quote has a "similar visual pattern." What they have done now is to make a mountain out of a molehill, convert the relatively simple task of learning to read into an unnecessarily complex system. Why? That we shall see as the story progresses.
The cat sat on the mat. How children are taught to read - and why they can't.
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