A six-point manifesto from psycholinguist Frank Smith – another of those items found in the basement. I must have prepared it as a hand-out for some long-forgotten purpose or another. I was happy to be reunited.
Frank Smith – who died last year – was one of those essential giants in the land of learning, literacy, and reading. I loved his notion that learning to read was like joining a club – The Literacy Club. And that helping children learn to read and discover read they loved was induction into a very special but by no means exclusive society. I always felt that way sharing a favorite book with children or having them share their favorites with me – even when it took the bizarre and rather inexplicable form of a passion for Flowers in the Attic. (V.C.Andrews) or a love of Norse mythology or The Babysitters Club that left me otherwise cold.
A Call to Arms
Common sense tells us that drilling, testing, and grading have nothing to do with how babies, children, and adults really learn. And research backs this up. Students who had been asked to write regularly without being taught to punctuate, for instance, ended a term not only writing but punctuating much better than students in a neighboring class who had been regularly drilled, tested, and graded solely on punctuation. This must be the most tedious, least rewarding, and least effective teaching that students have to endure. But false theory, political pressures, business opportunism, and harried administrators have persuaded us to accept this bureaucratic travesty of teaching as the real thing.
Insult to Intelligence focuses particularly on children learning to read and write, the area in which Smith has made his reputation. But his six-point manifesto on learning and teaching is applicable at every level of education, and in the context of America’s ongoing struggle to upgrade the teaching profession and to raise national standards of literacy, his book is nothing less than a call to arms.
Smith did not mince words. Here’s Heinemann again on Unspeakable Acts, Unnatural Practices in which he took on the pernicious nonsense of the industrial reading complex
At last, noted language researcher and educator Frank Smith weighs in! Using his razor-sharp analytical skills in linguistics and intimate understanding of professional teaching, Smith dismantles the shoddy science undergirding direct, intensive, and early phonics training. His book title is to be taken literally. The very reading instruction that claims to be “scientific,” “research based,” and “evidence based”—imposed on teachers and enforced through innumerable mandated tests—is founded on activities that are unspeakable and practices that are unnatural. The mandated approach to language teaching is, in fact, linguistically impossible, as Smith proves. Developed from years of research and multiple work sessions with groups of teachers, each of Smith’s essays in this book helps teachers understand the nature of thinking, learning, and reading. The essays also address the problems arising from pressure on teachers to adopt dubious practices that ignore their own judgment and experience. Smith acknowledges that reading is not the only area of education where unspeakable acts and unnatural practices abound. He devotes two essays to the teaching of mathematics and to the use of technology for good or ill in teaching.
Smith counters the pseudoscience we’ve seen of late with impeccable logic, clarity, and wit. When instruction is predicated on the idea that children learn complex skills by being taught parts of them that they can somehow integrate . . . when children are required to read or listen to nonsensical material and then engage in meaningless activities . . .when imagination, identification, and personal relationships—the soul of the classroom—are given short shrift . . . the consequences are intellectually stifling, as Smith so cogently shows. At the end of his book he offers a challenge and a plea—to keep the human heart of education beating no matter how heartless the environment in which we live, teach, and learn.
If you are not familiar with Frank Smith’s work – and you’re in the learning industry – you owe it to yourself and the children you teach to change that.
And the manifesto – imagine if we acted on it. Any comments or objections?
"We were young and we were keen; Europe was in flames, and we were ready…
When I was in the emergency room last year having busted my elbow, a nurse…
Most of us have done it at some point or another - accidentally locked ourselves…
Thanks to the #1970 Club, I've spent the spare moments of the past week immersed…
The #1970 Club is starting tomorrow (October 14th) and I'm prepared with some reading and…
View Comments
Are you familiar with this word, "clade"? Real question. Thanks !
What a curious question. Why do you ask?
Josie, thank you so much for this. I'd not come across Frank Smith's work so it's a great discovery.
I love the manifesto. How much better would education be if these principles underpinned our system!
I wonder if the final point is worth exploring further... The idea that education should be risk-free raises the question about what's happening when learning is taking place. Clearly, we need to feel safe and secure in order to learn but in confronting the unknown there is an element of risk involved - we never quite know in advance what we will take away from the learning moment and whether it will make sense to us or be any use to us. Being in Vygotsky's 'zone of proximal development' doesn't guarantee development of the kind anticipated by the teacher. So maybe we need to embrace this 'beautiful' risk (as Biesta has it) and the fact that the learning setting is not entirely controllable or predictable - or even successful. Perhaps without the risk, we can't have the learning?
I think what Smith means is that learning should be free from coercion and threat. Learning is always risky because the learner is on the edge of the unknown (as per the zpd). What schools often try to do is not "the canny art of intellectual temptation" (Jerome Bruner) but the bludgeon of rewards and punishments, stars and Fs and all the other paraphernalia of motivation and assessment.
And yes: "How much better would education be if these principles underpinned our system!" The answer is, "Vastly." And think of the joy quotient!
Thanks Josie, I suppose what I was getting at was the conventional ways of teaching someone to write were inappropriate for my son as although he understood what he was meant to do, he couldn’t mentally process the instructions to actually carry them out. He has learnt to write more legibly over time (he is now 25) and with the help of teachers at a school specialising in teaching kids with learning disabilities was able to achieve decent grades. He more than makes up for his poor handwriting in his eloquence. Thank you I didn’t really mean to sound off! Just having a bad day I guess.
Sorry this was meant to be in reply to your comment.
Fascinating stuff. My son who is dyspraxic could not be ‘taught’ to write. On leaving Primary school his teachers were still trying to get him to form letters by copying - you know writing out a letter between the lines from an example at the beginning. Each letter was painstakingly copied but there was no learning process. Yet he learnt to read at an early age - we read books, all sorts of books, any that captured his imagination, together. He couldn’t be ‘taught’ the fingering patterns to play guitar in the conventional way, he had to learn by repeating sounds until he ‘got it right’. He loves singing and interestingly learns songs by ‘rote’. His repertoire is off the scale. It was disappointing that the school system failed him - too rigid and inflexible (we did take him out of school for a couple of years and we let him learn many things ‘incidentally’). Have things changed. Not in my experience. Teaching methods seem as archaic as they were in my day!
That's an interesting and personal story Clive. I think what happens is that "we' get so locked into the most common way of the world that we exclude the actual diversity that is in front of us. Your son could not be "taught" to write. Yet could he express himself and make meaning? In what ways did he do that?
How can you learn when you're never allowed to fail? We are paying a heavy price for our insistence on perfection.
And now of course we have made "failure" into some kind of holy grail. We just have to go back to basics. How did we learn to talk? And how did we learn to walk?
People sure make a lot of money constantly inventing "new and improved" teaching methods. Without curiosity, a full stomach, relatively trauma free life and caring teachers no one can learn much of anything.
This is very true. And what any child (or person) needs when under the stress of deprivation is some slack and support not blame-the-victim grit, resilience, and rigor.
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to learning, which is why I entirely agree these points. Just as one wouldn't plant all kinds of vegetables together all at the same time of year so cramming kids into a uniform regime of learning by definition does them all a disservice. What it should be all about is creating the right conditions for each individual to learn, and when they're motivated learning takes place. I despair of non-educators thinking of educational institutions as factories with assembly lines and insisting on production targets.
Absolutely. But the literacy-industrial complex has to make its money somehow and who cares if it leaves kids turned, cheesed, and browned off? They just need some more applications of grit, rigor, and mindfulness training.
Oh! and show more gratitude while they are at it. We can sell them a journal for that.
As a late self-diagnosed autistic person I now realise what brought about my patchy learning in school and, later, some of my incomplete comprehension of how teaching and learning takes place. But I've always recognised from the start that learning takes place at one's own pace and in one's own way, but there was always a mismatch with whatever educational theory was in fashion at the time.
Interesting! Anyone remember the ‘Initial Teaching Alphabet’ fiasco?
I think that my contribution to the future of humanity has been to teach a lot of small children to read - by whatever means suited each child rather than always using the latest theoretical approach.
Plus, never to stamp on worms in the playground....... pick 'em up and put them in a safe, damp place!
I do remember the I.T.A. I think my mother was interested in it in the early 1960s. To me- who luckily came to reading early and effortlessly -it seemed to be unnecessarily complicated and very challenging to understand. Ditto with "Words in Color" which came soon thereafter. I think your approach of using what works makes sense, starting with the least intrusive. No-one knows how children actually learn to read.And of course we continue to learn to read all our lives. And agreed on the worms. And would add - do not put 'em in your mouth.