FIRST CHAPTER OF HOMESCHOOLING ODYSSEY BY MATTHEW JAMES:
The following is a chapter from a book by Matthew James called Homeschooling Odyssey. A copy of the book may be purchased from the author's wife. The address is 1853 Brush College Rd. NW, Salem, OR 97304.
I recently received a note from Matthew James' wife, who let me know that Mr. James had passed away. I am greatly saddened by her news, and the journey of this family as homeschooling parents with their children becomes even more poignant.
Here is the first chapter after the Introduction that every parent of an elementary child needs to read. I will say that Oregon is over the top with the attitude manipulation and values clarification, but this chapter, better than anything I ever read, describes what children endure in some public schools. Of interest to me was the fact that a father took the time to look into the reading materials at his daughter's school and figured out for himself that what was happening to her at school was detrimental. That's hard for parents to do because first of all they don't look at the books that their children are asked to read; sometimes they don't have access to those books; and sometimes they just don't know to do the looking. His perceptiveness, even though he didn't say WHOLE LANGUAGE out loud, was descriptive of what whole language is and what it does to the reading abilities of children. I suggest that if you love your child, you will pay attention to what they are teaching them at school--that you will look at their books and make them YOUR business!
"Little Manchurian Candidates"
(By Matthew James)
One ring to rule
them all, one ring to find them,
One ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind
them. --Tolkien
Our six-year-old daughter was so excited to start school. At our first parent-teacher conference, Barb and I expected to hear the usual compliments and heartwarming anecdotes about our bright little angel. From our experiences with activities like T-ball and soccer, or dance and music recitals, we had learned that parents always say nice things about the children of others. If the compliments are sometimes unrealistic or excessive, well, parenting is tough work. We can all use the encouragement.
I guess we
had been spoiled. Jenny’s teacher
got right to the point. She had
some negatives to address. For one
thing, Jenny was struggling with her reading. The teacher confessed that one of
the most difficult parts of her job was deflating parents with the news that
their children were simply not exceptional.
Jenny was, at best, an average reader.
She was not an Eagle; she was a Pony.
Our job was to learn to enjoy her as a 40-watt bulb rather than a bright
light. Was it my imagination, or
did this middle-aged matron’s sweet smile contain a trace of malice as she
related these tidings?
I was confused
by this assessment of Jenny’s reading abilities because it simply didn’t fit in
with her prior history. She had a
love affair with books for her entire childhood.
We have a photograph of her at 11 months of age staring earnestly at the
contents of an open book. I
remember reading to her when she was three.
I stopped for some reason, but she continued the narration.
She knew her stories by heart.
Like many other children, Jenny had learned to read at home.
She was a bookworm, and she was an experienced and passionate reader
before she ever started first grade.
The teacher went on to
explain that Jenny cried too much at school and that we needed to correct this
problem with the appropriate discipline.
Barb and I exchanged glances but didn’t argue.
We were in shock.
I was curious
about the crying. Jenny was such a happy child.
I asked her that night what made her sad at school.
Expecting to hear about something on the playground, I was surprised by
her answer. The listening-hour
stories made her sad:
Once upon a time there was a daddy duck with seven ducklings.
They ranged in age down to the youngest (who reminded Jenny of a first
grader). The daddy was mean.
One day he demanded that all his children learn three tasks, such as
running, swimming, and diving. If a
duckling was unable to master all of the tasks, he would be banished from the
family to live with the chickens.
The youngsters struggled under the cruel eye of their father.
When it came to diving, the first grader floundered and was sent away to
live with the chickens.
This was the
story Jenny related, in her own words, as an example.
I heard it told a second time several years later, by my cousin Nancy, as
a sample of objectionable curriculum.
We were impressed with the coincidence, since our families resided in
different states.
Jenny told me
she also cried over stories in her readers. They made her sad and frustrated in
some way. What a mess!
In one evening we had found out that Jenny was unhappy at school, that
her teacher thought she was a poor reader and a dim bulb, and that she heard
mean tales during listening-hour that I wouldn’t repeat to hardened convicts.
What in the name of heaven was going on at this school?
I was determined to
get to the bottom of things. Since
they didn’t send books home with students in the younger grades, I went to the
school the following day and spent a couple of hours reviewing the elementary
readers. As I read, my eyes opened
wider and wider. I had assumed the purpose of the reading curriculum was to
stimulate the juvenile imagination and teach reading skills.
Instead, I saw material saturated with, to borrow another parent’s
language, “an unadvertised agenda promoting parental alienation, loss of
identity and self-confidence, group-dependence, passivity, and
anti-intellectualism.”
I once
daydreamed through a basic psychology class in medical school which described
the work of Pavlov and B.F Skinner in the twentieth century.
Their conclusions were that animal (and human) behaviors can be
encouraged or discouraged by associating them with pleasure or pain.
This is such an obvious fact of nature.
It is amazing that anyone would bother to prove it with experimentation,
as if the carrot and the stick haven’t been used since time began.
In behaviorist
experiments various stimuli, such as food or electrical shocks, were used as
rewards or deterrents. Over time, due to
animal memory, a pattern of behavior could be established without food or shocks
coming into play. This educational
or training process is called “conditioning.”
With enough conditioning, the dog will stop chasing cars.
As I read
the stories and poems in Jenny’s readers, I was astonished to discover that they
were alive, in their own way, with the theories and practices of these dead
scientists. But the animals to be
trained weren’t dogs or rats. They
were our young students. Pleasure
and pain signals were embedded into the reading material in a consistent way.
Given the vicarious nature of the reading experience, and by identifying
with the protagonists in the stories, it was our first graders who were
“learning” certain attitudes and behaviors.
When a
child-figure in the stories split away from his group, for example, he would get
rained on, his toes would get cold in the snow, or he would experience some
other form of discomfort or torment.
Similar material was repeated ad infinitum.
Through their reading, our students would feel the stinging rain and the
pain of freezing toes. They would
learn the lesson like one of Pavlov’s dogs: avoid the pain, stay with the group.
The stories in
the readers consistently associated individual initiative with emotional or
physical pain. Consider the example of the little squirrel whose wheel falls off
his wagon. When he tries to replace
it, the wagon rides with an awkward and embarrassing bump, noticeable to his
friends, who then tease him about it.
Another attempt to repair the wheel results in an accident, with bruising
and bleeding and more humiliation.
The cumulative effect of this and similar story lines, given the vicarious
nature of the reading experience, would be to discourage initiative and reduce
self-confidence in the first grader.
Animal dads,
moms, and grandparents were portrayed over and over in various combinations as
mean, stupid, unreliable, bungling, impotent or incompetent.
Relationships with their children were almost always dysfunctional;
communication and reciprocal trust were non-existent.
A toxic mom or dad, for instance, might have stepped in to help our
youthful squirrel repair his wagon, only to make matters worse and wreak
emotional havoc in the process.
Jenny’s heart would be lacerated by stories which constantly portrayed
parent/child relationships as strained, cruel, or distant.
I could see her crying with hurt or frustration.
It occurred to
me that over the long run, at some level of consciousness, our daughter would
have to hold us accountable for permitting her to be tortured in school.
Logically, Barb and I had to be stupid, unreliable, uncaring, or impotent, just
like the parents in the books. By
sending her to school, we were validating the message in her readers,
contributing significantly to the parental alienation curriculum.
Continuing in her school-based reading series, Jenny’s relationship with
us would have become tarnished or eroded, and an element of bitterness or
cynicism might have crept into her personality.
I borrow
the term “anti-intellectualism” to describe another dominant theme in the
readers. Many of the compositions
were, essentially, word salad. They
lacked intrinsic interest, coherence, or continuity, and they often demonstrated
a sort of anti-rationality. The
stories and the corresponding questions seemed to require the student to suspend
the natural operations of his intellect, such as the desire to make sense out of
things or the impulse to be curious.
Under this yoke, a student could learn to hate reading or even thought
itself.
The
following “story” and “comprehension” questions are representative of the
anti-intellectualism that I found in the readers:
Once upon a time there was a little green
mouse who hopped after a tiger onto a yellow airplane.
The plane turned into a big red bird in flight, and the mouse turned into
a blue pumpkin. The pumpkin fell
to the ground and its seeds grew into pots and pans.
Blah, blah, blah……
1)
“What color was the mouse?”
2) “Why do mice turn into
pumpkins?”
3) “How do seeds
grow?”
I can see children getting
frustrated over material like this.
It is debatable as to which facet of the exercise is more onerous, the reading
or the “comprehension.” I almost
incline to the latter. Among other
concerns, I wonder if it is a good thing to pressure children to respond to
stupid or unanswerable questions.
Such a process would lead to passivity and a loss of confidence, to a little
engine that couldn’t.
According to
Pavlov and B.F. Skinner, repetition of unpleasant reading experiences would turn
a student off to the reading activity.
Predictable consequences would be a child who hates reading and loses out
on vast intellectual benefits and development.
In addition, his reading failure would tax his self-confidence, and he
could be branded with one of society’s popular labels such as dyslexia.
I considered Jenny’s
reading struggles in the context of performance expectations as well as grading
and comparisons with other children.
It seemed as if she faced a nasty dilemma: force herself to read
alienating material, or disengage and then disappoint parents, teachers and
self. What an impossible
predicament for a young child. Once
sunny and blue, the skies had turned dark and stormy for our happy little girl
whose only offense had been to attend her friendly neighborhood school at the
innocent age of six.
It has
occurred to me that the cause of
I was reminded
of the plight of our neighbors. The
father and mother were loving, dedicated parents.
He was an accountant and she was a homemaker and community leader.
They were nice people, and so were their
children. The two teenagers were
bright but got poor grades and hated school.
They hung out with the crowd and participated in the kind of
self-destructive behaviors that are commonplace today.
I asked these young people why they
would behave in ways which would cause pain for themselves or their loved ones.
They smiled quizzically and professed not to know.
Maybe the ideas that moved them truly were subconscious.
We are all
familiar with kids like this (Our own kids are kids like this, or they come too
close for comfort). They spend a
lot of time “doing nothing” with like-minded friends.
Passive-aggressive with suppressed individuality, they all seem cut from
the same mold. Self mutilation with
tattoos and body armor is almost universal.
Some of their groups are virtually masochistic cults.
Sadism is the other side of the masochism coin.
That so many of these
dysfunctional teenagers come from loving homes and neat families is inexplicable
and shocking, until you realize that they have all been tortured together in
school since the first grade. They
are a batch of little Manchurian Candidates with attitude, victims of the
obscure behaviorism that I found, and that others have found before and since,
in school readers.
Barb and I had
seen some perplexing changes in Jenny’s reading since she started in first
grade. For one thing, she had
stopped reading her favorite books and stories at home.
Before starting school, she had feasted on
Grimm’s Fairy Tales.
Although she still begged us to read these to her, she now explained that
she was not supposed to read them herself, according to her understanding from
her teacher, because they contained big words and content in advance of her
abilities. Barb and I, holding our
tongues, exchanged tortured grimaces and cross-eyed glances.
When reviewing
the school readers, I had noticed an impoverished vocabulary, composed mostly of
three and four letter words. I
brought this up with the teacher.
She explained that the readers were integrated into a district policy that no
more than five hundred new words be introduced to students during any grade
level. The idea was to protect
children from the dizzying and confusing effects of an overabundance of words
and ideas. I nodded as if I
understood, but I didn’t really get it.
Barb and I had clearly
used the wrong approach with Jenny.
We had allowed her to read anything she wanted and had provided her with a
flourishing home library.
Furthermore, we had encouraged her to run around in the grassy meadows and on
the sandy beaches. She must have
collided with great numbers of unfamiliar words and ideas, as well as a perilous
diversity of flowers and sea shells. It’s a wonder she survived at all.
We considered
the various elements of Jenny’s brief experience in first grade.
She had a clueless teacher.
She was regressing in her reading skills, vocabulary, and enthusiasm.
She was being indoctrinated with character destroying qualities like
passivity and group dependence. Her
intellectual development was being stunted, and she was being bombarded with a
curriculum of parental alienation.
Judging by her crying in the classroom, she was part of a captive
audience being repeatedly exposed to painful stimuli.
To put it plainly, she was the victim of ongoing torture and cruelty.
Along with her classmates, she was becoming, as one of her school poems
pointed out, “Small, small, small, just a tiny,
tiny, tiny piece of it all….”
In our state at
that time, compulsory education began at the age of eight.
Jenny was not obliged by law to attend school.
With our various concerns, we pulled her out of school while we tried to
figure out what to do.