by Peter Gray, Ph.D.

when i asked Amy (unschooling mom) how she responded to people asking,.. but how will they learn to read… she said: Peter Gray..

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peter on natural reading/learning – from 2013 – why natural learning fails in classrooms: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/201311/the-reading-wars-why-natural-learning-fails-in-classrooms

The classroom is all about training.  Training is the process of getting reluctant organisms to do or learn what the trainer wants them to do or learn.  Under those conditions, methods that focus on the mechanical processes underlying reading—the conversion of sights to sounds—work better than methods that attempt to promote reading through meaning, which requires that students care about the meaning, which requires that they be able to follow their own interests, which is not possible in the classroom.

no train

let’s just facil daily curiosity  ie: cure ios city

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just as we’ve experienced kids in the lab who thought they hated reading.. falling in love with the printed word…  with communication… with learning.

choice makes a huge difference.
debate is killing us.
let’s each choose (good bye cycle ness) how to spend our days.. right now. no?

you come too.

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Carol on 95% ness.

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shared by Manish:

from almost 90 years ago…
“Our real concern is with the fallacy involved in the attachment of an absolute value to literacy, and the very dangerous consequences that are involved in the setting up of “literacy” as a standard by which to measure the cultures of unlettered peoples. Our blind faith in literacy not only obscures for us the significance of other skills, so that we care not under what subhuman conditions a man may have to learn his living, if only he can read, no matter what, in his hours of leisure; it is also one of the fundamental grounds of inter-racial prejudice and becomes a prime factor in the spiritual impoverishment of all the “backward” people whom we propose to “civilise.”
– Ananda Coomaraswamy, The Bugbear of Literacy
http://www.worldwisdom.com/public/viewpdf/default.aspx?article-title=The_Bugbear_of_Literacy_by_Ananda_Coomaraswamy.pdf

We have allowed that in industrial societies, where it is assumed that man is made for commerce and where men are cultured, if at all, in spite of rather than because of their environment, literacy is a necessary skill. .. The vast majority of the world’s population is still unindustrialized and unlettered, and there are peoples still “unspoiled” (in the interior of Borneo): but the average American who knows of no other way of living than his own, judges that “unlettered” means “uncultured,” as if this majority consisted only
of a depressed class in the context of his own environment. It is because of this, as well as for some meaner reasons, not unrelated to “imperial” interests, that when we propose not merely to exploit but also to educate “the lesser breeds without the [i.e. our] law” we
inflict upon them profound, and often lethal, injuries. We say “lethal” rather than “fatal” here because it is precisely a destruction of their memories that is involved.

on Plato:

When we set out to “educate” the South Sea Islanders it is generally in order to make them more useful to ourselves (this was admittedly the beginning of “English education” in India), or to “convert” them to our way of thinking; not having in view to introduce
them to Plato. But if we or they should happen upon Plato, it might startle both to find that their protest, “Cannot a man remember?” is also his. “For,” he says, “this invention [of letters] will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not exercise their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without teaching, and will therefore seem to know many things [Professor E. K. Rand’s “more and more of less and less”], when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise but only wiseacres.” He goes on to say that there is another kind of “word,” of higher origin and greater power than the written (or as we should say, the printed word) and maintains that the wise man, “when in earnest, will not write in ink” dead words that cannot teach the truth effectively, but will sow the seeds of wisdom in souls that are able to receive them and so “to pass them on forever.” There is nothing strange or peculiar in Plato’s point of view; it is one, for example, with which every cultured Indian unaffected by modern European influences would agree wholly.

– –

From the Indian point of view a man can only be said to know what he knows by heart; what he must go to a book to be reminded of, he merely knows of.

The purpose of our educational activities abroad is to assimilate our pupils to our ways of thinking and living. It is not easy for any foreign teacher to acknowledge Ruskin’s truth, that there is one way only to help others, and that that is, not to train them in our way of living (however bigoted our faith in it may be), but to find out what they have been trying to do, and were doing before we came, and if possible help them to do it better.

It irks us that these others, who are neither, as we are, industrialized nor, as we are, “democratic,” should nevertheless be contented; we feel bound to discontent them, and especially to discontent their women, who might learn from us to work in factories or to find careers.

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from Carol Black‘s a thousand rivers..

A few times I tried, while reading her a story, to run my finger under the words as I read them, or to point out the sounds that certain letters make. Like most kids who don’t go to school, she was quick to recognize an adult with an agenda. “I don’t like it when you do that thing with your finger,” she said. So I stopped.

raised eyebrow ness

I began to notice that it was as though she was actually averse to focusing on the print on the page. She memorized whole books, whole poems, but she did it by sound, not sight. She played the piano but she didn’t like to look at the notes. When she drew, which she did constantly, she didn’t draw by looking at things and then copying what she saw. She drew from somewhere deep inside, her lines fluid, deft, intuitive.

imagine what we’re missing .. from the mouths of babes..

The fact that most literacy “researchers” and “experts,” not to mention school psychologists, don’t even realize that it is possible (learning to read w/o being taught) is something that should concern us all.

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what is essentially basic?

might we redefine nclb?

literacy.. language as control/enclosure

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from Roger on reading.. july 2015

http://educationoutrage.blogspot.ca/2015/07/reading-is-no-way-to-learn.html

First, let’s ask why Wikipedia exists. In part, it exists because Encyclopedia Britannica couldn’t keep up. But also, it exists because we live a in a world where we don’t know whom to ask. I get asked nearly every day what certain words mean or what certain ideas are about. I am asked because the people I am interacting with know I might know and know that I am always happy to teach. But mostly I am asked because people know that I give quick short answers to their questions. When you have someone to ask, you ask. Reading is the alternative when there is no one to ask. 

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..we have had a lot of practice at attempting to remember what we read. That practice is called school. We read. We study. We memorize. We take tests. And we are somehow all convinced that we have remembered what we read.

Every year I would ask my students on the first day of class at Yale and Northwestern if they could pass the tests they took last year, right now. No one ever thought they could. They studied.  They listened. They memorized. And  then they forgot. We don’t learn by reading nor do we learn by listening.

I said that I had never actually read an instruction manual  and that they haven’t actually been around for very long in human history. When a young boy wanted to learn to hunt lions he didn’t read the instruction manual, nor did he take a class. Throughout human history we have learned by watching someone older than ourselves, trying to copy that person, trying to be part of the team, and then trying things for yourself, and asking for help when we have failed. It is not that complicated. This is what learning has always looked like. And then, someone invented instruction manuals and we all forgot what we knew about learning. We replaced human mentors by Power Point lectures and asking by reading.

[..]

 When you have someone to ask, you ask. Reading is the alternative when there is no one to ask.

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.. and plus – you can skim

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“For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.” (Phaedrus 274c-275b)