Acknowledgments Set The Tone
Especially if read first
With my customary timeliness I just discovered Why America’s Children Can’t Think: Creating Independent Minds for the 21st Century (2002) by Peter Kline. Despite its 400 or so pages I was fortunate to start not with any chapters that appeared most interesting to me, but right at the beginning, with the preface and acknowledgments.
As soon as I saw the heartfelt detail he provided about his teachers, family members, and others, I knew to expect him as an educator to share the same feeling about his students in the many examples that followed. I can only leave that book with no hope of meeting him as he died in 2020, though it feels special to read of someone who had so much to say about those he’d known.
His critiques left me wishing he could still be part of his solutions. I don’t know enough about ESP to claim that influenced me to start the book at the left (so to speak), but whatever pushed me that way, I felt grateful during the whole reading.
Although not the technical highlight of the book, what got my attention most was a big subject some of you may know much about that was new to me: the disputed truth about William Shakespeare. I don’t blame you if admitting I knew so little about him causes you to disregard all this. Kline is a self-described Oxfordian — one who believes Shakespeare’s real name was Edward de Vere, the seventeenth earl of Oxford, who wrote under a nom de plume because a nobleman being a writer was considered unseemly.
Reading the story was a new experience for me in that I imagined the late broadcaster Paul Harvey spinning the adventure of “Edward” as a five minute “the rest of the story” as he had done with so many famous people, leaving us guessing until the very end until he stopped using their middle name or whatever. But all the controversy the author presented could hardly be referred to in a five-minute block.
The unique depth of this tome begins with the serious question of whether ants or bees are so stupid as individuals they should be studied as intelligent social groups. His focus on reading virtually starts with recommending the movie October Sky before his severe take on a mind being a terrible thing to waste by referring to something reputed to be innocuous as “vacuous web chatter,” leaving out far more harmful content we’re inured to. He goes on to say in some places the need for future prison cells is assessed by first grade reading scores.
The development of wisdom and insight has never before been a function of public education, which has concentrated mostly on people to follow directions, show up on time, and avoid rocking the boat. Now, however…
Then come chapters 2 and beyond, starting with how to read and comprehend words without eye strain. But describing this book further would do no justice to his critiques.
I was once told, in no uncertain terms, that children cannot develop any kind of moral sense before they reach a certain age. I have observed in my own family, with two different children, that this is wildly untrue.
Kids are given boring assignments and therefore may not be motivated to read.
I once visited a first grade class in which a movie was shown. The movie, as it happened, was the wrong one. It was intended for the sixth graders and was being shown to the first graders by mistake. At the end of the movie all the students clapped. They thought it was the best one they had seen in class that year.
And then his analogies paint a greater picture:
I believe it should be required by law that all road signs be designed and placed by people who are strangers to the area they are signposting. After the signs are up, they should be required to find their way around in the area by using the signs they have put up.
Admittedly much of the middle and later chapters hone in on writing and its meanings, which, deep as they are, might feel familiar to some. Such readers might prefer his declaration that only 6 percent of people really understand math and 48 percent are barely literate. He maintains that phonemes are best for the 60 percent who are bored with phonics drills and for whom wole language doesn’t work.
He says teachers can wildly impact the world by teaching their students to build metaphors to their interests.
