+OK 11926 octets Received: from mail2.halcyon.com (mail2.halcyon.com [206.63.63.60]) by mail3.halcyon.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id KAA26359 for ; Fri, 23 Apr 1999 10:54:12 -0700 (PDT) Received: from minglewood.dundee.net (minglewood.dundee.net [206.249.104.16]) by mail2.halcyon.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id KAA20955 for ; Fri, 23 Apr 1999 10:54:11 -0700 (PDT) Message-Id: Message-Id: Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1999 12:27:53 -0400 To: "ClearingHouse" From: "J. E. Stone" Subject: [education-consumers] "Deconstruction: A Key Element of Whole Language Reading Instruction" by Patrick Groff Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" X-MIME-Autoconverted: from 8bit to quoted-printable by pimout4-int.prodigy.net id MAA80134 Reply-To: "J. E. Stone" Precedence: bulk Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by mail3.halcyon.com id KAA26359 Status: ===================================================================== Understand research from a consumer-friendly perspective: RESEARCH AND INNOVATION: LET THE BUYER BEWARE by Stone & Clements. Now available at the ClearingHouse Website ===================================================================== Deconstruction: A Key Element of Whole Language Reading Instruction by Patrick Groff Professor of Education Emeritus San Diego State University The guiding principle of the Whole Language (WL) approach to reading development is that students best learn to read in the same informal, effortless way they previously learned to speak, as preschoolers. Psycholinguists agree that the casual, extremely easy manner in which almost all children learn to speak is made possible by a neurological capacity to do so that they have inherited. Children doubtless are born with a brain module designed to allow them to learn to speak in an unconscious fashion. For example, young children have no overt awareness that the words they speak are made up of sequences of a limited number of arbitrary speech sounds, nor that they speak immensely complicated sentence structures. Thus, psycholinguists deduce that children’s learning to speak must be instinctual, much to the same degree as is their learning to walk. However, psycholinguists do not find there is any such innate biological assistance available for children as they learn to read. They therefore emphasize that learning to speak and to read are distinctly different processes. That is a conclusion that WL advocates refuse to accept. To the contrary, on the basis of the guiding principle of their ideology, WL authorities assume that direct and systematic teaching of reading skills is unnecessary and even harmful to children learning to read. This explicit instruction is not required as children learn to speak, and therefore it follows it is not demanded for them to acquire reading ability, WL theorists insist. Since it is held that children manage to learn to speak without external, methodical directions from adults as to how to do so, WL experts presume that beginning readers should learn to read in the same independent way. Accordingly, children should be empowered to choose and manage the means through which they gain reading competency. There are three major reasons WL specialists offer as to why they hold this experimentally unverified belief: One, reading instruction cannot be humane unless students’ freedom, dignity, and self-esteem are constantly enhanced. The WL "philosophy" criticizes direct and systematic teaching as an unwarranted affront in these respects. Two, each child enters school with a unique learning style, WL mavins maintain. Since it is virtually impossible for teachers to write separate reading lesson plans for each exceptional child, he/she must take on most of the responsibility for teaching him/herself to learn to read. Three, authorization of students to personally teach themselves to read includes delegating to them the right to add, omit, and substitute words and meanings in written material, as they see fit. To that effect, a student in a bona fide WL class is issued the prerogative to "deconstruct" written material on his/her individual terms. It is presumed in this respect that meanings in written material do not reside in authors’ aspirations to that effect. The meanings of a written text instead are the peculiar, eccentric interpretations that a given student makes them out to be. The fundamental assumption of Western philosophy is wrong, WL students are urged to believe: There is no such thing as absolute written truth, as up-to-date science allows this to be determined. This is a reasonable theory, deconstruction philosophy contends, since texts putatively have hidden agendas (values and systems of belief), that exist beyond the conscious will of an author to control, that negate his/her intentions. Meanings in texts designed by authors thus are delusory since the rhetorical system an author uses inevitably destabilizes what he/she wished to convey to readers. The philosophy of communication called deconstruction, which the WL scheme has adopted, came into being, following World War II, as the brainchild of the now 68-year old Frenchman Jacques Derrida, born as a Jew. The views on deconstruction by anti-Semite Paul de Man have become the guide for its application to literary works. That contradictory position regarding Judaism is but one of the many found in deconstruction philosophy. The looseness of descriptions of the deconstruction idea, that meanings in written material properly are what its readers personally make of them, is reflected in attempts to define the philosophy on which the idea is based. The basic purpose of deconstruction seems not to be elucidation of the characteristics of what traditionally is known as high-quality reading material. Shakespeare thus is held not to be extrinsically superior as an object of deconstruction as is the writing found in comic books. Instead, a main purpose of deconstruction is to reverse the process of cause and effect relationships. As one of its advocates enigmatically proposed: "If the effect is what causes the cause to become a cause, then the effect, not the cause, should be treated as the origin." For example, pain felt precedes the puncture of the skin by a pin. The assault on logic, physical laws, and other forms of the real world by deconstruction thus often turns out to be a "kind of devil’s advocacy taken to the point of bad faith," a negative critic of it observed. The "subversive" intent by deconstruction on traditional assumptions of reason, external evidence, and nonsubjective reality is palpable. Therefore, the idea of right and wrong particularly is assailed by deconstruction. Another favored goal of the deconstruction movement has been to be a self-righteous source of expression of resentment for groups of people who are perceived as victims of oppression by society’s hierarchy. Revisionist historians, Biblical debunkers, radical feminists, Marxist/socialists, welfare dependency advocates, apologists for criminals, jury nullifiers, asymmetrical architects, interventionist judges, junk bond exponents, hard rock music faddists, qualitative (nonscientific) researchers, defenders of empirically unverified instruction, and the like (especially if they are tenured professors), are attracted to deconstruction philosophy as a means to rescue designated martyrs of what is deemed societal abuse. A particular appeal of deconstruction to WL is its vigorous challenge to orthodox thinking, meanings of words, and the way knowledge is acquired. As noted, WL contends that students’ reading skills are best developed in an aura of mistrust and suspicion of written material. The hidden contradictions, self-defeating rhetoric, and false values and ideals supposedly found in established texts mean that there are no reliable truths in them, but rather only possibilities for rival interpretations of their content. Any such reaction by a student is as heralded as is that of another one in genuine WL classrooms. The WL movement has decided that the most practical way for a student to practice the deconstruction goal of systematically, rigorously and ruthlessly defacing written material is to urge him/her to add, omit, and substitute meanings and words in it, as it strikes his/her fancy. The demand of deconstruction in this regard is only that the student not accept literally the meanings that an author had planned to convey. Otherwise, a student is free to change an author’s intentions so that they correspond to his/her ability to comprehend, reading ability, word knowledge, ability to think logically, background of experience, biases, and attitudes, etc. It is clear, therefore, that the basic purpose of deconstruction in WL reading lessons is a destructive one. Accordingly, adoption of deconstruction practices by the WL teacher stimulates students to indulge in dangerous, unproductive, and time-wasting thinking, to wit, to: o challenge traditional moral and ethical values and virtues; i.e., to "be bad sons and daughters demolishing beyond hope of repair the machine of Western metaphysics," as one deconstructionist put it; o reject American ideals such as capitalism, democracy, self-endeavor, and enlightened self-interest; o accuse the classics in Western literature as being instruments of oppression of minority groups, and Eastern peoples; o assume that they can critically analyze writings without first adequately comprehending their literal meanings; o confuse the worthy process of exposing a demonstrated falsehood in writing with the extravagant notion that nothing that is written can be trusted; o accept the view that it is acceptable to make vague, oblique, and injudicious statements about what written material means as long as it sounds radical, factious, or denunciatory; o argue mostly for the sake of impish confrontation; o believe the best way to acquire knowledge is to accept as true in written material only that with which they already are cognizant or agree; o rebut the idea that a quest for esthetics is a determinate, reachable goal; and o develop a brooding sense of impending doom that the power of words to communicate ideas is a hoax, i.e., the deconstruction "end of the wor (l) d theory." ===================================================================== EDUCATION CONSUMERS CLEARINGHOUSE networking and information for parents and taxpayers on the internet Subscriptions & Archives: http://education-consumers.com or You are currently subscribed to education-consumers as: arthurhu@halcyon.com TO UNSUBSCRIBE: Send a blank email to leave-education-consumers-989462S@lists.dundee.net ===================================================================== For less mail, click on the following link and choose 1) a daily digest, 2) a daily list of subjects, or 3) no mail (read postings on Web) http://lists.dundee.net/scripts/lyris.pl?enter=education-consumers For more help & info: http://www.lyris.com/help or .