Sheet Harbour is not Halifax Nova Scotia

An interesting comment in respect to the role of cursive writing in school and its deleterious effects on the student. As it happens I’ve just finished re-reading Andrew Nikiforuk’s “School’s Out: The Catastrophe in Public Education and What We Can Do About It” (1993), in many ways a reactionary caricature of progressive student-centered education but where he’s on track with his emphasis on learning as the cultivation of both character and mind. Here he is on literacy and writing.

“Advanced thinking, in addition to having flouted the alphabet – eschewing the struggle of sounding things out may have freed children’s spirits and given bohemian reign to self-expression, but it has not created people who read books and cherish the power of the word – has also thwarted the teaching of writing. Although the old ‘hammer the grammar’ school produced dubious results, progressives have merely replaced one poor method with another: writing by doing. To the progressive educator, writing is as natural as reading, which is as natural as walking, and having the students write about anything but themselves would be highly unnatural. Many schools have reduced writing to the keeping of personal journals in which students ‘discover’ themselves or ‘explore a subject.’ Directed mostly to an audience of peers, and full of ‘invented spelling,’ these journals are rarely corrected. One of the gurus of the ‘natural process mode’ notes, ‘”Writing is learning by doing and sharing it with real audiences, not by studying and applying abstract rhetorical principles in exercises which the teacher alone will read and judge.'”

Maybe the bitch’s author attended a progressive school in which writing was learned by doing and spelling was “invented” by way of “exploring himself.”

Why are you telling the OB to shut up in the voice of the pelican in “Finding Nemo?” Did you enjoy “Finding Nemo?” Did you find the voice of the pelican added to your enjoyment? Do you read? Do you think? Write back soon.