View 325 August 30 - September 5, 2004 (original) (raw)
Friday, September 3, 2004
In another conference someone said:
A reading guru told me that "dyslexia" is just the term used for "reading troubles" and doesn't indicate one particular cause -- it's more like "fever"
than "measles".
This prompted a long reply that on reflection I think belongs here:
All true. Like lumbago means ache in the lumbar regions and says nothing about causes, dyslexia describes the symptom "has problems reading" and says nothing about why.
There is a cross wiring difficulty in something like 3% of kids which causes them to confuse p and q and b and d. You might call this "true neurological dyslexia." The right kind of neurological cross training takes care of most of that. Roberta taught in schools for the gifted as well as regular schools, but eventually became the reading teacher of last resort for the Los Angeles County Juvenile Justice System. Because my wife got illiterate kids, many were diagnosed as "dyslexic" which really meant "It isn't MY fault I couldn't teach this poor protoplasm to read! Pass the problem to someone else or I call the CTA shop steward oops professional representative." So the kids were moved elsewhere, unable to read; some were lucky enough to become criminals sent to Kirby Center where they fell into Roberta's capable hands.
Of the ones Roberta got, 6,000, she taught all but one to read. It took about 6 months on average although I gather some caught on faster. These ranged in age from about 10 to 15 or 16. They mostly insisted they didn't want to learn (translation: "I can't do it so I will no longer try") and all did learn: the learning itself is rewarding once the kid realizes it is possible. Some of them went on to junior college. These were not particularly bright kids, but they were not stupid, either. We see some of them to this day. One is an usher at the Music Center; reads tickets and finds seats for people....
True neurological dyslexia is extremely rare, and even that can be overcome with TRAINING AND SKILLS such as tracing the letters with your fingers, "writing in the air" and other such multi-sensory training methods. I leave the methodology to people who know: which turns out to be a rare skill because most professors of education have never tried, and thus don't know about it.
One test for "dyslexia": can the kid look at a word and say the letters (the names of the letters) one at a time in the right order? If so that ain't dyslexia. If not, is it letter recognition problems (drill, drill, drill and learn skill)? Or needs spectacles (a surprising number of Roberta's dyslexic kids had seen a psychologist but not an optometrist).
And there are those who are partly deaf, but that wasn't diagnosed.
In Roberta's reform school when she found they needed glasses or hearing aids the County provided them (once the need was known) and that cured the "dyslexia" in those cases.
Dyslexia is mostly maestragenic: the teacher caused the disorder, and once that diagnosis was pronounced, no one tried to teach the kid, so the prophecy is self-fulfilling.
If you want to help the US, start by insisting that Head Start be changed to teach the kids to READ before the regular NEA bureaucracy gets hold of them and ruins them. If they can read they have a chance. If they get to school and are called dyslexic their only hope is to get put into a reform school where there is a teacher like Roberta Pournelle; and there are not many like that.
At the moment, Head Start is forbidden to teach children to read. It is not, says the NEA, "developmentally appropriate". Newt Gingrich tried to change the Head Start law to insert the words "nothing in this act shall be construed as prohibiting the teaching of reading and reading skills" but he was unable to do so; there was considerable opposition. I leave it to you to figure out why.
Note this isn't "teacher bashing." Most teachers have never learned that nearly all kids can learn to read. They are taught that "dyslexia" is common, and can be diagnosed; and of course it is a self-fulfilling diagnosis. Most professors of education and instructors in teacher colleges don't know any of this either. As Jane Jacobs says, we are entering a Dark Age in which we not only have forgotten much we once knew, but we have forgotten that we ever knew it: this despite printing presses and the Internet.
Reading is a SKILL. It has little to do with "education". The President last night talked about education as the key to success. He's wrong. This is not Lake Woebegone, and all the children are not above average. Those below average are not stupid, but they do not need "education" -- training in learning how to learn -- but SKILLS: actual hands on useful skills, things that can be learned by rote and drills and then that knowledge can be expanded. Plumbing. Electrical wiring. Carpentry. Fixing automobiles. There are many useful skills, for which people are deservedly paid more than most intellectuals; but our entire system of education, to the extent that it works at all, is aimed at producing educated people, intellectuals, as if all the children are above average.
No child left behind is a silly concept: carried to extreme, are we left behind if we are unable to attend California Institute of Technology or get a Ph.D. in Astronautical Engineering from MIT? Of course NASA restricts entry into space to intellectuals, rather than allowing skilled young riggers to go up and do a real day's work; but that's just part of the silly notion we have about the superiority of intellectuals over people who do actual skilled labor. Or unskilled labor for that matter.
Our school system is designed to keep the jails full and produce lots of people unable to do anything but cheap day labor. If that is not their purpose, tell me what you would change to make it more likely that the prison guards will have work and there will be a supply of unskilled labor?
Enough. I have expanded a lot on the answer I wrote for the other conference; this has become pretty near the essay I promised on education and skills. More another time. I have a column to do.
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WHAT IS A NEOCON?
While we are at it, in another conference there was a discussion of "neo-conservatives", with one well known writer insisting that he had never heard anyone call himself a neo-con. Exchanges (in which I didn't take part) went on for a while until finally this was said of the term "neoconservative""
The rise of a faction who believe that all America's troubles are the fault of a cabal of sinister Jews manipulating our nation's foreign policy to serve the cause of Israeli fanatics?
I replied:
Now that is a silly way to put it, probably done deliberately, but it may not serve a useful purpose this time.
The neo-conservatives were formerly liberals, and some were Trotskyites; many were disciples of Leo Strauss. This isn't condemnatory it's merely descriptive. Over time Commentary Magazine, edited by Norman Podhoretz, became one of the influential anti-communist magazines; and over time liberal anti-communism as personified by Scoop Jackson and for that matter at one time the Americans for Democratic Action got absorbed and destroyed: the liberal establishment resented those people, and marginalized them. Commentary, published by the American Jewish Committee, saw that the USSR was a real threat to Jews and Israel, and seeing what happened to liberal anticommunists, began to move to the right. Being intellectuals, they also had considerable cultural affinity with the intellectual conservatives like Kirk. Buckley established National Review as a nominally Catholic Conservative magazine with people like Kendall and Possony and Kirk, but there was also Meyer and Burnham who were men of the right, and Burnham was an ex-communist and in some ways a neo-con.
Podhoretz and his magazine formed a powerful intellectual weapon for anti-communism, and neo-conservatives were people who didn't want so much to be associated with the Old Right, and weren't libertarians, and drifted toward Commentary. Meyer had his "fusionism" which was an attempt mostly to bridge the gap between old line Conservatism of the Burkean variety as exemplified by Kirk and Cole (Kirk and Cole founded Modern Age, as an example) and the Libertarian wing. Straussians, meanwhile, played a Machiavellian role and I don't mean that as insult: it stems from their drift toward power and their belief that they have some secrets of statecraft.
So long as the USSR was the common enemy all was well. The neo-cons were willing to play along with the notions of limited government as long as the end result was anti-communism and the defense of Israel. The Catholic Conservatives were all for defending Israel as a steady ally in the Cold War, even when things like the Liberty Incident very much strained that alliance. This continued even to the First Gulf War -- when the neocons found that the old line conservatives weren't interested in conquest in the Middle East, didn't want an empire there, weren't interested in On To Baghdad and On To Damascus, and really thought there might be some conflicts between American objectives and Israeli objectives. The despicable way that the State of Israel treated Christians in the occupied territories didn't help as the stories filtered back: Eastern Rite Roman Catholics got more of a voice in the Vatican with the present Pope and their stories began to come out.
Then Weekly Standard discovered "National Greatness" as a goal, and explicitly said so; and that put the fat in the fire and the cat among the pigeons, because national greatness is precisely not in the old conservative agenda. In the US there has been an imperial strain, but it was populist not conservative: Daniel Webster was afraid of taking the West and Manifest Destiny precisely because it would upset the balance between the States and the Union (Webster from New Hampshire: Live Free or Die!) and so were many of the Old Right. Conservatives in England tended to be Imperial; but not in the US, where the balance between the Feds and the States was considered more important.
The Neocons tend to put international interests first, and believe, I am sure sincerely, that the fate of the US is bound up with the fate of the Middle East; that salvation for the US can come only by saving Israel.
One can believe that without supporting the national greatness that the neocons have also espoused; and without supporting Sharon's Greater Israel. There was an uneasy peace for a long time between Israel and the Arab world, until the occupation; and Israel has always had the option of building a fence along the Green Line (with modifications for security) and unilaterally withdrawing. They could have given the land back to Jordan in exchange for a peace treaty. But the settlers and internal Israeli politics have prevented that and it will not happen.
But I cannot think that the US has a vital stake in that any longer. For the price of the Iraqi War I could have built 100 1000 megawatt nuclear fission plants fueled with the fissionables recovered from the dismantled weapons (fuel grade is 10% enriched; weapons grade is 90%; you get a Lot of Fuel from a bomb) as well as gone a long way to cheap access to orbit: energy independence. The neocons are terrified of US energy independence because they see rightly that the US not dependent on Middle East Oil will not keep troops over there.
Now there is a cultural affinity between Israel and the US. It would be stronger if the Israelis had made friends with the Christian Arabs particularly in Bethlehem and made advocates and friends of the Vatican instead of being universally disliked by nearly every Vatican official I know, not for being Jewish but for being oppressors of the Church.
The neocons reached a high water mark when they inveigled National Review to allow the egregious Frum to denounce many anti-war conservatives as anti-semites, and then allowed him to flip off Stephen Tonsor in his answer to his critics. Tonsor may be an irascible old SOB but he is a well known and admirable man, perhaps a bit personally sensitive to his rank, but it's deserved.
But that was a high water mark. Among other things it took much of the sting out of the charge of anti-semitism because it was so patently absurd when applied to many of those he smeared with it.
The identification of neo-cons with Jewish interests is as much theirs as anyone's; it comes with wanting to use the anti-semitism weapon.
We in the US hope that our Moslem citizens are Americans who go to mosque rather than a church, and that our Jewish citizens are Americans who go to Temple rather than a church. We have always insisted that all ties other than sentiment to "The Old Country" are severed when becoming an American. But then, until recently, it was possible to study to be an American, and to understand what that means. In today's culture wars "diversity" is antithetical to that notion. But that is another story for another time.
Neoconservatives, at least those who adhere to The Weekly Standard, may or may not be mostly Jewish, but that is not the reason for their divergence from the old Conservative Movement, which to this day retains many Jewish adherents; it is their adoption of the "national greatness" position and their abandonment of the notion of limited government. There might be compromises on foreign policy: after all, no one in the Old Right would be unhappy if Iraq became a law abiding member of the liberal democratic family of nations. Astonished, yes, but not unhappy. I'll be the first to cheer if we can bring that off.
Neo and old conservatives can agree that the War on Terror needs to be won; we can disagree on tactics, and whether pre-emption is a good idea, and if it is, where (I'd have put the effort into Afghanistan to finish that war before invading Iraq, I would, I would). These are matters for discussion.
But compromises on the notion of limited government are something else again. I'm all for national greatness if that means the Congress builds Shakespeare Theater and an Opera House in the District of Columbia (it has the undoubted Constitutional power to do such things) and returns us to a 500+ ship Navy; I am not for National Greatness if it means idiocies like "No Child Left Behind" and the Americans with Disabilities Act and thousands of other intrusions of Washington into the lives of the citizens. From what I read in Weekly Standard, there is no act of "National Greatness" its editors won't agree to.
Sorry to be so long winded.