Students in Search of Meaning; or Why Literacy Alone Is Not Enough

Students in Search of Meaning; or Why Literacy Alone Is Not Enough Laurel Thompson The NewAusterity Beginning in many kindergartens these days, school is almost exclusively about reading and writing. It is about learning how to decode symbols and manipulate them so that you can digest other peoples' writing and express your thoughts. In the newElementaryLiteracy Block introduced in the fall of 2002 at Denver Pub­ lic Schools, half-day kindergarten students spend three and a half hours in school, three hours of which is devoted to literacy. Children trace and play with letters or numbers, look at big books, listen to stories on tape, do alphabet or number puzzles, write letters or words (author's personal observation). Students in subsequent grades face a similar routine designed to have them reading one million words a year. Classroom teachers work on "expectations" for annual as­ sessments mandated by the Colorado Basic Literacy Act (CBLA) and the dis­ trict's Literacy Program, devoting three hours a day (almost four for Spanish­ speaking students) to reading and writing workshops, skills, and other literacy development activities. Teachers of other subjects like music, art, or P.E. are re­ quired to have a strong literacy component in their lessons so that students lose no opportunity to pick up content vocabulary or to perceive the symbolic con­ nections between "specials" and reading and writing. Other than lunch and one recess, there is no part of the day that is free from a subtle, well-meant pressure 'to shift children into print. It takes several years before children are completely under the alphabet's spell, and primary teachers must provide a variety of materials to hold the inter­ est of the younger ones. However, by about grade three or four all the hands-on activities usually stop because it is assumed the children are hooked. They have learned enough about the alphabet, decoding and grammar to enter the "House of Print" and can now be subjected fully to the linguistic way of understanding the world. Though they may forget about the code after three-thirty, play soccer, and not touch another book for the rest of the day, when they open those pages again at nine o'clock the next morning their brains know exactly what to do beE &C/Education and Culture 21(1) (2005): 39-58 • 39 53 • Laurel Thompson cause they have been trained. They have been trained to decipher printed lin­ guistic representations. This training, no matter how devoutly it is to be wished and no matter how many doors it opens, is also the closing, or at least the re­ modeling of some other doors, the doors of perception. I wonder if teachers real­ ize how significant this is. The purpose of this article is to raise questions about the current almost exclusive emphasis on literacy and math in many of our public schools and to re­ start a discussion about the relation between language and perception in learn­ ing. Dewey wrote about this relationship in How We Think (first published in 1910) when he observed that Pestalozzi's "object teaching" (a pedagogy that tried to substitute sense perception of things for the manipulation of symbols, introduced by way of England at the beginning of the nineteenth century but not popular in American schools until the 1850s) was a necessary corrective to "the abuse of linguistic methods in education," and "the preeminence assigned to lan­ guage in schools" (1933,236­37). Education reformers were right, he thought, to attack teacher verbalism—the premium put on technical facility and skill in pro­ ducing external results—because words separated from things lacked "intelligi­ ble signification" (236). If the job of educators was to transform language into a "conscious tool for conveying knowledge and assisting thought" (239), they could not do this if they talked all the time, if lessons were too short and "so mi­ nutely subdivided as to break up the unity of the meaning," and focused on avoiding error not attaining power. This failure happened, he argued, because the educational value of "observation" was not appreciated. An emphasis "upon the linguistic factor eliminated all opportunities for first­hand acquaintance with real things" (248...