I seriously doubt that 75% of fourth graders read as bad as the examples at the beginning. But what troubles me more is that people go to universities to study education, and yet after all these years, they still seem to have no clue about how to teach a diverse group of young kids. Yet, they're often very confident in their teaching methods.
I'm not very familiar with the field, unfortunately, but it is my understanding that there is not much of a scientific method applied to teaching theories. As in, not just armchair theorizing, but more like A/B testing. I know, it's a hard problem, but so are many science problems, and Rome doesn't have to be build in one day. But where is the progress?
If anything, I keep hearing how kids today are doing worse than they did some generations ago. Well, it's probably difficult to even compare these different times, and certainly no-one would advocate going back to - god forbid - striking with a cane etc. But didn't anyone notice that in the course of changing the way kids are taught in school, their performance fell by the wayside?
I mean, even if half of the above claim were true, and some ~37 percent of 4th graders couldn't read properly, that would already be outrageous. But surely, that didn't happen over-night -- where were the corrective measures along the way?
Can you blame everything on changed societal habits? TV, playstations and smart phones at an early age instead of books? Somehow I doubt it.
I'm not very familiar with the field, unfortunately, but it is my understanding that there is not much of a scientific method applied to teaching theories. As in, not just armchair theorizing, but more like A/B testing. I know, it's a hard problem, but so are many science problems, and Rome doesn't have to be build in one day. But where is the progress?
If anything, I keep hearing how kids today are doing worse than they did some generations ago. Well, it's probably difficult to even compare these different times, and certainly no-one would advocate going back to - god forbid - striking with a cane etc. But didn't anyone notice that in the course of changing the way kids are taught in school, their performance fell by the wayside?
I mean, even if half of the above claim were true, and some ~37 percent of 4th graders couldn't read properly, that would already be outrageous. But surely, that didn't happen over-night -- where were the corrective measures along the way?
Can you blame everything on changed societal habits? TV, playstations and smart phones at an early age instead of books? Somehow I doubt it.