Rather than actually teaching students to read and comprehend data, something that produces literate people, the globalists have been actively redefining literacy.
You will hear terms like health literacy, media literacy, and inclusive literacy. These programs are faux literacy. While pretending to be about increasing reading and critical thinking skills, in actuality they are leftist agenda-driven indoctrinating and brainwashing operations. What they have little to do with is actual literacy.
You may hear about TIP, which is trauma-informed practices. This is avoiding triggers, creating safe spaces and eliminating discipline from education.
The big idea is “diverse learners.” This is the umbrella term for the innumerable learning styles invented from whole cloth. There is the VAK model, claiming you are either a visual, auditory, or kinesthetic learner. Someone else added reading and made it VARK.
Another system includes eight separate learning styles, those being visual, verbal, logical, auditory, social, intrapersonal, physical and naturalistic.
As if that is not enough, there are tactile learners, analytical learners, group learners, solitary learners, indoor versus outdoor learners, quiet versus noisy learners, seated versus ambulatory learners and sequential versus global learners.
Add to those Gagné’s Nine Levels of Learning, Ebbinghaus’ Forgetting Curve, The Learning Zone Model, Cognitive Load Theory, and the Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition. Don’t ask, you do not want to know. Man’s capacity for inventing gobbledygook is apparently without limit.
Educational experts (ha) cite anywhere from three to 170 different learning styles. It’s a bit like the gender debacle. Or the story of the blind men and the elephant. If the Tower of Babel language confusion was God’s punishment for man, this would be the Tower of Psycho-babble approach to education that is just as confusing and destructive.
All this has spawned a whole new educational industry based on IEPs, which stands for individual educational programs. Apparently, we need to compile individual learning profiles on students to figure out what to do. As if the infamous permanent record we all feared weren’t enough.
Using the various senses and other techniques can benefit any student. Since all the “learning styles” are useful tools for ALL students, telling a student he is one or another kind of learner is just limiting him, besides being harshly evaluative.
Student populations in any age group contain learners with a wide variety of different characteristics, including academic ability, physical ability, language, gender, ethnicity, religion, socioeconomic factors and life experiences. Some of these are immutable, despite efforts to the contrary.
Numerous personal characteristics do show significant correlations with learning outcomes. General cognitive ability, intellectual curiosity, social belonging, school identification, self-regulation, interest in the subject material, personal goals, background knowledge and personal life experiences are just a few. But these are not about HOW they learn, and won’t be solved by picking an arbitrary learning style or labeling students. And unfortunately, they have little to do with literacy.
Rather than rolling up their sleeves and teaching all students to read, write and think, the modern “educator” is more interested in inventing reasons, categories and labels. This Tower of Psycho-babble approach introduces unnecessary confusion into the process of education and reinforces the justified failures of both students and educators.
Let’s clearly define literacy. At its most basic, literacy means the ability to read and write. One is literate if one can read and write, and illiterate if one cannot. For most of its history, it meant well educated or learned, which one acquired through reading. A related word, literature, means written works. It was understood that becoming fully literate was accomplished by reading literature.
The root of all these related words is Latin litterātus, from littera, meaning letter. And of course, letters are put together into words. So what about this thing called literacy? Literacy has to do with reading and understanding words.
It is a lot simpler than the so-called experts would have you believe. Other than the very young who simply need to familiarize themselves with their environment, what we call school learning hinges on one thing: words. Can you read and write them? Can you say and understand them? Most importantly, do you know what they mean? That is what we are testing, and that is what facilitates or impedes learning. That is also why, on average, readers do so much better than non-readers. They understand the definition of and relationship between words.
If we want to improve literacy we must teach kids to read, write and speak well. Other than basic math, if you are doing much else for most of their grammar school years, you are missing the boat. Learning is not complex. Kids do it on their own all the time. By not getting in their way with a bunch of gobbledygook, and with a little simple help from those in charge of education, kids can get the great education they deserve.
