On Thinking For Ourselves - Or Not

In trying to decipher my hastily-scribbled notes for my last blog, I had an Aha! moment.  

Over the years, a number of people have told me that they can’t read my writing on some note or other.  I look at it, and I can see what I have written.  But now, in having trouble with that little chore myself, I got it:

It looks like just a meaningless jumble to them because many, under the pedagogical sway of the ‘look-say’ method of learning to read, were taught to know/recognize words by their looks, not their individual letters (the ‘old-fashioned’ phonics method).  And so, if they come across something other than clearcut printing, it is difficult for them to figure it out.  And hence also the emphasis in many schools on the pupils learning to print, and not on learning to write cursively.  Their ‘trained’ mind - in the ‘whole-word’ method - just gives up on that challenge to it.  Cursive writing just looks like chicken scratches to them.  

If I had to learn to read by the Chinese method - i.e., learning to recognize shapes - I would most probably have a hard time learning to read cursive as well.  Any formation of a letter even a little bit out of kilter would appear to be something else.

Now, some of this is in fact due to our writing.  (Like my tendency to write in chicken scratches, especially when I’m in a hurry - to the point that often I can’t read my own writing afterwards; having to decipher it via the context.)  But it is basically all a part of a plot by socialists 

to control our thinking.  

I came across that little gem of an idea many years ago, when looking into this subject for the first time - the subject of, in a phrase, ‘Why Johnny Can’t Read’.  Which is also the title of a book out at that time.  (This was in the midi-‘50s.)  The gist of the matter:

Socialists - especially of a particular bent of mind - don’t want people a) thinking for themselves, and b) coming across material that they don’t want them to be reading.  So they hit on the idea of controlling us by metering into our consciousnesses, and working vocabulary, the words that we would recognize.  By their shapes.  In primers, starting in the first grade of school, and introducing more words - shapes - each year.  In one example that I came across, the pedagogue - a man by the name of Gates - showed, in a primer, with pictures, how for the teacher to teach the word ‘monkey’ to their pupils, by the use of a picture of a monkey hanging on the tail of the concluding letter to the word.  They weren’t being taught how to read the word for themselves by sounding out the individual letters - 'mm..on..key - monkey!' - but by associating the word with the picture, of a monkey.  And so on.  And on.  A few new words at a time.  

No wonder so many people have such a short attention span these days.  And have taken so well to the pictures on our various devices.  

‘Telling’ us what our erstwhile masters want us to know…

Think for yourself.

While you still can.