Losing Our Language: How Multiculturalism Classroom Instruction Is Undermining Our Children's Ability to Read, Write, and Reason

Rating:
Summary: The real culprit: maybe not "multiculturalism"
Review: Discussion of tests which show that American schoolchildren are proficient in reading can lead one around in circles: if the standard falls, more people get in above the standard. If the standard moves, which it must depending upon how educators and experts feel it should, then the results of any measure will change. Is the standard Spin Magazine, or is it James Joyce's Ulysses? Much can change depending upon how one reviews the evidence.

However, living overseas in a country with a nearly 100% literacy rate and which takes in (albeit in a different fashion from the US) a form of multicultural education (and features many "non-standard" words as part of the language from the start), I would dare say that the culprit for a decline in high-end reading ability may have something to do not with multiculturalism itself, but its presentation. In short, the problem may lie with "American multiculturalism".

This is touched on a small bit in the book directly, although it could be seen as also being one of the main themes. However, the author needs to work on presentation. The impression one gets overall is one of hopelessness and frustration directed at ("unchecked", according to the author) moves to introduce the idea of multiculturalism into reading textbooks.

Where I disagree with her conclusions that multiculturalism is the main force at work, I do agree with her idea introduced at the start of the book and then seemingly left on the backburner later on: if you want kids to master the english language, have them learn from masters. What was left off, however, were the tremendous amount of masters who are not members of the "white experience" in America. How about getting actual authors of various walks to put together textbooks which illustrait their own unique backgrounds and experiences? Perhaps her conclusion should have been "bring back the masters... the REST of the masters".

Still, she raises an interesting question which is no doubt unsettling, if not downright upsetting to most. For pointing out a possible trend, she deserves a little credit. If she deserves any more... that'll be up to the experts to decide.

Rating:
Summary: Secondary Level Teacher Reacts to "Losing Our Language"
Review: I have to admit that I picked up this book to have my suspicions about what's happening to students at the elementary level confirmed. I have taught 9th through 12th grade English now for over 12 years, and I have witnessed the steady decline in my students' ability and willingness to engage and succeed at academic challenges that involve reading, writing, and critical thinking skills. As a private school teacher, I have been appalled at the pedagogical approaches of administrators and teachers who can't seem to reconcile their liberal politics and activism with the notion that they serve the elite (a word they detest). They have been more than willing to jump on the bandwagon driven by the likes of Grant Wiggins and Karin O'Neil, two education "gurus" who are foisting multiculturalism and overtly anti-intellectual approaches to history and literature into the private secondary school classroom (unbeknownst to the parents who write stiff tuition checks.) So, what I discovered in Stotsky's well researched and clearly written, if slightly redundant, material came as no surprise. What did surprise me, though, was the tremendous sense of dispair that came over me when I finished it. The problems in education really have less to do with money and materials and infrastructure than with the politics of those on the front lines. The real battle, as this book has confirmed for me, is against the hubristic intransigence of those who would right the traditional and historical wrongs of our society at the expense of all of our tradition and history...not to mention the unlucky children being subjected to this tripe. The first thing I did when I finished this book was to give it to a parent of one of my advisees who started asking some interesting questions. It made me feel a little better.

Rating:
Summary: Take a close look at your child's lit book
Review: Is your child's school using a series of "literature" books, with each year's text containing a wide variety of stories? Well, take a close look. Take a very close look. Are those stories uplifting? Challenging? Do they introduce valuable new vocabulary and increasingly more complex writing? Or do they have startling high proportions of stories you've never heard from, from third world sources? Stotsky's book is a searing indictment of these "basal readers", and just how badly they have slipped in the last twenty years. They are softer, fluffier, and have less inspirational content than ever before. This is a very scary book, and I heartily recommended it.

Rating:
Summary: Intellectual Goals vs Social and Political Goals
Review: Many of the harmful side effects to the current multicultural trends in education have been well documented by a host of authors. While Sandra Stotsky adequately peruses the many obvious harms of this divisive fad, she is the first whom I have encountered to also zero in on a too-often overlooked impairment caused by this divisive fad-its degradation of the English language. By analyzing the basal readers offered by five publishing houses and used almost exclusively in public grammar schools, Ms. Stotsky shows how adhering to rigid multicultural dictates has yielded a body of literature that neither stimulates young vocabularies nor stresses a command of standard English. Obsessing on the sacred cow of diversity, school-age children are regularly force-fed a bland non-chronological compilation of stories designed to emphasize the victim status of various groups. The book repeatedly demonstrates that this misplaced harping on cultural identity usually assumes that "culture" equals "victim status," a weird equation that very few parents proud of their heritage would want their children to adopt.

Among the tragic side effects of multicultural agitprop is the omission of genuine heroes whose lives could truly inspire children but who satisfy nobody's agenda. In addition to the putative aversion to white males, Ms. Stotsky shows how Helen Keller fails to pass politically correct muster. On the rare occasions when she is included, her story is subjected to perverse distortions; one author described her as "proud" to be deaf. Ms. Stotsky wisely laments, "Is Helen Keller's story disappearing because it cannot be used to indict the world in which she grew up?" Shouldn't such a charge be all the more reason to include her uplifting narrative?

Ms. Stotsky wisely stresses the complete lack of any research to support the truculent claims of multicultural proponents. No studies suggest that race-based philosophies help children learn better. Forcing non-English speaking children to sit through classes in their first language has not attested to an enhanced ability to learn English. No evidences supports the vagary that class warfare and group identity tendencies increase the much ballyhooed self-esteem of minority children (or anyone else or that matter), and nothing has ever shown salutary outcomes from stressing to various children that they are victims and to others that they are oppressors. In a brave display of realism she writes, "those who stand the most to lose the most intellectually from their (diversity proponents) subconscious racism will be the children in whose names the changes in reading instruction are taking place."

Several other thoughtful dissertations have accented these separatist aspects of multiculturalists, but "Losing our Language" goes a step further and shows how the diversity craze is hostile to the English language. Much of the juvenilia offered in modern day public schools substitutes politically correct gibberish for works that could stimulate a child's vocabulary. Linguistically hybrid stories are frighteningly commonplace based on the many flaccid passages Ms. Stotsky cites. Included are stories for 4th through 6th graders that feature alarmingly high volumes of Spanish, Japanese, or Swahili words. A familiarity with even the most basic Swahili is not a terribly high requirement for most productive United States citizens, nor is this exceedingly rare dialect the first language of many children in America (or anywhere else in the world) in the twenty first century. Even when the stories avoid bilingualism, a push to use foreign proper names is utilized in these readers. She sites characters or place names like Maizon, Eliscue, Emeke, and Quito Sueno as hard to pronounce examples that children will probably never encounter outside of an agenda-heavy classroom.

This volume is a caveat that we should not let the intricate English language be supplanted by the sectoring cant of multiculturalism.

Rating:
Summary: Institutionalized Dumbing Down
Review: Many of the harmful side effects to the current multicultural trends in education have been well documented by a host of authors. While Sandra Stotsky adequately peruses the many obvious harms of this divisive fad, she is the first whom I have encountered to also zero in on a too-often overlooked impairment caused by this divisive fad-its degradation of the English language. By analyzing the basal readers offered by five publishing houses and used almost exclusively in public grammar schools, Ms. Stotsky shows how adhering to rigid multicultural dictates has yielded a body of literature that neither stimulates young vocabularies nor stresses a command of standard English. Obsessing on the sacred cow of diversity, school-age children are regularly force-fed a bland non-chronological compilation of stories designed to emphasize the victim status of various groups. The book repeatedly demonstrates that this misplaced harping on cultural identity usually assumes that "culture" equals "victim status," a weird equation that very few parents proud of their heritage would want their children to adopt.

Among the tragic side effects of multicultural agitprop is the omission of genuine heroes whose lives could truly inspire children but who satisfy nobody's agenda. In addition to the putative aversion to white males, Ms. Stotsky shows how Helen Keller fails to pass politically correct muster. On the rare occasions when she is included, her story is subjected to perverse distortions; one author described her as "proud" to be deaf. Ms. Stotsky wisely laments, "Is Helen Keller's story disappearing because it cannot be used to indict the world in which she grew up?" Shouldn't such a charge be all the more reason to include her uplifting narrative?

Ms. Stotsky wisely stresses the complete lack of any research to support the truculent claims of multicultural proponents. No studies suggest that race-based philosophies help children learn better. Forcing non-English speaking children to sit through classes in their first language has not attested to an enhanced ability to learn English. No evidences supports the vagary that class warfare and group identity tendencies increase the much ballyhooed self-esteem of minority children (or anyone else or that matter), and nothing has ever shown salutary outcomes from stressing to various children that they are victims and to others that they are oppressors. In a brave display of realism she writes, "those who stand the most to lose the most intellectually from their (diversity proponents) subconscious racism will be the children in whose names the changes in reading instruction are taking place."

Several other thoughtful dissertations have accented these separatist aspects of multiculturalists, but "Losing our Language" goes a step further and shows how the diversity craze is hostile to the English language. Much of the juvenilia offered in modern day public schools substitutes politically correct gibberish for works that could stimulate a child's vocabulary. Linguistically hybrid stories are frighteningly commonplace based on the many flaccid passages Ms. Stotsky cites. Included are stories for 4th through 6th graders that feature alarmingly high volumes of Spanish, Japanese, or Swahili words. A familiarity with even the most basic Swahili is not a terribly high requirement for most productive United States citizens, nor is this exceedingly rare dialect the first language of many children in America (or anywhere else in the world) in the twenty first century. Even when the stories avoid bilingualism, a push to use foreign proper names is utilized in these readers. She sites characters or place names like Maizon, Eliscue, Emeke, and Quito Sueno as hard to pronounce examples that children will probably never encounter outside of an agenda-heavy classroom.

This volume is a caveat that we should not let the intricate English language be supplanted by the sectoring cant of multiculturalism.

Rating:
Summary: Losing Our Children
Review: Sandra Stotsky, a researcher at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, has for over 20 years studied the cognitive and political (she prefers "civic") consequences of contemporary educational fads, as well as their historical predecessors. Losing Our Language argues that during the past 30 years the pedagogical theories and strategies used to teach children English have harmed their cognitive development by supplanting academic goals with social goals and increasingly anti-intellectual methods and materials.

Stotsky reports that contemporary English "language arts" readers misrepresent American history by refusing to tell children about great American leaders, inventors, and scientists because they tended to be white males. Thus children are given to believe that Amelia Earhart invented the airplane, and the only "George Washington" they hear of is George Washington Carver. When presented at all, white males are portrayed as despicable racists. The focus, instead, is on American Indians, blacks, and Hispanics, all of whom are presented as victims.

The editors of these readers, and the professors of education and state education commissars whose recommendations they follow, are concerned primarily with quotas for the number of politically correct readings by writers who are black, Hispanic, Indian, disabled, and so on. The quotas and ideology leave little room for exciting, new children's literature, and since classic children's literature largely comes from the politically suspect pre-1970 "dark ages," it has practically been outlawed.

Stotsky cleverly intuits that the claim of prejudice in classic children's literature (for example, by Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling) is a cover story for the source of the multiculturalists' real anger: that the stories are so bloody good! The fantasy, whimsy, and relatively rich vocabulary of the great literature children have traditionally wanted to read creates a special, private world of the imagination.

Stotsky indicts multiculturalists as seeking to imprison children in a regimented, mean little public world. The preachy pseudo-literature they force on children uses vocabulary that is a mix of leaden, abstract nouns, useless foreign terms that are often presented with no guide to pronunciation; confusing pidgin languages such as "Spanglish" and "ebonics"; and little or no vocabulary that children can build on in their future studies. Thus, at ages when children's learning should be accelerated, it is actively decelerated. And instructional guides demand that teachers lead small children in discussions of grown-up concerns such as the evils of capitalism and racism.

The impoverished vocabularies are part of a war on English, which the educationists and state education officials who run the textbook-adoption process insist oppresses black and Hispanic children. Instead of improving the teaching of English for these children, the "solution" is to destroy the English language: "Self-righteous educators have chosen to take out their professed anger at this country's social problems on the English language itself. Unwilling to engage in the hard work of helping all children learn how to read and write, they have spitefully made the English language the object of their seeming frustration because it is so vulnerable, especially in its written form. What is not clear is how these educators can be held accountable for the damage their pedagogical notions are inflicting on a fundamental biological process in human development."

Stotsky observes repeatedly that no scholarship supports the multiculturalists' pedagogical claims. Influential education researchers such as Carl Grant of the University of Wisconsin and James Banks of the University of Washington constantly refer to other "research" that supposedly backs up their outlandish claims. But no such research exists. Stotsky notes that in contrast to early twentieth-century progressive pedagogues, multiculturalists consider the mere request for factual support proof of racism.

Concluding that dodges by multicultural education professors and teachers are the result of their laziness, unconscious racism, and desire to enhance their own self-esteem at children's expense, Stotsky gives parents advice on how to regain control of their children's education.

This is an exhaustively researched, rigorously argued work. However, in her insistence on maintaining a civil tone, Stotsky has avoided telling the occasionally brutal social history from which this pedagogy derived. The Black Power and New Left movements grew into the apartheid movement of multiculturalism, which mixes notions from communism, national socialism, and caste thinking. Through affirmative action and violent "community control," multiculturalists took over both university schools of education and slum-district schools. They installed incompetent professsors and often functionally illiterate school teachers based on the color of their skin and their degree of hatred, while running off competent educators of all colors. Only then did the pedagogy and teacher guides come along to rationalize the apartheid.

The truth can be a nasty business.

Rating:
Summary: Bad data, wrong conclusions
Review: Stotsky begins with the mistaken assertion that the reading achievement of American students has declined. It hasn't. The 1998 NAEP data show that 4th grade students recorded all-time high achievement levels. American 4th graders finished 2nd in the most recent international literacy assessments. But the misrepresentation of American student achievement is popular among journalists and politicians these days. The primary problem with the book is that the methodology for the analysis is fundamentally flawed so that it is virtually impossible to to have much confidence in the conclusions drawn about the incidence of multicultural excerpts or the supposed proliferation of foreign or non-standard English vocabulary. And, finally, since reading achievement in American elementary schools has been rising since 1990 according to the NAEP data Stotsky mis-cites, even if her research methods had been adequate she would have had to reach the opposite conclusion -- multicultural literature enhances American student achievement.Feel free to visit the ed.gov website and click on "The Nation's Report Card" button to find NAEP results.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent material for Parents of school aged children
Review: This is high quality material, written about what is taking place in elementary schools around the United States, on the subject of reading. There is a reason why many young children are not learning how to read properly and Sandra explains it in detail.

Thank you Sandra Stotsky for bringing all of these facts and figures together in one place. This is the book I have been waiting for.

If you are a parent with children ages 4 thru 12 you need this book now, even if your child reads well. Order it today. See the many reviews under the hardcover version of the book - ISBN # 0684849615.

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Bobzt
Engineer.