The more I think about it, I can't help but think that pedagogy is borderline quackery. If you read articles like this (and that's certainly not the only one), you realize pretty quickly that there is little scientific basis and a lot of it is just plain guess work. And it all comes with this air of self-confidence that is really not grounded in reality.
And don't get me wrong: I'm not against proposing a learning theory and then verifying or falsifying it empirically. But that's not really what's happening when you force some wild out-there method on a whole generation of students, only to find out years later that, oh, maybe that was all baloney. I mean, besides my foray into teaching I actually worked in academia for most of my career, and everytime you apply for funding for anything that's remotely related to user experiments, you must get ethics clearing, and that's not a joke. I'm amazed that new bogey teaching methods are so easily introduced and made mandatory in our school system with apparently no ethical considerations.
It would also be worth mentioning Nuffield Physics. I thought that was a really great course for learning how to do physics. Very oriented towards finding solutions, devising experiments.
If you're having a hard time squaring that with "cardinality" and "set theory"... yeah, that would be the problem.
I wish I could state with certainty that this post is a hyperbolic piece of irony.
In reality, however, >90% of the high school students I encountered were on the level of your grandparents 20 years ago. Like, say, they actually have trouble finding a file again they saved - mostly, because they don't even have a concept of the file system (thanks, mobile OS's!).
Absolutely. Every naïve mom and dad giving their kid a tablet to say oh he’s gonna be great at computers!
No. Your kid is gonna be a good user. To click the thing they’re told to click, follow the path laid out for them. It’s bad.
maria montessori developed her education methods using scientific experimentation with good outcomes.[0]
various ways to teach have been tried and we know the results. it is baffling to me why the ones that work aren't applied more.
of course not all of them are universally suitable. waldorf for example apparently also has decent results, but if there is one that i would put on the top of the list of education quackery, then waldorf would be it. so where do the good results come from? because they do one thing right: "Its educational style is holistic, intended to develop pupils' intellectual, artistic, and practical skills, with a focus on imagination and creativity. Individual teachers have a great deal of autonomy in curriculum content, teaching methods, and governance."[1], which is something that could be applied without basing it on steiners esoteric ideas.
it looks like it is not just quackery that is the problem. it is politics, NIH, probably the unwillingness to admit that they are wrong. unwillingness to change. in that context it is surprising that ITA got even off the ground. but it is also wierd that apparently the reason ITA fell out of fashion was not because it failed on its own but because that educational theory turned away from phonics.[2] that's like one mistake cancelling out another. even more surprising is that the ita foundation appears to be still active.
WAT?
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldorf_education
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_Teaching_Alphabet
I had this high school computing studies teacher, I’ll call her Dr B. She knew absolutely nothing about the subject she was supposed to be teaching us, but was beaming with pride as she told us about her PhD in education, for which she sat in on university-level engineering classes - she claimed she didn’t need to understand engineering to understand how engineering students learn
That said, once upon a time, I happened to stumble upon an education PhD thesis which I enjoyed reading and personally thought had something worthwhile to say: https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/10373/ - even though I live on the other side of the planet, its accounts of the personal experiences of parents resonated with some of my own experiences
> Even more puzzling is the way the system was rolled out. ITA was never adopted nationally, nor required. As Stainthorp explains: “At that time, there was no national curriculum – a headteacher could simply decide to implement it in their school, or a teacher in their class. There was no consistency.”
Whole Language[1] failed so many students, but had significant funding and guru-level support for decades. Brain Gym[2] is regarded as pseudoscience. Even Discovery Learning has had serious detractors.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_language 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_Gym_International
A lot of it is, I would agree, and I think the increase in homeschooling is partly motivated by that belief.
The basic question that needs to be asked: what is education for? What is its intended aim? The answer given will vary depending on the anthropology or vision of the human person that a particular culture has absorbed or that a culture has been organized around, though usually, I don't think this question is explicitly asked. It is a dangerous question, because it makes a person realize that perhaps better aims exist.
So, in capitalistic societies like ours, education has been reduced to what the capitalist class wants it to be, which is the production of cogs for the machine (and secondarily, a method of extracting money for what I take to be a mediocre education). This much is obvious. What do primary schools say college education is for? To get a "good job". The job is the primary focus of education in such a society. Test results are more about funneling workers into industry than helping students attain intellectual maturity and to gain insight into discerning their vocation.
(This is not an endorsement of collectivism, btw. Both hyperindividualism and collectivism are founded on a fantastically wrong vision of the human person; solidarism is by far the best account of the proper norm.)
But this is not the classical view of education whose aim was the formation of the person so that he can be free to be more fully human, of which the ability to known and understand the truth and to reason about life and the world are central. Intellectual formation presupposes moral formation as well (of which parents are taken to be the primary and first educators). This realization has caused an increase of interest in curricula such as classical liberal education which draws from the trivium/quadrivium tradition.
The biggest takeaway here is that we need to start asking fundamental questions questions again. We need to be Socratic again. We need to pay attention to first principles and to reconnect with our traditions to see what they have to say about them. The idea that you can do a better job by throwing inherited tradition overboard and starting from scratch is not only patently arrogant on its face, but has been demonstrated empirically to be disastrous.)
In this case, I cannot understate the importance of asking what it means to be human. Every society, every political order, every culture is guided by some anthropology, however implicit.
A quote for thought:
"Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about." ― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
In the U.S. my mom moved my sister and I into a new public school for what would have been my 4th grade.
What an odd school it was compared to the previous public schools I had been to. For starters, I was not in 4th grade, I was in Community 5 (I assume that Kindergarten was Community 1, so they decided to toss the zero-based system I was used to.) I seem to recall they had combined 5th and 6th grade into something called Suite 67.
The school itself was circular in construction with a sunken library in the center of the circle — the wedge-shaped classes going radially around the library. (If it sounds like Moon Base from Space 1999, I suspect it's because everyone in the 70's were drinking the same Koolaid.)
Classes were "open". While there were enough students to form two or more classes per grade, er, community, our community did not have a single teacher but a few. So you might have one teacher and learn reading, writing, and then later in the day another teacher would step in for science, math.
I believe the two teachers swapped and would teach the other group in Community 5 — the other group getting Math and Science in the early part of the day, English after.
And it was described as "open" and I believe that to mean that the two Community 5 classes had no physical wall between them. I don't remember though And, yeah, I know, sounds like trying to watch one movie at a drive-in while another screen is showing something else. I believe though there was perhaps some theory involving osmosis or some-such.
I remember clearly, now almost fifty years later, at least two of the science experiments we did in Community 5. They involved experiments with a control group, collecting data (one involving the effects of sunlight on bean plant growth, the other on the temperature preferences of isopods). They had definitely nailed that curriculum.
It was also where I was introduced to the Metric System (that Reagan would shitcan some years later).
When, a few years back, I went back to Overland Park, Kansas to try and find the school I was sad to see that it had been torn down and a standard rectilinear building in its place. No memory from the front desk staff about its wild history.
So sad.
If it’s any consolation, the modern Blue Valley school district is still considered excellent [0]. And there are still a few interesting ideas being pursued. The CAPS center [1] had some cool things going on when I graduated in 2018.
[0]: https://www.bluevalleyk12.org/site/default.aspx?PageType=3&M...
Yeah, we moved around the 'burbs a bit.
Also: another experimental "Free" school in the 1970's for one year was P.A.C.E.R.S. in KCMO, and then a partial year at a Catholic School in KCMO: Saint Francis Xavier, ha ha.
btw: just noticed you’re the person who wrote that color picker post. that was a fun read.
I did find a number of articles about it at Newspapers.com. Around 1971 and 1972 there were a few good articles about the architecture and "Open Classrooms", "Team Teaching", etc. (Kansas City Star, of course.)
New Zealand has just decided to scrap open plan classrooms: https://www.1news.co.nz/2025/07/16/no-more-open-plan-school-...
I thought they were a 70s thing but must of had a renaissance of the idea
I can't imagine how hard it was for people less bright than Steve. No wonder the scheme trained illiterates.
Secondly, he was one of the most functional human beings I've ever met.
The reason he was so good at herpetology is because he was raised with dangerous reptiles. The backyard of his home in Botany Circuit was crawling with snakes, crocs and goannas. I rarely played at his place, because it un-nerved me. He was very confident and capable, and understood animal behaviour even at 6yo.
I was better at playing with spiders though, no doubt that changed as he grew older.
I'm not sure if this is a valuable teaching tool, but I think it would be conceptually sound as a general replacement for Latin letters for English text. At this point, though, it's impossible to make such a drastic change. It would have global repercussions.
Speaking of which, it seems that the only case of spelling adapting to pronunciation in English is the commonly used spelling "me" for "my" in Irish dialects.
'h𐑬se' and 'aut' - where 𐑬 is read as 'au' in RP, but as 'oy' in NI.
The downside is that the said alphabet would have more letters and it won't be always easy to guess the spelling based on pronunciation (still easier than currently in English), but the upside is that one can always read any word correctly in their accent.
here is an interesting article listing digraphs in various languages with latin script that have lots of examples where the same sounds have a single letter in other languages:
I really want to hear a New Zealander quote "The pen is mightier than the sword".
If I were reforming English spelling, I'd take a much slower, more incremental approach. Make a simple change like SR1[0], that doesn't change that many words. Smaller change; less backlash.
(And even in the worst case, if the reform doesn't take, it's easier for the people who learned it to re-learn "classic English" spelling.)
Modern Italian, on the other hand, makes a modicum of sense because it was explicitly constructed during the 19th-century unification of Italy, when somebody had the bright idea that if you wanted to have a nation called "Italy", you should also have a language called "Italian" and it should make a modicum of sense. This is a memo which English has somehow never gotten.
To give an example, number words are often covered 3 times in English - one from English (Germanic?) roots, one from Latin roots, and one from Greek roots. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numeral_prefix#Table_of_number...
one / uni / mono
two / bi / di
three / ter / tri
four / quad / tetra
surely there are regional accents of Standard Italian where different people say the same word different ways though, right? Does everyone speak it the same way and save variation for their local dialect?
It's common for people of one area to not understand dialects from a very different area, but the language is one, and you pronounce all the letters (almost, there are some exceptions, but they follow a rule), and if you were to write the dialect you'd write anything you say.
There are many variations on the cadence and on how some words are used, but generally speaking the language is the same everywhere. But then, of course, Italy is a small Country and only a few millions people speak Italian.
I wasn't hinting that one language is better than others, just that it comes very natural to us to read that alphabet. Once you map in your head some signs to some sounds it's almost all there (provided that you know enough English to infer which words are written for enough time to learn the missing signs).
I live in Germany now but I'm American. The poem "dearest creature in creation" is always a fun party trick. German is difficult but it's a good reminder that English is, too.
If you're a non-native English speaker and you can get this poem even 50% correct you're doing really well. Most Americans (and, I'd imagine, other English native speakers) would also struggle with it.
https://www.learnenglish.de/pronunciation/pronunciationpoem....
English is one of THE WORST languages when it comes to encoding its phonemes in its alphabet.
I am familiar with pretty much every word in that poem. Knowing the word isn't the problem. How these words are correctly PRONOUNCED though, that is the actual issue. And even I got tripped up on some of them.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_round_of_simplified_Chi...
I also find it unfortunate that they bothered with this nonsense. If you're going to do anything just standardize the existing spellings with existing letters. Give long i a standard spelling and be done with it.
It seems to me that this ITA would have been quite useful had it served an annotative role taught in tandem with canonical spellings to build the morpheme-to-phoneme mapping. Akin to kana rubytext for kanji in books targeted for younger learners that are then elided for adult readers.
It's light and fun -- good beach reading, if you're a word nerd. And it does cover the ITA, from the article.
One thing I thought was funny: English spelling became more-or-less standardized in the years after the printing press made it to England in 1476. And almost immediately after the spelling was standardized, 15th-century Englishmen started complaining that the new system made no sense. ("Why is there a b in 'debt'?")
More than 500 years later, we're still complaining ;-)
I recently found out that Theodore Roosevelt had signed an executive order to adopt new spelling rules from the Simplified Spelling Board in 1906, but backtracked when the press began mocking it. If it had been a better organized release it could have succeeded but now it's a cautionary tale.
The future timeline extends out forever, if humanity is going to continue to primarily use an English-rooted language we need to make intentional improvements or we will be stuck with increased entropy, see the introduction of emoji's into text for example.
And, apparently, also the inventor of time travel—we know that various forms of shorthand have existed since antiquity.
0: https://www.sciencealert.com/word-jumble-meme-first-last-let...
For mature readers, it is a big contrast because it requires "sounding out" the words instead of being able to decode them in chunks / a whole word at a glance.
I would say it's more of a publicity stunt than anything. It looks kind of like Old English (maybe) and definitely isn't recognizable at a glance, but the fact that the letters make only one sound in this decoding system is a major advantage for beginners.
As a system for writing English it seems superior to what we have now. Spelling telling you how to pronounce something is how most languages work. English by comparison has no consistent framework, requiring a lot of memorization to build that mapping. ITA is only a stunt in retrospect because it never went anywhere
So - “If you enjoy walking around the hardware store for no reason, you might be someone’s dad.”
Kind of misapplied in this case, but I think that’s the joke.
The lack of correlation between sound and letter is embarrassing.
I wish this would have taken off (Maybe even giving us a gender neutral pronoun?).
Sadly, we'll need a dictator like Sejong the Great to make it happen.
Well, it's worse than that, because English speakers don't agree on how words sound.
So, if we started spelling things like they sound, words would get misspelled (or perhaps misspelt) a lot more than now. There's a lot of vowel shifts from place to place ... but not for all instances of those vowel sounds in all words. Some people like to add r's that aren't there, but there's a few places to do it.
You'd need a much tighter language community to enforce consistent enough pronunciation that a phonetic alphabet would work. And you'd be giving up centuries of printed works to do it.
We can’t agree in my house how to pronounce “bath” so how will the entire English speaking world agree on the spelling of every such word with consistent meaning but differing pronunciation…
Which is how the language functioned before the printing press.
With most text being read on a screen now days, phones and computers could have a button to switch between spelling systems.
Sadly, it'll never happen.
I'm sure it can be easily be trained to with enough samples just like it knows any other language, but for now it seems a good way to know you are reading a human generated text.
I’d distrust any top-down effort to change a language anyway. It belongs to the users and they’ll adapt it to their needs the way they see fit.
For my Pacific Northwest accent, either pronunciation works fine.
We have one: ‘it.’ What we don’t have is a specific indistinct-gender pronoun; instead, English uses ‘he’ (and in a very limited case, ‘they’).
We have those. "He/him/his" are gender-neutral pronouns in English. People simply assume they are male-only, but that isn't true.
People will assume the male gender even if it's technically correct.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/12/lucy-ca...
https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/parents-sue-lucy-ca...
ənˈfɔɹtʃənətli ˈnən əv ðə ˈwənz aɪ ˈtɹaɪd ɡɪv jə ˌʌnkənˈdɪʃənəli ɪˈmidiət ˌaɪpiˈeɪ wɪˈðaʊt ɪnˈstɹʌkʃən ænd ˈnən əv ðəm ˈænsɚ ˈkwɛs.tʃənz ɪn ˌaɪpiˈeɪ bəɾ aɪ kən ˈfɪks ðɪs baɪ ˈsɪmpli kɹiˈeɪtɪŋ maɪ ˈoʊn ˌdʒiːpiˈti ðæt ˈdəz ɪɡˈzæktli ðæt
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ipafy/
https://chatgpt.com/g/g-6878bd78e06c8191bcdf6de7a57eac52-ipa...
PS: it might take some time to learn the difference between IPA and API but it will be worth it finally we created the spelling reform we've always dreamt about
English spelling is a facade. Real English can be seen when sentences written in IPA. Having visual confirmation of sound feels refreshing.
ITA "lief ov a fisherman" is neither phonetic nor English. It replaced broken system with another broken system.
The problem will always be that that English has a lot more phonemes than it does letters, so a 1:1 mapping will never be possible. That said, I do think it would be a good idea to have a 1:1 correlation. Which is why everybody should just learn Esperanto instead.[1]
1: Joking.[2]
2: Well, mostly joking.
Rough: ro-uh-g
Not that hard. Not perfect either (hs are difficult to pronounce) but still helpful. It could easily become a game for children to talk to each other in this "secret language". And by doing so, they would be memorising the correct spelling of the words.
In German, this problem is solved by the convention that the written form exists to preserve the "correct" pronounciation. So, if you don't speak the word in the way it is written, you likely pronounced it wrong (yes, there exist situation where the pronounciation cannot fully be reconstructed from the written word; also newer loanwords tend to be written as in the original language; but these are rather exceptions).
Then there's also the etymology and handling of grammatical endings. Polish spelling would be more difficult without "rz" for example, despite its two sounds already existing elsewhere in the spelling system.
Spanish, for example: everything is spelled exactly the way it sounds, a sane design.
Or how about G? It makes one sound before I or E, another before A, O, UE, or UI, and yet another before UA.
Lots of folks think their language is simpler, but it's only because they can follow the rules so well they don't need to actually know them.
The fact that there are a few rules on how to pronounce combinations of letters (and even a few exceptions here and there) has nothing to do with the total mess that is English.
(the difference is aspirate vs. non-aspirate)
Same chart, from Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_Teaching_Alphabet#/med...
I was an atrocious speller until I moved back to foreign-land and had to take English class with my schoolmates.
Learning how people mispronounce English phonetically fixed most of my spelling.
Indeed, another tale of pure waste. How many of the opposite experiments are there? Is there at least 1 perfectly set up non-trivial experiment that added definitive knowledge in this sphere?
