gat

point of a sharpened pencil into the neck of Herbert who sits in front of him, all the while
whispering he will get Herb good if he gets Ron in trouble with the teacher; Alan is snapping a
rubber band at Flo; Ralph is about to call Leonard "trailer park trash" for the three-hundredth time
that day, not completely clear he knows what it means, yet enjoying the anguish it brings to
Leonard’s face; Greta, the most beautiful girl in the room, is practicing ogling shyer boys, then
cutting them dead when she evokes any hopeful smiles in response; Willie is slowly shaken down
for a dollar by Phil; and Mary’s single mom has just received an eviction notice.
Welcome to another day in an orderly, scientific classroom. Teacher may have a permanent
simper pasted on her face, but it’s deadly serious, the world she presides over, a bad place to play
psycholinguistic guessing games which involve sticking one’s neck out in front of classmates as
the rules of language are empirically derived. A method that finds mistakes to be "charming stabs
in the right direction" may be onto something person-to-person or in the environment of a loving
home, but it’s dynamically unsuited to the forge of forced schooling.
The Ignorant Schoolmaster
After Gedike, the next innovator to hit on a reading scheme was Jean Joseph Jacotot, a grand
genius, much misunderstood. A professor of literature at nineteen, Jacotot discovered a method of
teaching nonspeakers of French the French language beginning not with primers but with
Fenelon’s Telemachus. Jacotot read aloud slowly while students followed his reading in a dual
translation—to their own familiar language and to Fenelon’s spoken French. Then the process
was repeated. After the group reading, each student individually dismantled the entire book into
parts, into smaller parts, into paragraphs, into sentences, into words, and finally into letters and
sounds. This followed the "natural" pattern of scientists it was thought, beginning with wholes,
and reducing them to smaller and smaller elements.
Jacotot has a reputation as a whole-word guru, but any resemblance to contemporary wholeword
reading in Jacotot is illusion. His method shifts the burden for analysis largely from the
shoulders of the teacher to the student. The trappings of holistic noncompetitiveness are
noticeably absent. Penalty for failure in his class was denial of advancement. Everyone succeeded
in Jacotot’s system, but then, his students were highly motivated, self-selected volunteers, all of
college age.
From Jacotot we got the idea anybody can teach anything. His was the concept of the ignorant
schoolmaster. It should surprise no one that the ideas of Jacotot interested Prussians who brought
his system back to Germany and modified it for younger children. For them, however, a book
seemed too impractical a starting point, perhaps a sentence would be better or a single word.
Eventually it was the latter settled upon. Was this the genesis of whole-word teaching which
eventually dealt American reading ability a body blow?
The answer is a qualified No. In the German "normal word" method the whole-word was not
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