Dorothy Sayers and TLTOL (part ten)

In this post, I ponder on these two paragraphs from "The Lost Tools of Learning":

For we let our young men and women go out unarmed, in a day when armor was never so necessary. By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects. We who were scandalized in 1940 when men were sent to fight armored tanks with rifles, are not scandalized when young men and women are sent into the world to fight massed propaganda with a smattering of "subjects"; and when whole classes and whole nations become hypnotized by the arts of the spell binder, we have the impudence to be astonished. We dole out lip-service to the importance of education--lip- service and, just occasionally, a little grant of money; we postpone the school-leaving age, and plan to build bigger and better schools; the teachers slave conscientiously in and out of school hours; and yet, as I believe, all this devoted effort is largely frustrated, because we have lost the tools of learning, and in their absence can only make a botched and piecemeal job of it.

What, then, are we to do? We cannot go back to the Middle Ages. That is a cry to which we have become accustomed. We cannot go back--or can we? Distinguo. I should like every term in that proposition defined. Does "go back" mean a retrogression in time, or the revision of an error? The first is clearly impossible per se; the second is a thing which wise men do every day. "Cannot"-- does this mean that our behavior is determined irreversibly, or merely that such an action would be very difficult in view of the opposition it would provoke? Obviously the twentieth century is not and cannot be the fourteenth; but if "the Middle Ages" is, in this context, simply a picturesque phrase denoting a particular educational theory, there seems to be no a priori reason why we should not "go back" to it--with modifications--as we have already "gone back" with modifications, to, let us say, the idea of playing Shakespeare's plays as he wrote them, and not in the "modernized" versions of Cibber and Garrick, which once seemed to be the latest thing in theatrical progress.

Is being progressive always good? I don't see how that can be the case. Its most common definition is merely "to move forward". But in what are we moving forward? Are the outcomes positive...or at least better than they were before we took a given step forward? If not, there's nothing wrong with moving backward to something that gave us better results while we think of other things to try. In moving backward, we can still take with us the insights we gained from experimenting with the new thing, so in a way progress and regression can happen simultaneously.

For example, most reject the harsh schoolteacher who drills the class in arithmetic facts and "switches" the "dunces" in the class. In the name of progress in the USA, we seem to have given up not only the harsh, humiliating treatment of students but also demonized group recitation of arithmetic facts. What if we "threw the baby out with the bath water" on that one? What if group recitation of arithmetic facts serves an important and useful purpose in helping young children memorize math facts to automaticity? (I have no idea if this is the case. I'm making up a hypothetical.)

I would wish for the educational establishment in the USA to be better at utilizing the pedagogical methods and curricula that give good outcomes and rejecting any seemingly "progressive" things that end up giving bad results. Unfortunately, they glaringly fail at this, if I can judge by the "fuzzy math" curricula that so many school districts (including mine) refuse to give up in the face of quite pathetic math outcomes for the students. I'm so grateful to be able to teach my children using my own choice of curricula and methods.

Homeschool Update

66 days, over a third into the official "school year". (Colorado requires 172 days, with an average of 4 hours of instruction per day.)

How's second grade going for dd7?

Math - Oh, the pain! She STILL doesn't have her addition facts down. We've done flashcards, online games, board games, memorization strategies, and addition fact recitation. The only thing I can think of next to try is timed minute drills targeted towards the exact facts she needs to master. Conceptually, math is fairly easy for her. She picked up borrowing (called "renaming" in her math worktext) just last week with very little trouble. She could do her math work in 1/5 of the time (or less) if she just had her addition facts known to automaticity.

Reading - She's a great little reader. :) I like our current reading textbook, Our Country from Open Court. Not only is it a good reader for her level, but we are also covering the history of the USA at a level that is appropriate for her. Because it is a 1973 edition, I do find that I occasionally have to explain a few things. For instance, although negro means black in Spanish, we no longer call a black person a "Negro" (this came up in the context of the Lewis and Clark expedition). We've also had to discuss why the book uses the word "Indians" for Native Americans. That's the price I pay for using free books from my mother's old school library.

History/Social Studies - I really appreciate having The Story of the World to use as a spine for history studies. We're up to Julius Caesar now, which is fortuitous as the Christmas season approaches. Tax issues around Jerusalem and King Herod's actions make more sense in the context of the Roman Empire. We also are learning American history as part of dd7's reading schoolwork. And, of course, we do fun things like attending a Martinstag lantern parade and a Diwali celebration last week.

Foreign Languages - She picks up a smattering of Spanish vocabulary from her part-time attendance at a charter school; I think it's just enough to reinforce what she has learned from Dora and Diego. German continues to go well because her father only speaks German to her and we assign her 3-4 German vocabulary worksheets each week.

Writing - We do a small amount of dictation some days, and on other days she does a Draw-and-Write from the Enchanted Learning website. She wrote our family newsletter yesterday. It was short but fairly well-done, given her age.

Music - We do a little each day, either singing a song, playing the recorder, or practicing the piano. I could ask more of her, but it doesn't seem worth fighting over. She's learning to read and enjoy music and play a little on two instruments, and that seems like enough for now. I guess I'm no "tiger mother".

Art - No formal curriculum is needed or used at home. She draws almost daily on her own as part of her playtime projects. She does receive some instruction from an art teacher at the charter school.

Physical Education - I drive her to school in time for recess, and she has PE instruction there some days. I find it amusing that recess is her favorite part of school.

Science - We read a science article daily and watch a lot of science videos. She loves science and absorbs information from science videos and library books like a sponge.

Socialization - Thanks to the part-time attendance at the charter school, she is getting some socialization, which has been mostly positive; the one time she was called a mean name, I was standing by her and able to smooth it over for her immediately. Family and church friends also help satisfy her need for interpersonal interaction. She's an introvert and thus relatively easy to satisfy in this respect.

The year is going well. She is happy and learning a lot. Last week, she spontaneously said she was very glad I was her mother. I think she actually has an inkling of how lucky she is....

My updated theory on autism

If you read a couple of my older posts, you'll see that I think there is a link between autism and folic acid supplementation. I started paying attention to this issue because I have a family member who rather demonizes vaccinations. I, on the other hand, believe that the alleged vaccine-autism connection has been quite thoroughly debunked. In fact, a recent study of brains of normal and autistic people found that there were too many neurons (67% more) in the cerebral cortex of the brains of those with autism, neurons which are generated only prenatally and which typically are pruned prenatally and in early infancy through programmed cell death (see this study). Instead of still suspecting vaccines in autism, we should instead pay attention to the prenatal environment.

I'm open to being proved wrong on there being a connection between folic acid supplementation and autism, particularly in light of the 2011 finding by UC Davis that women who took prenatal vitamins were less likely to have autistic children. The researchers postulated that it was because of a protective effect of folic acid. I think they're guessing on that point. Folic acid affects methylation and seems implicated in epigenetic changes, which are connected to autism (see this recent study). Some other vitamin or combination of vitamins appears to me to be more likely as the cause of the protective effect of the prenatal vitamins. Vitamin D seems a very likely candidate, especially since "developmental vitamin D deficiency increase[s] cellular proliferation in the brain and reduce[s] the amount of apoptotic cell death that is normally associated with neuronal differentiation", per this paper.

I imagine this as a possible scenario--folic acid, given with the laudable goal of preventing neural tube defects, also contributes to autism by increasing the number of neurons in the cerebral cortex, then vitamin D deficiency prevents the brain from adequately pruning the neurons to the proper number, resulting in an excess of these neurons, which prevents the brain from functioning in a neurotypical way. Please, any ideas on this? In the meantime, I'm 27 weeks pregnant, and it's nearly winter; I'm going out to buy vitamin D supplements this week.


!! Update!! : A recent study out of Norway, where they do not enrich the food supply with folate, indicates that taking folic acid just before and after conception markedly decreases the probability that the child will have autism. In light of it, I revise everything I've ever said on this issue to include a recommendation that women trying to conceive take folic acid supplements from 4 weeks pre-conception to 8-weeks post-conception. Here's the abstract for the Norway study on the JAMA website:

ABSTRACT

ABSTRACT | METHODS | RESULTS | COMMENT | AUTHOR INFORMATION | REFERENCES

Importance  Prenatal folic acid supplements reduce the risk of neural tube defects in children, but it has not been determined whether they protect against other neurodevelopmental disorders.

Objective  To examine the association between maternal use of prenatal folic acid supplements and subsequent risk of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) (autistic disorder, Asperger syndrome, pervasive developmental disorder–not otherwise specified [PDD-NOS]) in children.

Design, Setting, and Patients  The study sample of 85 176 children was derived from the population-based, prospective Norwegian Mother and Child Cohort Study (MoBa). The children were born in 2002-2008; by the end of follow-up on March 31, 2012, the age range was 3.3 through 10.2 years (mean, 6.4 years). The exposure of primary interest was use of folic acid from 4 weeks before to 8 weeks after the start of pregnancy, defined as the first day of the last menstrual period before conception. Relative risks of ASDs were estimated by odds ratios (ORs) with 95% CIs in a logistic regression analysis. Analyses were adjusted for maternal education level, year of birth, and parity.

Main Outcome Measure  Specialist-confirmed diagnosis of ASDs.

Results  At the end of follow-up, 270 children in the study sample had been diagnosed with ASDs: 114 with autistic disorder, 56 with Asperger syndrome, and 100 with PDD-NOS. In children whose mothers took folic acid, 0.10% (64/61 042) had autistic disorder, compared with 0.21% (50/24 134) in those unexposed to folic acid. The adjusted OR for autistic disorder in children of folic acid users was 0.61 (95% CI, 0.41-0.90). No association was found with Asperger syndrome or PDD-NOS, but power was limited. Similar analyses for prenatal fish oil supplements showed no such association with autistic disorder, even though fish oil use was associated with the same maternal characteristics as folic acid use.

Conclusions and Relevance  Use of prenatal folic acid supplements around the time of conception was associated with a lower risk of autistic disorder in the MoBa cohort. Although these findings cannot establish causality, they do support prenatal folic acid supplementation.

ADDENDUM: I've recently discovered that around half the USA has a genetic mutation that makes it hard for them to actually use the folic acid that is put in white flour, breakfast cereal, and most multivitamins. To bypass the problem, it's better to ingest L-methylfolate, which is exactly the form that our bodies use. On average, it is better for increasing our blood folate status and doesn't mask B-12 deficiency. And get the word out so that food producers will start putting L-methylfolate in their products instead of plain folic acid.

Notice that in the Norway study above, autism went down by half in the group that took folic acid. Maybe it would have gone away almost completely if they'd given all the mothers L-methylfolate, seeing as around half the women couldn't use folic acid very well.

Dorothy Sayers and TLTOL (part nine)

Critical thinking skills are lacking in students and graduates throughout the USA, according to many an article on education in the past few years. An article yesterday in the Sacramento Bee stated that the top skill gap employers are finding in job applicants is the area of critical thinking and problem solving.

"American businesses are facing a paradox — high unemployment and the inability to fill key jobs in their organizations," said Mark Schmit, vice president for research at SHRM. "Our research shows that gaps between unemployed American workers' skills and those required for open jobs in the United States are a major reason for this seemingly unlikely contradiction. It follows logically that if key jobs cannot be filled in organizations, then other less critical jobs requiring less skill cannot be created either because the organizations' growth potential is stunted. Thus, the cycle of low or no job growth continues."

....

HR professionals at organizations having difficulty recruiting also reported gaps in basic knowledge and skills in job applicants. The top four skills gaps were: critical thinking/problem-solving (with 54 percent of those respondents saying that job applicants typically lack that skill); professionalism/work ethic (44 percent); written communication (41 percent); and leadership (39 percent).

The most common gaps in basic knowledge skills were:

• Writing in English
• Mathematics
• Reading comprehension
• Speaking in English

Despite 13-17+ years of formal education, too many American job-seekers are not learning the material addressed in the dialectic stage of the trivium. Dorothy Sayers would be not be surprised, per this excerpt from her essay where she discusses how modern education largely dispenses with teaching dialectics:

It is, of course, quite true that bits and pieces of the mediaeval tradition still linger, or have been revived, in the ordinary school syllabus of today. Some knowledge of grammar is still required when learning a foreign language--perhaps I should say, "is again required," for during my own lifetime, we passed through a phase when the teaching of declensions and conjugations was considered rather reprehensible, and it was considered better to pick these things up as we went along. School debating societies flourish; essays are written; the necessity for "self- expression" is stressed, and perhaps even over-stressed. But these activities are cultivated more or less in detachment, as belonging to the special subjects in which they are pigeon-holed rather than as forming one coherent scheme of mental training to which all "subjects"stand in a subordinate relation. "Grammar" belongs especially to the "subject" of foreign languages, and essay-writing to the "subject" called "English"; while Dialectic has become almost entirely divorced from the rest of the curriculum, and is frequently practiced unsystematically and out of school hours as a separate exercise, only very loosely related to the main business of learning. Taken by and large, the great difference of emphasis between the two conceptions holds good: modern education concentrates on "teaching subjects," leaving the method of thinking, arguing, and expressing one's conclusions to be picked up by the scholar as he goes along' mediaeval education concentrated on first forging and learning to handle the tools of learning, using whatever subject came handy as a piece of material on which to doodle until the use of the tool became second nature.

"Subjects" of some kind there must be, of course. One cannot learn the theory of grammar without learning an actual language, or learn to argue and orate without speaking about something in particular. The debating subjects of the Middle Ages were drawn largely from theology, or from the ethics and history of antiquity. Often, indeed, they became stereotyped, especially towards the end of the period, and the far-fetched and wire-drawn absurdities of Scholastic argument fretted Milton and provide food for merriment even to this day. Whether they were in themselves any more hackneyed and trivial then the usual subjects set nowadays for "essay writing" I should not like to say: we may ourselves grow a little weary of "A Day in My Holidays" and all the rest of it. But most of the merriment is misplaced, because the aim and object of the debating thesis has by now been lost sight of.

A glib speaker in the Brains Trust once entertained his audience (and reduced the late Charles Williams to helpless rageb by asserting that in the Middle Ages it was a matter of faith to know how many archangels could dance on the point of a needle. I need not say, I hope, that it never was a "matter of faith"; it was simply a debating exercise, whose set subject was the nature of angelic substance: were angels material, and if so, did they occupy space? The answer usually adjudged correct is, I believe, that angels are pure intelligences; not material, but limited, so that they may have location in space but not extension. An analogy might be drawn from human thought, which is similarly non-material and similarly limited. Thus, if your thought is concentrated upon one thing--say, the point of a needle--it is located there in the sense that it is not elsewhere; but although it is "there," it occupies no space there, and there is nothing to prevent an infinite number of different people's thoughts being concentrated upon the same needle-point at the same time. The proper subject of the argument is thus seen to be the distinction between location and extension in space; the matter on which the argument is exercised happens to be the nature of angels (although, as we have seen, it might equally well have been something else; the practical lesson to be drawn from the argument is not to use words like "there" in a loose and unscientific way, without specifying whether you mean "located there" or "occupying space there."

Scorn in plenty has been poured out upon the mediaeval passion for hair-splitting; but when we look at the shameless abuse made, in print and on the platform, of controversial expressions with shifting and ambiguous connotations, we may feel it in our hearts to wish that every reader and hearer had been so defensively armored by his education as to be able to cry: "Distinguo."

Oh, how I echo that wish that our young citizens could distinguish the logical fallacies that currently lead some of them to think that disorderly camping in public parks is the way to brighten their future. What they really need, and our public school institution has failed to give them, is solid education in critical thinking and communication skills so they can be hired for the "key jobs" requiring such skills.

I really like Sayers' phrase, "defensively armored by [one's] education". Education should teach us how to discern falsehood from truth and error from correctness. Otherwise, we're destined to be fooled like P. T. Barnum's proverbial "suckers".