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

by Sandra Stotsky

Book Overview

Why do American students' reading and writing test scores continue to decline? Why does the achievement gap continue to grow between minority and other students? Poor teacher training, large class... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0684849615
• ISBN13: 9780684849614
• Release Date: February 1999
• Publisher: Free Press
• Length: 316 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.4" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

Take a close look at your child's lit book

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.

Losing Our Children

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 educator

Excellent material for Parents of school aged children

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....Bobzt Engineer.

I thought I knew what was being taught in school...

I thought I knew what educators meant when they said they wanted reading materials that were both `authentic' and `inclusive'. It all sounded so very good. Good, that is, right up until I found out what is really being taught.I always wondered why our students are learning less than we did when I was in school years ago. I have long been wary of educator's explanations for students' poor performance; their reasons seldom ring true. Stotsky's well supported data reveals the declining intellectual expectations that ferverent multiculturists have for U.S. students. Having read her excellent book, I have concluded that multiculturists seem to view social goals, which they are creating and warping, as more attainable and worthwhile for students to acquire.I had hoped that `inclusive' materials would fit together to show children America's mosaic of cultures. Instead the students are fed culturally divisive snippets of poorly written materials, presented without context, that would otherwise be rejected for educational purposes if not for their `correct' ideaological bent. Unless improvements are made, children herded through today's educational system must come away inadequately educated, filled with faulty racial assumptions, largely ignorant of their country's history, and haunted by dark images of the `oppressive' society that they must feel they were unfortunate to have been born into. I am still in shock. I imagine those who have proposed and supported the worst `reforms' that our children have been subjected to will feel that the author maliciously neglects theories and data, if real data can be found, that have been used to warp our schools; she doesn't catalogue many of the endless number of faux `improvements' and `new' educational discoveries proposed in journals and books. They can't, however, contradict the facts that she presents.

See Spot Run Multiculturally

This is my review of Professor Stotsky's book as it ran in the Wall Street Journal of Monday, February 22, 1999 By now, we are familiar with the ways in which multiculturalism has infiltrated America's college reading lists and high school textbooks at the expense of the traditional curriculum. Less well known is what is going on in elementary schools. There, abysmal scores in reading and writing are often blamed on faulty methods, e.g., using "whole language" to teach reading instead of tried-and-true "phonics." No doubt there is a lot of truth to such claims, but it turns out that multiculturalism deserves part of the discredit, too. As young students learn to read, they use what are called "basal readers." These collections of stories and excerpts from literature--among the most widely read textbooks in existenc--are crucial to the mastery of grammar and vocabulary. The 19th century's version was, of course, the demanding "McGuffey's Readers." Today's versions are quite different, as we learn in Sandra Stotsky's "Losing Our Language" (Free Press, 316 pages, $26). Ms. Stotsky shows how reading instruction has fallen prey to multicultural fashion at a staggering cost to children. Because "language development is the engine that drives intellectual growth," a child's reasoning ability is the ultimate victim of the new social imperatives. The multiculturalists seem to be aware of the importance of basal readers, if not the reasons for their importance. Over the past thirty years, they have pushed for revisions motivated by a belief that underperforming students need to feel self-esteem before they can succeed academically. (This premise has never been validated in decades of empirical research.) How will self-esteem be cultivated? Not by insisting that all students achieve at a high level (and thus earn their self-respect) but by lowering standards. Ms. Stotsky uses some clever measurements, such as the number of challenging words in glossaries over succeeding editions. Difficult vocabulary words are now introduced at a declining rate as a student advances through the grades. Basal readers are less challenging in just about every other way too. Sentence structure and grammar have been dumbed down. The content of the readers is distressing as well. Essential aspects of American civic culture and history are gone, making way for stories, poems, articles, and inspirational tales by and about members of various U.S. identity groups--or non-European foreign groups. In the 1993 edition of the Macmillan/McGraw-Hill fourth-grade reader, _all_ the foreign content was non-European. (Didn't this make kids wonder who's been doing all the oppressing?) The teacher guides that accompany the texts pound the point home. The guide to a widely used reading series advises: "To help students begin to develop cultural awareness and understanding, they first need to learn who they are-t