"A book which provides reassurance for many and guidance for all."

Frequently Asked Questions (Page 1)

Q:Just how big is the problem of illiteracy?

According to the Council of Ministers of Education, 26% of Canadian adults are illiterate and an additional 9% are barely literate. These people cannot function well with the day-to-day demands for reading required by our society. These illiterate adults include 17% of our high school graduates, 11% of community college graduates and 8% of university graduates. The problem is huge, long-standing, expensive and seemingly intractable. Direct Instruction, an effective remedial method developed at the University of Oregon by Siegfried Engelmann, has been available for 30 years but it is largely ignored by adult literacy programs.

Q:What is the current educational philosophy in North America?

For the past 40 years, public schools in North America have adopted an educational approach known as Child-Centred Learning. This method emanated from Columbia University Teachers' College in the 1920s and was an alternative to the teacher-directed methods it replaced. The result has been an increasing and pervasive decline in academic standards and student achievement scores for several generations of students, as measured by national and international tests. E.D. Hirsch, in his book, The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them, suggests that, like the planners of Soviet-style economies, Teacher College professors have been misled by a wrong-headed approach. Other more effective means, based on proven results, must now replace this misguided philosophy.

Q:Is there a method out there that can really teach kids?

William Raspberry, a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for The Washington Post, outlined in a recent article how America solved pilot training problems during the Second World War. The U.S. Air Force identified their best trainers and created an instructional manual from their practices. A similar approach to solving school problems has not been adopted by teacher trainers or teachers themselves. A proven approach to teaching children called Direct Instruction is being ignored by our schools. It is a highly organized, sequential, field-tested approach to teaching reading, writing, math and spelling. It demonstrated its superiority in the largest, most expensive, long-term study comparing 16 instructional methods.

   

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