The Blumenfeld Education Letter May_1995

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Education Letter, Pg. 2 , May 1995

understanding his Maker, or the signification of words,but was furnished both with the faculty of speech andwith speech itself or the knowledge and use of wordsas signs of ideas, and this before the formation ofwoman. Hence we may infer that language wasbestowed on Adam in the sarre manner as all hisother faculties and knowledge, by supernatural power;or, in other words, was of divine origin: for, suppos-ing Adam to have had all th e intellectual powers ofany adult individual of the species who have sincelived, we can not admit as probable, or even possible,that he should have invented and constructed even abarren language, as soon as he was created, withoutsupernatural aid. Itmay indeed be doubted whether,without such aid, men would ever have learned theuse of the organs of speech, so far as to form language.At any rate, this invention of words and the construc-tion of a language must have been by a slow process,and must have required a much longer time than thatwhich passed between the creation of Adam and ofEve. It is, therefore, probable that language, as well asthe faculty of speech, was th e im med iate gift o f G o d . Weare not, however, to suppose the language of our firstparents in parad ise to have been copious, like mostmodern languages; or the identical language theyused, to be now in existence, Many of the primitiveradical words may and probably do exist in variouslanguages; but observation teaches that languagesmust improve and undergo great changes as knowl-edge increases, and be subject to continual altera-tions, from other causes incident to men in society.

By giving Adam th e power of speech,God gave man the ability to know objectivereality, to know truth-which Webster de-fines as: "Confonnity to fact or reality; exactacoordance with that which is, or ha s been,or shall be." In fact, the first purpose oflanguage for Adam was to enable him toknow God, his Creator. That knowledge, inand of itself, established the basis for know-ing the truth, the existence of God and theobjective reality created by God. Thus, thebeliever speaks of the universe as God'screation.According to Webster, Adam's initialvocabulary was given to him by God. Adamdid not initially invent words which he thentaught God. It had to be the other wayaround. But then God brings before Adam

every living creature, "and whatsoever Adamcalled every living creature, that was thename thereof." And so Adam became anobjective observer of the natural worldaround him, he became the world's firstscientist and the world's first lexicographer.L in gu is tic s a nd E vo lu tio n

As a believer and a linguist, Websterdefined linguistics as lithe science of lan-guages, or of the origin, signification, andapplication of words." Modern linguists,however, begin with the premise that man isthe product of evolution and that man, there-fore, created language through a process ofevolutionary development without the helpof any supernatural deity. In other words,language is an arbitrary set of voice noisesmade by man to represent thought. Of course,even evolutionists can accept the notion thatman developed and used language as ameans of getting a grip on reality. VVhy elsewould language have been developed?Curiously enough, Noam Chomsky, theworld's leading linguist, believes that man isindeed the product of evolution but that hislanguage faculty is not. He writes:

OOt is almost Universally taken for granted thatthere exis ts a problem of expla in ing the "evolution"of human language from systems of animal oommu-nication . . . [H]uman language appears to be aunique phenomenon, without significant analogue inthe animal world. If this is so, it is quite senseless toraise th e problem of explaining the evolution of humanlanguage from more primitive systems of communi-cation that appear at lower levels of intellectual ca-pacity. (Language an d Mind , p. 67)

As far as we know, possession of human lan-guage is associated with a specific type of mentalorganization, not simply a higher degree of intelli-gence. Ther e seems to be no substance to th e viewthat human language is simply a more complex in-stance of something to be found elsewhere in theanimal world. This poses a problem for th e biologist,since, if true, it is an example of true "emergence"-th e appearance of a qualitatively different phenome-

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Education Letter, Pg. 3, May 1995

non at a specific stage of complexity of organization.(p . 70 )

Infact, the processes by which the human mindachieved its present stage of complexity and its par-ticular form of innate organization are a total mys-tery. (p, 97)

Furthermore, Chomsky believes thatman's language faculty is biologically andgenetically predetermined, that it is innate.In fact, his view is about as dose to a Biblicalcreationist view as a humanist scientist cancome to. He writes:

T he human mind appears to consist of differentsystems, each intricate and highly specialized, withinteractions of a kind that are largely fixed by ourbiological endowment; in these respects it is like allother known biological systems, th e physical organsof the body below th e neck, for example. One of thesesystems is the human language faculty. It is particu-larly interesting because it is a common property ofhumans, with little if any variation apart from quiteserious impairment, and it appears to be unique to th ehuman species; contrary to much mythology, otherorganisms appear to lack even the most rudimentaryfeatures of th e human language faculty, a fact that hasbeen shown quite dramatically in recent studies ofapes. Thus human language app:ars to be a true"species property," and one that enters in a centralway into our thought and understanding. (The Read-in g T ea ch er , D ec. 1994, p. 330)

As for his views on the teaching of read-ing, Chomsky says:As a linguist, Ihave no particular qualificationsor knowledge that enables or entitles me to prescr ibe

methods of language instruction. (Ibid, p. 332)Thus, Kenneth Gcxxlman's claim , that

his idea of reading being a "psycholinguisticguessing game" was suggested by some-thing Chomsky said, may be a product ofCoodman's strained imagination. From whatChomsky writes about a child's acquisitionof language, it s e e m s to be anything but agame. He writes:

The person who ha s mastered any human lan-

guage has developed a system of knowledge that isrich a nd complex. This cognitive system providesspecific and precise knowledge of many intricate andsurprising facts. It seems that the mind carries outprecise computational operations, using mental rep-resentations of a specific form, to arrive at preciseconclusions about factual matters of no little com-plexity, without conscious thought or deliberation.TIle principles that determine the nature of the men-tal representations and the operations that apply tothem form a central part of our biologically deter-mined nature. 'They constitute the human languagefaculty, which one might regard a s an "organ of themind/brain." (L ang uage an d P ro blem s o f Knowledge , p.131)

But there are those among psycholin-guists who believe that the evolutionarydevelopment of language was and still is asubjective psychological process with a ratherloose connection to objective reality. Theimplication is that man, by creating language,creates reality out of his own head. Thusinternal reality is considered more real thanexternal reality which is interpreted subjec-tively. Consequently, "truth" is within, notwithout. Such an idea is anathema to adher-ents of the Bible who believe that God gaveman language to enable him to know objec-tive reality, not create it.T h e C h a s m

In other words, language divorced franGod makes no sense to the believer, while forthe atheist cognitive psychologist or linguist,language derived from God is not onlyunbelievable but not even worthy of discus-sion. That is why, despite Chomsky, thechasm between evolutionists and creation-ists is so deep and so wide. That is whycognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner couldcomplain in his memoir about "becoming"the target of the ultra-right in America forespousing a curriculum that included abeautifully crafted account of human evolu-tion. The hounds of creationism were set

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Education Letter, Pg. 4 ,May 1995

baying!" Thus, the chasm is political as wellas philosophical.And now we shall present a whole-language, psycholinguistic definition ofreading as given by three whole-languageprofessors in their book, Who le Language :W hat's th e D ifference? published in 1991:

From a whole language perspective, reading(and language use in general) is a process of generat-ing hypotheses in a meaning-making transaction in asociohistorical context. As a transactional process(Rosenblatt 1978; Goodman 1984), reading is not amatter of "getting the meaning" from text, as if thatmeaning were in the text waiting to be decoded by thereader. Rather, reading is a matter of readers usingthe cues print provide and the knowledge they bringwith them (o f language subsystems, of the world) toconstruct a unique interpretation. Moreover, thatinterpretation is situated: readers' creations (not re-trievals) of meaning with the text vary, depending ontheir purposes for reading and the expectations ofothers in th e reading event. This view of readingimplies that there is no single "correct" meaning for agiven text, only plausible meanings. (p, 19)

Obviously, when one compares thisdefinition of reading to Webster's, one cansee the stark difference between the two.WebSter 'S is based on the premise that Go dendowed man with the power of speech sothat man could know and deal with externala s well as internal reality objectively. Web-ster defines the alphabet as "the series ofletters which fonn the elements of speech."Thus, an alphabetic writing system repre-sents spoken language, and that to read, asWebster explains, is "to utter or pronouncewritten or printed words, letters, or charac-ters, in the proper order." In other words,one derives meaning=or th e message----fromtext by decoding the text accurately, Theauthor's message may be dear or unclear,but that judgment cannot be made until themessage is accurately decoded and articu-lated in the form of speech.The whole-language approach is quitedifferent It implies that it is the reader's

subjective interpretation that determineswhat the author's message is, regardless ofwhat the author intended to convey. Thus,inwhole language the reader, not the author,creates the meaning, the reader, not the au-thor, creates the message.A Holis tic R eflex

This view of reading naturally affectsthe way reading is taught inwhole-languageclassrooms. The children are taught to de-velop a holistic reflex, that is, to automati-cally look at printed words as whole con-figurations, like Chinese characters, ratherthan see the words alphabetically in theirphonetic components. They are taught strate-gies rather than phonetic decoding, althoughsome whole-language teachers will equatestrategies with decoding. The children aretaught to rely on configuration cues, picturecues, context cues, syntactic cues, and gra-phophonemic cues-that is, some lettersounds, or phonemic cues, as one of thestrategies to be used in reading. But thisinformation becomes largely irrelevantphonetic knowledge in the child's head whichis rarely if ever used. Why? Because it isdiscouraged by whole-language teacherswho advocate "taking risks," or guessing,and using word substitutions to arrive atmeaning. Besides, when a child has devel-oped. a holistic reflex, it requires consciouseffort to apply phonetic knowledge, effortwhich most children are reluctant to makebecause it slows down the reading process.

It is odd that a reading philosophy thatputs so much emphasis on "meaning" shouldencourage guessing and word substitutionswhich make a mockery of accurate meaning.Indeed, we read in Evaluat ion: Wlw1e Lan-guage, Whole Chi ld by Jane Baskwill andPaulette Whitman (Scholastic, 1988):

The way you interpret what the child does will

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reflect what you understand reading to be. For in-stance, if she reads the word ! r u t h e r for father, a phon-ics-oriented teacher might be pleased because she'scome close to sounding the word out. However, ifyou believe reading is a meaning-seeking process,you may be concerned that she's overly dependent onphonics at the expense of meaning. You'd ~ happi~with a miscue such as daddy, even though It doesn tlook or sound anything like the word in the text. Atleast the meaning would be intact. (p, 19)

The inference is that the phonics-ori-ented teacher who wants to help the childread the text accurately by helping her im-prove her decoding skills is somehow notinterested in meaning. In whole-language,readers are supposed to "create meaning"rather than derive it from the text. Theconcept of accuracy gets totally lost in theprocess. But we live in a high-tech civiliza-tion in which accuracy is exceedingly impor-tant, and to give a child the impression thatit isn't is doing the child a tremendous dis-service. Yet, whole-language advocate JuliaPalmer, president of the American ReadingCouncil, when questioned about word sub-stitutions by a reporter from the WashingtonPos t (11/29/86), replied: "Accuracy is notthe name of the game."

How can a high-tech civilization ad-vance with that kind of philosophy govern-ing the education system?The Meaning of M eaning

The confusion is over the word "mean-ing" and how it is being used by whole-language educators. They define "reading"as "creating meaning." In fact, the KentuckyDepartment of Education describes its whole-language view of reading in its OutcomeBased Education program as: "Studentsconstruct meaning from a variety of printmaterials for a variety of purposes throughreading."In phonics, children are taught to de-

code an author's message before they decidewhat it means. In other words, there is adifference between such questions as: ''Whatdoes the message say?" and "What does themessage mean?" Whole-language educa-tors not only confuse the two but equate thetwo. And one can imagine the confusion thiscreates in the mind of a child.The phonics-oriented teacher wants tomake sure that the child can "read" or de-code what "the author says," and in simplechildren's books the authors generally meanwhat they say, or what they say can be easilyunderstood. What authors "mean" is whathigh school and college students might re-flect on as they read works of greater com-plexity that challenge the intellect.

But where did this confusion aboutmeaning, which seems to be at the heart ofthe psycholinguistic approach to reading,originate? Where did Kenneth Gocx:imanget his idea of reading being "a psycholin-guistic guessing game?" He says he got itfrom Chomsky who suggested "that readersmake tentative decisions as they strive tomake sense of text, and they remain ready tomodify their tentative decisions as theycontinue reading." We can already se e withinthis statement a confusion between the pro-cess of finding out what the author is saying,by decoding, and determining what he orshe means, by interpretation or analysis.Obviously, not all texts require interpreta-tion or analysis. But to use such a confusingconcept as the basis for primary readinginstruction can only lead to eno rm ous co nfu-sion and frustration among children.

T h e W ittgenstein FactorPerhaps we can best understand where

all of this confusion carne from by seeking itsphilosophical source since so many whole-language advocates insist that whole lan-guage is a philosophy and not a method of

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Education Letter, Pg. 6 ,May 1995

instruction. The one name that stands outamong many lesser lights is that of LudwigWittgenstein (1889-1951), the Austrian-bornEnglish philosopher who taught at Cam-bridge University from 1929 to 1947. His twochief works, T ra ct atu s L o gic o- P hilo so p hic us(1921) and P h i lo s oph ic a l I nv es ti ga ti o ns , pub-lished posthumously in 1953, have pro-foundly influenced not only modem phi-losophy, but also psycholinguistics andcognitive psychology. Indeed, one findsreferences to Wittgenstein in the books ofChomsky, Jerome Bruner, and virtually everyother author dealing with language. Indeed,it is quite possible that the term "wholelanguage" itself is derived from a passage inP h ilo so p hic al In ve stig at io n s. Wittgensteinbegins his treatise by quoting a passage fromAugustine's Confess ions in which Augustinedescribes how he learned language by a sso -dating words with objects. Wittgensteinwrites:

In th is picture of language we find the roots ofthe following idea: Every word has a rreaning. Thismeaning is correlated with the word. It is the objectfor which the word stands. (p, 2)

Wittgenstein is simply restating theAugustinian notion of language. But then hebegins a very long. tedious process of testingthe limits of that idea. He writes:

That philosophical concept of meaning has itsplace in a primitive idea of the way language func-tions. But one can also say that it is the idea of alanguage more primitive than ours. (p. 3)

Wittgenstein then presents us (in 2)with an example of a very primitive lan-guage of only four words based on theAugustinian model. He writes:

We could im ag ine that the language of 2 wasthe whole language of A and B; even the whole lan-guage of a tribe .... (p. 4) [Emphasis in the original.]

We can also think of the whole process of using

words in (2) as one of those games by means of whichchildren learn their native language. I will call thesegames "language games" and will sometimes speakof a primitive language as a language-garne .... (p, 5)Ishall a lso call the whole, consisting of languageand the actions into which it is woven, the "language-game". (p. 5)Psycholinguis tic Guess ing Game

Is this where Kenneth Goodman got hisidea for calling the whole-language conceptof reading "a psycholinguistic guessinggame"? In any case, Wittgenstein proceedsin his investigation of the Augustinian con-cept of words as names of objects. He writes:But what, for example, is the word "this" the

name of in language-garne (8) or the word "that" inth e ostensive definition "that is called .... "?-If youdo not want to produce confusion you will do best notto call these words names at all. ... (p, 18)

This queer conception springs from a tendencyto sublime the logic of our language---as one mightput it. The proper answer to it is: we call very differentthings "names"; the word "name" is used to charac-terize many different kinds of use of a word, relatedto one another in many different ways;----but the kindof use that "this" has is not among them .... (p. 18)

This is connected with the conception of namingas, so to speak, an occult process. Naming appears asa q u e e r connexion of a word with an object.-And youreally get such a queer connexion when the philoso-pher tries to bring out th e relation between name andthing by staring at an object in front of him andrepeating a name or even the word "this" innumber-able times. For philosophical problems ar i se whenlanguage go es o n holiday. And here we may indeedfancy naming to be sorre remarkable act of mind, asit were a baptism of an object. And we can also say theword "this" to the object, as it were address the objectas "this" --a queer use of this word, which doubtlessonly occurs in doing philosophy. (p, 19)

At this point, Wittgenstein begins specu-lating about the concept of "meaning." Hewrites:Let us first discuss this point of the argument:

that a word ha s no meaning if nothing corresponds toit.-It is important to note that the word "meaning" is

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being used illicitly if it is used to signify the thing that'corresponds' to the word. That is to confound themeaning of a name with the b e a r e r of the name .... (p,20)

For a large class of cases-though not for all-inwhich we employ the word "meaning" it can bedefined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in thelanguage. (p, 20 )

Wittgenstein then quotes Socrates whosays: "For the essence of speech is the com-position of names." (p. 21 ) Once more, weare touching base with Augustine. But thenWittgenstein decides to wade into deeperphilosophical water. Using the notion thatthe word "this" is not a name, he tries to useit to make distinctions between "simpleconstituent parts" and "composites," andbetween "names" and "descriptions." Hewrites:

For naming and describing do not stand on thesame level: naming is a preparation for description.Naming is so far not a move in the language-garre-any more than putting a piece in its place on the boardis a move in chess. We may say: nothing has so fa r beendone, when a thing ha s be en named. It has not evengo t a name except in the language-game. This waswhat Frege meant too, when he said that a word hadmeaning only as part of a sentence. (p . 24 )

That concept strikes a familiar note inwhole language, where children are nottaught to read words in isolationbut only insentences so that they can get the "mean-ing."

From this point on, Wittgenstein wan-ders off into endless philosophical specula-tion about the language-game. He seems tobe saying that we are all locked in the lan-guage-game and that the philosopher istrying to find a way out but can't. He says:

We are under the illusion that what is peculiar,profound, essential, in our investigation, resides in itstrying to grasp th e incomparable essence of language.That is, the order existing between the concepts ofproposition, word, proof, truth, experience, and so

on. This order is a super-order between--so to speak-super-concepts. Whereas, of course, if the words'1anguage", "experience", "world", have a use, itmust be as humble a one as that of the words "table",'1amp", "door". (p. 44)

The question ''What is a word really?" is analo-gous to ''What is a piece in chess?" ...

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchmentof our intelligence by means of language. (p, 47)

The results of philosophy ar e the uncovering ofone or another piece of plain nonsense and of bumpsthat the understanding has got by running its head upagainst the limits of language. These bumps make ussee the value of the discovery.

When Italk about language (words, sentences,etc.) Imust speak the language of every day. Is thislanguage somehow too coarse and material for whatwe want to say? Then how is another one to be con-structed?-And how strange that we should be ableto do anything at all with the one we have! (p.48)

W r t t g e n s t e in o n R e a d in gAnd so, even though Wittgenstein sees

languageas a game, it is a game played on anAugustinian playing field. Nor would heapprove o f reading being defined as a "psy_cholinguisticguessing game." In investigat-ing the word "reading," he writes:

First In e e d to remark that Iam not rounting theunderstanding of what is read as part of 'reading' forpurposes of this investigation: reading is here theactivity of rendering out loud what is written orprinted; and also of writing from dictation, writingout something printed, playing from a score, and soon.

The us e of this word in the ordinary circum-stances of our life is of course extremely familiar to us.But the part the word plays in our life, and therewithth e language-garre in which we employ it, would bedifficult to describe even in rough outline. . . .

Now what takes place when, say, [an adult]reads a newspaper?-His e ye passes-as we say-along the printed words, he says them out loud-c-oronly to himself; in particular he reads certain wordsby taking in their printed shapes as wholes; otherswhen his eye has taken in the first syllables; othersagain he reads syllable by syl1able, and an occasionalone per haps letter by letter. . . .

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Now rompare a beginner with this reader. Thebeginner reads the words by laboriously spellingthem out-i-some however he guesses from th e ron-text, or perhaps he already partly knows the passageby heart. Then his teacher says that he is not reallyreading the words (and in certain cases that he is onlypretending to read them).

If we think of this sort of reading, the reading ofa beginner, and ask ourselves what reading consistsin, we shall be inclined to say: it is a special consciousactivity of mind. . . .

The word "to read" is applied differently whenwe are speaking of the beginner and of the practisedreader .... (pp. 61-62)

But when we think th e matter over we aretempted to say: th e one real criterion for anybody'sreading is th e conscious act of reading, the act ofreading the sounds off from th e letters. (p, 63)

And if Iso much as look at a Gennan printedword, there o ccurs a peculiar process, that of hearingthe sound inwardly. (p. 67)I feel that the letters are th e reason why I readsuch-and-such. For if someone asks me "Why do youread such-and-such?"-I justify my reading by th eletters which are there. (p. 68)

Obviously, Wittgenstein would beappalled by what whole-language peoplecall "reading"! But Wittgenstein had nocontrol over how future academics wouldinterpret his philosophical ideas. He wrote:

Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approachfrom one side and know your way about; you ap-proach the s a m e place from another side and nolonger know your way about (p. 82 )

What is your aim in philooophy?-To shew thefly the way out of the fly-bottle. (p. 103)

My a r m is: to teach you to pass from a piece ofdisguised nonsense to something that is patent non-sense. (p.133)

In a way, Wittgenstein brought philoso-phy to a dead end, by simply making usaware of the limits of language. But if weunderstand the functions of language inBiblical tenns, then we understand that theprimary purpose of language is to enable usto know truth.

It is no accident that we read in theGospe l Acrording to St. John (1:1):

In the beginning was th e Word, and th e Wordwas with God, and the Word was God.

God endowed man with what Chomskycal ls our '1anguage faculty" or our "species-specific human possession" so that man,made inGOO'simage, would be able to knowtruth. The language that God gave manprovides him with lim it le ss capab il it ie s toseek and know truth, to know what is, whatexists. For the unbeliever, however, it isn'tthe limits of language that confine him, butthe limits of truth, the limits of objectivereality, the limits of what exists.That is why for the believer, "the truthshall make you free" (Iohn 8:32), but for theunbeliever the truth is an unspeakable prison.

Quotab le QuoteTIle foundations of modern philosophy are in

Descartes. His thinking made the individual con-sciousness the world's bas ic reality and the startingpoint of all philosophy. Man's ego, the '1", tookprecedence over God and th e world. Not surpris-ingly, the logic of this led to Hume, who dispensedwith God and the world as epiphenoma, and even themind was eroded to the point that it was only momen-tary states of consciousness rather than a reality.Immanuel Kant went a step further; things in them-selves, i.e., realities, are unknowable and only phe-nomena can be known. The real world is thus not avalid area of knowledge, because we can only knowappearances. As Schopenhauer put it, the world iswill and idea.

Philosophy thus set th e stage for the substitu-tion of role-playing, i.e., phenomena, for th e real man,the thing . n i ts el f, reality. It could thus be said thatclothes make th e man (or woman), and that a goodfront is essential; appearances berome everything.. . . The results have been devastating. Roleplaying in the theater e n d s commonly in a curtain calland a pay check. In real life, politics, role playingleads instead to disaster.-RJ . Rushdoony, Chalcedon Position

Paper No. 36

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The Blumenfeld Education Letter May_1995