Asian Higher Education Leaders Offer Advice to Break the Bamboo Ceiling
When Dr. Ratna Naik was offered the job of dean of physics at Wayne State University, she was reluctant to accept.
2 Responses to “Asian Higher Education Leaders Offer Advice to Break the Bamboo Ceiling”
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May 5th, 2008 at 3:53 pm
HERE FOLLOWS A BRIEF ESSAY ON A VITAL, THOUGH JOURNALISTICALLY TABOO SUJECT:
I have set up a free Internet listserv and invited 40 kindergarten teachers to join it in order to explore classroom experiences in testing the thesis that all kindergarten students, irrespective of ethnicity or socioeconomic status, will learn to read well before they enter first-grade. If you would like to monitor the message traffic on this listserv, I believe you will wind up having a very newsworthy story. To join the group, simply send any message to k1writing-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
It seems ironic to me that lay people I talk to seem to have no trouble at all understanding that teaching five-year-olds to write would naturally lead to their learning to read. It is only with people who “have studied literacy” that won’t accept what I’m saying, or have any interest in doing the simple observations that would prove or disprove this idea, which Maria Montessori discovered about one hundred years ago.
I had thought the reason for their reluctance was simply that the “conventional wisdom” of today’s educators and school psychologists does not agree with this idea. Instead, they read that the answer lies in “learning to break the code”, and “overcoming inborn learning disabilities”.
However, since Barack Obama’s speech on Tuesday, I have come up with another theory to supplement the fact that educators do not want to examine the relationship of teaching kindergartners fluency in printing and their learning to read spontaneously.
The fact is that in order to show that all kindergarten kids can learn to print fluently, and therefore can easily learn to read (showing that conditions like “dyslexia” and “specific learning disabilities”, as well as “cognitive deficits” and “central auditory processing disorder” actually do not even exist), one would in effect be doing a study to test another idea which is completely taboo. This helps explain why the reading gurus don’t want to “go there”.
Because observing whether all minority and disadvantaged children can or cannot learn to read and print fluently early in life is tantamount to doing a study to see in African-American children actually are culturally and/or genetically inferior to white children.
True, if it turns out that ALL kids can learn to read and write in kindergarten, irrespective of race, ethnicity or socioeconomic status, it will prove that the Declaration of Independence is actually correct, and all men are, indeed, “born equal”.
But if it turns out otherwise, and reading and scholastic problems persist even in racial-minority children who are given oodles of printing practice, then it will turn out that certain groups of kids actually are inferior, and that Diane Ravitch was correct in writing, a few years ago, that “if this is correct, then democracy is wrong.”
It is now clearer than ever why education professors, school psychologists, education administrators and journalists do not want to learn the truth about the failure of American schools. It just is too politically incorrect.
essay by Bob Rose, MD (retired), Jasper, Georgia; rovarose@aol.com
May 6th, 2008 at 9:07 pm
In the race for “diversity” Asians are often overlooked just because they don’t need any special help. Ironically, the best way for Asians to break the “bamboo ceiling” is to stop doing so well. Only then will affirmative action come to their aid.