[HN Gopher] A 1960s schools experiment that created a new alphabet
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A 1960s schools experiment that created a new alphabet
Author : Hooke
Score : 110 points
Date : 2025-07-15 16:33 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| bbminner wrote:
| Hm, I'm not a native speaker, but I had no issues reading that
| weird script, is it supposed to be hard somehow for native
| speakers?
| crazygringo wrote:
| Nope, it's a gimmick that's dumb. It's not as effortless to
| read as proper English, but it's still immediately obvious what
| the words are.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| The difficulty is apparently in the child learning it and then
| later transitioning to standard English.
| vintermann wrote:
| As a radical spelling reform it may not have been so bad, as
| a pedagogical tool for graduating to "real" English it's not
| hard to see how it would have been a disaster.
| clickety_clack wrote:
| I guess I wrote UK English until I came to the US a decade ago
| and spell check fixes a lot of those issues for me. I could
| imagine that's something similar here where it seems the mother
| has no problem reading, but when writing she seems to confuse
| the weird spelling they taught her.
| fsckboy wrote:
| it's not hard to read for native speakers, but you have to go
| slowly, where ordinary reading is very fast. reminds me of the
| experiment that shows you can read words with all the letters
| scrambled if the first and last letter are not part of the
| scramble https://www.sciencealert.com/word-jumble-meme-first-
| last-let... I assume that works in any language? but that
| "reads" fairly quickly whereas this one here for me at least is
| a little slower
| parlortricks wrote:
| It feels like I was able to read the text at the same speed
| as normal English text.
| sheiyei wrote:
| Yeah, and it's a matter of getting used to it for most. A
| bit like when text has an accent written out.
| fn-mote wrote:
| > is it supposed to be hard somehow for native speakers?
|
| For mature readers, it is a big contrast because it requires
| "sounding out" the words instead of being able to decode them
| in chunks / a whole word at a glance.
|
| I would say it's more of a publicity stunt than anything. It
| looks kind of like Old English (maybe) and definitely isn't
| recognizable at a glance, but the fact that the letters make
| only one sound in this decoding system is a major advantage for
| beginners.
| wongarsu wrote:
| A contrast only by familiarity. I imagine the difference
| would vanish very quickly.
|
| As a system for writing English it seems superior to what we
| have now. Spelling telling you how to pronounce something is
| how most languages work. English by comparison has no
| consistent framework, requiring a lot of memorization to
| build that mapping. ITA is only a stunt in retrospect because
| it never went anywhere
| foxglacier wrote:
| Not the lower-case-omega letter which is the oo in book, and
| the ou in you.
| jsnell wrote:
| That's not my experience from the short samples in the
| article, I could get the correct meaning out of all of them
| at a glance. The only slowdown was in returning to the text
| after the initial read, to try to puzzle out the exact
| definitions for the new letters. I'm pretty sure that I could
| read English in this alphabet almost as fast as the normal
| one even with no practice.
| 0manrho wrote:
| Native speaker here (American). I can read it, it's not
| necessarily difficult but it's _much_ slower. I would not
| voluntarily read any book or long form text written in this
| script. This feels very much the same as those experiments
| where the words contain all the correct letters, and the first
| and last are in the right position, but the rest are in jumbled
| order. For example, "Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch" vs "According
| to a research" [0]. It's readable, but I hate it lol. EDIT:
| that said, I do recognize that it could be a useful tool for
| helping people that may not be native speakers or perhaps have
| some learning disability, or perhaps even a way to better
| encode text for text-to-speech uses or other accessibility
| purposes. I _personally_ do not care for it, but I 'm not
| against it.
|
| 0: https://www.sciencealert.com/word-jumble-meme-first-last-
| let...
| mock-possum wrote:
| it's a meme, in the format "If you X then you might be Y."
|
| So - "If you enjoy walking around the hardware store for no
| reason, you might be someone's dad."
|
| Kind of misapplied in this case, but I think that's the joke.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I confess, I miss some of the experimental teaching techniques
| they tried in the late 60's. Education was a surprisingly dynamic
| field it seems.
|
| In the U.S. my mom moved my sister and I into a new public school
| for what would have been my 4th grade.
|
| What an odd school it was compared to the previous public schools
| I had been to. For starters, I was not in 4th grade, I was in
| Community 5 (I assume that Kindergarten was Community 1, so they
| decided to toss the zero-based system I was used to.) I seem to
| recall they had combined 5th and 6th grade into something called
| Suite 67.
|
| The school itself was circular in construction with a sunken
| library in the center of the circle -- the wedge-shaped classes
| going radially around the library. (If it sounds like Moon Base
| from Space 1999, I suspect it's because everyone in the 70's were
| drinking the same Koolaid.)
|
| Classes were "open". While there were enough students to form two
| or more classes per grade, er, community, our community did not
| have a single teacher but a few. So you might have one teacher
| and learn reading, writing, and then later in the day another
| teacher would step in for science, math.
|
| I believe the two teachers swapped and would teach the other
| group in Community 5 -- the other group getting Math and Science
| in the early part of the day, English after.
|
| And it was described as "open" and I believe that to mean that
| the two Community 5 classes had no physical wall between them. I
| don't remember though And, yeah, I know, sounds like trying to
| watch one movie at a drive-in while another screen is showing
| something else. I believe though there was perhaps some theory
| involving osmosis or some-such.
|
| I remember clearly, now almost fifty years later, at least two of
| the science experiments we did in Community 5. They involved
| experiments with a control group, collecting data (one involving
| the effects of sunlight on bean plant growth, the other on the
| temperature preferences of isopods). They had definitely nailed
| that curriculum.
|
| It was also where I was introduced to the Metric System (that
| Reagan would shitcan some years later).
|
| When, a few years back, I went back to Overland Park, Kansas to
| try and find the school I was sad to see that it had been torn
| down and a standard rectilinear building in its place. No memory
| from the front desk staff about its wild history.
|
| So sad.
| skavi wrote:
| Wow, was reading through this with a relatively detached
| interest and had to reread a few times to overcome the whiplash
| of you naming the city in which I attended elementary, middle,
| and high school.
|
| If it's any consolation, the modern Blue Valley school district
| is still considered excellent [0]. And there are still a few
| interesting ideas being pursued. The CAPS center [1] had some
| cool things going on when I graduated in 2018.
|
| [0]:
| https://www.bluevalleyk12.org/site/default.aspx?PageType=3&M...
|
| [1]: https://bvcaps.yourcapsnetwork.org/
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Ha ha, which schools? I can list Pawnee, Apache, Comanche,
| Somerset, Meadowbrook and Shawnee Mission East (although the
| latter ones were in Prairie Village, KS).
|
| Yeah, we moved around the 'burbs a bit.
|
| Also: another experimental "Free" school in the 1970's for
| one year was P.A.C.E.R.S. in KCMO, and then a partial year at
| a Catholic School in KCMO: Saint Francis Xavier, ha ha.
| skavi wrote:
| Sunrise Point Elementary, Prairie Star Middle, and Blue
| Valley High. IIRC, SPE is a bit newer. But Blue Valley High
| has probably been there since the start of the district.
|
| btw: just noticed you're the person who wrote that color
| picker post. that was a fun read.
| skavi wrote:
| Would you mind naming which school replaced the
| experimental school you described in your original post? Or
| the name of the experimental school itself?
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Comanche Elementary was the experimental school. It is
| still there, but is not the same round building that I
| remember.
|
| I did find a number of articles about it at
| Newspapers.com. Around 1971 and 1972 there were a few
| good articles about the architecture and "Open
| Classrooms", "Team Teaching", etc. (Kansas City Star, of
| course.)
| WillAdams wrote:
| There was a similar round school in Farmville, Va. which
| afforded children within walking distance an education _and_
| local college students an easy/convenient student teacher
| position, which sadly has apparently also been demolished.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Fixing the half-arssed effort Sam Johnson is famous for is long
| overdue. Although we owe him a debt, that unnecessary B in debt
| is completely ridiculous.
|
| The lack of correlation between sound and letter is embarrassing.
|
| I wish this would have taken off (Maybe even giving us a gender
| neutral pronoun?).
|
| Sadly, we'll need a dictator like Sejong the Great to make it
| happen.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > Maybe even giving us a gender neutral pronoun?
|
| We have those. "He/him/his" _are_ gender-neutral pronouns in
| English. People simply assume they are male-only, but that isn
| 't true.
| AstralStorm wrote:
| Ambiguous pronoun/declination is not the same as neutral. We
| have the same problem in Polish.
|
| People _will_ assume the male gender even if it 's
| technically correct.
| bigDinosaur wrote:
| Curious what's wrong with 'they'?
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Yup. "They" has been accepted in major style guides and it's
| what I use. It's at times a bit limiting because there can be
| ambiguity for singular and plural but overall it's pretty
| much a non-issue.
| sheiyei wrote:
| Imagine having a language with no issues cobbling together
| significant portions of vocabulary from at least 8
| different languages, and then ending up with the same
| pronoun for plural and singular, in both the 2nd and 3rd
| persons...
| Ekaros wrote:
| Might as well go full way and adopt also we for both
| singular and plural.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| Or imagine dropping "thou" and using "you" for both
| singular and plural. Crazy!
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Outrageous! How dare things keep evolving after I'm done
| evolving?
| com2kid wrote:
| Soundspel is my personal favorite proposal, it is easy for
| existing English readers to read, I suspect only a few hours
| would be needed to come to to full speed.
|
| With most text being read on a screen now days, phones and
| computers could have a button to switch between spelling
| systems.
|
| Sadly, it'll never happen.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundSpel
| cornholio wrote:
| It's interesting ChatGPT can't produce anything close to
| SoundSpell no matter how I prompt it, it will invent its own
| system.
|
| I'm sure it can be easily be trained to with enough samples
| just like it knows any other language, but for now it seems a
| good way to know you are reading a human generated text.
| Digit-Al wrote:
| Interesting, but surely thought should be thawt instead of
| thot.
| danw1979 wrote:
| That one stood out for me too. I think there's a lot of
| pronunciation nuance that would be lost with SoundSpel.
|
| I'd distrust any top-down effort to change a language
| anyway. It belongs to the users and they'll adapt it to
| their needs the way they see fit.
| toast0 wrote:
| > The lack of correlation between sound and letter is
| embarrassing.
|
| Well, it's worse than that, because English speakers don't
| agree on how words sound.
|
| So, if we started spelling things like they sound, words would
| get misspelled (or perhaps misspelt) a lot more than now.
| There's a lot of vowel shifts from place to place ... but not
| for all instances of those vowel sounds in all words. Some
| people like to add r's that aren't there, but there's a few
| places to do it.
|
| You'd need a much tighter language community to enforce
| consistent enough pronunciation that a phonetic alphabet would
| work. And you'd be giving up centuries of printed works to do
| it.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Been thinking about this and Finnish dialects can be
| misspelled mostly inside standard writing system. I see no
| reason why words should not have multiple spellings matching
| to different pronunciations. It is kinda a thing already when
| different local words are used. So why not go entire way.
| Write how it is pronounced even if someone uses different
| pronounciation.
| danw1979 wrote:
| I think of English as being actually not a single language
| but rather dialects with many different pronunciations which
| share most of their written form. I also think this means any
| centralised effort to change how it is written will fall
| flat.
|
| We can't agree in my house how to pronounce "bath" so how
| will the entire English speaking world agree on the spelling
| of every such word with consistent meaning but differing
| pronunciation...
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| > So, if we started spelling things like they sound, words
| would get misspelled (or perhaps misspelt) a lot more than
| now. There's a lot of vowel shifts from place to place
|
| Which is how the language functioned before the printing
| press.
| eadmund wrote:
| > Maybe even giving us a gender neutral pronoun?
|
| We have one: 'it.' What we don't have is a specific indistinct-
| gender pronoun; instead, English uses 'he' (and in a very
| limited case, 'they').
| lehi wrote:
| I kept expecting this article about the ITA (Initial Teaching
| Alphabet, a Latin-based script with new glyphs for spelling words
| phonetically, now unused) to mention the IPA (International
| Phonetic Alphabet, a Latin-based script with new glyphs for
| spelling words phonetically, still widely used), but apparently
| there is no relation?
| marc_abonce wrote:
| The article doesn't explicitly mention the IPA but the
| illustration with the character set compares each character
| with its IPA equivalent.
|
| Same chart, from Wikipedia:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_Teaching_Alphabet#/med...
| mousethatroared wrote:
| I learned to read in foreigner and soon after moved to an English
| country at age 6.
|
| I was an atrocious speller until I moved back to foreign-land and
| had to take English class with my schoolmates.
|
| Learning how people mispronounce English phonetically fixed most
| of my spelling.
| leke wrote:
| I'm English and an atrocious speller until I started learning
| Finnish and learned to pronounce the English words phonetically
| in my head using the Finnish phonetic system.
| sheiyei wrote:
| That's awesome, I'm Finnish but when at school in England I
| was very quickly one of the best spellers in my class.
| mousethatroared wrote:
| I think learning to mispronounced English words is an under
| appreciated spelling technique.
| xeonmc wrote:
| So this is essentially the equivalent of teaching only hiragana
| for years and then immediately throw you into the deep end
| expecting you to suddenly know all the kanjis already, without
| any transition of gradually accumulating the mapping of morphemes
| to phonemes.
|
| It seems to me that this ITA would have been quite useful had it
| served an annotative role taught in tandem with canonical
| spellings to build the morpheme-to-phoneme mapping. Akin to kana
| rubytext for kanji in books targeted for younger learners that
| are then elided for adult readers.
| WillAdams wrote:
| There was another version of this where rather than a new
| alphabet, only the lower half of the letters were changed ---
| since text is easily read by only having access to the upper half
| of the letters, that made for a much easier transition.
| eviks wrote:
| > The issue isn't simply whether or not ITA worked - the problem
| is that no one really knows. For all its scale and ambition, the
| experiment was never followed by a national longitudinal study.
|
| Indeed, another tale of pure waste. How many of the opposite
| experiments are there? Is there at least 1 perfectly set up non-
| trivial experiment that added definitive knowledge in this
| sphere?
| noduerme wrote:
| Imagine how kids now will feel when they find out that prompting
| Claude isn't actually coding.
| n1b0m wrote:
| I did this at primary skool, not an issue, my spelling is orsum
| senorqa wrote:
| ITA looks like the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to me. I
| like that. If all English text was written in this way it'd be
| really easy to learn (at least for me). It reads like a breeze.
| tigroferoce wrote:
| I agree. As an Italian (where you read exactly what you say and
| you say exactly what you read) it was straightforward to read.
| I have always wondered why English has so many weird
| pronunciation exceptions.
| mnw21cam wrote:
| Because we nicked so many words from so many different other
| languages, and kept (to some extent) their so many different
| spellings and pronunciations.
| nkoren wrote:
| The standard joke is that English isn't actually a language:
| it's three languages stacked on top of each other wearing a
| trench coat, which go around beating up other languages and
| rifling through their pockets for loose vocabulary and spare
| grammar. This is funny because it's true.
|
| Modern Italian, on the other hand, makes a modicum of sense
| because it was explicitly constructed during the 19th-century
| unification of Italy, when somebody had the bright idea that
| if you wanted to have a nation called "Italy", you should
| also have a language called "Italian" and it should make a
| modicum of sense. This is a memo which English has somehow
| never gotten.
| egypturnash wrote:
| The monkey's paw curls a finger: "Today Donald Trump
| announced a new initiative to teach all children a new AI-
| normalized language known as Americish. All English signage
| will be replaced with Americish."
| Zambyte wrote:
| Absolutely tremendous! _rocks out on invisible accordion_
| nayuki wrote:
| > English isn't actually a language: it's three languages
| stacked on top of each other
|
| To give an example, number words are often covered 3 times
| in English - one from English (Germanic?) roots, one from
| Latin roots, and one from Greek roots. https://en.wikipedia
| .org/wiki/Numeral_prefix#Table_of_number...
| one / uni / mono two / bi / di three / ter /
| tri four / quad / tetra
|
| Other examples include: A dentist works on your teeth, a
| canine is a dog, the meat from a cow is beef, a foreword is
| a preface.
| goodcanadian wrote:
| The sibling comments are good answers. Another factor is the
| fact that written English goes back a long time. In some
| cases, pronunciation has drifted over time, but the spelling
| didn't change. The silent k's in words like knight and knife
| were not always silent, for example, but you have to go back
| to old English for them to be pronounced.
| nayuki wrote:
| Donald Knuth bucks the trend by insisting the KN to both be
| pronounced. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth
| mcphage wrote:
| Another factor is, sometimes different forms of words have
| different pronunciations (because of the phonology of
| English), but often the same spelling: compare "electric"
| where the final "c" has a hard K sound, and "electricity",
| where he same "c" has an S sound. The pronunciation change is
| predictable, but the spelling retains continuity between the
| two pronunciations. It breaks the idea of 1-to-1
| relationships between sounds and spellings, but in these
| kinds of situations, I think it's a good thing.
| 1-more wrote:
| > where you read exactly what you say and you say exactly
| what you read
|
| surely there are regional accents of Standard Italian where
| different people say the same word different ways though,
| right? Does everyone speak it the same way and save variation
| for their local dialect?
| Perenti wrote:
| I encountered this in 1968. This was at Clarinda State School, in
| grade 1. The 1A class used ITA, and 1B used proper latin
| alphabet. My best friend, Steve Irwin (yes, _that_ Steve Irwin.
| Everyone had to go to school somewhere) was in 1A. Every
| afternoon after school he'd come to my place and we'd go through
| our readers for the day. I'd read the English one to him, and
| he'd memorise it to recite (pretending to read) to his teacher
| the next day. I assume he was taught properly when he moved to
| Queensland in 1969.
|
| I can't imagine how hard it was for people less bright than
| Steve. No wonder the scheme trained illiterates.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Bright, but it sounds like he was also overcompensating. Many
| celebs, leaders in thier respective fields, get there by being
| massive good at something. Often they get that good as mental
| cover for some other self-percieved failure. The drive required
| to be the absolute best is itself rather unnatural, requiring
| some sort of trigger. Being a totally friendly extrovert seems
| a logical cover for poor reading ability.
| Hasnep wrote:
| That's a lot to read into a story about a kid memorising
| books
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| Wild. I can read this, no problem, and I can see that it is a
| clear improvement over standard letters and spelling. Latin
| letters are (quite literally) a poor match for the English
| language. They don't match the sounds required to speak English.
|
| I'm not sure if this is a valuable teaching tool, but I think it
| would be conceptually sound as a general replacement for Latin
| letters for English text. At this point, though, it's impossible
| to make such a drastic change. It would have global
| repercussions.
| throw310822 wrote:
| I think the issue is that, missing a clear correlation between
| spelling and sound, there's no unique pronunciation for words
| across countries and accents. Trivial example: data. It's
| either "dayta" or "dahta". Or privacy- pri-vuh-see or prai-vuh-
| see. You'd have to choose one.
| noosphr wrote:
| Why? We've managed to live with color and colour without
| destroying the space time continuum somehow.
| throw310822 wrote:
| Indeed, but there's not just US and UK. In northern Ireland
| house is sometimes pronounced "hoyse" (rhymes with choice).
| Time is "toyme" in Australian. Pen is "pin" in New Zealand.
| Etc.
|
| Speaking of which, it seems that the only case of spelling
| adapting to pronunciation in English is the commonly used
| spelling "me" for "my" in Irish dialects.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| > Pen is "pin" in New Zealand.
|
| I really want to hear a New Zealander quote "The pen is
| mightier than the sword".
| totetsu wrote:
| thaNGks f@ Se@rING dIs. Its aektSu@li s@'praIzINGli i:zi t@ ri:d
| dIs. b@t It maIt bi: bI'k@z aI aem f@'mIlj@ wId di aI.pi:.eI.
| o:ls@U elelemz si:m t@ du: @ di:s@nt dZab aet aUtpUtING tu:, s@U
| daet teIks @'weI d@ dIfIk@lti In le:nING t@ taIp @'gen.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| aI 'rI@li l^v daet @'proUtS der Iz 'iv@n @ 'k^st@m ,dZi:pi:'ti:
| daet d^z d@ dZab for ju
|
| @n'fortS@n@tli 'n@n @v d@ 'w@nz aI 'traId gIv j@
| ,^nk@n'dIS@n@li I'midi@t ,aIpi'eI wI'daUt In'str^kS@n aend 'n@n
| @v d@m 'aens@ 'kwes.tS@nz In ,aIpi'eI b@r aI k@n 'fIks dIs baI
| 'sImpli kri'eItING maI 'oUn ,dZi:pi'ti daet 'd@z Ig'zaektli
| daet
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ipafy/
|
| https://chatgpt.com/g/g-6878bd78e06c8191bcdf6de7a57eac52-ipa...
|
| PS: it might take some time to learn the difference between IPA
| and API but it will be worth it finally we created the spelling
| reform we've always dreamt about
| kleiba wrote:
| I briefly worked as a teacher for comp sci, math, and physics at
| a local high school. Luckily, I hardly ever had to interact with
| people higher up in the education hierarchy (DOE) but everytime I
| did, there was this attitude of "you know nothing about how to
| teach, we know everything". Like, you _have_ to use tablets in
| math class these days, what am I thinking suggesting that pen and
| paper is appropriate??
|
| The more I think about it, I can't help but think that pedagogy
| is borderline quackery. If you read articles like this (and
| that's certainly not the only one), you realize pretty quickly
| that there is little scientific basis and a lot of it is just
| plain guess work. And it all comes with this air of self-
| confidence that is really not grounded in reality.
|
| And don't get me wrong: I'm not against proposing a learning
| theory and then verifying or falsifying it empirically. But
| that's not really what's happening when you force some wild out-
| there method on a whole generation of students, only to find out
| years later that, oh, maybe that was all baloney. I mean, besides
| my foray into teaching I actually worked in academia for most of
| my career, and everytime you apply for funding for anything
| that's remotely related to user experiments, you _must_ get
| ethics clearing, and that 's not a joke. I'm amazed that new
| bogey teaching methods are so easily introduced and made
| mandatory in our school system with apparently no ethical
| considerations.
| makeitshine wrote:
| Having taught for about 15 years, your feeling that pedagogy,
| as taught in most professional development sessions, is
| quackery, is not wrong. There are so many hucksters writing
| books and doing seminars.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| Don't worry. The pushing of tablets will soon be gone! To be
| replaced by the pushing of tablets with AI. Because it is
| inevitable, so they better get used to it in every aspect of
| their educational career.
|
| I wish I could state with certainty that this post is a
| hyperbolic piece of irony.
| kleiba wrote:
| It's funny - you would think that this new generation of
| "digital natives" is already so apt with everything IT-
| related that they could use their tablets like wizards and
| give additional value to the classroom that even surprises
| their teacher!
|
| In reality, however, >90% of the high school students I
| encountered were on the level of your grandparents 20 years
| ago. Like, say, they actually have trouble finding a file
| again they saved - mostly, because they don't even have a
| concept of the file system (thanks, mobile OS's!).
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| > In reality, however, >90% of the high school students I
| encountered were on the level of your grandparents 20 years
| ago.
|
| Absolutely. Every naive mom and dad giving their kid a
| tablet to say oh he's gonna be great at computers!
|
| No. Your kid is gonna be a good _user_. To click the thing
| they're told to click, follow the path laid out for them.
| It's bad.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| If only they became good _users_. It seems they are
| becoming excellent _consumers_ instead.
| skissane wrote:
| > The more I think about it, I can't help but think that
| pedagogy is borderline quackery
|
| I had this high school computing studies teacher, I'll call her
| Dr B. She knew absolutely nothing about the subject she was
| supposed to be teaching us, but was beaming with pride as she
| told us about her PhD in education, for which she sat in on
| university-level engineering classes - she claimed she didn't
| need to understand engineering to understand how engineering
| students learn
|
| That said, once upon a time, I happened to stumble upon an
| education PhD thesis which I enjoyed reading and personally
| thought had something worthwhile to say:
| https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/10373/ - even though
| I live on the other side of the planet, its accounts of the
| personal experiences of parents resonated with some of my own
| experiences
| smingo wrote:
| There are quite a few examples of very misguided educational
| strategies.
|
| _Whole Language_ [1] failed so many students, but had
| significant funding and guru-level support for decades. _Brain
| Gym_ [2] is regarded as pseudoscience. Even _Discovery
| Learning_ has had serious detractors.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_language 2.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_Gym_International
| kleiba wrote:
| Bingo! It's exactly stuff like that that I had in mind. And I
| also pity the parents whose kids have to endure this nonsense
| instead of getting a proper education. I mean, you basically
| have no power. You give your kids to whatever the
| government's idea is of an education and all you can do is
| watch helplessly from the side.
| AlanYx wrote:
| Liljedahl's "Building Thinking Classrooms" is the current
| poster child for this. Hugely influential in educational
| circles, but inconsistent with most of the reproducible
| research in cognitive science and likely quite deleterious to
| learning.
| em-bee wrote:
| _pedagogy is borderline quackery_
|
| maria montessori developed her education methods using
| scientific experimentation with good outcomes.[0]
|
| various ways to teach have been tried and we know the results.
| it is baffling to me why the ones that work aren't applied
| more.
|
| of course not all of them are universally suitable. waldorf for
| example apparently also has decent results, but if there is one
| that i would put on the top of the list of education quackery,
| then waldorf would be it. so where do the good results come
| from? because they do one thing right: "Its educational style
| is holistic, intended to develop pupils' intellectual,
| artistic, and practical skills, with a focus on imagination and
| creativity. Individual teachers have a great deal of autonomy
| in curriculum content, teaching methods, and governance."[1],
| which is something that could be applied without basing it on
| steiners esoteric ideas.
|
| it looks like it is not just quackery that is the problem. it
| is politics, NIH, probably the unwillingness to admit that they
| are wrong. unwillingness to change. in that context it is
| surprising that ITA got even off the ground. but it is also
| wierd that apparently the reason ITA fell out of fashion was
| not because it failed on its own but because that educational
| theory turned away from phonics.[2] that's like one mistake
| cancelling out another. even more surprising is that the ita
| foundation appears to be still active.
|
| WAT?
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldorf_education
|
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_Teaching_Alphabet
| pm215 wrote:
| With that kind of "separate specialist school" setup I think
| you would also need to be careful when analysing outcomes to
| avoid confounding effects from "the parents are actively
| interested and engaged in their childrens' education, and
| have the resources to support it", which I suspect is pretty
| well correlated with good outcomes.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Don't also forget sampling effects; if you randomly assign
| children to schools that are of different sizes, the small
| schools will have higher variance and thus tend to
| represent both the best and worst items in the set.
| MarkusQ wrote:
| And if you _don't_ randomly assign, the effect is even
| stronger: students who are being well served by the
| standard/control school don't opt to change, while
| students who aren't are primed to jump as soon as the
| option is provided. So the alternative/trial school gets
| both ends of the bell curve on almost every metric (the
| main exception being athletic performance, since the
| larger school typically has more team sport options).
| jerf wrote:
| The sad thing is that this isn't even a one-off. Education has
| been repeatedly rocked by "someone had a whacky idea and now
| it's the law of the land". The original "New Math", and several
| things after it labelled "New Math". "Whole word" reading, and
| a whole zoo of related "what if we took how we've been
| successfully teaching reading and just hypothesized that
| something else might work better maybe" initiatives. The
| concept of "learning modes", which everyone believes is real
| but science strongly suggests don't exist very strongly at all.
| The solution to every educational problem being to push
| standardized testing even harder. Just over and over.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| IIRC, New Math (at least the original) had the strongest
| pilot success of the lot. However, it failed in mass adoption
| because teachers didn't want to retrain and parents threw
| fits that they could no longer drill their kids in math facts
| using half-remembered methods from their schooling.
| jerf wrote:
| I'd be intrigued to see that, at least if we're talking
| about the same New Math that was basically "Hey, let's
| teach kindergartners number theory and 'cardinality' and
| the soon-to-be-vital skill of doing math in octal so they
| can use computers". The name got tagged on to a lot of
| things over the years, and some of them have some merit,
| but I'd have a hard time believing the original New Math
| ever tested well in a fair analysis. It's a violation of
| basic developmental theory, expecting young children to
| handle levels of abstraction they won't be ready for for
| another 5-15 years to do basic concrete math.
| shayway wrote:
| Not that I disagree with your overall point, but it's worth
| noting that in this case it wasn't enforced top-down:
|
| > Even more puzzling is the way the system was rolled out. ITA
| was never adopted nationally, nor required. As Stainthorp
| explains: "At that time, there was no national curriculum - a
| headteacher could simply decide to implement it in their
| school, or a teacher in their class. There was no consistency."
| kbelder wrote:
| In C. S. Lewis' "That Hideous Strength", a character observes
| that no parent would ever let people experiment on their
| children, but they will happily send their children to an
| experimental school.
| neaden wrote:
| I mean that isn't true. Parents let people experiment on
| their children all the time it is how we test new medicines
| and such on them. My daughter was part of a clinical trial.
| On the other hand I would probably feel more cautious about
| sending them to an experimental school as that is a much
| longer time-frame to try and understand and will have a big
| impact on their social and academic life.
| loa_in_ wrote:
| People who are alive forget that there are people who know
| nothing stopping all born every day. Each thing we add to the
| "tutorial level" is going to have to be paid by the next
| generation.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| > pedagogy is borderline quackery
|
| A lot of it is, I would agree, and I think the increase in
| homeschooling is partly motivated by that belief.
|
| The basic question that needs to be asked: what is education
| _for_? What is its intended _aim_? The answer given will vary
| depending on the anthropology or vision of the human person
| that a particular culture has absorbed or that a culture has
| been organized around, though usually, I don 't think this
| question is explicitly asked. It is a dangerous question,
| because it makes a person realize that perhaps better aims
| exist.
|
| So, in capitalistic societies like ours, education has been
| reduced to what the capitalist class wants it to be, which is
| the production of cogs for the machine (and secondarily, a
| method of extracting money for what I take to be a mediocre
| education). This much is obvious. What do primary schools say
| college education is for? To get a "good job". The job is the
| primary focus of education in such a society. Test results are
| more about funneling workers into industry than helping
| students attain intellectual maturity and to gain insight into
| discerning their vocation.
|
| (This is not an endorsement of collectivism, btw. Both
| hyperindividualism and collectivism are founded on a
| fantastically wrong vision of the human person; solidarism is
| by far the best account of the proper norm.)
|
| But this is not the classical view of education whose aim was
| the formation of the person so that he can be free to be more
| fully _human_ , of which the ability to known and understand
| the truth and to reason about life and the world are central.
| Intellectual formation presupposes moral formation as well (of
| which parents are taken to be the primary and first educators).
| This realization has caused an increase of interest in
| curricula such as classical liberal education which draws from
| the trivium/quadrivium tradition.
|
| The biggest takeaway here is that we need to start asking
| fundamental questions questions again. We need to be Socratic
| again. We need to pay attention to first principles and to
| reconnect with our traditions to see what they have to say
| about them. The idea that you can do a better job by throwing
| inherited tradition overboard and starting from scratch is not
| only patently arrogant on its face, but has been demonstrated
| empirically to be disastrous.)
|
| In this case, I cannot understate the importance of asking what
| it means to be _human_. Every society, every political order,
| every culture is guided by _some_ anthropology, however
| implicit.
|
| A quote for thought:
|
| "Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all
| classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.
| Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy
| of those who merely happen to be walking about." -- G.K.
| Chesterton, Orthodoxy
| 90s_dev wrote:
| Plain guess work, and excitement, and fads, and people
| profiting from being "the experts", and in general social noise
| that overcomplicates the simplicity of life.
| akdor1154 wrote:
| I wonder if it is included in Unicode? Could the people here
| claim their native alphabet, taught to them in standard
| institutions from a western country, is not represented in
| Unicode?
| junon wrote:
| > And many letter combinations contradict one another across
| different words: think of "through", "though" and "thought".
|
| I live in Germany now but I'm American. The poem "dearest
| creature in creation" is always a fun party trick. German is
| difficult but it's a good reminder that English is, too.
|
| If you're a non-native English speaker and you can get this poem
| even 50% correct you're doing really well. Most Americans (and,
| I'd imagine, other English native speakers) would also struggle
| with it.
|
| https://www.learnenglish.de/pronunciation/pronunciationpoem....
| Digit-Al wrote:
| Soooo long; I got bored about halfway through. There was only
| one word I was not familiar with though.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| The fact it is so long, underlines the magnitude of the
| problem.
|
| English is one of THE WORST languages when it comes to
| encoding its phonemes in its alphabet.
|
| I am familiar with pretty much every word in that poem.
| Knowing the word isn't the problem. How these words are
| correctly PRONOUNCED though, that is the actual issue. And
| even I got tripped up on some of them.
| dpassens wrote:
| > Sir Isaac Pitman, the inventor of shorthand
|
| And, apparently, also the inventor of time travel--we know that
| various forms of shorthand have existed since antiquity.
| Rendello wrote:
| I had a shorthand kick and learned about the Tironian Notes
| shorthand, which last from "1st century BC - 16th century AD".
| Apparently the 7 symbol is still used in Scotland and Ireland
| today in place of "&".
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tironian_notes
| throw310822 wrote:
| I always thought the exact opposite would be helpful: don't touch
| the alphabet but instead teach a fluent phonetic system in which
| each single letter has a sound and each word can be pronounced
| exactly as it's written. Remembering the spelling of a word is as
| easy as remembering its sound in the alternative phonetic system.
| acadapter wrote:
| Phonemics is more important than phonetics for these things.
| Sometimes two sounds need to be represented with the same
| letter if they are similar and their difference is context-
| dependent.
|
| Then there's also the etymology and handling of grammatical
| endings. Polish spelling would be more difficult without "rz"
| for example, despite its two sounds already existing elsewhere
| in the spelling system.
| gavinray wrote:
| Having a language in which the exact same letter(s) make
| different sounds only based on context is absurd.
|
| Spanish, for example: everything is spelled exactly the way
| it sounds, a sane design.
| nulbyte wrote:
| The pronunciation of C in Spanish is context dependent.
| Before I or E, it shares the same sound as S. Before A, O,
| or U, the same sound as QU.
|
| Or how about G? It makes one sound before I or E, another
| before A, O, UE, or UI, and yet another before UA.
|
| Lots of folks think their language is simpler, but it's
| only because they can follow the rules so well they don't
| need to actually know them.
| bananaflag wrote:
| I think the point is that you can derive the
| pronunciation from the spelling (though not, arguably,
| the other way round).
| throw310822 wrote:
| "Context dependent" here means a different thing than it
| means in English, where the pronunciation of letters
| depends on the word they're in, without any hard rule. To
| the point of being pronounced in different ways even in
| homonyms: e.g. "tear" noun and "tear" verb.
|
| The fact that there are a few rules on how to pronounce
| combinations of letters (and even a few exceptions here
| and there) has nothing to do with the total mess that is
| English.
| acadapter wrote:
| Would it be sane to have a special letter to distinguish
| the "p" in "park" from the "p" in "spark"? In some
| languages, it's important, but these two sounds can be
| represented by the same letter in others because they don't
| "compete" for the same contexts.
|
| (the difference is aspirate vs. non-aspirate)
| nkoren wrote:
| So if you want to remember how to spell "phone", you first have
| to remember "puh-hon-eh"? I'm not sure that'd be an
| improvement. How do you even make a phonetic word out of
| something like "rough"?
|
| The problem will always be that that English has a lot more
| phonemes than it does letters, so a 1:1 mapping will never be
| possible. That said, I do think it would be a good idea to have
| a 1:1 correlation. Which is why everybody should just learn
| Esperanto instead.[1]
|
| 1: Joking.[2]
|
| 2: Well, mostly joking.
| throw310822 wrote:
| Phone: phoh-neh
|
| Rough: ro-uh-g
|
| Not that hard. Not perfect either (hs are difficult to
| pronounce) but still helpful. It could easily become a game
| for children to talk to each other in this "secret language".
| And by doing so, they would be memorising the correct
| spelling of the words.
| ntlk wrote:
| How would this account for wildly different regional accents?
| meepmorp wrote:
| Or changes over time.
| Taikonerd wrote:
| If anyone is interested in the history of spelling reform, I
| recommend _Enough Is Enuf: Our Failed Attempts to Make English
| Easier to Spell._ [0]
|
| It's light and fun -- good beach reading, if you're a word nerd.
| And it does cover the ITA, from the article.
|
| One thing I thought was funny: English spelling became more-or-
| less standardized in the years after the printing press made it
| to England in 1476. And _almost immediately_ after the spelling
| was standardized, 15th-century Englishmen started complaining
| that the new system made no sense. ( "Why is there a b in
| 'debt'?")
|
| More than 500 years later, we're still complaining ;-)
|
| [0]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0063360217/
| navark wrote:
| It's too bad that none of these reforms have succeeded. English
| has become the Lingua Franca due to the influence of the
| British Empire and American culture, along with it's ability to
| incorporate loanwords, but not because of it's spelling.
| Helping my kids learn how to read struck me by how insane
| English spelling really is.
|
| I recently found out that Theodore Roosevelt had signed an
| executive order to adopt new spelling rules from the Simplified
| Spelling Board in 1906, but backtracked when the press began
| mocking it. If it had been a better organized release it could
| have succeeded but now it's a cautionary tale.
|
| The future timeline extends out forever, if humanity is going
| to continue to primarily use an English-rooted language we need
| to make intentional improvements or we will be stuck with
| increased entropy, see the introduction of emoji's into text
| for example.
| Taikonerd wrote:
| Agreed! It's sort of perverse: the more people speak English,
| the harder it is to reform it.
| memsom wrote:
| When I was in school in the 80's, I remember seeing these books
| stacked up at the back of the classroom. There were other
| Ladybird books in English standard spelling (they were really
| common), but these were weird. The teacher just told us to ignore
| them. But weirdly, the text is really easy to read int he
| examples given. I never used or even read the ones in my youth,
| so it must just be easy for my brain to process (disclaimer, I am
| a speaker of basic Swedish and a little Norwegian, so I am used
| to reading words with odd spellings and going "oh right, that is
| X in English.")
| mc32 wrote:
| They couldn't even get the phonemes right. For them "blue rimes
| with your." I'd buy the /u/ "you're" and "blue" but not "your"
| and "blue."
| pimlottc wrote:
| I didn't think so at first, but for certain British accents,
| I could see it
| ajb wrote:
| It would be interesting to know more about why it failed. It's
| not obviously a dumb idea -it's basically Pinyin but for English,
| and that works very well for Mandarin as far as I know, which has
| a similar memorisation hump to get over.
| em-bee wrote:
| according to the wikipedia page about IPA it was connected to
| phonics and fell out of fashion because in the 70s educational
| theory turned away from phonics. so it didn't fail on its own
| but it got canceled out by another mistake.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| If you want to talk about failed attempts at teaching reading,
| the best example is in the US:
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/12/lucy-ca...
|
| https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/parents-sue-lucy-ca...
| gwbas1c wrote:
| I'm a speed-reader, and I'm able to speed read the images. Some
| words are harder than others, yet I'm still comprehending faster
| than I can "speak".
| Taikonerd wrote:
| I think the problem with the ITA, or other reform schemes, is
| that they try to change too much at once. So the new system looks
| silly and alien to existing speakers, and there's a backlash.
|
| If I were reforming English spelling, I'd take a much slower,
| more incremental approach. Make a simple change like SR1[0], that
| _doesn 't change that many words_. Smaller change; less backlash.
|
| (And even in the worst case, if the reform doesn't take, it's
| easier for the people who learned it to re-learn "classic
| English" spelling.)
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SR1
| npteljes wrote:
| I would have loved this growing up! The proposed spellings make
| so much more sense.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| It made so much sense, what a great idea. This was literally
| debugging English.
| tianqi wrote:
| The story told in this article shocked me, even sending shivers
| down my spine. It was the first time I learned that such things
| had also occurred in the English-speaking world. China carried
| out its second round of character simplification in 1977[1],
| which has left many Chinese people, including my grandmother,
| unable to read characters normally to this day. They continue to
| write those weird "second simplified" in their lives. I always
| believed this to be one of the crime of the Bolsheviks destroying
| Chinese culture, and I never imagined such a thing could happen
| in the English-speaking world.
|
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_round_of_simplified_Chi..
| .
| xenadu02 wrote:
| We should consider scale in this scenario. What the Chinese did
| affected millions of people. This story is about a relative
| handful of kids.
|
| I also find it unfortunate that they bothered with this
| nonsense. If you're going to do anything just standardize the
| existing spellings with existing letters. Give long i a
| standard spelling and be done with it.
| sergeykish wrote:
| English is my third language, first two use phonetic alphabet.
| Blaming bad spelling on ITA is like German, Spanish speakers
| blaming own languages.
|
| English spelling is a facade. Real English can be seen when
| sentences written in IPA. Having visual confirmation of sound
| feels refreshing.
|
| ITA "lief ov a fisherman" is neither phonetic nor English. It
| replaced broken system with another broken system.
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