My eyes went to a full stop when I read this line: "Yet the only time in the recorded history of this planet that a culture has had universal, proficient literacy was in the United States from the 1600s to the 1950s. The vast majority of Americans from this era could comprehend a very broad range of vocabulary" (Page 57, Location 888)
For a book deeply focused on learning history, drawing from many sources, and applying logic to make deductions the sweeping inaccuracy of this, yet another uncited statistic, was confounding. I was left to wonder what she was really saying. Is Leigh Bortins actually discounting entire civilizations outside of modern North America as if they didn't exist?
Or, perhaps there was a clue to what she was implying in her use of the word "American". Perhaps, according to Ms. Bortins, only white, land-owning men are really Americans. Since we know that the majority of Native Americans, slaves, indentured servants, and physically and mentally handicapped who were either kept at home or sent to institutions, were denied an education from the 1600s to the 1950s and thus could not be literate...are we to deduce they were discounted when considering literacy rates because they weren't truly American in this author's eyes?
The author opens with a scathing condemnation of public schools that leads the reader to believe all public school teachers and administrators began teaching in a way that harms their students in the 1950s. Yet, she provides no reasonable explanation for why American education has undergone the changes that, supposedly, caused this harm.
So I will provide it here. The author continually refers to the 1950s as the watershed decade when public education began to decline. What happened in the 1950s? Desegregation. 1954 was Brown v. Board of Education. From the 1950s through to 1975, when the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (the advent of special education) was passed, our public schools underwent a sweeping reform in whom they admitted through their doors. Prior to the 1950s if a kid was too difficult, too odd looking, too poor, or too non-white, a principal could deny that child a place in the classroom. Ms. Bortins may mourn the passing of the good old days of 1950 and before when the riff raff were kept out of school but I do not.
I am deeply proud to be a public school special education teacher. I am deeply proud to work within a system that embraces the difficult and imperfect and gives them the same respect and care we give to the easy kids. This author repeatedly exhorts parents not to shy away from the difficult when teaching their own child and yet she begins her explanation of how to classically educate kids with a clear mandate to first remove all the imperfect and, according to her, "non-American" kids from the classroom.
Whenever someone claims they've created a utopia it is important to look closely and see whom they had to push aside in order to create their perfect space.
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