Times Colonist Letter
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Re: "Lagging literacy hurts us," opinion, Sept. 9.
Frank McKenna puts his finger squarely on one of Canada's greatest dirty little secrets: We are producing a generation of functional illiterates.
What he does not deal with is the other side of this educational failure, that we are producing a generation of kids who lack the ability to think clearly enough to know what it is they want to say or write.
No amount of spelling bees, dictation, grammar, spelling or punctuation is going to be of the slightest use to kids who cannot think logically, draw conclusions based on evidence and express themselves in ways that can be understood by others.
Until we are a society that understands what it is to assimilate new information, integrate it with what we already know, and test it against objective reality, we are likely to continue down the road of feel-good, fuzzy thinking because we don't know what else to do.
When kids know what it is they want to say and have confidence that it really means something, they will want to find ways to say and write it.
Only then will we be able to claim we have provided them with an education.
Tom Masters, Chemainus.
