On Learning to Read: The Child's Fascination with Meaning
Turner, John R.
Both Dylan Thomas and Richard Blackmur, a brilliant literary critic and good minor poet, drank themselves rapidly into the next world. Even among writers, this represents high attrition....
...If the term Lost Generation applies to any group of young writers, it is surely to those described by Eileen Simpson...
...After all, one of the shibboleths of educational psychology is that process is more important than product...
...What are we to do when the experts on reading d o n ' t know what language and l i t e r a t u r e are...
...My admiration for Bruno Bettelheim is too great...
...The modern poet was the man who wrote, he said, with the culture of Europe in his bones-"from Homer to the present"--and Eliot meant it...
...Berryman, Lowell, and the rest were frequently powerful writers, but in the circumstances in which they worked it was not enough to write very well...
...Eliot's authority as a poet was reinforced by his almost frighteningly intelligent literary criticism...
...Whereupon the student will invariably go back and read the line correctly, thus showing that he had recognized the word from the beginning...
...by 1962, it had shrunk to 153...
...The two best writers in Eileen Simpson's memoir, Berryman and Lowell, did not aspire to--did they even grasp?--the Epic Imagination...
...This book is a sad example of my point...
...One learns to read only by reading, which means coming to grips with meaningful stories...
...Their intramural vying, Bell says, "did contribute to the appearance of vacillating, indecisive leadership...
...Of Eliot, writes Donald Hall in Remembering Poets: "No one since has embodied, or seemed to embody, such authority...
...in-waiting . . . people permanently entrenched in Washington," whom he "installed in the middle-level posts at the White House and some cabinet departments," says Bell...
...It is co-authored by a woman whose dissertation was titled " F a c i l i t a t i e n of Conservation in Atypical Learners...
...The authors give the impression that most misreadings are of this sort...
...They employed what might be called the Epic Imagination...
...The readers of o t h e r major publishers have shown a similar decline...
...Ostrow William Morrow and Co...
...It is that reading is not merely a m a t t e r of decoding words...
...But in comparison with Ehot, Yeats, and the other poetic forebears, it all seems lacking in additional dimension...
...But why did all his friends also destroy themselves...
...The towering poetic fathers had placed a virtually unbearable burden upon these sons, and when poetry renewed itself in the sixties, it had to ignore Eliot and Yeats and move in an entirely new direction...
...My d a u g h t e r Elizabeth, for example, who has j u s t completed the f i r s t grade, often tries to read materials written for adults, and though she misses much of what a text says, she usually understands enough to find meaning in it...
...Yeats wrote of Ireland and Maude Gonne, but played it in worldhistorical terms: Maude, thus, was also Helen of Troy...
...A clock for me...
...All that's required is that the teacher recognize the possibility of unconscious response and acknowledge its legitimacy...
...In one of the rare passages that approaches eloquence, Bettelheim says: What is required for a child to be eager to learn to read is not knowledge about reading's practical usefulness, but a fervent belief that being able to read will open him to a world of wonderful experiences, permit him to shed his ignorance, understand the world, and become master of his fate...
...The great modernists, Eliot, Yeats, Joyce, Pound, and the rest, were absolutely dominant...
...Sounding loud anti-Washington themes, Jimmy Carter annihilated every rival from his party's congressional ranks and promised a revolution among the power pyramids along the Potomac...
...You cannot teach a child to read by drilling him on word-lists or by pushing him through a series of primers designed sequentially to enhance his word power...
...The late Lionel Trilling used to argue that v.;riters are no crazier than bank presidents, the only difference being that they tell you all about it...
...and even more to the point that Yeats lived to be 74 and T.S...
...Wordsworth was pondering the early deaths of Chatterton and Burns, but it is very much to the point that Wordsworth himself lived to be eighty...
...To the White House's four major power centers--the Domestic Policy Staff, Office of Management and Budget, the Counsellor to the President, and National Security Council-Carter added a fifth: the Mondale Vice Presidential office and staff...
...Eliot 77...
...If reading is not its own reward, it will never assume much importance in a person's life...
...I wonder...
...Bloomington, Indiana II...
...I have been astounded at what she gets from articles in the Columbia Encyclopedia, a book she has begun to consult regularly...
...I would guess that Berryman's poetry is overdue for reassessment and sustained critical attention...
...From my observation, virtually all textbooks, from kindergarten to graduate school, are insipid and ought to be ditched...
...Nonetheless, Bell's ultimate judgment must be regarded as harsh: Carter failed at governing because the very character of exquisitely sensitive political pragmatist and symbolist that carried him to campaign victory rendered him incapable of steadfast and inspiring leadership as chief executive...
...The evidence the authors adThere opportun, ity...
...My reservation concerns the impact the r e a d e r s have...
...Its intention is to connect America to the English tradition, and in particular to the seventeenthcentury English tradition so powerfully evoked by Eliot in both his poetry and criticism...
...I t is my thesis that a bureaucracy out of control was a chief contributor to President Carter's failure to govern as the people would have preferred," he declares...
...A demand of this sort, and it was made in other terms by Yeats, Pound, andJoyce, made final literary success seem almost out of reach...
...With such works as The Informed Heart, The Uses of Enchantment, and the above-mentioned essay of Freud, he has earned the gratitude of those who, to use the terminology of one of his earlier writings, are determined to develop their consciousness of freedom...
...And then, just a couple pages later: "There is reason to believe that only those for whom reading was early endowed with some visionary qualities and magic meaning become literate...
...rity only by the quality of the few ideas it encompasses, one is bound to wonder what went wrong...
...I'm convinced that he's right, and that for the child who has a positive attitude toward reading the appropriate simplicity of reading m a t t e r becomes relatively unimportant...
...On Learning to Read has t h r e e major themes...
...I hope readers will remember him for his nobler books and pass over this misfire quickly, recalling it only for the good thoughts it so inadequately espouses...
...We thus come to the third thesis, that the primers, or readers, used in the early grades in American schools are sappy and work mainly to insult the s t u d e n t s they are supposed to teach...
...We hear about their marriages and mistresses, their mothers and fathers, their adventures and their faults, their urges and their drinks, their literary views, and their political views--the latter usually ridiculous...
...Now John Berryman is a very interesting literary figure, and my own sense is that he remains vastly underrated...
...Books intended to instruct r a t h e r than to express truths t h e i r authors find important are flattened by their conception and appeal only to people who d o n ' t know what language is...
...But, then, I don't guess the experts ever know...
...I remember how dumbfounded I was at the Democratic National Convention in July 1976 in New York when Carter announced his choice of Mondale as veep...
...Not only are they hampered by television and by parents who rush around too much to take the time to sit down and read to them, they are taught by people who cannot imagine the necessary unity of form and substance in genuine literature...
...same year, not getting it...
...Berryman and Lowell can write as welt as Eliot or Yeats, but the drama takes place in a limited spiritual context...
...He 34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1982 has been a notable champion of freedom in an age when it has been fearfully assaulted by the forces of mass culture...
...13.50 Eugene H. Methvin I n 1976a virtual unknown whose unlikely qualification was one term as governor of Georgia swept through the presidential caucuses and primaries to capture the Democratic nomination and the White House...
...They had scored their own triumphs against a weakened Romantic tradition, and, in Pound's phrase, they had made it new...
...ON LEARNING TO READ: THE CHILD'S FASCINATION WITH MEANING Bruno Bettelheim and Karen Zelan / Alfred A. Knopf/$13.95 John R. Turner When a famous child psychologist, a man with a long list of distinguished titles to his credit, joins with an experienced associate to write on a subject as intrinsically exciting as teaching children to read, the result ought to be a fascinating book...
...Both Pound and Joyce built upon Homer...
...If, for example, a child reads "mild" when the page says "wild," it's probably not that he can't tell the d i f f e r e n c e between an "m" and a " w , " but that he has been frightened by the idea of wildness and has creatively a l t e r e d the text to make it more comfortable...
...For t h e o r i s t s of the psychoanalytic persuasion, this means that the student's unconscious response to the text cannot be neglected...
...His long poem "Homage to Mistress Bradstreet," concerning the seventeenth-century American poet Anne Bradstreet, seems to me a major work...
...Most children in the f i r s t grade have a vocabulary of about 4,000 words, and they engage in fairly sophisticated conversations at home and on the playground...
...Maybe...
...Indeed, he almost sounds like a rip-roaring Reaganite...
...Yet, when they sit down in their reading groups, they confront a mother who on receiving a gift says, "A clock...
...In his portion of the preface, Bruno Bettelheim says that he wrote five chapters of On Learning to Read, whereas the other eight were "based on the work of the entire staff and were written by both authors...
...TAKING CARE OF THE LAW Griftin B. Bell, with RonaldJ...
...Simpson's title comes from Wordsworth's great poem "Resolution and Independence' ': We poets in our youth begin in gladness But thereof comes in the end despon dency and madness...
...My point is not that first-graders should be set to reading encyclopedias, but that when the incentive is sufficient a child will learn more from readings that are excitingly difficult than from empty stories that have nothing to recommend them save a vocabularly designed for his grade level...
...I wish it were true that our deficiencies in language could be rectified by simply changing a few schoolbooks...
...Just listen: Carter was ambushed by a "McGovern-Kennedy-Nader governmentEugene H. Methvin works in Washington D.C...
...Like a hardnosed prosecutor, Bell walks straight into the ring and hits 'em in the snoot with a first chapter entitled "What Went Wrong...
...In Carter's last year the prime interest rate exceeded the President's popularity, which sank even lower in the polls than Nixon's at the time of his resignation and almost bumped into the inflation rate on the way down...
...The drama became Spenglerian and cosmic...
...The beleaguered t e a c h e r will find little advice from Bettelheim and Zelan about what to do in such instances...
...If so, we can honor the motive without being overly respectful of the result...
...Mary's College of Maryland and author of the column "An Idea of Freedom...
...This is something I like...
...It tries to defend the magic of reading in a turgid, repetitious prose redolent of the green walls of edpsych labs...
...The authors wisely caution, however, that elementary schoolteachers have neither the time nor the knowledge to turn reading lessons into psychological forays...
...Eileen Simpson, who is now a psychotherapist, perhaps as a direct result of her marriage to Berryman, thinks Berryman had suicide as a psychic legacy from his suicide father, and no doubt there is truth in that view...
...But surely there must be occasions when a child simply d o e s n ' t know what a word means...
...But after that, in a surprising metamorphosis, Berryman in his "Dream Songs" wrote in the tradition not of Eliot but of Whitman, structuring his work brilliantly on the pattern of the black minstrel show...
...When you read this volume, representing his entire career, the impression you get is of a major literary talent yet also of an achievement in which the parts are more interesting than the whole...
...All of them were tough, intelligent, and very major poets, and during the forties and fifties Eliot and Yeats were at the pinnacle of reputation and influence...
...However, I can't end this review on a disparaging note...
...Four years later, Carter became the first elected incumbent to lose the White House since the Depressionambushed Hoover...
...Eliot certainly writes about his private struggles, griefs, and triumphs, but he projects it all in Dantean terms, from Prufrockian damnation through Waste Land Purgatory and on to salvation and the moment in-and-out.of-time...
...Although the five for which Bettelhelm takes sole responsibility are THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1982 33 b e t t e r than the others, they are so inferior to what readers have come to expect from him one is led to suspect that the enervating hand of educational committeeism has intruded even into the master's private preserve...
...Nothing other than the immediacy of an interesting story will keep a child working at the bewildering array of intellectual tasks required to become a mature reader...
...n Mnerlca...
...The reason he can now face up to the wildness is that someone has acknowledged the logic of his fear and his reaction to it, thereby allowing him to integrate it into his conscious personality...
...For instance, in 1920, the number of words in the first grade reader of the Scott, Foresman series was 425...
...Whatever other verdict history delivers upon Carter, nothing can detract from that glittering achievement as the epic "long march" of American political history...
...The teacher can then demonstrate both respect for accuracy and understanding of w h a t ' s going on in the c h i l d ' s mind by saying something like, "It would be nice if tigers were mild, wouldn't it...
...Bell gingerly refrains from saying that the ringmaster failed to crack the whip, for it is clear he maintains affection and admiration for Carter despite bruises and disappointment...
...It is fatuous to tell a six-year-old that he should persist in his learning so that he can do well in the third grade or get a good job upon graduation from high school...
...Perhaps this book is no more than the generous attempt of a renowned thinker to spread some of his fame to a less well-known colleague...
...as a senior editor of Reader's Digest...
...IIduee seems incontrovertible...
...In the process, Bell reveals himself to be a conservative idealist who wandered for three years in the Potomac swamplands with a bevy of pragmatists, leftists, and careerists--and he now sounds like an angry but wiser Amos come out of the wilderness...
...How could a man who had won the nomination by defeating the Democratic/Washington THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1982 35...
...The truth is that the ideas presented h e r e do not deserve booklength development, but would be better served by a substantial essay, something similar to B e t t e l h e i m ' s recent article in the New Yorker about the English translations of Freud, which is as brilliant a piece of periodical literature as one is likely to find...
...The first, repeated incessantly, tiresomely, tediously, is that the reading teacher ought to engage not just the intellect of the student but rather his whole personality...
...When instead it turns out to be a work saved from dog-dead mediocJohn R. Turner is an administrative officer at St...
...The great moderns also used a trick --and I hope the word does not seem irreverent--that eluded Berryman, Lowell, Schwartz, and the others...
...but I have my doubts...
...We are not told why...
...But Berryman and his friends had the great modernists looming above them...
...children know that real mothers don't say dopey things like that, and they can't be expected to take much interest in fictional mothers who do...
...Now comes the second (after Joseph Califano's) of the Carter Administration memoirs, Taking Care of the Law, by former Attorney General Griffin B. Bell...
...This is something I want...
...The first question concerning a jointly authored book is who really wrote it...
...In 1976, Lowell published his Selected Poems, a bid, I would guess, for a Nobel Prize...
...He died the...
...The second thesis is more important and makes the book worthwhile despite its flav~s...
...Note that verb: contribute...
...My question is not whether the primers are as vapid as Bettelheim and Zelan say they are...
...In the end, it was kowtowing to single interest groups to hold their loyalty for the next election that prevented him from appearing to have a coherent Presidency," Bell concludes...
...But it seems to me that the c h i l d r e n ' s deepest problem is that they are being brought up in a culture hostile to the best uses of language...
...Bettelheim and Zelan seem to believe that the primers are the main source of a child's learning, and are responsible for the terrible problems some children have in mastering the written word...
...Berryman's poem is a superb piece of writing...
...Sarkes Tarzian Inc...
Vol. 15 • September 1982 • No. 9
