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18
These changes in school methods were the results
of an educational revolution some thirty years ago.
Psychological research showed that in learning to read,
words were recognised by the letter-shape of the whole
word, by association with pictures, or by the sounds
of the letters. A child could not logically recite
Jay..ay.. en..e..tee and arrive at Janet. The new
method gradually was adopted in schools, but parents
were left ignorant of the change.
Before they have really grasped the current
methods, a new revolution is upon them. Further
educational research under the stimulus of necessity,
surnamed expediency, has produced a new reading method
which should speed up the intial processes, and a new
approach to mathematics which prepare children for the
technical know how needed in the computer age. Soon
parents will find that first reading books have an
augmented alphabet no longer twentysix letters, but
with extra strange letter like symbols. Books they
buy for their children will not have the same printed
look as school books. Sum books as used in school
will seem to be dealing in fields formerly considered
as geometry and algebra. These new methods seem to be
soundly based. But parents may find an even wider gap
between their educational language and that which the
child will meet in school.
So parents are likely to be more anxious, more
insecure, where their children's primary education is
concerned. Surely this prospect calls for preventive
action on the part of all who are responsible for or
interested in the stable development of children within
a secure family environment. Should not the parents
and all relevant adults, outside the scholastic world,
be given some insight into the changing educational
methods, so they can to some extent share and comprehend
the learning experiences of their children? If we still
hold that the family is the best social unit in which a
child should grow up, it should be the aim of research,
administration, and education as well as medicine to
preserve it on as many levels as possible, and not to
drive the educational wedge even deeper between parents
and children. To maintain or restore family security,
one step should surely be to explain new (and not so
new) teaching methods to parents. How?"