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Here’s Steven Pinker’s fascinating lecture The Stuff of Thought. He explains how the way we use language sheds light onto how we think and feel. In particular, he explains why certain kinds of words evoke such strong emotions that you can’t say them on television or over the radio.

Continue reading ““Dirty Words” and Tourette Syndrome”

Many Americans believe that apes can be taught to speak in sign language. In the movie the Rise of the Planet of the Apes, an orangutan that had been a “circus ape” could converse in American Sign Language, even though he had not yet undergone the intelligence-boosting transformation. In reality, Homo sapiensis the only living species that can really talk, whether in an oral language or in ASL. You can train some animals, such as apes or parrots, to give certain kinds of gestures or vocalizations in response to certain prompts. Yet unlike practically any human toddler, apes and parrots can never hold real conversations. Why can children converse whereas chimpanzees and orangutans and parrots cannot? It all boils down to grammar. Human beings can grasp it, and other animals cannot.

Continue reading “To Promote Reason, Teach Grammar”

Stephen L. Carter recently wrote an article titled It Is to Be Hoped That “Hopefully” Will Fade Away. Unfortunately, the article reveals that Professor Carter doesn’t understand what sentence adverbs are or what they do. Nor does he understand what the mission of the Oxford English Dictionary has always been.
Continue reading “Hopefully, Grammar Schools Will Go Back to Teaching Grammar”

Several years ago, I read the following sentence in a newspaper article: “She decided to stop having sex after going to church.” I think that the writer meant that the woman had taken a vow of chastity for religious reasons, but the sentence made me think of this song.

In other words, the sentence made it sound as if the woman might still be sexually active but has decided to make Sunday her day of rest.
Continue reading “She Stopped Having Sex After Going to Church”

European schools do a great job of teaching foreign languages. In contrast, hardly any American high school graduates can use a foreign language, unless they learned it at home. This shocking lack of foreign language skills results from two problems. One is that American schools generally do not start teaching foreign languages until after the children have gone through puberty, when it suddenly becomes harder to learn new languages. The second is that American schools have been neglecting the teaching of English grammar.

Continue reading “If You Don’t Know English Grammar, You’ll Have Trouble Learning Foreign Languages”

Here’s a clip from the Three Stooges’ 1938 movie Violent Is the Word for Curly. 
 

The fact that Moe was supposedly teaching phonics to college students is particularly silly. Most of the people who were entering college in the late 1930s would have mastered phonics in the first few months of first grade.

Continue reading “The Three Stooges Do Phonics!”

Gosh, I wish this were a hoax. Here’s one of the planks in the Republican Party of Texas’s 2012 campaign platform:

Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority. 

If your beliefs can’t withstand being subjected to higher order thinking, they’re probably stupid. And if a child’s fixed beliefs are never challenged, he or she may remain childish for life.

Unfortunately, this anti-education activism can cause damage throughout the entire country. Texas buys a lot of textbooks. To appeal to the Texans, textbook publishers may be tempted to dumb down the textbooks to be used throughout the country.

A few years ago, I met a woman who said that she had been a special education teacher in a poor urban area. She told me that she had observed a large number of children who had a bizarre learning disability. According to her, the children couldn’t associate what they saw on a vertical surface, such as the chalkboard, with what they saw on a horizontal surface, such as the top of their desk. As a result, they couldn’t copy what was on the chalkboard into their notebooks. She said that this must have been due to some previously unknown brain disease.

She was excited about this discovery, but it sounded dubious to me. I asked what I thought was an obvious question, “Did anyone check their vision?”
Continue reading “Some Kids Can’t See Well, But Some Grownups Lack Vision”