Education: What Ivan Reads

While conceding Russia’s megatonic output of scientists and engineers, U.S. educators are fond of a theory that Soviet schools suppress the humanities—subjects that supposedly thrive in U.S. schools. To “shatter that illusion” is a goal of English Professor Arther S. Trace Jr., member of the Russian study center at Cleveland’s John Carroll University.

This week Trace stated his case in What Ivan Knows That Johnny Doesn’t (Random House; $3.95), a comparison between Russian and U.S. non-science textbooks. He argues that humanities are “dangerously neglected” in U.S. schools and that Russian children get “vastly more thorough training” in those subjects.

Spot v. Tolstoy. The key, says Trace. is early introduction to the joys of good reading. Russian youngsters enter first grade at seven, a year later than U.S. children. But in a few weeks, using a phonics system, they can handle all sounds of their Cyrillic alphabet (Russian is more precisely phonetic than English). Bright or slow, all children then take up a standard first-grade reader with a vocabulary of 2,000 words. By comparison, one commonly used U.S. first reader. Fun with Dick and Jane* is limited to a 158-word vocabulary. Sample: “See me run,” said Sally. “See Spot run. Oh, oh! This is fun.”

In essence, the Russians shun this-is-fun in favor of solid content. In his first reader, the Russian tot is blatantly propagandized, notably in a eulogy of Lenin’s love for children. He is urged to keep clean, study hard, tell the truth, feed birds in winter, help old ladies when they fall, and take care of papa when mama is off at her job flying an airplane. But he also studies the lives of ants, bees and squirrels. He is taught how to identify six mushrooms, twelve birds and the tracks of hares, foxes and wolves. Fully one-third of his reader is unadulterated literature—poems by Pushkin, Lermontov and Nekrasov, old Russian fables and seven assorted stories and anecdotes by Leo Tolstoy, including his Russian version of Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

In second grade the Soviet student doubles his reading vocabulary to 4,000 words. In third grade he hits 8,000 words with a formidable reader of 384 pages. The paper is cheap; the prose is rich. A third-grader studies the origin of everything from rivers and steel to frogs and wind. Anatomy and medicine are introduced with an adult description of bones, muscles, lungs, heart, ear, contagious diseases and six bacteria, all illustrated. Throughout the reader are stories by first-rate authors—Chekhov, Turgenev, Gorky.

When he finishes fourth grade, with a reading vocabulary of 10,000 words, the Soviet student is ready for a systematic study of Russian literature, plus separate courses in history, geography and foreign languages. By contrast, the U.S. fourth-grader is still at work on a “basal” reader with a vocabulary of fewer than 1,800 words, “a middle-class idealization” of cardboard mommies and daddies in “a hypothetical and sterile community”—trirling stories written by obscure women with three names.

“No New Words.” The reason for such limitations is the U.S. dogma of “vocabulary control”—holding down each reader to only a few new words. The rules are often “downright exquisite,” says Trace. Widely used readers boast that “no new words” appear for 100 pages or more; the old words are endlessly repeated; the stories are inevitably dull. “Insipid, trivial, inane, pointless,” Trace calls them.

At this point. Trace’s critique meshes precisely with another new report by seven indignant American, British and Canadian reading experts. Tomorrow’s Illiterates (Little, Brown; $3.95) is edited by English Professor Charles C. Walcutt of New York City’s Queens College. He cites one series of primers as typical of “vocabulary control”: at the end of first grade, after using four books, the child learns 235 words, endlessly repeated in 7,257 words of text.

Seeking the origins of See-Spot-run, Walcutt finds them in an understandable reaction against 19th century U.S. primers. Children then gasped through sentences such as: “The multiplicity of considerations subsumed under the intransigeant prognostications of enthusiasm is considerable.” In 1838 Reformer Horace Mann protested: “More than eleven-twelfths of all children in the reading classes of our schools do not understand the meanings of the words they read.”

Y Is for Monkey. Yet the children could pronounce and spell those incomprehensible words. Using phonics, they had learned to build from letters to words. The reforms, cresting in the 1930s, played down the meaning of letters and played up the meaning of words. The result was the “look-say” and “whole-word” methods of teaching. Children were supposed to be taught first to “see” words and then break them into letters and syllables, but teachers rarely got around to carrying out the second step effectively.

All sorts of “research” was used to justify the change. The work of such experts as Arthur I. Gates of Columbia’s Teachers College seemed to prove that children recognize words by visible “clues.” For example, said Gates, the “tail” (or y) at the end of the word denotes monkey to children. Soon children were asked to recognize the “two little eyes” in moon—with logical results. Since letters meant nothing, moon turned into boon, loon or soon. Now, say critics. U.S. children are mired in a whole lexicon of reading errors—bolt for blot, bouquet for banquet, cottage for college, and scores of others.

To avoid these errors, look-say advocates were driven to “vocabulary control” in readers that focus on a few “safe” words. When this worked badly, experts invented “reading readiness” tests, which in effect blame children for being slow. As it stands, “research shows” that a child must attain a “mental age” of precisely 6½ before he is “ready” to read—even if common sense shows that many a child is dying to read at 4½. As a result, charges Critic Walcutt, 75% of U.S. youngsters do not read as well as they could, and “at least 35% of them are seriously retarded.”

Lassie v. Huck Having seen the Russian schoolboy off to a flying start. Critic Trace builds his case with a comparison of more advanced teaching of literature and history. He contrasts U.S. fifth-graders reading excerpts from Lassie Come Home with Russian fifth-graders reading Huckleberry Finn. He finds that the 45% of Russian seventh-graders who study English know more English literature than U.S. seventh-graders. He details the toughness of Russian history courses; a typical question for sixth-graders is: “What were the causes of the First Punic War?”

Have Trace and Walcutt overdrawn their cases? There will be U.S. school superintendents who say so. But many teachers are beginning to realize that the U.S. is in crying need of textbooks that shun triviality and push vocabulary growth.

* Published by Scott, Foresman and Company. Another leading series: Alice and Jerry Basic Reading Program, grades 1-6 (Row, Peterson and Company).