"And what we have now are English professors saying that, you know, Taylor Swift is as good as Mary Shelley."

"Q: 'So I want to ask you about Philistines and how Philistines have taken over the culture. I think the phrase you used is ‘Philistine supremacy’?'

"A: 'That's right. A lot of the time, when we talk about Philistines, we mean, oh, that awful person I know who doesn't appreciate the high arts. And it's a kind of snob thing. I'm not interested in that. Everyone's a Philistine, right? I'm a Philistine. You're a Philistine.

"'The really important thing is whether the literary elite are Philistines. And what we have now are English professors saying that, you know, Taylor Swift is as good as Mary Shelley. And the guy who runs the New York Times book review section hasn't read Middlemarch and doesn't think it's a problem. And there are just so many examples like that—that sort of suggest that the elite tier has kind of given up on being elites in a way.

"'I think part of it is we had what was called prestige TV, and people wanted to write about that and talk about that.'

"Q: 'Let me play Devil’s Advocate for a moment and say, no, 'Succession' is really good. The writing is very interesting. The cinematography adds a new layer to its presentation. The storytelling's good. It gives you room to explore various themes in a way that a play doesn’t because of its runtime and multi-season arc. Tell me why that’s crazy.'

"A: 'There are two questions here. Is Succession good? And is Succession the sort of thing that merits the cultural elite giving it the kind of attention that they have? And those are separate questions.

"'Maybe Succession is good. I neither know nor care. I found it boring. I couldn't watch very much of it. Personally, I think the cinematography is hugely derivative. ... But should we be talking about it in partnership with King Lear? Should we be devoting the kind of space and the kind of critical attention that we give to it, that we also give to the great works of fiction and drama? That’s obviously a no. Even the advocates can't really make a serious case for it. And, you know, King Lear is 400 years old at this point and is acknowledged as one of the great masterpieces of the West. No one's printing out the Succession scripts and doing a close reading. ...'

"Q: 'What would you do specifically about Shakespeare?'

"A: 'So the first thing I would say is, you’re not at school and you’re not that person anymore. And there are a lot of things you did and didn’t like at school that are no longer relevant. So just move on. Put that to one side. That’s over. Shakespeare’s the best. People get a little fussy about, can we say the best, and can we have rankings? Whatever. Yes, he’s the best. He’s the heart of the English canon. He’s the best reading experience you can have. You owe it to yourself to see or read some Shakespeare in the way that you would travel to see amazing landscapes, amazing buildings, have the best food of the world, hear the best music of the world. No one thinks it’s crazy to jump on a plane for eight hours to go and do something incredible on the other side of the world. But spending three hours with this book is too scary?'"

~ from an interview with Henry Oliver on developing literary taste in an age of TV binge-watching and dumbed-down mass culture: 'How to Be a Serious Reader'

The dawn of the post-literate society (and the end of civilisation?)

"If you’ve ... been concerned with the decline of reading as a leisure activity, or you’re wondering what happens if a culture abandons literacy, this is a conversation for you. ... ranging from the rise and fall of literacy, the causes behind it ..., and what this could mean for politics. ...

"[S]tatistics, which show pretty consistently—... and virtually everywhere—that reading is in quite severe decline. ... [A] third of UK adults have given up reading for pleasure. ... UK reports shocking and dispiriting falls in children reading for pleasure. Researchers .... found a 40% drop in reading for pleasure in the last 20 years in America. [A]n OECD report at the end of last year found rates of literacy were falling or stagnating across the developed world ...[P]ublishing’s been dying for 100 years. But ... even college graduates have by and large abandoned reading for pleasure after they leave university. ... And the most talented and the most ambitious students [themselves] now read almost the same as the least talented students who have often not really read that much. ...

"[I]f we were to abandon literacy, you might expect some devastating consequences, or at least the world would be quite different than the world we’ve become used to living in, especially in the last 500 years when literacy became a widespread phenomenon. ... if writing transforms consciousness, how does television or broadcast transform consciousness? What do we lose when we move towards rapidity and breadth over slowness and depth?"

~ from an interview with Jared Henderson and James Marriot on 'The Post-Literate Society'

RELATED: 1. Marriot's post on The dawn of the post-literate society ...

 

RELATED: 2. Conversely, author Jonathan Rose reflects 20 years later on his book, first published in 2001, uncovering which books people read, how they educated themselves, and what they knew; from the preindustrial era to the twentieth century:

'If I today had a chance to rewrite [my book] The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes ["the classic book about auto-didacticism, especially in the UK"], would I revise anything? I have changed my mind about one important issue. In 2001 I assumed that the autodidact tradition died out after 1945, but it is today very much alive and kicking. Twenty-first century book clubs – untold thousands of them in the UK and US – are the successors to the nineteenth-century 'mutual improvement societies.' These are seminars without professors, where students democratically select their readings and educate each other.

"The Internet is, for all its flaws, the greatest machine for self-education ever invented, and it does far more good than harm. The fact that the powerful and wealthy want to control and censor it is a testimonial to its immeasurable social value. When economic inequality is breaking all records, when the media is concentrated in ever fewer hands and deeply complicit with corporations and governments, when universities create vast bureaucracies devoted to shutting down debate, when Western liberals have abandoned liberalism, online discussion groups and websites must be preserved as islands of free thought and individual self-direction."

 

Free the children! They have nothing to lose but their illiteracy, and their indoctrination.

Cartoon by Nick Kim

I'm looking for the right word to describe my feeling when I read this op-ed, from the NZ Initiative's Dr Michael Johnson.

He writes:

For two decades, New Zealand’s school education system has been in a death spiral.
    In 2007, the Ministry of Education adopted a curriculum bereft of knowledge. A few years earlier it had implemented NCEA, an unorthodox ‘standards-based’ approach to school qualifications. NCEA encourages fragmented teaching and rewards superficial learning. 

    Around the same time, Teachers Colleges were absorbed by the universities. The universities’ initial teacher education (ITE) programmes do not prepare new teachers well for the profession. Trainees have too little classroom experience during their training. The quality of the professional mentoring they receive is highly variable. The coursework focusses on the wrong things.
    Data, both domestic and international, demonstrate the dismal consequences. Our young people are less literate and numerate, and generally less knowledgeable, than they were 20 years ago. 

That all sounds all too sadly correct, except .... what's this about twenty years ago? The problem began loooong before that. Where was Dr Johnson that he didn't notice?

In 2005, the Labour department here found that more than half-a-million New Zealand adults have inadequate literacy and numeracy skills! Half a million!

In a briefing to incoming ministers [reported the old 'Dom Post' back in November 2005], the department said though the latest adult literacy and numeracy survey was nearly a decade old, 18 per cent – or 530,000 adults – had "very low" competencies. Living standards would slow in the next decade unless "skills and adaptability" of the existing workforce improved.

They didn't.

Things got even worse. Much worse: the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) reckons that around 48% of New Zealand adults have low literacy skills — forty-eight percent! — skills, while 50% have low numeracy skills. These rates are not just "higher than the OECD average," they are a complete fricking disaster.

Nothing has been done to arrest this. But the trajectory was set long ago, condemning several generations to functional illiteracy and innumeracy.

But there's one thing that hasn't declined: the amount of indoctrination in the classroom. That's only increased.

Here's a random sample of what I was already saying over the last two decades, indicating the problem has been around longer than 2005 ...

• When literacy dives at home, as it has -- more feel-good crap and less real learning seems to be the motto of the state's factory schools both here and the US -- then it becomes easier to hire literate workers 'outsourced' from offshore.
  Outsourcing the literate – NOT PC, 2005
• Illiterate graduates of the State's factory schools have been let down by a system that promotes the government's chosen values ahead of promoting real learning. We are all the losers. 
  Neither free nor education – NOT PC, 2005
• Literacy and numeracy rates are already at an all time low. Any honest educator would be horrified at at that, and scrambling to reverse the situation. Instead, the government's ministry of educators instead intend to continue the process that delivered that across the board failure. 
  Recipe for indoctrination – NOT PC, 2005
• As a new report by consultants McKinsey and Co makes plain, spending on NZ's factory schools has rocketed in the last few years, while results have ... slid back.
  So we're left staring into the maw of a great truth: throwing money at education doesn't give you better education. The less that's spent on the factory schools, the worse the results; the more that's spent on the government's factory school, the worse the results. We're left to deduce that education isn't a function of the money that's thrown at it; what matters more is what that money is spent on.
  What it's been spent on in recent years is bullshit, mush and toxic swill. 
  Education: Buying less with more – NOT PC, 2007
• “Education in the government's factory schools is pumping out an ever-increasing number of functionally illiterate and unemployable youths - good for nothing beyond stuffing a ballot box."
  Illiterates still sadly surging forth. Ambulances positioned firmly at cliff base. – NOT PC, 2008
• Things are bad all over. Literacy figures across the western world have been getting worse and worse for years … Can you imagine then, in a world of rampant and increasing illiteracy, a school which goes against fashion and where students are actually taught to read, and to write well?
  Reading, writing and teaching that works – NOT PC, 2007
• It’s not just that teachers don’t want to be found out for their lacklustre teaching – although that’s the motivation for many of them – it’s that today’s fashionable educational theories mitigate against any objectivity at all, or even genuine education.
  Standards? What standards? – NOT PC, 2009
• If there’s a silver bullet for improving the appalling literacy rates of the youngsters who leave NZ’s factory schools it’s not National Bloody Standards, it’s phonics. Phonics from an early age to teach youngsters properly what those marks on the page sound like, and at a later age to repair the damage of those teachers who told them the marks themselves didn’t matter – that it was okay just to guess.
  There’s a frickin’ elephant in the schoolroom – NOT PC, 2009
• I posted this morning about the complete and calamitous systemic failure that happens when government departments go wrong. Here’s one of the biggest, confirmed by just-released Massey University research: the minimising and belittling of phonics in teaching reading (begun by “The Look-Guess Lady” Dame Marie Clay and spread though govt Teachers Colleges, and govt schools with govt-mandated curricula) which has been disastrous.
  New report says bring back phonics to fix widespread illiteracy – NOT PC, 2013

Despite having his blinkers on earlier, apparently, Dr Johnson is excited now nonetheless that Education Minister Erica Stanford appears to be "on a mission to turn things around." He looks forward to "a new, knowledge-rich curriculum [which] is on the way." He is thrilled that "work is being undertaken to reform NCEA."

Basically, he is fired up that a small change in the state's factory school system now will effect a major turnaround from many decades of piss-poor pedagogy peddled by that same system —and by he himself.

I alluded in posts above to the tragedy that the primary object of the state's factory schools is neither literacy nor numeracy, but pumping out youngsters fully inculcated with the state's chosen values. That indoctrination is only going to increase under Minister Stanford, not decrease. As it has and will under every minister.

'The only way to change that is not minor tinkering from a minister however highly (allegedly) motivated. The only way is a complete separation of school and state—in the same way and the same reason as the separation of church and state.

Free the children! They have nothing to lose but their illiteracy, and their indoctrination.

"Reading, if one is reading properly, is to think"

"There is, within every reader worth the ink spilled in his direction, an impulse both criminal and holy: to scrawl and to deface the pristine margins of a book with the unruly evidence of thought. We call this annotation, ... the very gesture by which a book is rescued from the museum glass of mere consumption and dragged, kicking and screaming, into the flickering present of a mind alive with questions.
    "Reading, if one is reading properly, is to think, and thought, unruly thing that it is, resists containment. It overflows and demands articulation. If it is not spoken, it will be written. And so, the margins—those innocent blank expanses to the right and to the left—become battlefields, sites of interrogation, where the reader takes up the pen not as a scribe but as a conspirator. Here, in the tight scrawl of a half-formed argument, in the underlined passage thick with silent agreement, in the snide rebuttal penciled next to an author’s pronouncement, is evidence of that most radical act: the refusal to simply receive. The marked book is the thought-through book, the wrestled-with book, the book taken apart and reconstructed in the mind of its reader."

~ Michael S. Rose from his post 'The Subversive Art of Annotation' [hat tip Carrie-Ann Biondi]

Why Johnny isn't Reading [updated]

We all know that many students emerge from universities knowing less than they did when they entered; graduating with heads full of random, un-integrated bites of information, and arguments they’re aware (deep down) they’ve never really mastered. 

We know you can leave today's universities without every having heard of the giants of your own field; that you can be given an economics degree having never read (or read of) Adam Smith; or an architecture degree without ever getting to grips with Frank Lloyd Wright; or a philosophy degree without ever even encountering, or wrestling with Aristotle.

But it gets worse. More and more young people "just don’t want to read books any more: they seem to lack either the will or the attention span."

"If you’ve been teaching at the [university]  level for a number of years," says the Atlantic in a long piece on the distressing development, "and your teaching involves reading books, you’ll have noticed the phenomenon." I have. Even fourteen years ago it was evident.

Economist George Reisman used to reckon that graduates in any discipline should really emerge possessing 

the essential content of well over a hundred major books on mathematics, science, history, literature, and philosophy, and do so in a form that is well organised and integrated, so that he can apply this internalised body of knowledge to his perception of everything in the world around him. He should be in a position to enlarge his knowledge of any subject and to express his thoughts on any subject clearly and logically, both verbally and in writing. Yet, as the result of the mis-education provided today, it is now much more often the case that college graduates fulfil the Romantic ideal of being ‘simple, uneducated men.’” [Emphasis mine.]

This is everywhere. As the Atlantic recounts, 

students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. .... Many students no longer arrive at [university]—even at highly selective, elite [universities]—prepared to read books.

The Spectator and Daily Skeptic tell a similar tale. The problem starts even earlier than university.

[A] student told [one uni lecturer] that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

Hard to study literature if you've never read a book. And can't. 

Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.

The result:

Students arrive on campus with a narrower vocabulary and less understanding of language than they used to have. ...; students “shutting down” when confronted with ideas they don’t understand; they’re less able to persist through a challenging text than they used to be. Daniel Shore, the chair of [one] English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet.

A sonnet is only fourteen lines!

The problem is said to be the internet.

Teenagers are constantly tempted by their devices, which inhibits their preparation for the rigors of college coursework—then they get to college, and the distractions keep flowing. “It’s changed expectations about what’s worthy of attention,” Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at UVA, told me. “Being bored has become unnatural.” Reading books, even for pleasure, can’t compete with TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. In 1976, about 40 percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5 percent who hadn’t read any. By 2022, those percentages had flipped.

But "teenagers are not bothering with the internet either."

They don’t want to know that much to actually initiate a question of the internet. If pushed, they might ask Alexa at home but they hardly go to the bother of typing out a question.
    And this, I have finally worked, out is the reason for teenagers’ disinterest in the possibilities of the internet: the current generation of children are passive users, not active ones. They look at their phones and entertainment is presented to them via their specific feeds: reems and reems of the stuff on Snap or TikTok. Teenagers have no need to actively look for anything, as everything has already been perfectly curated for their specific needs (generally beauty for girls, fitness and jokes for boys – disappointing but there it is). Internet use is a bit like reading a magazine of old, someone else has done all the hard work for you and all you have to do is sit back and scroll. ... 

[F]or the vast majority of children, the internet is as ignored and unvisited as the libraries and bookshops of old.

 So perhaps the problem is not that regular whipping boy. Perhaps the problem is that generations of children — teachers of the teachers of the teachers of today's teachers — have been taught dis-integrated knowledge; that facts are negotiable; that the author is dead; that creators are hegemonic; and that the oceans are boiling and colonial settlement is necessarily genocidal. The hierarchy of knowledge is routinely ignored (or entirely unknown), and teachers increasingly see themselves as agents of social and political change instead of what they once were: teachers. 

Is it then any surprise, after decades of this intellectual rot emanating from philosophy departments and then teachers colleges — a result of the long 'progressive' march through the institutions —that we're not overwhelmingly seeing strong, healthy, confident, independent and knowledgeable young folk, but too many who can't write, can't read, and can't think? 

How to solve this?

Start by burning to the ground the teachers colleges from whence this poison emanates. (Or at least close them). And insist that teachers know their goddamn subject. Philosopher Leonard Peikoff is a strong advocate of this policy to fix Why Johnny Can't Think:

There is no rational purpose to these institutions (and so they do little but disseminate poisonous ideas). Teaching is not a skill acquired through years of classes; it is not improved by the study of “psychology” or “methodology” or any of the rest of the stuff the schools of education offer. Teaching requires only the obvious: motivation, common sense, experience, a few good books or courses on technique, and, above all, a knowledge of the material being taught. Teachers must be masters of their subject; this — not a degree in education — is what school boards should demand as a condition of employment.
    This one change would dramatically improve the schools. If experts in subject matter were setting the terms in the classroom, some significant content would have to reach the students, even given today’s dominant philosophy. In addition, the basket cases who know only the Newspeak of their education professors would be out of a job, which would be another big improvement.
    This reform, of course, would be resisted to the end by today’s educational establishment, and could hardly be achieved nationally without a philosophic change in the country. But it gives us a starting point to rally around that pertains specifically to the field of education. If you are a parent or a teacher or merely a concerned taxpayer, you can start the battle for quality in education by demanding loudly — even in today’s corrupt climate — that the teachers your school employs know what they are talking about, and then talk about it.
    “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free . . .” wrote Thomas Jefferson, “it expects what never was and never will be.” 
    Let us fight to make our schools once again bastions of knowledge. Then no dictator can rise among us by counting, like Big Brother in 1984, on the enshrinement of ignorance.
    And then we may once again have a human future ahead of us.

 UPDATE:

At least one youngster is fighting back. On the tech front, at least.

And one school. On the philosophical front.

"Reading books."

"I have always been a reader. There have always been books in my life from my earliest recollection. A voracious appetite for the written word. It has always bought me pleasure and joy. ...
    "[T]here is more to reading and books that any practical or pragmatic considerations. There is the joy or reading. And in that respect I unashamedly prefer the physical book – printed pages between covers – to words on a screen. For me reading is a tangible activity. ... printing [an] article or piece and annotating it or highlighting it with a highlighter. Physical engagement with the text. ...
    "Reading books is one of the most rewarding and enjoyable activities that anyone can do. Books can transport us to different worlds, teach us new things, inspire us, and make us think. Reading books can also improve our mental health, cognitive skills, and creativity.
    "There are a number of elements that make up the joy of reading.
    "One is that books stimulate our imagination. ... We also imagine how we would feel and act if we were in the same situation as the protagonists. Reading books allows us to escape from our reality and enter into a different one, where anything is possible. Reading books can also help us develop empathy, as we learn to understand and relate to the perspectives and emotions of others.
    "Books can enrich our knowledge and understanding of the world. Books can expose us to different cultures, histories, sciences, arts, and philosophies. ...
    "Reading books can also help us improve our vocabulary, grammar, and communication skills. Reading books can also challenge our assumptions and beliefs, and make us more critical and analytical thinkers. Reading books can also inspire us to pursue our passions and interests, and to discover new ones. ...
    "Reading books can spark new ideas, insights, and solutions to problems. ... Reading books can also encourage us to express ourselves, to share our stories, and to create our own works of art. Reading books can also help us develop our own voice and identity, as we reflect on our own experiences and values. ...
    "[B]ooks are always there, ever patient, waiting to be read or, in the case of my many favourites ... re-read. My only concern is that I shall be left with more books than my allotted time allows. But every moment with a book is and will be savoured, celebrated and enjoyed."

~ A Halfling from his post 'The Joy of Reading'

National's low education expectations

"Given Erica Stanford's performance in opposition as spokesperson for Education, I was stunned and dismayed by this answer she gave recently in the House to former minister Jan Tinetti.

“As schools start back for 2024, there will be a relentless focus on lifting student achievement. This Government's ambitious target of getting 80 per cent of our tamariki to curriculum by the time they finish intermediate by 2030 is our North Star.”

    "What the minister has clearly stated is that she and the new National-led government only believe they are capable of improving education in New Zealand over six years to still have one in five Year 8 students failing at basic literacy and numeracy. That is despite each New Zealand child receiving 9600 hours of funded education in eight years of schooling. Her answer is dripping with pessimism and lack of ambition.
    "If we are truly aiming at a 'world class' teaching profession and education system, why do we have a self-imposed limit that we can only get 80 per cent of students even to a moderate level of ability and achievement?"

~ Alwyn Poole, from his post 'Education in New Zealand – Aspiration needs to come from the top'

"We shouldn’t underestimate the power of great literature to resist the blandishments of Woke coercion."

"We shouldn’t underestimate the power of great literature and a great tradition to resist the blandishments of [so-called] Woke coercion. Identity politics don’t appeal so much to a youth who has imbibed ‘Self-Reliance’ and Walden, works that abhor group dynamics. Read Swift and Orwell and you immediately suspect an idealist who arrives with promises of radical change….Victimology won’t please a mind that admires Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery."

~ English professor Mark Bauerlein, quoted in the article 'A Key Lesson in Education Policy: You Don’t Make Peace with Termites'

Reading communicates

"There is a connection between the written language and the spoken language. The written language puts the child into communication with the thoughts expressed by other people without any sound - a communication from soul to soul, secrets told without even a whisper, a personal communication of thoughts which nobody else can hear. In this respect reading has a high spiritual value."

~ Maria Montessori, from her 'new' book Creative Development in the Child: The Montessori Approach

Government schooling ...

"A general state education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another; and the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the existing generation in proportion as it is efficient, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body."

          ~ John Stuart Mill, from On Liberty

[Hat tip Andy Clarkson and C. Bradley Thompson]

Quote of the Day: On the short-term vision of so-called poverty campaigners

"'Hone Harawira and Marama Fox say that the cost of their number one policies [respectively: feeding kids and no GST on primary produce] doesn’t matter, that it should just be done.'  
    "Enduring, entrenched poverty and the plight of our most needy? Look to the short term lack of vision of successive spokespeople on their behalf. Where’s the reality checking? What about the fact that vouchers, instant fish fingers and food bank handouts are not a patch on fishing lessons, rods, nets, the securing of a spot on the river, community vege gardens, fiscal, numerical, language upskilling? Where’s that mentioned, Hone and Marama?
    "The message has clearly changed since Tariana let Fox take over. Looks like on top of Weet-Bix, fruit and milk, Harawira wants lunch and dinner too."
~ commenter 'traveller' on The Nation's minor-party leaders debate 

  
.

Quote of the Day: On welfare, parenting and the 30-million word gap

 

“Ironically one of the reasons the DPB was introduced was to allow sole mothers more time with their children. To reduce their stress and enable better parenting. Today it is known that maternal depression, welfare dependence and low literacy are all associated.”
~ Lindsay Mitchell on The genesis of the DPB and "The 30-million word gap"

.

“Pre-schoolers who can match sounds to letters earlier go on to read more easily”

“New research suggests it may be possible to predict which preschoolers will struggle to read.”

The study analysed brain waves of children as young as 3. And guess what they discovered: that those most likely to have trouble reading are those least exposed to oral language, and least able to link sounds to letters.

Connecting sound to meaning is a key foundation for reading. For example, pre-schoolers who can match sounds to letters earlier go on to read more easily.

This will be no surprise at all to those who learn, and teach, phonetic reading.

It will be astonishing news to those who don’t.

[Hat tip Maria Montessori Education Foundation]

New report says bring back phonics to fix widespread illiteracy

I posted this morning about the complete and calamitous systemic failure that happens when government departments go wrong.

Here’s one of the biggest, confirmed by just-released Massey University research: the minimising and belittling of phonics in teaching reading (begun by “The Look-Guess Lady” Dame Marie Clay and spread though govt Teachers Colleges, and govt schools with govt-mandated curricula) which has been disastrous.

Here is the research that proves it, with the blame squarely laid at the feet of government programs, including the $40 million-a-year Reading Recovery programme begun by Marie Clay herself to fix the flaws created by her own failed educational philosophy. The programme, says the report, is “fundamentally flawed.”

The problem created by Departmental obsession withe Clay’s methods is huge. Generations of New Zealanders have left school functionally illiterate without even the basic ability to read a newspaper or bus timetable.  “New Zealand’s relatively ‘long tail’ of literacy underachievement was a major concern for educators and policy makers that grew during the 1990s,” says the report. 

It was.

The comprehensive 1996 International Adult Literacy Survey surveyed adults worldwide from 16-65. The New Zealand portion of that survey found that for prose (the “ability to understand and use information from text”) a staggering 66.4 percent of Mäori were “functionally illiterate,” unable to meet the “complex demands of everyday life and work” and an equally tragic 41.6 percent of non-Mäori.

This represents more than half-a-million New Zealanders who were functionally illiterate. Nothing has changed since to improve that.

Professor James Chapman says … “The current approach is not working for too many children  – and we need to change it.”
    He and his colleagues say the failure of the strategy is not the fault of teachers and principals, but the result of misguided policy decisions. They recommend major scientifically-supported changes to New Zealand’s approach to literacy education.

What caused this monstrous failure?  As the report notes, the unquestioned victory in policy meetings of Marie Clay’s look-and-guess method of teaching illiteracy, for which the effect on young NZers has been all-too-often disastrous:

New Zealand has followed a predominantly constructivist approach to literacy education for the past 25 years. In this approach literacy learning is largely seen as the by-product of active mental engagement. There is little or no explicit, systematic teaching of phonemic awareness (the ability to reflect on and manipulate the phonemic segments of spoken words) and alphabetic coding skills (the ability to translate letters and letter patterns into phonological forms). Yet, both phonemic awareness and alphabetic coding skills are essential for learning to read successfully.
  Underpinning the constructivist approach to literacy teaching is the “multiple cues” theory of reading (sometimes called the “searchlights” model). According to this view, skilled reading is a process in which minimal word-level information is used to confirm predictions about the upcoming words of text based on multiple sources of information (Clay, 1991). Learning to read is seen largely as a process in which children learn to use multiple cues in identifying words in text. Text-based cues (i.e., picture cues, sentence context cues, preceding passage context, prior knowledge activated by the text) are used by students to predict the text yet to be encountered. Letter-sound information is generally used only to confirm word predictions or guesses and for self-correction (Clay, 1998).

In other words, instead of using phonics to acquire the ability to easily decode words, in Clay’s “system” it was generally only to confirm (somehow) a child’s guesswork.

Astonishing.

The report notes that “the scientific community has firmly rejected the constructivist/multiple cues model of
reading,” and highlights research indicating “that for progress to occur in learning to read, the beginning reader must acquire the ability to translate letters and letter patterns into phonological forms.”

Without that ability …

MENYKIDSFINEDWREEDINGHAADATHANYAWFINEDINGITNOW.

They find it hard because the phonic codebook was ripped away from them by the misguided decisions of misguided policy wonks in a misbegotten government ministry who watched all this happen and did nothing arrest it. 

One of the main changes this report recommends is to bring phonics back to their place of importance in early reading, and urgently.

Let us hope this time they succeed.

• The report’s 11-page summary is here.  The full report is here.

National Standards publication won’t fix cognitive child abuse

Cartoon by Nick Kim

There’s a lot of cant been talked about National Standards and the publication on a national newspaper’s website of the results thereof.

The Prime Minister and the previous National Education Minister both insisted the results of National Standards tests would not be used or published as league tables—when it was apparent to everyone watching that they always would be.

The teachers unions complained the testing would be intrusive (true), and confusing (not true), but would overall be bad because it would demonise bad schools and focus only —when everyone with a brain knew their real reason for complaining was it would show up bad teaching, especially the bad or non-existent teaching of reading, writing and arithmetic, which should be (but isn’t) the core of any child’s schooling.

There is a lot of bad teaching about. Most of it teaching of reading, writing and mathematics—and most of that caused by the brain-dead teaching methods taught in teachers colleges and required by the school curriculum: “look and guess” non-reading; “cultural-historical activity” non-arithmetic; “constructivist” non-mathematics; “whole language” and “whole maths,” rapidly moving targets that teach neither –teaching methods all more focussed on “social” standards than rigorous academic standards, and every one of them committing cognitive child abuse.

Schools have been more interested in teaching the seven-lesson inculcation of servitude than they have been teaching literacy and numeracy. They’ve been uninterested in the huge numbers of functionally illiterate and totally innumerate young men and women they pumped out to fill the prisons (most of whose occupants can neither read nor write) the factories and, yes, the teachers colleges—where they head back to school to repeat the cycle again.

The fault does not lie with the 800,000 NZers so functionally illiterate they “struggle to transfer printed information to an order form,” and so functionally innumerate they cannot understand a bus timetable—that’s “close to 1 million working age adults in New Zealand [who] lack the literacy and numeracy skills needed to function in a modern workplace” and the modern world.

National Standards will do nothing to fix this problem. It will do nothing to fix the poor teaching methods producing this horde of illiterates. But it might at least embarrass the poorest performers to find better methods.

And maybe to sack those teachers unable to read or write properly themselves.

Graham Crawshaw, 1931-2012

I’ve just received the very sad news that inspirational literacy campaigner and friend Graham Crawshaw died on Sunday at his home.

Graham Crawshaw’s greatest passion was teaching young boys to read. In around two weeks on what he called his Reading Adventure Camps, he gave un-reading and troubled young boys “alternatives to angry behaviour, offering them activities involving the three key elements boys love – mud, fire and water. After awhile, they forget to be angry.” And they were taught to read.

Graham’s  two criteria for choosing boys for his camps were 1) they couldn't read, and 2) they were considered unmanageable. From this unpromising material he changed young lives.

Graham began his life’s work in 1962 on a small scale, starting camps for boys on his farm. He always loved working with the “hard cases”—the kids forgotten or ejected by the factory school system; the misfits, the rebels, the rejects, the ones who didn’t fit in. The first camps were held in his woolshed, where a loft was constructed for the sleeping quarters.

The boys loved it [he remembered a few years ago]. Later on, they helped us build 10 rough cabins – it was this hands-on approach, as well as our focus on activities designed particularly with boys in mind, that made us different from the many other camps that were around.
The boys came to us from the Auckland Baptist Tabernacle – some were very hard cases. We could see the camps were making some radical changes in them. You could see the delight in their faces when they were doing things they enjoyed. Camps were held regularly from 1962 through to 1991.

Over time he identified a common theme with his troublemakers, and the troublemakers he met elsewhere.  Following his intuition he began to haunt the courts, astonished at what he found: the troublemakers at both the courts and his camps had all been through the mainstream schools system, yet nearly all of them had never learned to read.  Victims of Dame Marie Clay.

The year 1991 was a key time, he says. We had 42 boys at a camp and I decided to test their reading ability. We were appalled at some of the results. The problem cut right across wealth and ethnic boundaries. Although I knew nothing about teaching reading, except my memories of the good primers we had had at school which taught phonics, I decided to try to do something to help the boys who had such low reading ability. It was a case of trial and error.
    We started with the poorest readers. Then, in 1995, we held our first reading adventure camp in Titirangi, which was attended by about 30 boys. Girls didn’t seem to need the camps as much as boys - they seem to have been better at surviving the whole language (look and guess) methods used by schools. I realised that conversation is an integral part of literacy learning and there is a marked absence of conversation in many boys’ lives. We hear of boys disrupting the school, but I sometimes wonder if it is the school system disrupting the boys’ learning style. Since then we have held 70 reading camps, now called Farmstays. I still believe the level of illiteracy in our nation is a national scandal. No boy should pass his seventh birthday without being able to read. If there is a problem, such as dyslexia, Irhlen or Asperger syndrome, then they need to be diagnosed early so teaching can be adjusted accordingly.

Graham adjusted his teaching.

MENYKIDSFINEDWREEDINGHAADATHANYAWFINEDINGITNOW.

Many kids find reading hard. They don't need to. Poor reading is mostly a result of teaching reading poorly—especially teaching based on the failed 'Whole Language' method. Using phonics, Graham taught kids who’d given up on reading that it's really not hard once you "break the code” -- that reading is fun, and far less difficult than they thought. (Try reading that hieroglyph above by “whole language” and it will be difficult. Decode it syllable by syllable however and you’ll crack it.)

The elephant in the literacy room is the failed ‘whole word’ – or ‘look and guess’ – method of scaring children away from learning to read, a non-method of non-teaching made up out of whole cloth by wholly ignorant academics. Yet the fight to rid schools of the ‘look-and-guess’ nonsense has been interminable, internecine, and still on-going.

It was a fight that set many school teachers against a man who only wanted to give schools’ inmates the learning they never received.

Since 1995, Graham held 69 six-day Reading Adventure Camps up at his Phonics Farm near Dargaville, teaching over 1400 children the joy and skills of reading there, and many more at his Windy Ridge Boy’s Farm, south of Warkworth, that he opened 12 years ago.

He was a legend.

Said one parent after one of Graham's reading camps,

My son wasn't that keen on going to a reading camp. But the difference towards reading was amazing. He read his first novel in one week and couldn't put it down... It has been evident to me this camp is essential for all children with reading difficulties...

And so they were.

You can read more about Graham and his reading camps at page 11 of the digital edition of Free Radical 73 [pdf], and an interview with him in Free Radical 74, page 12 [pdf]. And of course, feel free to enjoy the rest of each magazine.

To help you laugh, here’s one of Graham’s favourite funny phonics stories. A story about a frickin’ elephant . . .

Five-year old students are learning to read.

Yesterday one of them pointed at a picture in a zoo book and said,

"Look at this! It's a frickin' elephant!"

I took a deep breath, then asked..."What did you call it?"

"It's a frickin' elephant!

It says so on the picture!"

And so it does...

" African Elephant "

Hooked on phonics! Ain't it wonderful?

Graham talked to Lindsay Perigo last year:

I will miss him. 

Since this has turned into an obituary for my old friend, let me post the obituary that he wrote for The Free Radical magazine in 2007 on the death of Dame Marie Clay, the person he held more responsible than any other for NZ’s disgraceful legacy of illiteracy being passed down the generations.

“The Look & Guess Lady”
Marie Clay (January 3, 1926 – April 13, 2007)
By Graham Crawshaw

Reading advocate Graham Crawshaw has for many years “picked up the casualties of the present system of reading instruction” at his reading camps for boys and girls. He challenges here the many glowing tributes to her that have appeared since her death in April.

A NZ Herald obituary to Marie Clay – I refuse to recognise her grand title of “Dame” – concluded that “her influence on literacy in New Zealand is unparalleled.” With that judgement I wholeheartedly agree – except perhaps for the equally disastrous influence of her mentor, Clarence Beeby.

Marie Clay [her first name is pronounced MAH-ree, but hey, just go right ahead and guess; it’s what she used to encourage] has certainly earned for herself a place in literacy history that is unchallenged. She is credited with changing the face of primary school literacy in New Zealand, and she did: largely by discarding the teaching of phonics as the very foundation of learning to read, leaving several generations of New Zealanders adrift in a world of words, and without any means by which to decode them.

The results can be seen in literacy surveys such as the 1996 world survey on adult literacy, which demonstrated all too clearly -- and it's worth reminding ourselves of this fact frequently – that too many New Zealanders emerge from school without two of the basic skills that were once (pre-Clay) taught there: they can neither read nor write at a skill sufficient to function in the modern world.

The survey found that a staggering 66.4 percent of Mäori are below the minimum level of “ability to understand and use information from text,” and an equally tragic 41.6 percent of non-Mäori. 40 percent of employed New Zealanders and 75 percent of the unemployed are below the minimum level of literacy competence for everyday life and work. Universities organising remedial reading and writing courses for first-year students report that "University students can't read, write or spell," and that "Students fail basic skills," and the Labour Department estimates that up to 530,000 New Zealand adults have inadequate literacy and numeracy skills.

530,000 New Zealand adults! You’d have to think that levels of functional illiteracy that dire did not happen by accident, and you’d be right. They happened after Marie Clay’s “look and guess” method of reading was substituted for the teaching of phonics.

Phonics teaches children to match the sounds of letters and groups of letters that make up words, a skill that once mastered allows the student to match letters to sounds and vice versa – in short, to learn to read. Eighty-seven per cent of the English language can be easily learned using phonics, and the remaining thirteen per cent by rote and memory -- not a difficult task once the groundwork has been laid. It is a tried and true method by which the mystery is removed from those mysterious marks that appear on the page.

Marie Clay rejected this thinking altogether. In her book Becoming Literate (given me by a training college student for whom it was required reading), she writes,

Teachers may feel that the critical thing for the child to learn is his sounds, and they may provide an elaborate scheme for teaching that overrated aspect of reading known as phonics… Current thinking suggests that we may have to revise our thinking about the value of phonics…

Perhaps instead, given the tragic results of lost generations before us, we might find more value if we “revise our thinking” about the work of this woman, who threw out the baby of phonics without even leaving any bathwater behind. I suggest a more appropriate name for her book is Remaining Illiterate, which sums up the situation for several generations of functionally illiterate New Zealanders who have her own overrated system to thank for their minds having been turned to mush.

Although some schools and even some of Clay’s own protégées claim to teach phonics as part of a “mixture of methods,” in reality this teaching is mostly confined in the early stages to teaching the ‘names’ of the letters (rather than their sounds) so that children may identify the first letter in words, at which point children are encouraged to guess what words say by using “the context of the story,” or “picture clues,” and then to commit them to memory by “shape.” Other approaches bizarrely introduce children to whole words first, only then getting them to sound out letter combinations within words. Where more structured phonics is taught it is usually later on, and then chiefly for spelling purposes.

However research evidence shows that pupils do not learn to distinguish between the different sounds of words simply by guessing, or by being exposed to books by a process of osmosis. They need to be taught the connection between letters and sounds, rather than an over-reliance on guessing.

Supporters of Clay will point to her much-vaunted Reading Recovery programme, initiated by Clay to pick up the casualties caused largely by her own implementation in NZ schools of the wholesale rejection of phonics, and which earned for her a Damehood. It was adopted by NZ schools in 1983, and for a time even bought overseas in both the UK and the US, and in Australia.

However research in the US and by James Chapman and Bill Tunmer at Massey University in NZ show that the true results for this programme have been grossly overrated. Reading Recovery programmes often resulted in lower self-esteem, they found, and no long-term improvement in reading ability. US education writer Martha C. Brown summarises the reasons that made California and Texas drop Reading Recovery and Whole Language and begin again to embrace phonics. Reading Recovery's stated goal, notes Brown, is to bring “the bottom 20 percent of readers up to the average reading level in their classroom.”

The Reading Recovery programme claims an 83 percent success rate, promising to cut other remedial costs. However, Timothy Shanahan, professor and Literacy Center director at the University of Illinois, and Rebecca Barr, professor of reading at the National-Louis University in Evanston, Ill., found Reading Recovery rejects some eligible children and drops others who progress slowly. Reading Recovery omits these children in figuring its success. With this data included, the researchers found the short-term success rate was 51 percent, not the 84 percent Reading Recovery claimed with one group of children…

A New Zealand Ministry of Education study blames Reading Recovery's failure on lack of "systematic instruction in word-level strategies" (phonics). Reading Recovery uses "principles and practices very similar to those of whole language," says Patrick Groff, emeritus professor at San Diego State University. Reading Recovery books, like Whole Language books, contain repetitive sentences and pictures to help children guess.

"The Whole Language approach to reading simply does not work for children with reading disabilities. A structured, phonics-based approach is more likely to help them," concludes a 13-year study by 100 researchers in medicine, education and psychology.

Despite flawed methods and high cost, Reading Recovery 's average annual enrollment increase between 1986 and 1998 was 47 percent, based on figures from Reading Recovery Council of North America. Nearly 11,000 U.S. schools use Reading Recovery, and 560,000 children have participated.

A Battelle Institute study shows the average annual cost of a Reading Recovery tutor is 30 percent more than the cost of a teacher for other remedial programs…

The scandalous problem of rampant illiteracy has for too long been denied, disguised and explained away by insiders in the training colleges and the elite clique of educationalists who have followed along behind Clarence Beeby and Marie Clay. Their confusing ‘look and guess’ system of illiteracy is increasingly discredited, and continues to consign the young people who can’t cope with it to the scrap heap. Her influence on New Zealand literacy has indeed been unparalleled – and I do not intend that as a compliment.

And his 15-point cure for the malaise:

Putting a Rocket Under Reading

Here are fifteen things governments could do immediately to stem the rampant and almost unchecked illiteracy in our very beautiful country:

1. Restore the teaching of phonics at training college level to equip teachers to teach literacy properly. This will mean replacing most training college principals and staff.
2. Utilise existing qualified and able literacy experts such as Cathy Aplin, Janet Barnaby, Brian Botting, Miriam Holloway, James Chapman, Doris Ferry, John Lewis, Tom Nicholson, Bill Tunmer, Anita Bagrie, Ann Emery, Lindsay Middleton, Soraya Landell, Pam Rogers and others.
3. Retrain existing teachers.
4. Recognise support and utilise existing programmes that help.
5. Make reading more ‘boy friendly’ and ‘girl friendly,’ recognising their unique learning needs.
6. Make the phonics teaching a compulsory part of the curriculum, as it is in Texas, UK and elsewhere.
7. Reorganise primary schools’ schedules to focus more on literacy, as is being done in Abercanaid in Wales.
8. Re-establish the responsibility and authority of parents in training and building up their children and empower them to select suitable sub-contractors eg., teachers who will efficiently perform their tasks, focusing on teaching the basic skills (weren’t they once called the three R’s?).
9. Reimburse and finance parents for payment of outside tutors, camps, etc.
10. Reprint suitable books, such as the Progressive Primers. Use existing proven materials, such as the Bannatyne Programme, Australian Language Foundation. Dump superficial material now used in schools. Curtail or cancel over-rated and over-expensive programmes such as Reading Recovery.
11. Clip the wings of the NZEI and make teachers and educationalists accountable.
12. Test teachers’ own literacy levels.
13. Revamp the selection process for teachers entering training colleges, ensuring that each prospective teacher genuinely respects children and will show them respect, compassion and understanding.
14. As children enter school it is very important that their literacy level is clearly established, and that they keep moving up from there in an environment where they can flourish.
15. Visit prisons, identify the illiterates, test their reading levels and apologise to them for not being taught to read. Implement suitable top quality phonics-based reading programmes. When anyone is arrested, test their reading when their fingerprints are taken.

Farewell, Graham. There will be none like you again.

Lindsay Perigo on "The Dunce-ification of Everythink"

Guest post by Lindsay Perigo

A shock-horror headline emblazoned on the front page of The Dominion Post's June 23-24 weekend edition asked, “Are we raising a nation of dunces?”

“Some kids are starting school unable to name a colour or even string a sentence together,” the article began, as though this were news. It isn't.

It's also not news that some kids still can't string a sentence together when they leave school.
An article in the Sunday Star-Times of June 25 then reported, “Hopes of an economic boom driven by a highly-skilled Kiwi workforce could be dashed by the number of illiterate and innumerate adults. One in five students is leaving school without qualifications. Some struggle so badly they cannot fill out the unemployment benefit form.”

Plus ça change .


In 1996, the Adult Literacy in New Zealand survey of adults aged 16-65 found 66% of Maori and 41% of non-Maori were below the minimum level of literacy required to “meet the complex demands of everyday life and work.”

A 2006 survey's results were no better: it found 43 per cent of adults with some sort of literacy issue, and half the population with numeracy difficulties.

Here's the Dominion Post of February 15, 2011:

“Some teachers are so lacking in literacy and numeracy skills that they cannot write adequate reports or do primary-level maths, secondary principals say. … Anecdotal evidence from principals included teachers being unable to write reports, having poor reading comprehension, making basic punctuation, spelling and grammar errors, and being unable to help pupils’ reading.”

The country is now caught up in a vicious circle arising from decades of state-mandated dumbing down in the education system. This process has been faithfully replicated on state (and now private) television—as I've written in my article, The Rice for the Putts, linguistic cretins are being hired for on-air jobs not just in spite of being unable to speak but because they're unable to speak.

Masterton Primary School principal Sue Walters says, "We get a lot of kids who come to school who just can't form proper sentences. They have very limited vocabulary and some are operating at a 3-year-old's level. You can't teach kids to read and write if they can't speak." Well, TV reporters in their 20s are speaking like 5-year-olds—with the active connivance of their bosses!

Massey University senior lecturer in speech and language therapy Elizabeth Doell says at the age of 5, a child should be able to construct a reasonably complex sentence, and have a certain level of vocabulary. But this is often not the case, she observes, and an urgent inquiry is needed to get to the bottom of the problem. "I don't think we truly know the extent of it."

Here's the bottom of the problem: the deliberate inculcation of mediocrity by the state over generations, manifest in the Look-Say method of the teaching of reading and an egalitarian hostility to speech standards rooted in the belief that polished, clear speech is unacceptably “posh.” The resultant oral and written ineptitude have fed upon and reinforced each other.

Given this part of a letter I received last year from then-Education Minister Anne Tolley, I'm not hopeful of an imminent reversal of the current collapse into cretinism:

Although there may be variation from school to school in the approaches they take to the teaching of reading, the majority of New Zealand schools follow the Ministry of Education guidance outlined in the key reference texts Effective Literacy Practice in Years 1 to 4 and Effective Literacy Practice in Years 5 to 8. In these publications teachers are urged to use a range of instructional strategies as they help students engage with meaningful texts. Such a balanced programme would include some phonics work, some use of known words and many other ways for readers to unlock and make sense of texts. [Translation: Look-Say and politically correct BS rule.]

I am interested in your observations about the speech of some of our young people. As you will know, language use, including oral language is not static. Our parents may well have mourned the decline they perceived in our speech patterns and pronunciation. In this age of technology, young people now hear a wide range of spoken language. Sometimes they may even deliberately use patterns different from those of their parents as a mark of their identity and individuality. Such is the nature of fluid and flexible language use as we all strive to make ourselves understood in the global world of today. [Translation: kids indeed speak as though they were morons. That's the way we want it: everyone sounding equally uneducated. For good Orwellian measure we'll call it “identity” and “individuality” precisely because it's the opposite of those things.]

Normally I'd advocate simply retrieving the thing from the clutches of the state and letting market forces generate a drive for remedial excellence. But all of society is now so steeped in barbarism that the private sector too is zombified. The state must act urgently to stop and reverse the rot it started and sponsored to such devastating effect. Hand in hand with the overdue revival of grammar, spelling and punctuation that is already supposed to be happening, the state must restore to phonics its former hegemony, and it must introduce speech-training into the curriculum, both for pupils and teachers.

What stake do I as a libertarian have in this matter? To quote Ms Walters again, “You can't teach kids to read and write if they can't speak.” And in a nation of inarticulate illiterates, liberty doesn't stand a chance. In the domain of dunces, demagogues dictate.

Lindsay Perigo is a former television newsreader and interviewer, blogging at SOLO (Sense of Life Objectivists).

Is that it?

I don’t understand Hekia Parata.

If you’re going to pick a fight with teachers, teachers unions and parents—and there’s nothing wrong with that at all—then why do it for change as nugatory as “class size” or as frankly foolish as saying there will be no new teachers on your watch.

Galt knows the government’s factory schools are like the Augean Stables: overripe for a clean out. But if you’re going to have a fight, then why not do something radical to education like, oh I don’t know, throw out whole language and bring back phonics; or thoroughly overhaul the socialist studies curriculum without all the social engineering; or abandon the dumbing-down of the NCEA experiment, abolish the NZQA, and introduce a curriculum properly recognising the integration and hierarchy of knowledge; or remove the presumption against home schooling; or encourage, rather than discourage, alternative educational philosophies to flourish; or abandon zoning  and introduce scholarships, or even vouchers, so even the poorest geniuses can attend good schools; or bring in tax credits for education so folk who do pay for private don’t have to pay twice?

It’s not like there’s a shortage of things that could be done if you did want to pick a fight about something really worth doing.

But if you do insist on picking a fight, you really need a real issue and far more ammunition than she can muster here or here.

Mind you, the same criticism stands for her National Party. If this is the only thing they plan to do anywhere this term to make a change and buy a fight—which is how it looks—then what the hell are they there for anyway?

Perigo!, #4

In the fourth show of his new series, Lindsay talks to educator Graham Crawshaw from Windy Ridge Boys Farm about his unique reading camps for troubled boys, and the debate over Phonics and Look-Say.

How to complicate maths education

Having had success in encouraging illiteracy over past decades by removing phonetic teaching from classrooms—refusing to teach children the very abstract tools by which they can decode text, replacing them instead with guesswork and a multiplicity of random concretes—educators the world over have also been doing the same with mathematics, quietly removing (for example) the means by which children can make sense of simple multiplication tasks.

In this video, Washington State educator MJ McDermott just how thoroughly today’s educators have made a complicated mare’s nest out of simple mathematical tasks, replacing reliable and easily understood algorithms with complicated procedures and guesswork.

If you understand the phenomenon Ayn Rand called the crow epistemology, you might understand just how successfully the “new” systems being taught for multiplication won’t teach students mathematics so much as “blow their crow.” 

[Thanks to reader Falafulu Fisi for the link]