Word: walcutt
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...House; $3.95), a chilling comparison of Russian and U.S. textbooks that pegs the vocabulary of Ivan's typical first-grade reader at 2,000 words and Johnny's at 300, owing to the U.S. mystique of "vocabulary control." Equally indignant about U.S. reading deficiencies is Charles C. Walcutt's Tomorrow's Illiterates (Atlantic-Little, Brown; $3.95), and it has the added virtue of describing key reading reforms throughout the country. Critics who blame it all on progressive education, without real knowledge of the subject, might check Lawrence A. Cremin's Transformation of the School (Knopf...
...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...
...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...