Emphasis on Verbal Skills : Educator Urges Single Class for Early Grades

Youngsters in the first years of elementary school--kindergarten through third grade--should be taught in a common class with a heavy emphasis on the crucial skills of reading and writing, a prominent national educator said in Orange County on Thursday.

“The use of language is the centerpiece of all educational problems,” said Ernest L. Boyer, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in Princeton, N.J. He said the grouping of children in those levels would help educators build a foundation of verbal skills that would serve students through the college level.

Speaking in Irvine to a national conference about problems facing college freshmen, Boyer noted that most college freshmen woefully lack adequate reading and writing skills

“Children must learn to read and write in the early years,” Boyer said. “I think careful attention to this must be at the levels of kindergarten through third grade, and I think we should break out of that mold of having grades at that level. What difference do grade levels make at that age?”

Best Paid Teachers

Boyer said he thinks these “basic years,” which he said are kindergarten through third grade, are so important that the teachers at those levels “should be the best paid in the system.”

Reporting last fall on a three-year study of American higher education, the Carnegie Foundation issued sharp criticism of U.S. colleges and universities, saying they had “lost their sense of mission.”

Expanding on those findings, Boyer told his UC Irvine audience that students’ poor understanding of English in reading and writing is the root problem at all levels of schooling.

“English is the knowledge through which all other knowledge is pursued in our culture,” he said. “It is transcendent. It is not a separate subject; everything is learned through a knowledge of the language. . . .

“I think colleges and universities must establish relationships with schools, much as the University of Michigan is doing with schools all over that state. . . . But in the end, it’s the early years that are the most important. . . .

“I proposed in a National Press Club speech (in Washington) last fall a notion that deals with a long-term, not a short-term, response to the problems in education. I’d like to see us reorganize the kindergarten and first three years (of grade school) in a radical fashion and call it ‘the basic school.’ I would like to see it ungraded. I would like to see teachers in those schools have no more than 15 students each.

“I would like to see language the central theme of that school. It would be a kind of saturation of writing, reading and music language with, incidentally, the content of the language meaningful and not nonsense. This would include a developing knowledge of our history and traditions and literature. They would be reading meaningful material.”

The conference on “The Freshman Year Experience,” sponsored annually by the University of South Carolina, is being held on the West Coast this year for the first time. UC Irvine is helping with the arrangements for the event, which is being held through Sunday at the Irvine Hilton.

Boyer’s keynote speech to the conference Thursday night was on “The College as Community.”