In the late 90s, feature stories began appearing in the national media about children and parents who were so overwhelmed by the amount of homework that it was destroying their family life and causing psychological damage. The evidence presented in these stories was often anecdotal, profiling just one or two families. However, the articles were published in enough respected publications that they sparked a national debate on whether children have too much homework. Schools scrambled to create homework policies, parents held protests, and children began to receive sharply mixed messages on the value of homework.

In all the fuss, people never realized that the information contained the articles simply wasn't true. In 2003, the Brown Center on Educational Policy at the prestigious Brookings Institution released a report that shattered the perception that American students are staggering under an unreasonable load of homework. In fact, they found just the opposite: American students probably don't spend enough time on homework. Gathering data from a number of studies that had been performed in the late 90s, the Brown Center drew four startling conclusions.

Typical students, from kindergarten to high school, don't spend more than an hour a day doing homework. In fact, pointing to a study done by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, the Brown report found that more than two-thirds of college freshmen did five hours or less of homework during their final year of high school.

The report also analyzed studies and concluded that the homework load for the average student has not increased appreciably since the 1980s. This is in direct opposition to the anecdotal evidence cited in the article of homework increasing to as much as three hours per night.

However, a study performed in 1997 by Michigan State University showed that children at that time were spending just over two hours per week on study, which could include activities other than homework. Interestingly, this study is often used to prove that students have too much homework, since the weekly hours spent on study increased over the life of the study by 23 minutes. The Brown Center postulates that this statistical increase was actually caused by children who previously had no homework at all and because they had advanced in grade, now had homework.

Finally, the Brown report found that, contrary to the articles' portrayal of militant parents protesting homework, most parents are satisfied with the amount of homework their children receive. In fact, if parents were dissatisfied with the amount of homework their children had, it was because they felt it wasn't enough.

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If a teacher tells a child to guess what a word is, that teacher is basically saying: “I’m not going to teach you how to read. I don’t care if you learn to read. You will probably become a functional illiterate and that’s okay with me.”

Admittedly, many teachers are in a hammer lock, as superintendents and principals may have ordered the teachers to use an unworkable pedagogy or be fired.

So I’m not saying the teacher is thinking those thoughts consciously. I’m saying it’s AS IF the teacher were thinking those thoughts. The children end up in the same place no matter how you slice it. For a very simple reason: guessing is NOT reading.

Reading is processing letters into sounds, from left to right. You don’t study the words as if they are logos or faces. You don’t look around the whole paragraph. You don’t analyze the illustrations. You don’t think of what you might know about the subject. You don’t try to deduce meaning from context. All that is blather and bogus.

Reading involves a very simple skill: you read the words. That is, you convert them into the sounds that the letters represent. As I say, you READ the words. You absolutely do not guess the words. That is the opposite of reading. It is anti-reading.

We are discussing one of the most astonishing hoaxes of the 20th century. The Education Establishment convinced itself (so they claim), and then tried to convince the nation, that the average person could memorize tens of thousands of words as graphic designs. Well, as you know from trying to name a celebrity or a famous painting, and the name escapes you for a  minute, naming designs of any kind can sometimes be very tricky. So the official experts had to come up with various crutches. Use context. Study the pictures. Guess!

 Of course, if a child does not in fact know how to read, that child has NO CHOICE but to guess. If you are in Shanghai, walking down a street where the signs are written in Chinese, you will use every trick in the book to guess what those symbols might mean. You might think: well, this looks like a place where busses might stop, I’ll wait here for a bus. You might be right. Or the sign might say: LOADING ZONE. 

If you could actually read Chinese, you wouldn’t guess, you would know. Can’t read Chinese? Of course you have to guess. You have to be very clever. You may get a few right; but you will experience a lot of frustration, waste a lot of time and energy, and often be wrong.

And that’s a perfect description of what happens to the victims of Whole Word in our public schools.

Now, if you are smart enough to be reading this article, you probably could memorize a few thousand sight-works. Some very smart people actually go to college and read using the techniques mandated by Whole Word. Typically, these people have headaches; they’re anxious and uncomfortable; they don’t read for pleasure. So, yes, there is a small minority of brainy people who can read, however tensely, with sight-words. You may be one of them, so you might be thinking: what’s the big deal? I think I could do that.

Please put that thought out of your head. That thought is one of the big reasons why the frauds running our educational system could get away with their nonsense for all these decades. To put it bluntly: the smarter citizens are busy preening; while the dumber citizens are pushed further down.

You are probably in the top few percent of the population, intelligence-wise. Let’s look at the people in the middle; they are lucky to get over 500 sight-words. Let’s look at the bottom 30%; some of these kids cannot learn 100 sight-words, even after years of trying. Meanwhile, the rest of their education is on hold. Next thing they know, they’re in middle school and as miserable as drowning cats. Predictably, they start showing signs of ADHD. They are given Ritalin. Parents are told their kids are dyslexic and they’ll never read because of something wrong with their brains. The whole thing is a nightmare--an unnecessary nightmare.

So don’t suppose that because you could learn some sight-words, that therefore little Johnny Doe, with an IQ of 100, can do anything close. No, he is simply depressed, and dreaming of the day he can drop out of school and take up a life of crime. In so far as you support Whole Word in the public schools, you abet that destruction.

All of this craziness is contained in that one word: guessing. Major theoreticians (all of these are people with Ph.D.’s in Education) stated flat-out that when children encounter a word they don’t know, they should guess or skip it.

For the average child, this pedagogy is death. Your life as a student is over. You can be a worker of some kind, but probably a low-level one. Meanwhile, there are jobs and accomplishments that will be forever out of your reach, but they may have been easy for you if you had only learned to read.

Correct that: if only your school had bothered to teach you to read.

CODA: I have a reason for writing this strongly worded article. I don’t think we can trust the people who came up with Guessing Is Reading. Nor can we trust many of the other weird things these alleged experts come up with. I don’t see improvement ahead in education. I’m afraid we’ll see more of the same old nonsense (like guessing). We’ll hear a lot about Common Core Standards, Social Justice, 21st-Century Skills, Authentic Assessment, etc. No matter what the jargon is, the meaning will basically be: same old, same old. Fact is, we could’ve done much better throughout the 20th century. Now we’re going into the 21st century on the wrong foot. But here’s good news: there is so much room for improvement. Why, just imagine what would happen if schools actually start teaching again. 

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Learned helplessness is the belief that our own behavior does not influence what happens next; that is, behavior does not control outcomes or results. For example, when a student believes that she is in charge of the outcome, she may think, “If I study hard for this test, I’ll get a good grade.” On the contrary, a learned helpless student thinks, “No matter how hard I study for this test, I’ll always get a bad grade.” In school, learned helplessness relates to poor grades and underachievement, and to behavior difficulties. Students who experience repeated school failure are particularly prone to develop a learned helpless response style. Because of repeated academic failure, these students begin to doubt their own abilities, leading them to doubt that they can do anything to overcome their school difficulties. Consequently, they decrease their achievement efforts, particularly when faced with difficult materials, which leads to more school failure. This pattern of giving up when facing difficult tasks reinforces the child’s belief that he or she cannot overcome his or her academic difficulties.

Learned helplessness seems to contribute to the school failure experienced by many students with a learning disability. In a never-ending cycle, children with a learning disability frequently experience school difficulties over an extended period, and across a variety of tasks, school settings, and teachers, which in turn reinforces the child’s feeling of being helpless.

Characteristics of Learned Helpless Students

Some characteristics of learned helpless children are:               

The Pessimistic Explanatory Style

Learned helpless students, perceive school failure as something that they will never overcome, and academic events, positive or negative, as something out of their control. This expectation of failure and perceived lack of control is central in the development of a learned helpless style. The way in which children perceive and interpret their experiences in the classroom helps us understand why some children develop an optimistic explanatory style, and believe that they are capable of achieving in school and others develop a pessimistic explanatory style, believing that they are not capable of succeeding in school (Seligman, Reivich, Jaycox, and Gilham, 1995).

Children with an optimistic explanatory style attribute school failure to momentary and specific circumstances; for example, “I just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Children with a pessimistic explanatory style explain negative events as something stable (the cause of the negative event will always be present), global (the cause of the negative event affects all areas of their lives), and internal (they conclude that they are responsible for the outcome or consequence of the negative event). A typical pessimistic explanatory style is, “I always fail no matter what I do.” On the contrary, when the outcome of the event is positive, a pessimistic child attributes the outcome to unstable (the cause of the event is transitory), specific (the cause of the event is situation specific), and external (other people or circumstances are responsible for the outcome) causes.

Learned Helpless Students Need Learning Strategies

Due to this perceived lack of control of the negative event, a learned helpless child is reluctant to seek assistance or help when he is having difficulty performing an academic task. These children are ineffective in using learning strategies, and they do not know how to engage in strategic task behavior to solve academic problems. For example, learned helpless children are unaware that if they create a plan, use a checklist, and/or make drawings, it will be easier for them to solve a multistep math word problem. With learned helpless children, success alone (e.g. solving accurately the multistep problem), is not going to ease the helpless perception or boost their self-confidence; remember that these children attribute their specific successes to luck or chance. According to Eccles, Wigfield, and Schiefele (1998), trying to persuade a learned helpless child that she can succeed, and asking her just to try hard, will be ineffective if we do not teach the child specific learning and compensatory strategies that she can apply to improve her performance when facing a difficult task. The authors state that the key in helping a learned helpless child overcome this dysfunctional explanatory pattern is to provide strategy retraining (teaching her strategies to use, and teaching explicitly when she can use those strategies), so that we give the child specific ways to remedy achievement problems; coupled with attribution retraining, or creating and maintaining a success expectation. When we teach a learned helpless child to use learning strategies, we are giving her the tools she needs to develop and maintain the perception that she has the resources to reverse failure. Ames (1990) recommends that, in combination with the learning strategies, we help the learned helpless child develop individualized short-term goals, e.g., “I will make drawings to accurately solve a two-steps math word problem.” When the child knows and implements learning strategies, she will be able to experience progress toward her individualized goals.

Learned Helpless Students Need to Believe that Effort Increases Skills

To accomplish this, we need to help learned helpless children recognize and take credit for the skills and abilities that they already have. In addition, we need to develop in children the belief that ability is incremental, not fixed; that is, effort increases ability and skills. Tollefson (2000) recommends that we help children see success as improvement; that is, we are successful when we acquire or refine knowledge and skills we did not have before. We need to avoid communicating children that, to succeed in school, they need to perform at a particular level, or they need to perform at the same level than other students. When we help children see success as improvement, states Tollefson, we are encouraging them to expend effort to remediate their academic difficulties. In addition, we are training them to focus on strategies and the process of learning, rather than outcomes and achievement.

Concluding Comments

To minimize the negative impact of learned helplessness in children, we need to train them to focus on strategies and processes to reach their academic goals, reinforcing the belief that, through effort, they are in control of their own behavior, and that they are in charge of developing their own academic skills. For example, to help a child focus on the learning process, after failure, we can tell the child, “Maybe you can think of another way of doing this.” This way, our feedback stays focused on the child’s effort and the learning strategies he or she is using -within both the child’s control and modifiable. When children themselves learn to focus on effort and strategies, they can start feeling responsible for positive outcomes, and responsible for their own successes in school and in life.

References

Ames, C. A. (1990). Motivation: What teachers need to know. Teachers College Record. Vol. 91, No. 3, pp. 409-421.

Eccles, S., Wigfield, A., and Schiefele, U. (1998). Motivation to succeed. In Eisenberg, N. (Ed.) Handbook of Child Psychology. Vol. 3 (5th ed., pp. 1017-1095). New York: Wiley.

Seligman, M. E., Reivich, K., Jaycox, L., & Gillham, J. (1995). The optimistic child. New York: Houghton Mifflin.

Tollefson, N. (2000). Classroom applications of cognitive theories of motivation.Educational Psychology Review, Vol. 12 No. 1, pp. 63-83.