dyztak to prosim smazte - k tomu co rika o teaching se mi libilo mj toto: Bill Hull once said to me, "If we taught children to speak, they'd never learn." I thought at
first he was joking. By now I realize that it was a very important truth. Suppose we decided
that we had to "teach" children to speak. How would we go about it? First, some committee of
experts would analyze speech and break it down into a number of separate "speech skills."
We would probably say that, since speech is made up of sounds, a child must be taught to
make all the sounds of his language before he can be taught to speak the language itself.
Doubtless we would list these sounds, easiest and commonest ones first, harder and rarer ones
next. Then we would begin to teach infants these sounds, working our way down the list.
Perhaps, in order not to "confuse" the child--"confuse" is an evil word to many educators--we
would not let the child hear much ordinary speech, but would only expose him to the sounds
we were trying to teach.
Along with our sound list, we would have a syllable list and a word list.
When the child had learned to make all the sounds on the sound list, we would begin to teach
him to combine the sounds into syllables. When he could say all the syllables on the syllable
list, we would begin to teach him the words on our word list. At the same time, we would
teach him the rules of grammar, by means of which he could combine these newly learned
words into sentences. Everything would be planned, with nothing left to chance; there would
be plenty of drill, review, and tests, to make sure that he had not forgotten anything.
Suppose we tried to do this; what would happen? What would happen, quite simply, is that
most children, before they got very far, would become baffled, discouraged, humiliated, and
fearful, and would quit trying to do what we asked them. If, outside of our classes, they lived
a normal infant's life, many of them would probably ignore our "teaching" and learn to speak
on their own. If not, if our control of their lives was complete (the dream of too many
educators), they would take refuge in deliberate failure and silence, as so many of them do
when the subject is reading.