KINDER'S COMMENTARY: SECOND-GRADERS `INVENT' SPELLING

Over the last year of writing on education reform issues, warnings have repeatedley been sounded in this space. I have gone beyond what some have called the dumbing down of America's schools to make a much more far-reaching indictment of what so-called education "reform" will ultimately mean for Missourians. Specifically, I have tried to warn readers that the educrats are marching us into what one writer has called "a great night of unknowingness" -- an abyss of ignorance unimaginable in a modern society that spends the staggering amounts we spend on education.

In all this I have taken no pleasure. These trends are indeed painful to describe, and it isn't exactly a day at the beach to find yourself subjected, as some of us were again last week by Gov. Mel Carnahan, to the hackneyed and cliche-ridden charge of being "against public education."

"A great night of unknowingness." Too extreme? You be the judge. Latest confirmation of the grim charge comes from a public elementary school in a north Missouri community. The daily newspaper in that community published brief paragraphs written by a class of second graders in November 1995 on the subject of cooking Thanksgiving dinner. A citizen of that community approached me at the Capitol with the article, commending it to me as an example of "creative" or "invented spelling."

This is one of the new and surely most depressing of all educational fads marching hand-in-glove with outcomes-based education. With "invented spelling," children in the early primary grades aren't drilled in correct spelling -- that would "turn them off," we are told, by the educational theorists who would turn our public schools into giant factories of ignorance -- but rather allowed to do their own, uncorrected thing where spelling, grammar, syntax and usage are concerned.

I have the copy of the article with the date and page number, but I have purposely omitted here both the city and the newspaper, as well as the names of the teacher, the school and the youngsters themselves. The reason is to avoid heaping scorn or humiliation on anyone. (Readers who doubt the authenticity of what follows may contact me for copies so that all may judge for themselves. In this omission I have been far more kind than the original, which listed all these names.) Without exception, all spelling and usage are original. Here, painfully, it goes:

* "Biy it from the store. Then cook it in a pan. Then put turkey sas then put it in the havn for 5 mins. Thin take it out have the havn. Thin put the vachtib in the havn for 7 mins. Thin take them out. Thin put stas in the havn."

* "I use a fiaing pan and I pet in 10 secnds and then we eat it and the turkeys is rardy to eat. We put in wioter and we eat."

* "I cech turkeys I pluk them and I cook it in a uven and I poot butter in it and I poot peper on it and sot on it. I cut and I drin the blud. I cook it for an haf an auer and poot some stu in it."

* "By the Turkeys at piggi wiggi. Cook in a big pan. Stoof the turkeys with stoofing and cook the turkeys for 3:00. She thkes the turkeys."

* "You need a scilit. By a 5 paund turey. Put pepre and put it on the stove and cook it. You can have salt, crits, brokle, lades, tnadus, putads. You need szden, salte, ugigns."

There's more. Far more. But you get the drift.

We're constantly being told by Dr. Bob Bartman and the other lords and masters of public education in Missouri that "we aren't doing the nutty stuff" you read about in some of the more outrageous examples from other states. Examples such as this give the lie to that Bartman claim. Also worth noting is an earlier version of the same article that also featured the work of second graders from the same community. The same exercise from November 1988, published in the same newspaper, was vastly superior -- nearly error-free second-grade work, in fact. That would be prior to this school's plunging headlong into the ignorance business, courtesy of the sort of thousand-dollar-a-day consultants who advise Mel Carnahan and Bob Bartman on how to -- according to their claim -- create "world class schools."

So there you have it: "Invented spelling", Show Me State version. Some day, surely, there will be hell to pay for the "experts" and "leaders" who are marching us into this. How long before the full-scale revolt begins?

~Peter Kinder is the associate publisher of the Southeast Missourian and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.