Wall Street Journal 7-28-97 A19 Letters to the Editor
Your article stating that listening is, again, on the way out contains
some remarkable statements by well-meaning experts to the effect that
listening is a skill that has to be taught to little kids. This is
errant nonsense. Children are listening from the day of birth onward
and have, by age 2,3,4 or 5, taught themselves an incredible complex
native tongue without any formal teaching whatsoever.
And not only is teaching oneself the language the most difficult piece
of learning that any of us will ever do but, as the home-schooling
movement has demonstrated, kids will teach themselves to read, write,
figure and collect information right and left given "mentoring-adults"
who play games with numbers, read aloud, weight and measure,
demonstrate, discuss the world, answer questions, and help them develop
their interests-while keeping very tight control on all TV, videogame
and computer screens.
ROBERT E. KAY. M.D.
Philadelphia
-- $ dale-reed@worldnet.att.net Seattle, Washington U.S.A. $Knowledge is the straight Line: Wisdom is the power of the straight line, or the Square: Virtue is the power of the Square: or the Solid. Ralph Waldo Emerson