Is Germany Raising a Generation of Illiterates?

StartsWithABang (3485481) writes "Over at Starts With A Bang, the weekly question comes in from Germany, where we're informed: 'In Germany, many teachers have adopted a new way of teaching children to write properly. The way is called "Writing by Reading" and essentially says: Write as you wish, you're not bound by any rules. Recently, this way of teaching has been heavily criticized [link in German], but not before it has been "tested" on several years of school children.' The reading wars have been going on in the US, too, but will this wind up having a negative outcome? Or, as this piece argues, is it likely to be a wash?"

Comments

u can rite any way u want

[ArcadeMan]

i rite az i wish and it doz afekt my wrighting.

Re:u can rite any way u want

[rrohbeck]

This seems perfectly par for the course as far as Internet comments go.

Re:u can rite any way u want

[Culture20]

Fast forward to today and a part of me believes that if an educator is actually teaching words and meanings to students that their should be actually definitive meanings for terms when given the chance. We know that written language is derived from verbal communication which is why we used phonetics in the first place. So, for example, if a teacher was teaching the world "there" without a definitive meaning, then students would always have to rely on context clues to figure out if the communicator is saying the equivalent to "there, their, or they're". Which can become even more confusing if there are other words that are also homophones in the same sentence.

Is this irony or coincidence? I was never taught the difference.

They've got a lot of catching up to do...

[damn_registrars]

The US has been raising illiterates for decades (if not longer). In this metric we can truly shout

We're number one!
We're number one!
We're number one!

I doubt they could catch up with our functional illiteracy rates even if they tried.

Re:Tested on school children?

[cold fjord]

They had to test it on school children. Environmental law is too strict to allow testing on rats.