FACT: People learn languages effortlessly, using a part of their brain – the unconscious mind – that cannot be taught to, cannot be reached with traditional language instruction.
FACT: Most language teachers do not know this, with the result that they teach to the rational, linear, conscious mind. This is idiotic.
FACT: In 50 years or so, language educators will be laughing at us in the same that we laugh at the flat earthers.
FACT: If the above facts are true, and they are fully supported by the research (no research has proven otherwise), then grading children is absurd. Why? It is because what the teacher wants to test for does not reside in the same part of the brain they think it does.
FACT: All people can learn a language.
FACT: Unbelievably, teachers do their tradition teaching and memorization things without realizing that in languages, how the brain learns is completely different than how learning occurs in other subjects. It’s like with Trumpism and BLM – they shouldn’t be considered as “opposing points of view” where Americans “agree to disagree”. That is not an option when evil, amoral, unethical, dark things are coming out of one side, things that are opposed to the higher fundamental values of our mankind and our nation and its superb Constitution.
FACT: The result in language education of allowing ignorance of the research to happen over the past fifty (!) years causes kids to feel as if they can’t do something that they really can do.
FACT: This is deceitful as well as a form of outright betrayal by adults on children.
FACT: In such non-research-based settings, many students feel that they don’t measure up to the memorizers in the room, who are seemingly the only ones allowed to be successful by the teacher who sets up and perpetuates each year the memorization ruse. The other kids, who don’t memorize well and on some deep level know that they are being tricked, start feeling incapable.
FACT: When a child who may even be a genius – or are otherwise very capable academically – is taught in the traditional way, they tend to go through life not ever caring about learning another language. It is because their experience with that one language teacher has been so negative. They are made to believe that they really can’t learn any language. This puts a huge dent in their belief system of who they are as a language learner. Not only that, our children, so lost at sea these days anyway, experience yet one more situation in their lives where they are made to feel “not enough”. When does the weight become too much?
Do you see? What we are supposed to be doing, raising up kids to be the best adults that they can be (go read those lying mission statements found in school buildings), is not what we are in fact doing. What we really are doing is chopping down our students’ belief in themselves. We do this simply because we haven’t adjusted – modernized – our teaching to reflect the current actual research. It’s like a heart surgeon performing operations in alignment with research that was around in the 1950s. What professionals are even allowed to do that in their fields?
CONCLUSION: When we grade kids in ways that don’t reflect the actual way that people actually learn languages according to the research, we are hurting, not helping the child. That is evil.