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| OMAR
KHAYYAM AND HIS TALKING TYPEWRITER
A miraculous machine
teaches two-year-olds to read, spell, punctuate and
even touch-type in less than a year.
By C.P.
Gilmore
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Two year olds can learn to read!
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The scene of Keith's remarkable accomplishment was the
nonprofit Responsive Environments Foundation Inc., a
reddish-brown, two-story nursery school in Hamden, Conn.,
a suburb of New Haven. Like other nursery pupils, 30
children at Hamden spend two and a half hours each session
painting, singing and playing games in a large, airy
classroom. However, each child also devotes up to 30
minutes a day to what the youngsters call "the
talking typewriter," and that daily half-hour session
makes all the difference. |
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400 children of all races, ranging in age from
two to seven, in background from deprived to wealthy,
and in ability from retarded to gifted, have chalked
up impressive achievements with the talking typewriter.
Two-year-olds exposed to daily sessions with
the machine have romped through their first-grade
reading material before their third birthday.
First-and Second-graders write, edit, and cut
the stencils for |
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"Sometimes typing tests disconcert me,"
one child in the newspaper. "If it's too
disconcerting you sometimes omit a few things.
Then you may get into a predicament."
One five-year-old felt called on to publish
the following advice to a friend: "Pam, you
could be a nurse someday. But when you be a nurse,
you can not scream like you do now."
Finally, standard tests given second-graders,
who have been involved in the program for three
years, show that they read, on the average, at
the seventh-grade level.
The founder and director of this experimental
-and highly controversial- school is Dr. Omar
Khayyam Moore, a small, wiry 45-year-old professor
of social psychology at the University of Pittsburgh.
His major interest for many years has been in
the esoteric field of symbolic logic, the study
of the use of words and numbers to describe ideas
and things. Some years back, Doctor Moore worked
out a set of mathematical models showing how people
learn; in 1958, while an associate professor at
Yale, he began testing his ideas with an ordinary
electric typewriter. His first subject was his
own two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Venn.
"Two weeks after Venn started," he recalls,
'my wife and I could hardly believe it. 'My God,
look at her go!' I said." Venn was reading
and writing before she was three. Moore and an
engineer then designed an ingenious machine that
combined an electric typewriter, a miniature computer
and a tape recorder.
The first large-scale test of this machine came
in 1961, when the Carnegie Corporation of New
York financed a three-year experimental project
at a private school in Hamden. Whole classes of
children from nursery school through the second
grade participated, and the results were impressive.
In 1964 Moore moved his Responsive Environments
Foundation to its own building a few blocks away,
where it now operates with small classes of preschool
children as a demonstration and training center.
Last spring schools in Mount Vernon N.Y., successfully
used one typewriter with 24 underpriviledged four-year-olds
and this fall leased four of the $35,000 machines.
Currently both Mount Vernon and Freeport, N.Y.,
are seeking over two million dollars in federal
funds to set up programs in their school districts. |
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Doctor Moore explains the typewriter's
extraordinary success by pointing out that very
young children become highly motivated to learn
when they are allowed to make their own discoveries.
He also feels there is no greater deterrent to learning
than the fear of making a mistake. So the children
discover that when the make an error, nothing happens.
The typewriter never scolds; it is never impatient.
(One child gleefully struck the asterisk 75 times
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succession without the machine or
attendant saying a word.) To further eliminate pressure,
all typewriter work is completely voluntary.
Critics of Doctor Moore's ideas and methods rarely
challenge the fact that children do learn from the
talking typewriter, but they seriously question
the the advisability of such learning at an early
age. Some educators even fear that early reading
may cause eye damage that will not become evident
until later. Others, such as Drs. Frances L. Ilg
and Louise Bates Ames of the famous Gesell Institute
of Child Development, call early reading "foolish
and needless". Sue Moskowitz of New York City's
Bureau of Educational Research adds, "Research
proves that early readers don't generally read betetr
later on than those who learn at the regular time.
Pushing an unready child into formal instruction
can create destructive feelings of fear, inaedequacy
and frustration."
Moore disagrees. To guard against physical or psychological
damage, all children in his program are examined
regularly by a pediatrician and a clinical psychologist.
In five years no signs of physical or emotional
strain have been detected.
To those who say early reading instruction can overwhelm
and frustrate a child, Moore replies that his preschool
students actually develop a permanent zest for learning.
Moreover, he claims that youngsters who go through
his program do not get bored when they get into
a regular school, even though they are usually far
ahead of their classmates. "By this time they're
self-starters," he says. "They don't have
any trouble doing the regular work of the class,
and they keep themselves occupied with special projects."
Of course, Moore's system isn't the only way to
teach very young children to read. "People
say that any good teacher, using conventional methods
and giving children as much attention as we do,
would get results." Moore says. "I would
have to agree. We don't claim to have the only method,
but we do claim to have a method that works."
"One advantage is that we
don't need highly skilled booth attendants,"
adds Joseph R. Dunn Jr., who heads the school. "They
have to be trained, but we can do that quickly.
We're not dependent on crack teachers for our results."
Most of Professor Moore's work has been with normal
preschoolers. This year, however, the school in
Hamden began taking a few problem children. Among
them was Bernard, an 11-year-old classified by school
authorities as a nonreader. One day, after Bernard
had spent about two weeks with the typewriter, the
booth attendant found him perched excitedly on the
edge of his chair.
As the machine called for a series of letters, Bernard
typed each one and began to put the sounds together.
Then, beating the machine by a split second, he
shouted, "f-a-s-t, fast!" The glow on
his face was one of pure triumph. |
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Moore's machine may hold unexpected
promise for seriously disturbed children too. One
six-year-old had never spoken, and several psychiatrists
recommended that he be sent to a mental institution.
In desparation, doctors at the Mary Imogene Bassett
Hospital in Cooperstown, N.Y., decided to try the
talking typewriter. The child seemed fascinated
by the machine, and after several months he suddenly
began to talk. He is far from cured, but it now
appears that he may go to school instead of an institution.
"The machine's potential may be even more enormous
than we suspected," says Dr. Mary Goodwin,
a pediatrician.
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Perhaps the typewriter's greatest achievement
is the way it allows a young child's imagination
to soar by quicky and painlessly helping him overcome
the reading and writing hurdle. Sometimes the
child's creative imagination reaches truly wondrous
heights, as in this story about Lincoln, written
by first-grader Spencer Taylor for his school
newspaper:
Abraham Lincoln got shot. he was watching the
hockey game at the fair. Someone had a gun. He
shot Abraham Lincoln in the head. They stopped
playing hockey and called the ambulance. It came
rushing no matter if cars were in front of it
or not. They shouted to the boss of the hockey
game to call the police. They found the man with
the gun.
Aware that some of their younger readers still
lacked a certain sophistication, the newspaper's
six-year-old journalists added this editor's note:
(All of Spencer's story is not true.) |
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