THROUGH THE WHOLE-LANGUAGE APPROACH
Traditional education was essentially school-centered, i.e. a rather elitist approach to teaching the three R's; elitist because it failed to exploit the productive potential of all the school children, because curricula were culturally and socially biased towards the more affluent segment of the population, because pedagogical methods were based and implemented on the basis of theories of learning which often lacked scientific, or even serious, verification. Socially, then, it was undemocratic; pedagogically it was undergirded by a weak, ambiguous, or unproven theoretical foundation. Furthermore, knowledge was arbitrarily fragmented. In the case of language, for example, vocabulary was taught out of meaningful context; grammar was a set of strict rules to memorize; translation of written texts was the method of choice in the learning of a second (or other) language. Rote memorization of paradigms and imitation of the teacher's modeling behaviors were, in fact, the basic instruments of learning whether a first or another language.
Thus Western education has historically resorted to an academic ideological approach to literacy.
Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Montessori, Steiner, Fr£bel, and others discovered the child-as-learner-and-social-being gifted with unique personality and learning style, rather than as a fact-recipient. Hence, learner-centered education was born. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) taught that "by emphasizing natural tendencies as healthy rather than evil", education became the art of nurturing rather than the science of disciplining (Miller, 1991, p. 29). He demanded that one considers the whole child, rather than separate skill potentials. J.A. Comenius (1592-1670), J.H. Pestalozzi (1746-1827), J. Neef (1770-1854), F. Fr£bel (1781-1852), J. Dewey (1859-1952), and an increasing number of educators believed that teachers ought to begin the educational process where the ch...