ild is at, i.e. with the child's own experiential background (the object method). In fact, parents and teachers had no moral right to demand that children be fashioned as carbon-copies of their elders.
In the 1980s the term Whole-Language became popular in elementary schools (at least in America). The initial difficulty resided in the fact that no one could really define what it was. A lot of mumbo-jumbo made up for a lack of precision in thinking. As Whole-Language slowly took shape and added advocates, it turned out that it was more a philosophical than a didactic approach. The International Dictionary of Education (Page & Thomas, 1977) defines it as an "analytical method of teaching from the total topic to its constituent parts" (p. 36)--which stresses methodology rather than philosophy--but then, inductive learning was nothing really new.
In essence and practice, Whole-Language is a holistic approach to education. Advocates believe that one learns better by approaching wholes than by atomizing language (and other disciplines) into discrete parts to eventually synthesize the parts back into the whole. They doubt that language need be taught in specific sequences, or, in fact, that there is a best way for everyone to learn. They refuse to adhere to a strict curriculum, and to act as mere dispensers of knowledge. Indeed, if the locus of knowledge is in the learner's brain, then the locus of learning ought to be in the learner's own acquisition mechanisms. Whole-Language teachers do not consider learning as a discontinuous process. Learning cannot be fragmented and is a continuous never-ending process; there are no espistomological barriers between disciplines and natural phenomena. Taxonomy is but a superimposed and arbitrary arrangement as artificial as the dichotomy between mind-and-body. In particular, Whole-Language teachers view language acquisition as a mode of socializing through communication, rather than as a mode of ...