Subliminal messaging curriculum

The Australian has reported on a trial to radically change the way students would learn to read. Under a trial called ‘MULTILIT’ (Making Up Lost Time In Literacy), teachers would put less emphasis on phonics but focus on the sentance as whole.

Suggestion on how to do this?

Subliminal messaging.

In a group email sent to a network of literacy educators, associate professor in education at Wollongong University Brian Cambourne proposes flooding Ms Firth’s office with emails that associate phonics based approaches with failure “at an almost subconscious level”.

Professor Cambourne suggests messages, including linking phonics to “readicide”, which he defines as a noun meaning “the systematic killing of the love of reading, often exacerbated by the inane, mind-numbing practices found in schools”.

He points to “evolution theory” and non-Western forms of writing such as Chinese and hieroglyphic scripts as evidence that decoding sounds in the written word is not a prerequisite for being able to read alphabetically based scripts.

The article which was published online on March 19 also gives the reader an idea of the politics and background of education in Australia; the conflict of ideas, schemeing and what seems to be a constant battle to influnce minds.

Ms Firth said the purpose of the trial was to provide evidence of what methods worked best, and to “stop arguing about what we believe, and start talking about what we know”.

Professor Cambourne denied he was proposing a campaign and said he was “just using my right as a member of the community and my friends to inform the minister of things we think she should know” to counter bias propagated by MULTILIT and supporters of phonics.

Asked why he had to resort to a subliminal campaign instead of relying on evidence, Professor Cambourne first said: “You don’t really believe we can influence the minister’s subconscious?”

When the email was quoted back to him, Professor Cambourne said he and his colleagues had to rely on cognitive science’s “framing theory”. “It’s a way of making ideas change based on new theories rather than just denying or trying to argue with people you can’t argue with,” Professor Cambourne said.

“When you rely on evidence, it’s twisted. We can also present evidence but we never get a fair hearing. We rely on the cognitive science framing theory, to frame things the way you want the reader to understand them to be true – framing things that you’re passionate about in ways that reveal your passion.”

Professor Cambourne said the best example of the use of framing theory was former US president Richard Nixon, who was “framed a crook by newspapers … It didn’t matter how many times Richard Nixon said ‘I’m not a crook’ … every time he denied it, he reinforced the connection between himself and being a crook,” he said. “It didn’t do him any good.

“It doesn’t matter how many times we say all the evidence that’s been presented about whole language. Because of the way whole language has been framed by people like MULTILIT, we don’t get anywhere. We have to use the same kind of tactics that have been used to demean and demonise whole language.”

Professor Cambourne then said that, if The Australian reported his comments: “I will deny I ever said this.”

Even education and journalism has come to clash in this article. It seems to exposes the sinister side of educating children.