From: jeffrey E. <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, December 7, 2017 4:09 AM To: Noam Chomsky Subject: Re: no question in my mind that it is a huge benefit for the g=oup. but my conjecture is that it is not necessarily goo= for the individual. . like being a hero ( t=rowing yourself on a grenade ) . good for the group not =o good for the hero. . as writing forces a I=near slow pace. I wonder if in a large population , hand=riting wiill be correlated with G . an=way , I need to get my mind off the way you have been getting =crewed. drives me crazy. On Wed, Dec 6, 2017 =t 10:51 PM, Noam Chomsky wrote: =blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0.8ex;border-left:lp= #ccc solid;padding-left:lex"> Good to have a fun note. I suspect that forcing children to do anything is probably=harmful. But it's possible to introduce writing and (secondarily= reading in a way that seems to enhance thinking. That's the ide= behind "invented spelling" (here's a link to some of the wo=k: htt=s://pages.wustl.edu/files/pages/imce/treiman/Read%20%26%20Treima=_Childrens_Invented_Spelling_final.pdf <https://pages.wustl.edu/files/pages/imce/treiman/Read%2=%26%20Treiman_Childrens_Invented_Spelling_final.pdf> ). Back in the early =#39;50s, a philosopher friend of mine (Israel Scheffler) brought me some p=ges on which his two- year old son had written things that he thought were =ibberish, wondering if I could make something of it. It was immediat=ly obvious that the kind had learned the names of the letters and was spon=aneously stringing them together to express himself in writing. And raking interesting generalizations. Thus the letter "A", pr=nounced /ey/, he used for the words "came," "pet", &qu=t;pat"; the letter "i", pronounced /ay/, he used for "=ie", "pot," "but," . And so on. It all made=sense. Our kids did the same thing. Carol wrote some papers ab=ut it, Charles Read and others carried it forward. Turns out to be a=great way to teach reading too. K