A 1960s schools experiment that created a new alphabet

I confess, I miss some of the experimental teaching techniques they tried in the late 60's. Education was a surprisingly dynamic field it seems.

In the U.S. my mom moved my sister and I into a new public school for what would have been my 4th grade.

What an odd school it was compared to the previous public schools I had been to. For starters, I was not in 4th grade, I was in Community 5 (I assume that Kindergarten was Community 1, so they decided to toss the zero-based system I was used to.) I seem to recall they had combined 5th and 6th grade into something called Suite 67.

The school itself was circular in construction with a sunken library in the center of the circle — the wedge-shaped classes going radially around the library. (If it sounds like Moon Base from Space 1999, I suspect it's because everyone in the 70's were drinking the same Koolaid.)

Classes were "open". While there were enough students to form two or more classes per grade, er, community, our community did not have a single teacher but a few. So you might have one teacher and learn reading, writing, and then later in the day another teacher would step in for science, math.

I believe the two teachers swapped and would teach the other group in Community 5 — the other group getting Math and Science in the early part of the day, English after.

And it was described as "open" and I believe that to mean that the two Community 5 classes had no physical wall between them. I don't remember though And, yeah, I know, sounds like trying to watch one movie at a drive-in while another screen is showing something else. I believe though there was perhaps some theory involving osmosis or some-such.

I remember clearly, now almost fifty years later, at least two of the science experiments we did in Community 5. They involved experiments with a control group, collecting data (one involving the effects of sunlight on bean plant growth, the other on the temperature preferences of isopods). They had definitely nailed that curriculum.

It was also where I was introduced to the Metric System (that Reagan would shitcan some years later).

When, a few years back, I went back to Overland Park, Kansas to try and find the school I was sad to see that it had been torn down and a standard rectilinear building in its place. No memory from the front desk staff about its wild history.

So sad.

I encountered this in 1968. This was at Clarinda State School, in grade 1. The 1A class used ITA, and 1B used proper latin alphabet. My best friend, Steve Irwin (yes, _that_ Steve Irwin. Everyone had to go to school somewhere) was in 1A. Every afternoon after school he'd come to my place and we'd go through our readers for the day. I'd read the English one to him, and he'd memorise it to recite (pretending to read) to his teacher the next day. I assume he was taught properly when he moved to Queensland in 1969.

I can't imagine how hard it was for people less bright than Steve. No wonder the scheme trained illiterates.

θaŋks fə ʃɛəɹɪŋ ðɪs. ɪts æktʃuəli səˈpɹaɪzɪŋli iːzi tə ɹiːd ðɪs. bət ɪt maɪt biː bɪˈkəz aɪ æm fəˈmɪljə wɪð ði aɪ.piː.eɪ. ɔːlsəʊ ɛlɛlɛmz siːm tə duː ə diːsənt ʤɒb æt aʊtpʊtɪŋ tuː, səʊ ðæt teɪks əˈweɪ ðə dɪfɪkəlti ɪn lɜːnɪŋ tə taɪp əˈɡɛn.

Wild. I can read this, no problem, and I can see that it is a clear improvement over standard letters and spelling. Latin letters are (quite literally) a poor match for the English language. They don't match the sounds required to speak English.

I'm not sure if this is a valuable teaching tool, but I think it would be conceptually sound as a general replacement for Latin letters for English text. At this point, though, it's impossible to make such a drastic change. It would have global repercussions.

ITA looks like the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to me. I like that. If all English text was written in this way it'd be really easy to learn (at least for me). It reads like a breeze.

I did this at primary skool, not an issue, my spelling is orsum

So this is essentially the equivalent of teaching only hiragana for years and then immediately throw you into the deep end expecting you to suddenly know all the kanjis already, without any transition of gradually accumulating the mapping of morphemes to phonemes.

It seems to me that this ITA would have been quite useful had it served an annotative role taught in tandem with canonical spellings to build the morpheme-to-phoneme mapping. Akin to kana rubytext for kanji in books targeted for younger learners that are then elided for adult readers.

Hm, I'm not a native speaker, but I had no issues reading that weird script, is it supposed to be hard somehow for native speakers?

I kept expecting this article about the ITA (Initial Teaching Alphabet, a Latin-based script with new glyphs for spelling words phonetically, now unused) to mention the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet, a Latin-based script with new glyphs for spelling words phonetically, still widely used), but apparently there is no relation?

There was another version of this where rather than a new alphabet, only the lower half of the letters were changed --- since text is easily read by only having access to the upper half of the letters, that made for a much easier transition.

Imagine how kids now will feel when they find out that prompting Claude isn't actually coding.

I learned to read in foreigner and soon after moved to an English country at age 6.

I was an atrocious speller until I moved back to foreign-land and had to take English class with my schoolmates.

Learning how people mispronounce English phonetically fixed most of my spelling.