O.K.'s Children

Omar Khayyam Moore ("My parents just admired Omar Khayyam") is a chain-smoking Yale sociologist with a theory even more striking than his name. Says he: "It is possible for children aged two to five to type, read, write and take dictation.'' And for the past two years Moore has been proving his point in an experiment at his tiny Yale lab. By letting two-year-olds "play" with an electric type writer, Moore gets them reading at second-grade level within six months. His explanation: "The intellectual capabilities and interests of young children have been seriously underestimated."

Known at Yale as "O.K.," Utah-born Sociologist Moore, 40, launched his experiment as a result of recent ferment among behavioral scientists, who no longer see man and beast as motivated mainly by the "primary" drives of hunger, thirst and sex. Another major motivation, the scientists now argue, is a "competence" drive--the appetite to master complex relationships that is the apparent basis of problem solving. Moore's special interest is the problem in which the seeker has . no rules or fixed goals to guide him. Most notable example: the mystery of how children learn to speak their own language.

No Rules. Analyzing this everyday miracle, Moore theorized that children conquer speech by a trial-and-error process, which in true sociologist's style he calls' "heuristic search." To find the logic behind incomprehensible symbols (words), they make up their own rules, match their results against adult speech.

In the same way, reasoned Moore, children might apply their "competence" drive to early reading if no one confused them with grown-up rules. "Built on curiosity," Moore's method is to let the child "control" his learning. As the child strikes typewriter keys, an instructor names the character printed. (One delighted child hit the asterisk key 75 times to test teacher's stamina.) Sitting beside his "student" in a gadget-filled booth, which has 60-odd switches to pique the child's curiosity, the instructor also projects the chosen letters on a screen. After each half-hour typing session, the child prints the letters on a blackboard, soon works up to complete words and eventually to sentences.

Grasping the logic of these symbols, says Moore, the child next begins typing simple stories from film strips, later talks his own stories into a tape recorder and types them as well. About all the teacher does is correct punctuation with as little overt "teaching" as possible.

Big Excitement. Actually, the child has less control than he thinks; he is being taught touch-typing as he experiments. His fingernails are painted various colors and so are the keys corresponding to the fingers that should hit them. With his own on-off switch to the electric typewriter, the teacher sees to it the child produces a letter only when the right finger strikes the right key. What lures the child on is the sense of discovering the rules himself. When his proteges do so says Moore, "their interest and excitement are almost without bounds."

Moore's first guinea pig, in 1958, was his daughter Venn, who was then' two years and seven months old. At four years and five months, she now types letters to friends and reads Lassie stories to her baby sitters. After Venn came 35 other children, many of them from Hamden Hall, a suburban New Haven private school, which now plans to set up a sizable Moore-style lab. On the evidence so far, Hamden Hall may have to revamp its entire primary school curriculum. One girl of not quite four read at third-grade level after Moore's training; less gifted three-year-olds have been learning to read and print in only 14 weeks.

"At this point my techniques are laboratory toys," says Moore. "They are expensive and too cumbersome to be of immediate practical value." But New Jersey's Thomas A. Edison Research Laboratory is now designing automated equipment to simplify the technique. Hamden Hall's parents are already sold. Says one father: "I was waiting for my boy to grow up before I spent time with him. Now, I'm sorry when he goes to bed."

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