By Bruce Deitrick Price ——Bio and Archives--June 28, 2013
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“In my textbooks and workshops for teachers I recommend [favoring] the whole-sentence and full-text methods and to regard phonics as probably not necessary for reading.” “Almost invariably parents and others not having these professional reasons side with phonics because it suits the conservative cast of mind.`God believes in the beauty of phonics’ means that those who see themselves as God’s spokespeople prefer phonics, precisely, I think, because it shuts out content by focusing the child on articles of language too small to have any meaning.” “How to limit what they may find to read out of school? A good way is to cripple literacy at the outset, to make reading so technical and meaningless youngsters will…simply not seek books any further or will find the act of reading so painful that they virtually give it up.”I believe Moffett has everything backwards (having accepted the sophistries of Frank Smith and Ken Goodman), and that most children do learn to read by mastering the small “articles” which he disparages. Moffett lies in pretending that children learn these small parts so they can stop there. No, it’s a first step. All instruction progresses from crawling to walking to running, then to dancing, skiing, etc. You don’t crawl in order to crawl for the rest of your life but Moffett weirdly pretends that we do. Conversely, Whole Word is built on what might be called the expert fallacy. Adults, according to Whole Word theory, read whole words. So let’s teach children to read whole words from the beginning. This is like teaching a child to ski by letting him loose on a steep slope. Constance Weaver, another famous proponent of Whole Language, argued: “What motivates such advocacy? Oddly enough, it may not necessarily be what proponents claim: namely, the desire to teach all children to read. A great deal of the force behind such advocacy seems to be the desire to promote a religious agenda and/or to maintain the socioeconomic status quo.” A third advocate of Whole Word instruction, Reggie Routman, actually wrote: “phonics instruction is a useless sore, even a handicap.” In fact, it’s phonics that makes children into fluent, independent readers, the kind of people who can learn what they want and make decisions for themselves. Conversely, it’s the millions of functional illiterates created by Whole Word that turn out to have few skills. Talk about maintaining the socioeconomic status quo. You can say that these Whole Word people were not just wrong, they were pathetically wrong. They drank the Kool-Aid and then denied the obvious: a phonetic language such as English requires that children learn that letters on a page stand for sounds. That’s the essence of phonetics, or phonics. Ideally, all parents would understand how phonics works and that Whole Word can cripple a child. Additionally, they would be aware that many dangerous sophistries were devised during the Reading Wars, thereby rendering the entire reading debate muddled and dysfunctional. Working around this confusion is the first priority. Bottom line: English words were never designed to be memorized visually. If you want to see how weird our words look to a first grader, just choose a random page of text, turn it upside down, and look at it in a mirror. You will see that the word-designs are annoyingly similar; and they change in unpredictable ways from typeface to typeface, from lower case to UPPER CASE. There’s a lot of visual complexity and chaos. Imagine trying to memorize many hundreds of these so-called sight-words on sight. This project is nearly impossible. The progressives’ Reading War was actually a reading scam. Phonics, by proceeding one simple step at a time, enables all children to read, typically by the end of first grade.
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Bruce Deitrick Price has been writing about education for 30 years. He is the founder of Improve-Education.org. His eighth book is “Saving K-12—What happened to our public schools? How do we fix them?” More aggressively than most, Price argues that America’s elite educators have deliberately aimed for mediocrity—low standards in public schools prove this. Support this writer on Patreon.