In an article explaining why children can't read, a teacher made this extraordinary statement: "I still struggle with a lot of guilt."
You almost never see this sort of confession. Teachers rarely acknowledge responsibility. Typically they are cocooned inside official policies. They're expected to agree with administrators, principals, superintendents, bureaucrats, and professors who preside godlike above them.
Why children can't read
Teachers may be using inferior methods. They may be dispensing hokum all day long. In their dealings with parents they may be lying. But they don't know this. The Education Establishment does not leave much to chance. Teachers are trained and indoctrinated; that is, they are given The Truth.
This particular teacher stumbled into a higher reality because she worked in a school district that believed in Balanced Literacy. That's where you give the children a dose of phonics and a dose of Whole Language (i.e., sight-words). The guiding mantra for this schizophrenic approach is to repeat endlessly: all children are different; each learns in a different way.
This teacher had a decade of experience in various schools and had seen different ideas in action. She decided to teach both main theories to separate groups in the same class for a side-by-side comparison. She found that one group of children far surpassed the other. Guess which group.
She thinks the students who learned the non-phonetic approaches (such as picture reading, guessing, and three-cueing) were harmed. "I did lasting damage to these kids. It was so hard to ever get them to stop looking at a picture to guess what a word would be. It was so hard to ever get them to slow down and sound a word out because they had had this experience of knowing that you predict what you read before you read it."
Phonics is a simple concept simply explained. Kids learn that each letter stands for a sound
Think about that. One of the official doctrines in American education for 60 years proclaims that children can predict what they will read next. And people wonder why we have 50 million functional illiterates.
By the way, the article discussed here is by Emily Hanford, who is a saint of patience. She carefully explains all the weird science that our professors have come up with. (I tend to want to sum things up by saying "Quacks hurt children with nonsense." I think of my audience as parents who welcome a good wake-up call. But if you're a confused teacher who wants to be treated gently, read Emily Hanford's patient presentation of all things phonics.)
Please note, phonics is a simple concept simply explained. Kids learn that each letter stands for a sound. That's it. For example, B stands for buh as in beach. All the phonics experts claim that children will learn to read in the first half of first grade (because, as this video explains, reading is easy).
The striking thing about the anti-phonics theories is how scatterbrained they are, how disruptive, how irrational. They make children do many other things besides read. Here we encounter the dark genius of our Education Establishment. They concoct Ponzi schemes that seduce teachers and parents into believing that they actually work. They don't. They create semi-readers, functional illiterates, and millions of teenagers who insist, "I never read. I hate books." Translation: I'm illiterate because nobody taught me how to read properly.
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Unfortunately, American K-12 has embraced dozens of really bad ideas
If we have to pick one gimmick that is more egregious than all the others, it might be encouraging children to guess what a word is by looking at a picture somewhere on the page.
The whole idea that children can look at pictures and figure out words is absurd from the beginning. It only works in the first grade when you have short sentences with an obvious mystery word, e.g., "horse." And what do you know, there's a picture of a horse nearby. So the child says "horse" and thinks he can read. Obviously this scheme won't work in later grades when the sentences are longer.
But by that the time the child is hopelessly hooked. Guessing becomes the first tactic used in all circumstances. To save a bad reader, the first step is to eliminate guessing.
The easiest way to understand the folly of the official methods is to realize that the reader looks away from the text, searching for clues in the pictures, the semantics, or the broader context. This searching takes time and is disorienting. But real reading with phonics moves relentlessly left-to-right and is extraordinarily fast— roughly three, four, or five words a second! Studying a picture can take several seconds at least. So the reading, even if correct, will be painfully slow.
If the people at the top had all the best ideas, we would now be in education heaven. Unfortunately, American K-12 has embraced dozens of really bad ideas. Teachers are forced to learn them and to inflict them on their students.
If teachers take the time to learn just the basics about phonics, they would quickly be able to judge whether they have been hurting their students or helping them.
(More info about phonics.)
