Oh, my gosh. No, wait. I actually don't realize that. Nor do I accept the assumptions underlying your assertion. Perhaps you merely have a highly reflective and mirror-like computer monitor?
Let's keep recapping.
Your point (and that of your fellow travelers): Phonics-based systems are the only possible and true and correct way to teach reading. Everything else is a communist plot. (No, really. You guys really said that.).
My point: Not even the very bestest of the bestest pedagogical systems in the whole world will reach every child every time. Sometimes, some children benefit from approaching the problem of learning in a different way. (And I agree that John Dewey followed a political ideology indistinguishable from some forms of communism. But I just don't buy the communist plot thing.)
It's a pretty basic logical distinction. You all say all. I say some. All that it takes to show you're wrong is one null reader for whom a pure phonics system did not work but a different system or a mixture of phonics and a different system did work. I know from personal experience and my own studies that you're wrong. Probably not terribly wrong, and in a rational discussion we might even manage to agree that the demands of mass producing readers means that a phonics-only curriculum might be the most efficient means with the least spoilage. But we're not in that discussion; we're in this one, and you're wrong as a matter of logic.
That's it. And yet all you've done is call me names (that's called an ad hominem), assert -- with absolutely zero factual foundation (remember what they say when you "assume"!) -- that I am a left-winger, a stoolie for the educational establishment, a whole-words acolyte of the 9th order, and so on. And you deliberately make other people feel bad because they disagree with you. Finally, you (again without any foundation at all), throw in calumnies that I am associated with bad people like government educators or that I must actually be one of them evil, bad, communist plotting, George Sorosing public school educators. (That's guilt by association).
On top of that, your buddy, Wintertime is whinging out there about how I want to force everyone onto a whole words pedagogy. (That's a strawman argument). I think I've said previously in this eminently tiresome thread that I agree that a phonics-based system is the most important core around which language instruction should be based. Where we disagree is with your assertion that other methods cannot supplement phonics.
Your attacks are starting to just get silly. Now, come on. Call me names again.
“pedagogy”
You realize that you’re giving yourself away with terms like that. No normal person uses it - only education insiders.
“Everything else is a communist plot. (No, really. You guys really said that.).”
I’ll let others use that term...I don’t need to. I only go as far as saying that the people pushing this crap at the top simply want to “level the playing field a bit” and bring the US down to with the rest of the world.
And judging by our test scores (which just happen to crash when we went to Whole Language and Fuzzy Math), they have been quite successful.
My point: Not even the very bestest of the bestest pedagogical systems in the whole world will reach every child every time. Sometimes, some children benefit from approaching the problem of learning in a different way.
- - - - -
Phonology is ingrained to such a degree (and wrongfully so) that it can become an imediment to learning foreign languages.
MrR was reading at 2 1/2, I was reading a few months later (by my 3rd birthday). We were in preschool together and were the only two who could read (which annoyed the director of the daycare because we wanted to follow directions as printed, not as they told us). Neither of us went through traditional ‘phonetic’ training.
Fast forward 16 years. I’m in college, studying Biblical Hebrew. Almost all the kids tried to learn it like they learned English (phonetically). I treated it as a code substitution and learned to recognize root patterns. It worked for me, but it wasn’t what most kids were taught.
Sometimes we have to learn to think outside the box, US education doesn’t do that and as a result we have instead dumbed down our education system to the point of no return.
I will say that sometimes no system does much to help. My sister is dyslexic, and phonics won’t do much for someone who cannot see any difference between the printed words ‘god’ and ‘dog.’ Understanding the concept that they are different things is great, but does nothing to change the fact that either word is potentially a typo to her. One-size-fits-all solutions always have a human cost; this is the sin in socialism.