1932? I was taught phonics in the mid-70’s. So was my hubby.
We were introduced to the sight-word teaching method in the mid-90’s with our kids and were very upset.
RE: “I was taught phonics in the mid-70’s. So was my hubby.”
Look, it’s a huge country. You find variations from neighborhood to neighborhood in the same city. A lot of teachers went underground, and taught phonics when the door was locked. Any variation is possible.
But the history of the thing is that the Education Establishment massively introduced look-say circa 1931, to the degree they could get away with it! That’s the Dick and Jane books that everyone talks about. Simultaneously, the little weasels were going into public libraries and destroying phonics books as fast as they could find them. But not every school surrendered, not every neighborhood surrendered. And there were counterattacks and relapses. That’s why they’re called the Reading Wars. Flesch counterattacked massively in 1955. The professors counterattacked him with the International Reading Association in 1956. There was a massive outpouring of incomprehensible jargon. Most parents had no idea what was being done to their children, except they weren’t learning to read very well. This pattern continues to now. That’s why I write about it.
I’ve written 50 articles about this stuff and at some point I have to start making these generalizations and sweeping statements, otherwise I have to start over and explain everything again. Frankly, I am writing things now that, five years ago, I would not have understood myself. All I can hope to do is pull people along, and hope they look at some more articles. The broader goal, for me, is to raise the level of the public debate. One of our big problems is that an almost evil Education Establishment invents terms, changes the meanings, and in general tries to keep everybody perpetually baffled. THAT is what they are really good at.
Another interesting point is that most people have no clear memory of how they learned to read. You’re 4, 5, 6 or seven. What do you know? One of these commenters claims he read billboards at age 4. Wonderful. Why does he assume he was reading sight-words? He cracked the code quickly and he was able to read words. Unless somebody showed him that word at home and said, memorize this design, he was not reading it as a sight-word. He was taking those words apart with some sort of proto-phonetic insight, at least partially. I mean, that’s my guess. He was four years old, how does he know otherwise? (I still have no idea how I learned to read. But it was phonetic. And to this date I hardly know any phonics rules. I cracked the code, that’s all. A is for Apple. Probably my mother gave me some clues but I don’t remember them.)