Posted on 03/10/2025 4:13:40 PM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
Here's the starting point for this article. For almost 100 years the Education Establishment has maneuvered, plotted, and schemed to eliminate phonics, and to make American children memorize sight-words. The pitch has always been sweeping: phonics can’t possibly work for a complex language like English, and sight-words are the only way to go. Teachers, students, and parents have been bullied relentlessly to embrace what phonics experts (such as Rudolf Flesch) assume is a fraud and a nonstarter. How does the ordinary citizen deal with this? Well, it's been rough because the professors at Harvard, etc. do not play games. They're trying, in my opinion, to dumb down the country in order to conquer it. They're not going to let you get in the way. In short, we have a perfect situation for testing what AI can do for us.
A lot of people have the feeling that AI is like a Magic 8 Ball or Ouija board. Some profound truth is brought to us from the Great Beyond.
Sorry, that's a false impression. AI scans the vast amount of information found on the Internet (databases, libraries, archives of any kind) and summarizes. In the case of reading methods, you have to realize that the Education Establishment has been flooding the education zone with claims that we need sight-words and more sight-words. It wouldn't surprise me if the bias is 90% for sight-words and 10% for phonics. (Please note that our Education Establishment has been hugely inventive, renaming and reinventing sight-words every five or ten years. For example, we had Dolch words, Whole Word, Whole Language, Balanced Literacy, and many others.) When a community starts objecting too strenuously, the professors withdraw one phony theory and introduce another.
During the 1920s, the Education Establishment maneuvered and probed: would it be possible to tell Americans to stop using what works, and do what doesn't work? In the Autumn of 1931, the Education Establishment went all-in on sight-words. Why then? The great stock market crash of 1929 and the resulting Depression convinced leftists that Marx was right. Capitalism was finished and Communism would prevail. The time to strike is now!
But the first call for war occurred even earlier, in 1919, when Stalin and Lenin created the Communist International. These people just finished defeating what was left of imperial Russia. They were ready to take on the United States, a smaller country. By 1921 the Communists (a.k.a. the Comintern) were infiltrating people into the media, education, foundations, cultural organizations, and so on. Where possible, the Communists jumped into local political campaigns at the state and local level. Thus began a 100-year civil war.
This recap was necessary because now you see how easily the anti-phonics campaign could seem stronger. In fact, the arguments are sometimes presented as almost offsetting. Or phonics is better. If you want your children to learn to read, please deal with this verdict.
One AI said: "Reading often depends on the individual…” But "phonics is fantastic because it teaches you how to decode words by understanding the sounds that letters and combination of letters make. It's like giving someone a toolbox to break down unfamiliar words and manageable pieces. Research shows that systematic phonics instructions helps most beginners build a strong foundation, especially for spelling and tackling new words, a huge validation of phonics.”
Another said: “Studies, like the 2005 National Reading Panel, report that phonics boosts decoding skills, especially for beginners and struggling readers. It’s foundational because English is alphabetic—knowing sound-letter patterns lets kids tackle new words independently.”
Still another said: “Evidence leans toward phonics as the stronger base—decoding is a transferable skill, while sight words are finite. The 2000s Reading Wars settled this somewhat meta-analyses (e.g., Ehri et al., 2001) found phonics-first approaches outperform whole-word methods long-term, especially for spelling and word attack skills.”
A personal note: after I've been studying this debate for many years, I often reminded myself that the whole word lunatics are trying to teach children about five words a week! Or at best, 100 words for the year!! Even if a few kids have a perfect memory, they never reach a few thousand words. But college students need 100,000 words, even 200,000 words. The whole dispute is ridiculous.
Here's the beauty, and the point of this article. Everybody has access to AI now.You can phrase the question different ways. You can ask different AI's and see what they say. You can look at all the evidence, neatly summarized. We can take this whole discussion away from the pretenders at Harvard. You will be the judge and jury. Please send this on to parents you know with young children. It's the kids we are trying to save.
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(Bruce Deitrick Price’s new novel is a smart, emotional thriller titled “The Boy Who Saves the World.” Visit Lit4u.com)
Neither phonics nor word sight is a complete solution. Too many contradictions and exceptions for phonics and word sight too limiting in vocabulary.
There is no easy or “one size fits all” solution to teaching English as we know it. Sort of know it anyway.
Pretty much why English is a required subject for 12 years of primary school.
Yepper, phonics :)
Right. Phonics is essential but it works best on words with fairly simple spellings. It doesn’t help, for example, with the multiple ways to pronounce “ough”. Those kinds of words have to be memorized so they are recognized by sight. (Or is it “site”, or is it “cite”?). Of course, when a person has true fluency of reading, it’s all by sight.
Agreed. My brother explained the phonics principle to me. But most of my reading was based on whole word recognition. For years, I had a vocabulary of words the pronunciation of which was somewhat vague to me. So it’s not either phonics or whole word, it can be both. And individuals will find different strategies best for them.
Two computer history videos I made of computer applications for teaching kids to read. One for IBM Research, and one for BBN in Cambridge MA after I took early retirement and did videos for BBN and MIT Media Lab. A career change from computer language design that came out of being a Trekkie and making music videos. The world is just FILLED with fun things to do.
IBM Research - Meadow - 1991
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t03p0B7dCrU
BBN Voice Recognition Reading Aide - 1997
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUQ5jcex5Ug
Now AI is training humans to read the way it wants them to read. That is not all AI will be training us to do...
My two years older sister taught me to read, she started when I was 3. My brother was born then, and I remember sitting in his high chair while Mom did dishes at age 5 reading Dickens to her. She took the book, A tale of two cities. Mom said, it’s too deep for you. I could read everything, and started out in 4th grade reading class at age 6.
Both of my daughters were taught phonics at an early age, with site words added as they progressed to more complex sentences and words. Both are excellent and prolific readers.
Look Say or whatever it is called this year is teaching reading as if English were Hieroglyphics. Literacy is obviously NOT the goal of modern education.
“AI” will say whatever it thinks you want to hear.
and if you disagree it will say, oh sorry did you want to hear this ?
Japanese using hiragana and katakana is phonetic. Once you venture into Kanji, it becomes rote "sight words" to map the Kanji to words and meanings. Mandarin Chinese seems to be an exercise in sight words too, but a worthwhile exercise since written Chinese is standard while spoken Chinese is not e.g. Mandarin and Cantonese speakers can read and understand, but speak different words.
Phonographix is a great method that encompasses the exceptions and decoding them. I highly recommend.
Absolutely agree!
My husband and I are homeschooling one of our grandchildren. He started with us the month he turned 12. He was completely illiterate and innumerate. He did not know the alphabet and couldn’t add 3+8.
I started him on phonics. Three years and one month later, he is half-way through Saxon Math Algebra 1 and is fluently reading an Advanced Placement history book.
Honestly, This has been the most important and satisfying work I have ever done. It’s not often a person gets to save a life.
That is wonderful!
Just one more thing.
If we had more school choice, I believe privately run schools would use phonics, more children would learn to read, and government schools would be pressured to adopt phonic programs.
Bless you.
Truly, it is. He was sullen and discouraged. Today, he is confident, cheerful, curious,and eager to learn. He is a pleasure to teach.
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