Mona McNee -- Why She Fights For Phonics

RantRave.com ^ | April 25, 2012 | Bruce Deitrick Price

[BruceDeitrickPrice]

For more than 40 years, Mona McNee has been fighting the good fight on behalf of intelligent reading instruction. She is the author of "Step By Step" (a phonics program) and "The Great Reading Disaster" (with Alice Coleman, 2007, 335 pages), which chronicles the incompetence of the UK's Education Establishment.

I always think of Mona McNee as the Patron Saint of Reading.

Mona has recently prepared a booklet called "Why Billy can't read," which sums up her message in 30 pages. You can find a pdf of this booklet, and as well her free phonics program, on phonics4free.org (link below).

Mona is a hard campaigner. The kind of person who has gone to endless meetings, sent lots of letters, and tried to call up the Minister of Education to tell him what he should be doing if he had any sense. Here are a few characteristic quotes from her new booklet:

"In 1931 the Hadow Report said that 'The curriculum is to be thought of in terms of activity and experience rather than of knowledge to be acquired and facts to be stored.'... This simply cancels out the whole purpose of education! Utterly mad, but official wisdom, never challenged and still around."

"All I want is an end to this terrible scourge of needless failure in reading. It has been and is a major factor in the collapse of our culture and high government spending....This is the worst scandal ever, 1000 times worse than the News of the World hacking, and it still goes on, still protected by the establishment."

"Is this confusion at the top based on honest ignorance or (worse) is it deliberate? Government will not even discuss it with me, and the meddling goes on and on."

"Keeping these strategies is part of the idea that because 'all children are different,' they can expect to be taught different ways, and this is not so. There is one alphabet, and one way to teach all children, of any age, adults and dyslexics."

"Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath: 'First do no harm.' Untold, uncountable harm has been done to millions for life by many thousands of hard-working, well-meaning teachers under the thumb of the establishment."

"In 40 years I have found a total absence of genuine professional curiosity, at all levels."

"The lost potential for half a century is a tragedy beyond our grasp.... Today teachers still get the blame, and the guilty teacher-trainers are never challenged. It has crippled millions and still there is nowhere to turn."

ARTICLE CONCLUDES BELOW

[little jeremiah]

And each child is really different. They have to be treated as individuals. I taught myself how to read; by age 4 I was reading 3rd or 4th grade books, I don’t even remember how I learned. My parents used to read out loud to us kids all the time and I probably followed along in the books they were reading.

Other kids want to do other things.

The catch-up effect is something I have read about from more than one source.