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1) Is this argument still going on? I understand their are some educators who still have an attachment to "look-say" or "whole language," but don't most schools of necessity devote time to phonics as well?

2) For argument's sake, why are we losing out the the Chinese (if we are in fact losing out to the Chinese)? Reading and writing "hieroglyphs" hasn't actually hurt them, has it?

“2) For argument’s sake, why are we losing out the the Chinese (if we are in fact losing out to the Chinese)? Reading and writing “hieroglyphs” hasn’t actually hurt them, has it?”

First, we’re not “losing out to the Chinese” so much as allowing the deck to be heavily stacked to favor the Chinese.

Now, on to the Chinese written language...

Years ago, I worked for a Chinese family. One of the, recently “immigrated” members of that family had been a construction engineer in China. According to him, the Chinese language was a huge handicap in any technical area. The language wasn’t nearly flexible enough to function in fields that were not native to China. To become an engineer, the guy had had to learn Russian, German and English.

This was in PDRChina where he had worked. The Russian was necessary for political reasons. The German was necessary because many of the site managers were Germans. English was necessary because, according to him, anything worth knowing/learning on engineering was published in English.

RE: “but don’t most schools of necessity devote time to phonics as well?” Good question. Point is, they keep as much non-phonics as they can get away with.

I’m on a literacy forum where a young, passionate, and disgusted teacher just left this harrowing message-—
“I also know that with the departure of Bush (and I wasn’t a fan, personally), the Liberal states who have made pedagogy political to the point of lunacy literally reacted as if they had been freed to return to whole language. They don’t even pretend to include phonics here. ....I have now subbed in three of this districts’ schools in first grade and one Kindergarten. I have not seen any phonics instruction beyond beginning sounds. The class reading poster poems are back, the listening centers in Kindergarten with 2nd grade level books, the centers where you guess-read and write and the writing workshops where children draw a story picture and then write about it when they haven’t been taught anything except alphabet names (poorly) and 7 ‘sight’ words like ‘on’ ‘an’, ‘in’ ‘went’, ‘I’ ‘a’ and ‘the’.... they are encouraged to write words that they can’t sound out in any way at all....the idea is it is a success even if they just copy the alphabet...they will get it in time. They are calling this Balanced Literacy...but it is whole language straight out. Balance would indicate some phonics, but there is none, in the two grades where it is absolutely critical. Intervention is guided reading from non-decodable text. Pure, flat out whole language....”

Here’s a second anecdote to give you a sense of how bad things can be. A man called me from West Virginia last week to get help with his fifth-grade granddaughter, who has never been taught with anything but sight-words and is now functionally illiterate. In fact the man said he lived in a house with five generations of functionally illiterate people. To sum this up, this is what the Democrats in West Virginia are doing to the poor black citizens of that state. It’s really Goddamn disgusting.