Posted on 03/30/2018 4:13:23 PM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
“There is one question I'd really love to ask (One Heart!): Is there a place for the hopeless sinner, Who has hurt all mankind just to save his own beliefs? Bob Marley
The people in charge of literacy in most English-speaking countries are literacy’s worst enemies. This counterintuitive turn-about has to be one of the planet’s more bizarre stories.
The official experts praise a method, often called Whole Language, that doesn’t work. They insist that young teachers use this useless method. The teachers in turn force their students to embrace the method, and they make the parents tolerate the method. That’s how you get a never-ending illiteracy crisis.
This twisted tale is beautifully illustrated in one teacher’s epiphany. Berys Dixon, an Australian housewife, raised children, went back to school, and became a teacher. She found that many things had changed, mainly, “The explicit teaching of phonics was abandoned.”
Berys recalls: “I was to tell the parents, ‘Don’t sound the words out, you can’t sound them all out. This is what you have to do. Look at the picture, see what the first sound is, try a word. See if it makes sense’….If they’re really stuck, tell them what the word is.”
Try a word?! Isn’t this suggestion preposterous on the face of it? Trying out different words would make reading an endless process of guess and hope-you-get-lucky. Real reading is very fast. There is no guessing and luck about it.
Dixon did everything her professors told her, even though the results were bad year after year.
One day, a parent complained that her young child couldn’t sound out the words in his home reader. Berys suppressed her doubts and confidently instructed the parent NOT to expect the child to sound out words. Instead, encourage him to look at the picture, read ahead, “have a guess,” etc., etc. Then if he still couldn’t get the word, just read it for him. All of this is bunk but Berys Dixon did not know this. Her professors surely did.
Dixon became more uneasy with her failure: “That night I went home and began Googling...There was so much out there.”
The next day, Dixon had to go back to the mothers at the door and say, “Forget everything I said to you last week. There's a better way of doing things.”
As she relates on a poignant video, “In 2008 my whole world changed.”
Berys Dixon is the Education Establishment's worst nightmare, a teacher smart enough to see through the popular gimmicks. But think of all the damage already done by the time of her epiphany. Think of the thousands of other teachers who never have an epiphany. That’s why Australia has been in turmoil for many decades. Their schools adopted all the junk exported from America.
Frank Smith, throughout the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, was the arch apostle for Whole Language. (Ken Goodman is the other important name to know.) If you enjoy highfalutin paradoxes, you will never grow tired of Frank Smith. If you think that sometimes he’s making sense, savor some of the following sentences (from his famous book “Reading Without Nonsense”) and you’ll realize he rarely makes sense:
“It is just not possible to decode written language into speech. Phonics…just does not work.”
"But there is no evidence that there is any limit to the capacity of human memory…”
“Similarly, a child who reads ‘John didn’t have no sweets” when the text is ‘John has no sweets’ may well be reading better than a child who is more literally correct.”
“In other words, when we read a word, we do not read letters at all.”
“Comprehension depends on prediction.”
The big question is not how to teach reading. The big question is how do you find tens of thousands of hacks who pretend to believe something they can’t possibly believe except by being willfully oblivious. After all, Rudolf Flesch did explain the whole matter in “Why Johnny Can’t Read” (1955). And yet our Education Establishment goes right on doing the exact opposite of what works best.
If you demand why Frank Smith and many other professors encouraged dysfunctional approaches to reading, here’s what we know for sure. Stanley Hall (d. 1924) and John Dewey (d. 1952), two of our big-shot early educators, did not think literacy was primary. Even more scary, they did not like children to be independent thinkers, able to figure out their own answers. Dewey was on a committee, roughly 100 years ago, whose goal was to start reading instruction in the fourth grade, not before. Never mind that various research studies had shown conclusively by 1930 that Sight-words did not work. The score was 11 to zero in favor of phonics.
The critical part of Berys Dixon’s story is that every day she gave bad advice to her students and parents. She did this in good faith. She had been rendered useless and dangerous by what the Education Establishment chose to teach her. Parents, students, and teachers are equally victims in this story. None of them knows the reality. But the people at the top know it.
In reality, phonetic languages must be taught phonetically. There are no other good options no matter how much the “literacy experts" pretend otherwise.
The only question, in this whole discussion, is when are these so-called experts going to apologize? They’ve been hurting children for decades (apparently as part of a push for a more socialist society) and it’s time to accept responsibility.
Stats shows that only one-third of fourth- and eighth-graders are considered “proficient “in reading. Clearly, the people in charge do not understand how to teach reading. In a business environment, they would all be fired for incompetence. Are they ready yet to take responsibility for creating (in the US alone) more than 40 million functional illiterates?
(Bruce Deitrick Price analyzes educational methods on Improve-Education.org. His new book is “Saving K-12.” Support this writer on Patreon.)
Stupid question. They will never apologize. They will never admit they were wrong. Move on to winning the war.
The majority of languages in the world, including English, have sound-based alphabets, although a few languages, like Chinese and Japanese, are sight-based.
Since English is sound-based, it’s useful to know basic rules, because the rules apply to large numbers of words. A silent “e” at the end of the word, for example, makes the vowel long. A lack of the silent “e” makes the vowel short. Examples are: made, mad, fire, fir, note, not, cube, cub. It’s useful for little kids to know things like this. Our education system used to be much better (sigh).
I bet you can diagram a sentence...
Many years after publishing papers on how intelligent dolphins were, even using their own speech, it came out that John Lilly was a big LSD user.
Same probably goes for folks in the education department.
Actually, my more paranoid leaning mind blames Chinese Commie infiltration here. They’re basically teaching as they would for pictograms.
How do you sort a Chinese dictionary anyway?
New York state abolished literacy tests for government school teachers because 50% of the Hispanic and 60% of the black teachers couldn’t pass it.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/03/17/teachers-unions-celebrate-removal-literacy-test/
Knowingly placing illiterate teachers in classrooms should be a capital offense.
My kids went to elementary school in rural north Alabama where they still taught phonics. Both are excellent and voracious readers.
My children learned to read using the method called PHONOGRAPHIX. lots of games and fun. Adults need to use their brains. look at what Margaret Sanger was really about when she started Planned Parenthood.
Bkmk
I think the Russians have been here since 1920, ever since the Comintern started cranking up. The weakest targets were in education so that’s where they went.
This article explores the idea that our school system is “occupied territory.”
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/12/k12_occupied_territory_comments.html
I have to confess that I knew nothing about this product. So I’m glad you mentioned it. Here is their website:
I’m continually struck by all the creativity and variety on the phonics side. There must be dozens of wonderful choices. The main crime that I write about is that our public schools continue to force Whole Word on elementary school children.
This is always such a sad story.
I went to the link you gave. So I heard for the first time about Mona Davids, a real fighter in education. I just finished writing a note to her.
We need someone like her in every community; then the battle would be over.
It was painfully difficult for my daughter to read until she started with the phonographix program.Now she is a kindergarten teacher and loves seeing the look on her students faces when things click.she sings and plays lots of games with them. It’s sad when the school wants her to change her methods. She teaches in a title1 school and loves it.
There used to be a computer game called Eararobics that was a great phonics tool. my daughter played eararobics for hours.
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