Now that the barn door is closed. John Dewey and James Kirkpatrick wanted to dumb down the American public, to stop them from reading The Federalist Papers and the Bible and to stop reading the classics. They insisted that all the children would be equal if they were taught using the whole world word method, so that they looked at phonetic words like Chinese ideograms. Mission accomplished, American kids are safely stupid for Socialism.
Right you are.
I went to battle up here in Ontario over 25 years ago when my children went into Kindergarten. When I found out how they were teaching reading, and the child-centered philosophy of “educating”, I was stunned that anyone could fall for such nonsense. I immediately pulled my daughter out and home-schooled.
Long story short, I wrote a very good reading/spelling program, used to be a guest on talk radio in our area, started a tutoring business (which paid for my children to go to private schools at 7th grade) and have taught many, many children to read. Some of them were teacher’s children.
The system STILL uses whole language. It’s a guarantee for illiteracy, but that creates lots of make-work projects for the system. They create the illiterates and them put them into intense whole-language in an attempt to remedy the problem. Sadly, the teachers today follow whole-language with religious zeal - good luck changing them.
I am now home-schooling my grandchildren with my daughter. My little 5 year old has a spelling review list of 50 words, which gets updated every time a new spelling to sound association is introduced. She’s only as big as a minute and can out-spell any Grade 3 student.