I retired from teaching last year after teaching high school science for 7 years. I previously worked in business and raised our kids, so this was a mid-life career change. Going through the education course work for certification was eye opening. Education students are provided with many tools for teaching literacy. We were told to preview the material, relate it to the students' lives, scan section headings with students, read aloud, chunk it, and on and on and on . . . Not once was there a conversation or instruction relating to phonics or individual effort. It was all about how the teacher could make it easier for students who were presumed to be weak readers.
For someone like me who went to grade school in the 1960's, this was very convoluted. My mother taught me to read when I was four (in another language), and our sons learned to read at home before starting school as well. Today's educators seem to go in with the attitude that reading is a great hurdle that most children can't overcome. Indeed, it was my experience that most of my high school students were poor readers. They seemed unwilling to invest effort and didn't know that they could break down words into familiar prefixes, suffixes and roots. The concept of sounding out words was also foreign to them. Sight word instruction and lack of effort have contributed to a crippled generation of readers. Pedagogical malpractice.
Rudolf Flesch, Why Johnny Can’t Read ? And What You Can Do About It (1955) explained it.
About 20 years later, he wrote "Why Johnny STILL can't read".
BTW, when we were homeschooling, I figured Americans were the most literate in the Victorian era.
So I looked for books teaching reading from 1830 to 1860.
I quickly found two sets of phonics rules that have been forgotten since then.
The table of substitutes and the table of silent letters.
I put them on my edsanders.com website.
Scroll down there, and look for "phonics" and click on it.
Do it soon, as I am going to be working on that site, and they may disappear for a while.
They are made to be printed out as "cheat sheets".
“Sight word instruction and lack of effort have contributed to a crippled generation of readers. Pedagogical malpractice.”
Don’t think, FOR A MOMENT, that it’s not intentional, at least at the upper levels, where the decisions are made. They know what works, but their prime motivation is to simply bring this country down, or at least white America down, a notch or two. And what better way to do that than to delay them learning to read or learning math, as long as possible.
They own education, and yet WE still still feed them our kids. I’ve given up on this country, and even my fellow conservatives, after the way I was treated by them when I told them that even their ‘wonderful’ public schools sucked. The only people who did listen were immigrants, as they came from countries with much better education systems than ours, and so had something to compare us to. The rest...they’re clueless, but they sure know how to live in nice houses!