I can understand the desire to make money off selling new textbooks and teaching materials, and for building careers aound promoting a “new” system every few years.
But why is it that “educators” return, again and again, to versions of the failed “whole language” concept? Years of dismal results across multiple iterations of the program is plenty of evidence that “whole language” does not work for most children learning to read in English (and languages written in Roman or Greeek characters), while phonics has been proven to work reliably for most.
Is there a Marxist angle, or some other ideological imperative driving this in Schools of Education? Is it sometimes a tool for racial levelling? This is harsh, but I could see leftist educrats using whole language to produce “equity of results” to render both “minority” and white children equally illiterate, crippling their ability to absorb any subject matter. Maybe it’s intended to fail.
Yes, ideological imperative is exactly what we’re up against.
You might like seeing podcast LET’S FIX EDUCATION episodes 116 and 117, both written as I was finishing the Lucy article.
It’s wonderful to see so many people agreeing on phonics. I’ve been placing education articles on Free Republic for years and usually there’s a gang of sight-word people criticizing me. If kids are started off on sight-words for a few years, they really are damaged.