The Big Silence—How Phonics Was Disappeared
Comments(1) | Tagged Dewey, Frank Smith, illiteracy, phonics, reform, sophistry, whole word As I’ve written about the reading wars—Whole Word vs. phonics—and argued that Whole Word was never anything but a sophistry, I’ve become increasingly fascinated by a collateral question: how were our educators able to get away with their scam?? (If that sounds harsh, please Google: “A Tribute to Rudolph Flesch,” which is on Improve-Education.org.)
Here’s the answer that is haunting me. Whole Word could be pushed upon the country, and phonics driven out of the schools, because our media and academics stood silently by and let it happen.
Remember, Flesch wrote his first Johnny-can’t-read book all the way back in 1955. Everything you need to know is in the first chapter. But educators mobilized against him. Who came to his defense? The media, who should be reporting the truth and the news? NO, not that I can discover. Academics, who should be protecting standards and literacy? NO, not that I can discover. A shameful silence spread across the land.
Please, if you know of examples where media or academics did rally to Flesch’s side, I’d like to know. Any year, any publication, any college. Leave a comment.
One of my fondest memories is of a time when I was 6 years old and discovered that I could read. I could read words in school, of course, as the teacher had written the words out and, by rote, we pupils would sound the word out. But, this one day, I was with my mother in a store where they had paperback books and I saw a book with the title “Red Door.” There I was, not in class, knowing what the letters on the cover of that book meant, without a teacher to help me. I was so excited, that I tried to read every cover of every book. It was a moment I have never forgotten. All due to phonics.
This past summer I was in Vietnam. I was asked to teach English to people who ranged in age from 8 to 45. I don’t speak Vietnamese. There the students learn English, but not from anybody who can speak it. So, though they can comprehend what they read, and are grammatically correct when they write it, they can’t speak it. So, I taught them phonics, purely from my own memory of how I was taught it. They loved the classes and after 6 weeks, they were speaking English very well.
I never understood “whole word” reading. My grandchildren had difficulty reading using that technique and because of that difficulty they hated reading. Once they started with phonics, their reading skills improved dramatically, and now they are voracious readers.