An educational controversy
Let’s break it down, my swing dance instructor used to say. We learned more complex moves not by watching him and his partner perform them over and over at music speed and trying to memorize the whole. We learned the move by reducing their actions to component parts. Do this, then this, then that. Where to put your weight on which foot. When to shift it — more subtle stuff than the eye could catch.
I’m old. I learned to read decades earlier the same way with phonics. But sometime between then and now, the “whole word” method took hold. It’s been controversial. Controversial enough that the Washington Post Editorial Board saw fit to address it in its Sunday editorial:
The so-called reading wars have been raging for decades now, sometimes pitting teachers against publishers or publishers against academicians — and also sometimes, as too many things do these days, pitting progressives against conservatives or Democrats against Republicans. That’s unfortunate, because — as perhaps too few things do these days — the debate over how best to teach children to read lends itself to a conclusive answer. That’s phonics.
There is some history behind the contest, and the Post lays it out in brief.
In phonics, students learn a letter or a pair of letters at a time.
That’s how most Americans learned to read. Slowly, letters add up to words.
Eventually, through a process called “orthographic mapping,” some words will lodge themselves in a child’s memory so they’ll know them on sight. And it turns out the most efficient and effective route to this mapping is linking sounds, letter by letter, to written words. Our brains light up in the right places when we do it.
What’s more, knowing the sounds “a,” “m,” “n” and every vowel team and consonant blend on the long journey to “z” will eventually allow a young reader to decode any word, even when they don’t recognize it.
In education, as in other fields, one doesn’t achieve recognition by doing the same thing that’s always been done. Innovation brings attention, tenure, and speaking invitations. “Whole-language” (and “balanced literacy”) was born.
In the whole-language approach, students are shown simple sentences and learn by logical association.
They learn entire words at a time.
But some students just memorize the narrow set of words in their books and exercises.
In the more modern version of this approach, heavily reliant on what’s known as the “three-cueing system,” students are essentially encouraged to guess words: Does it make sense? Does it sound right? Does it look right?
Apparently, the older method just works better. But what’s trendy has its own momentum.
Many of those most devoted in recent decades to balanced literacy see phonics as, well, boring: “drill and kill,” as some put it. Especially in schools with fewer resources, the chances instructors will be skilled enough to bring these lessons to life might be slim. The thinking goes that kids won’t improve at reading if they don’t enjoy reading, and that to enjoy reading the focus should be on understanding the story a book is trying to tell rather than on getting each and every word exactly right. Who cares, for example, if a student says “puppy” instead of “dog?”
I studied philosophy as an undergrad for all that boring, the-unexamined-life stuff. It became clear that by the 20th century in philosophy, all that ancient and medieval stuff was, well, ancient and medieval. Boring. Not a way to make your mark. Some scholars who did over the last century got really, really esoteric.
A friend had what he called his phenomenology joke.
Ask a phenomenologist do you believe in God and he’ll say, “What do you mean, Do?”
Sometimes basics are just that. Sometimes we do things the old-fashioned way because they work. Other times we abandon old-fashioned things like cursive writing because in a digital age they are anachronisms. Like buggy whips.
Whole-language requires young students to bring to the classroom basic background knowledge and experiences that those from less-advantaged homes may not possess.
But balanced literacy isn’t really balanced — phonics instruction is usually sprinkled here and there rather than instituted systematically in the manner that’s required for students actually to benefit from it. And three-cueing methods sometimes teach students hacks. For those who don’t immediately catch on to sounding out words, those hacks can discourage them to ever learn how.
Recognizing that students will bring a range of vocabulary and experience to the classroom is important, but that doesn’t negate the reality that phonics is essential, because learning a new word starts with sounding out what the word is and because unspooling a good metaphor requires drinking in an entire sentence.
To be continued, likely.
I once asked my late mother-in-law, a Columbia-trained school librarian, how she and her colleagues navigated the educational fads that blew in and out of public education over the course of her career.
“We tried to ignore them until they went away.”