(Mona McNee, an English author and teacher now in her eighties, has been an indomitable crusader for smart reading instruction over many decades. She created “Step By Step.” Her great sadness is that so many children are still damaged by faulty programs. I suggested that she write a short, sweeping history of The Great Reading Disaster, which I am proud to post here. Every teacher and parent should read this account.)
In the field of education, probably the biggest catastrophe of the last hundred years occurred in the methods used to teach children how to read.
In fact, this catastrophe and its effects spread far outside of education, for tens of millions of people were rendered illiterate. In effect, they were mentally damaged and their life-time earnings much diminished. Most major English-speaking countries--the UK, United States, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand--have been rendered less efficient and less productive.
In many respects, the story is almost beyond belief. The top experts rejected the commonsense way of teaching children to read, a method that had worked for centuries. In general, this method is called phonics. Simply put, children learn the alphabet, then the sounds of the letters, then the two-letter blends, the three-letter blends, and how letters interact consistently.
At this point the students are more or less reading. The whole process can usually be taught in less than a year. Children use their new skill to study history, geography, science, and literature. In doing this, they become better and better readers. That's the way education has always worked. And we must return to it.
The catastrophe occurred because top educators, intoxicated by God only knows what bizarre drug, declared war on phonics. They announced that what had always worked was old-fashioned and didn’t work at all. Instead, they insisted upon a new way, which has been variously called look-say, whole word, sight-words, Dolch words, etc. Like the typical criminal, this method has many aliases. But it is always the same basic idea.
Children should not learn letters and sounds. Instead they must memorize the shapes or designs of words. In the purest form of Whole Word, children do not even know that words have syllables or that they should be read from left to right. Typically, the cognitive confusion has been devastating. Many children are diagnosed as dyslexic, ADHD, and many other fancy terms.
The common scenario is that the child reaches 7, 8, or 9, and knows that his parents and teachers think he is retarded. His self-confidence collapses. He probably starts to act up and misbehave, and in some countries he is probably going to be given medication to keep him quiet. In any event, he is illiterate, probably for life, and his progress in education is virtually nil.
The devastation from this stupid decision was already massive by mid-20th century. That's why Rudolf Flesch wrote "Why Johnny can't read," published in 1955. He explained the entire problem and what we needed to do. Instead, the top American educators formed the International Reading Association, pinned the label genius on each other, and dug in for the long conflict. They were determined to teach reading the wrong way, no matter how much pain and pathology they created. Probably there was an ideological component in their decision. In any case, their decision was arguably irrational and criminal.
All the time that this nightmare has been unfolding, a stubborn group of traditional educators, private school administrators, homeschoolers, and others have gone on teaching reading in the proper way. Perhaps a dozen phonics experts created programs that parents could use. There has never been any mystery about how English works. Due to the fact that English took words from all over the planet, some of our vowels ended up having two or three similar sounds. But in every important way, English is a phonetic language just like Greek, Latin, French, German, Spanish, and Italian. C-a-t is cat.
Phonics and how to teach it is not the big problem. The big problem is an entrenched Education Establishment that is either crazy or crazy like a fox. In any case, this Establishment never admits mistakes, never apologizes to its victims, and retreats an inch or two only when forced to. Expecting them to help genuine literacy is like asking liquor stores to crusade for sobriety.
At this point, the practical path for everyone concerned about education is to go around the Education Establishment. Denounce them but otherwise ignore them. All intellectuals, academics, community leaders, the media, and everybody else worried about the future of our civilization has to ask one question of every elementary school: are you teaching children to read in the first or second grade? If not, you are probably not using phonics and you need to change course.
In this way, we can improve education, save the next generation of kids, and greatly enhance the creativity and productivity of our society.
(My own phonics program can be found here: www.phonics4free.org. I should mention that in the UK, the public thinks that phonics has been embraced and that the Reading Wars are therefore over. In reality, phonics has been tossed into the mix with everything else. Instruction is very confused, and results are still unacceptable. I believe this approach is called Balanced Literacy in the US. The Education Establishment has employed the same trick many times over the last 60 years. They claim that phonics is now okay, now in the classroom. Which turns out to be dishonest. They mix in a little bit of phonics and then pretend that students are getting the real thing. Phonics, nothing but phonics, is what children need.)
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