After Ruining Education By Dropping Phonics, Liberals 'Discover' Phonics Workshttps://hotair.com/david-strom/2025/06/03/after-ruining-education-by-dropping-phonics-liberals-discover-phonics-works-n3803381The human brain is wired for spoken language, which is why children focus on words, facial expressions, and lip movements very early in life and begin speaking fairly young, and also why people with fairly profound intellectual disabilities still learn to speak and understand. We are speaking beings.
Not so with reading, and especially not so with alphabets, which is why pictograms preceded alphabets, which associate individual letters with sounds. That is a level of abstraction one step beyond pictures. Alphabets just beg to be taught with phonics.
That is a concept so obvious that, of course, "education specialists" decided that it couldn't be so, and they went in search of alternatives. The result? More and more kids can't read.
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The Los Angeles Times reports this as an innovative approach to the literacy crisis, which to me is dispiriting. I really can't say for sure how I learned to read--I did so long before I went to school, and was an avid reader even before I became a motormouth--in a family of 4 kids, there was little point to interjecting myself into the chaos. But I certainly remember phonics being used to teach others to read, and parents have been using it to teach kids at home forever (in families where reading is prioritized and parents don't rely on teachers to mess up their kids' education).
Read this sentence slowly, digesting its meaning:
Why Johnny Can't Read was published in 1957. It was known in the 1950s that memorizing whole words - implemented using different euphemisms - as a method for teaching Reading worked poorly. Some 70 or 80 years of primary grades students were taught using a method
KNOWN to be inferior, but the
experts refused to admit having been wrong.
My first 3 years of elementary school were in a parochial school. We were taught to read using phonics. I caught on fairly quickly, but the teacher kept up the phonics drills so that the less quick students could also learn. Those repeated drills I no longer needed bored the snot out of me, but the teacher cared about all her students, and she was right.
Sooooooooo fast-forward 25-30 years, guess what method we used to homeschool our munchkins? Because it was one-on-one, we had the freedom to turn our munchkins loose in the library (metaphorically and literally) once we knew they "got it" and were reading fluently. English is a much-hybridized language and written English is not perfectly/consistently phonetic, but it is close enough that teaching Reading using phonics works fairly well.
It POs me that 70 or 80 years of students were taught Reading in public schools using a method that was
KNOWN to be inferior. Where would the US be educationally, had, in 1955 or 1960, public schools admitted the obvious, retrained their teachers, and reverted to teaching Reading using phonics?!
