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Comment by Bruce Deitrick Price on February 18, 2014 at 4:53pm

I wrote a long version of my answer several years ago called "30: The War Against Reading" on my site Improve-Education.org. I think you would enjoy it.

The short version is that starting about 1925, the Left decided to conduct a full-scale war against traditional education and to engage in what Iserbyt called "the deliberate dumbing down of America." The main thing they wanted to kill was literacy, and thus they introduced look-say into the schools about 1931. They are still introducing variations of look-say into the schools now.

 At this point we have to make a distinction between the people at the top (they are ruthless SOB's and know exactly what they're doing) and the great majority of people in education, who do what their superiors tell them to do. If you were a low-level priest in the Catholic Church, are you going to dispute what the Pope says? If you're a private in the Army, are you going to dispute what a general says? So the truth is that teachers do not know that they have been lied to, and are poorly educated or not educated at all about reading.

 

So what I do now is write a lot of articles trying to make it clear that whole word cannot possibly work, that phonics is the only answer, that there is a great deal of deception and propaganda in education. But teachers are pretty well brainwashed during their two years at Ed school. They do not like to hear their field or their professors criticized. They do not like to hear that they have wasted two years learning nonsense,  understandably enough.

 So I don't see any magic bullet. Many of these young teachers do not know who Flesch is, or Blumenfeld. So we're talking about a level of ignorance that is close to ground level. So, these days I'm more and more aggressive about saying that the whole thing is organized to make children dumber. I'm more aggressive about saying that the Education Establishment is rotten at the top and the entire group should be fired.

 Meanwhile, there must be 10,000 of these commissars. They've got $1 billion to throw around. There is no policy so stupid that they cannot put it into the schools. They are organized into a network of professional groups like the NCTE, the IRA, and many others. They reinforce each other.

 Robin Eubanks has just written a long book, "Credentialed to Destroy," to explain all this in international terms. Her view is, if we don't save the country and education now, it's not going to be saved. We are approaching the point of no return with Common Core. 

 This piece I've just written about Mona McNee is a quick, pleasant way to learn about a fascinating woman and the whole of the Reading Wars for the past 50 years. So I recommend it to everybody in this context. (It  features a short video called "Reading is Easy." Perhaps, if a few million people saw this video, we could be saved overnight.)

 Well, that's the best I can do for now. Thanks for asking.

Comment by Tunya Audain on February 18, 2014 at 4:05pm

Phonics As Education Malpractice – Where Did This Belief Come From?

 

Surely, everyone would agree that being able to read is key to living a full and useful life. After following the “Reading Wars” issue, I’m still not clear why some teachers resist using phonics as part of their range of approaches to teaching reading. Why is phonics — a proven approach — treated as “malpractice”?  Could it be

 

•        teacher training bias?
•        lack of training in phonics approaches?
•      political ideological agenda?
•        deliberate dumbing down?
•        evidence-based research?
•        conflicting literacy theories?
•       Other

 

Surely love of reading has to be grounded on the ability to read. To me it verges on professional misconduct for a teacher to deliberately avoid a method that might do the trick for that percentage of students who are not being reached by today’s practices.  Couldn’t parents, on behalf of their affected child, sue because of a denial or withholding of services?

 

So, Bruce, are there articles or books where we can find why there is this resistance? This resistance itself needs to be dealt with?  Where do we start?  Is there any good news on this front?

 

This decades-long “Reading War” is unfinished business and needs to be settled.  We’ve got urgent challenges ahead with Data Wars lurking.  We can’t afford to have mindless, illiterate people trying to make proper decisions in the 21^st Century.

 

Comment by Bruce Deitrick Price on February 15, 2014 at 7:39pm

 it seems odd to me that there is no mention in this article of making sure the children can read. This was a feature of the whole language classroom. Thousands of books, constant caressing of books and talking about books, but many of the children never learn to read.

I just did an email interview with Mona McNee. Her life is the Reading Wars. In 1950 Fred Schonell, a leading UK authority, taught that children should memorize the outlines of words. This is so completely insane you know the fix was in. The children were not supposed to learn to read. And after all these years, there is still a lot of this in the field's DNA, sad to say..

@educatt