Phonics Is Winning – IOTW Report

Phonics Is Winning

Saturday, 26 October 2019, 18:00 MJA Uncategorized 25

American Thinker: Phonics is winning, finally, at long last, after 85 stupid years, after 50 million functional illiterates, after one of the most stubborn subversive schemes against common sense ever to brutalize a country.  Finally, the one correct way to teach reading is again embraced as the one correct way to teach reading.

Go ahead, shout “OMG.”  The fix has been in for so many dumbed down decades that many people may have given up hope.  You may think this is now crazy optimism on my part.  But I will show you some signs that things have suddenly and surely changed.

First, conservatives must note that the New York Times is finally on the right side of a major debate.  It was on the wrong side for a long, long time.  I don’t know what finally woke those people up.  Toward the end of 2018, a seminal article appeared: “Why Are We Still Teaching Reading the Wrong Way?” by Emily Hanford.

The subtitle tells it all: “Teacher preparation programs continue to ignore the sound science behind how people become readers.”

Hanford concluded, “To become readers, kids need to learn how the words they know how to say connect to print on the page.  They need explicit, systematic phonics instruction.  There are hundreds of studies that back this up.”

Well, you can imagine the shockwaves circling the globe.  Thousands of so-called literacy experts have been sent back to school.  Two things kept the hoax going all these years.  1) A mountain of dubious research that 2) an army of education professors flogged to control the debate.  The professors will have to work much harder now.
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25 Comments on Phonics Is Winning

  4. “The Education Establishment is not good at teaching children to read.”

    The Education Establishment is not interested in educating. It is interested in creating a population of Comrades.

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  6. …the looney crap did what it was supposed to do. It made the kids dumb enough to vote Democrat…

    …I remember a PJ O’Rourke story about a Baptist minister of the Jimmah Carter ilk visiting a friend in Arkansas. He noted the man had a few sons, and said, “Those are some good looking boys there. All good Democrats?”

    His friend replied, “All except for Cletus there. That onery cuss, he got himself to readin’…”

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  11. Phonics was never accepted because it does not work. It is the Common Core Math of literacy. Periodically, it is tried and thousands of children are left behind, unwitting victims of academic arrogance and political expediency. If the forces behind phonics have truly won the battle to nationwide implementation, we will have a nation of illiterates — but then, who will notice?

    As with Common Core Math, some children find some advantage, however, when applied to the general (not cherry-picked) population, it causes problems. We will never get past the requirement for rote memorization in learning, and, we will never be able to treat all children the same, because they are not the same. There is no magic formula that will work for every kid.

    In education, you will always find as many studies that support your position as will condemn it, just as you can in all social and behavioral studies. People are different. With people, outcomes will always be different. We can only guarantee equality in outcome when we lower expectations to the lowest common denominator — the secret to Common Core.

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  14. Ask a deaf person how to communicate without phonetics. My wife, an ASL interpreter & teacher, deals with it all the time.

    Hold a fist out at chest level with thumb towards up, but not extended up. Make a fist with your other hand, with thumb extended up, making the thumbs up sign. Now put the thumb in the first fist, on the bottom below it so your fists are together vertically. Now remove the thumb up fist. You just signed “shit.”

    That was tough, now the easy one. Extend your right index finger and put it next to your head at eye level. Now shake your head back and forth as if saying “No.” You just signed “I don’t understand.”

    Now for a super advanced one. Do the “shit” sign from above, but scrunch your face like something hurts and pull out the thumb up hand sloooowly. You just signed “constipated.”

    Those are the only three I know outside of universal signs.

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  16. Oldtime school teaching produced quite a few very literate statesmen that knew how to write and to speak, and to read. I was taught phonics as part of grade school learning. It was very helpful in learning proper spelling of words. Although English as spoken and written in the US includes much integration of foreign influence in spelling and pronunciation, knowing phonics basics is really useful knowledge. And it is knowledge. Specific knowledge is not wasted, but learned. Inexact perspectives is actually ignorance, not knowledge. When the members of the same society cannot communicate using the same known words, mutual understanding is not possible, and for now, not even acceptable in a civil setting — political correctness supercedes exactness in expression.

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  19. Geeknerd
    OCTOBER 26, 2019 AT 10:10 PM
    “Phonics is spelled phonetically: we stole it from the Greeks”

    …but it seems like we English speakers would expect it to be Fawnicks, or Fanucs if you’re into robots…

    1

  22. Growing up, had a German nanny, British teachers and Yankee family.
    Imagine this young man thrown into rural Georgia schools.
    I had to learn to fight early, the teachers were the worst.
    It all started when they insisted using my left hand was wrong.
    LOL, both parents are lefties, wish I had been there to see the fur fly.

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  23. I was taught phonics by a teacher who left the field because they dropped phonics from the curriculum in 1960. She taught local preschool students phonics privately in the basement of her own home while her sister taught the more advanced students upstairs.

    I was reading on the “eighth grade level” when I started public school in 1963 and was promoted to the second grade after two weeks of arguments among the staff about whether or not I could comprehend what I was reading.

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  25. Phonics actually does work very well to expedite learning to read. The serious downside is that kids have an awful time learning to spell.
    Back to old school for everything, including social studies that tell things the way they actually happened, not some lefty revisionist bs.

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