Beginning reading was successfully taught by phonics in the US from the 17th century to the mid-19th century, when Horace Mann (and later, the Progressives) switched teachers to a method that created generations of poor readers and illiterates.
Ignorant ideas never seem to die. They just keep getting re-adopted by ignorant people and those who, not knowing any better, follow them. Two cases in point: socialism and whole-language reading instruction. The first has been repudiated by history numerous times but is now the program of the Bernie Sanders Progressive wing of the Democratic Party. The second, whole-language reading instruction, has been debunked by five decades of research demonstrating the superiority of phonics-based reading instruction. But it’s still being widely used and creating new generations of students who can’t read.
Whole-language methods expect children to just pick up reading skills by osmosis, the way they learn spoken language. Children are expected to recognize whole words without ever being taught the phonic code that relates orthography to the spoken language they already know. English is taught as though it is an ideographic language, in which each word has its own unique graphic. But this isn’t even an accurate model for Chinese, 80% of whose characters share both a semantic and phonetic component.
Acquiring spoken language is a human instinct; it’s picked up effortlessly by young children in conversation with friendly adults and older children, apparently for tens of thousands of years. Reading, on the other hand, is a skill learned by most children only by formal instruction. It’s not as old as the human species. Rather it only became possible with writing systems, which were invented relatively late in the existence of our species.
The formal instruction must be competent, or the children won’t learn to read well or at all. That is precisely the problem with whole-language instruction, which is still leaving millions of US school children as poor readers or illiterates.
This situation may surprise Founders Broadsheet readers. Wasn’t this controversy settled decades ago? Isn’t phonics-based reading instruction known to be superior?
Well, yes, in circles guided by scientific research, but that doesn’t seem to include the National Education Association (NEA) or the California educational establishment, among others.
The failed teaching method still with us
An op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times asks, rightly, “Why Are We Still Teaching Reading the Wrong Way?” The author, Emily Hanford, writes that
“It’s a problem that has been hiding in plain sight for decades. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress [NAEP], more than six in 10 fourth graders aren’t proficient readers. It has been this way since testing began. A third of kids can’t read at a basic level.
“How do we know that a big part of the problem is how children are being taught? Because reading researchers have done studies in classrooms and clinics, and they’ve shown over and over that virtually all kids can learn to read — if they’re taught with approaches that use what scientists have discovered about how the brain does the work of reading. But many teachers don’t know this science….
“[T]he science shows clearly that to become a good reader, you must learn to decode words. Many whole-language proponents added some phonics to their approach and rebranded it balanced literacy.”
The late Jeanne S. Chall played a formative role in launching the scientific study of reading acquisition in the US. This is acknowledged by The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation here and by Wikipedia here.
Chall’s work and that of subsequent researchers was so effective that the whole-language establishment resorted to semantic obfuscation, claiming they were in favor “balanced literacy,” which supposedly included the best of both phonics and whole-language instruction. But despite the name change and a few perfunctory feints in favor of phonics, whole-language-based instruction continued to dominate in many school systems. Above all, “balanced literacy” was (and still is) defended by the Progressives’ teachers union, the National Education Association (NEA) and the Progressives’ flagship state of California.
The surprising villain: Horace Mann
Horace Mann is celebrated in history of education courses taught in this country’s teachers colleges because he
- Established the nation’s first teachers’ college, and
- Established the first state education bureaucracy.
Whatever the contribution of those two institutions in Mann’s day, they certainly are of questionable worth today.
Not so well known is the fact that Mann was the founder of whole-language reading instruction. In so doing, he overthrew two centuries of successful phonics-based instruction:
“Beginning with The New England Primer, published in England in 1683, instruction in the alphabet and phonics was always stressed first. The children first learned the letters, letter syllables, spellings of sounds, and then the reading text. After The New England Primer came a long string of spelling books that were used to teach reading. The most famous of these was Noah Webster’s The American Spelling Book, affectionately called ‘the blue-backed speller,’ which over a period of about thirty years became one of the best-selling readers of all time, with a total distribution of 24 million copies. The first part of the speller contained rules and regulations, followed by lessons on learning the alphabet, syllable, and consonant combinations, and various word lists to be sounded out according to the number of syllables.
“With the arrival of Horace Mann on the educational scene in the middle 1800s, however, the almost two hundred years of phonics-based reading programs came to a sudden end. Horace Mann, as secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, was so impressed by the order and universality of Prussian education, that he publicly denounced phonics and advocated the whole-word method of teaching reading. Mann (sometimes referred to as the ‘Father of Modern Education’) was such a persuasive individual that his system gradually spread to other states.”
Even in Mann’s own day, his attack on the traditional phonics-based reading instruction was denounced:
“In 1844, Samuel Stillman Greene wrote an excellent essay refuting the whole-word approach, which at that time was being vigorously advocated by Horace Mann. Mr. Mann, attempting to prove that printed words should be learned as whole objects, gave this example: ‘When we wish to give to a child the idea of a new animal, we do not present successively the different parts of it—an eye, an ear, the nose, the mouth, the body, or a leg; but we present the whole animal, as one object.’ Professor Greene showed the flaws in Mann’s thinking with this reply:
…The illustration drawn from the animal, or a tree which is more commonly given, fails, we think, to meet all that is required in teaching a child to read. Grant, that he does not, in learning to distinguish a tree from a rock, or any other dissimilar object, form his idea of it by inspecting the parts separately, and then by combining trunk, bark, branches, twigs, leaves, and blossoms. In learning to read, however, he is to distinguish between objects which resemble each other, and in many instances, very closely, as in the case of the words, hand, band; now, mow; form, from; and scores of others. To make the illustration good, it would be necessary to place the child in a forest, containing some seventy thousand trees, made up of various genera, species, and varieties, among which were found many to be distinguished only by the slightest differences. Or, if it will suit the case any better, let him be placed in a grove, containing seven hundred trees, having, as before, strong resemblances; if, then, this general survey of each of them, as a whole object, will enable him to distinguish them rapidly from each other, whatever may be their size, or the order in which he may cast his eyes upon them, we will acknowledge the aptness of the illustration.
“The reader can easily see how Greene’s analogy applies to the perception of words. One can tell the difference between a word written on a page and a fly walking across the page without examining the parts of either one: he can perceive each of them as wholes. But one can reliably and consistently distinguish one word from another only by being able to recognize the parts that make up each word.”
Failure underlined by test scores
In California, where whole-language (a.k.a. “balanced literacy”) still reins supreme, only 31% of students are proficient in reading in fourth grade and 32% by eighth grade — which suggests that the poor readers are damaged for life. In Massachusetts, by comparison, where phonics-based reading is more common, the comparable figures are 51% and 49%.
Reading competency is a necessary but not sufficient condition for mathematics competence. Not surprisingly, the latest ACT scores show a national decline in both reading and mathematics competency. Progressives have been in the lead of a national movement to minimize or do away with testing. It’s not hard to guess why.
Whole-language instruction, a.k.a. “balanced literacy,” has the scientific status of astrology. When will state-level politicians step in to address this scandal, hopefully on a bipartisan basis? If not, let the fervent debate begin.
Click here to go to the previous Founders Broadsheet (“On Halloween, Progressives give rein to their inner ghoul”)
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