What Phonics Can Teach Us About the Education Debate
To our collective detriment, U.S. public education has become so insanely politicized that it’s damn near impossible even to have a reasonable discussion about educating our children, never mind actually do something to improve education. One popular dividing line: reading instruction.
Back in the day, schools used phonics as the primary method for teaching kids to read. But, according to a book I’m reading, “[phonics] was gradually abandoned because of increasingly obvious defects and shortcomings. Nevertheless,” the author continues, “it seems apparent today that in throwing out phonics, the educational theorists threw out the baby with the bath water.”
Familiar, yes? The phonics/anti-phonics debate. The pro-whole language/anti-whole language debate. The desire for some to return to the good old days of reading instruction, which magically — as often happens in distant memories — worked for just about everyone. Or the desire for some to eschew anything from the past and to use only newer methodologies and, as my book points out, “‘reading clinics,’ staffed by ‘reading specialists,’ to attempt to remedy the defects of early instruction.”
The yin and yang of educational theories. The us vs. them mentality. The I win/you lose educational machine. That’s where we are today.
Here We Go ‘Round In Circles
Apparently we were there yesterday, too. The book I referenced above, Learn to Read: A Linguistic Approach, was published in 1961. (The bulk of it was written in the early 1940s, but it wasn’t published — and it’s introduction, which I quoted, wasn’t written — until 1961.) The phonics debate to which it refers was raging in the 1950s, fueled in part by the 1955 book Why Johnny Can’t Read, by Rudolph Flesch. The introduction to Learn to Read says Flesch “voiced in concrete terms a vaguely felt but widely experienced dissatisfaction with current [aka, 1950s] instruction in reading in the elementary schools of our country.” Flesch advocated “a return to materials and methods long since discarded.”
You know, phonics.
What do we learn from this history? Not that phonics doesn’t work, but that phonics has been debated for over 80 years, from the time it was being used in the first quarter of the twentieth century to the time it was being replaced in the second quarter, into the 1950s and up to today.
By the way, those would be the same 1950s that today’s conservative educational critics cite as the good old days to which they’d like to return our schools. The same 1950s that Why Johnny Can’t Read asserts was failing at teaching reading.
So what’s going on?
Nothing more than a polarized educational debate in which people align themselves with teaching approaches that allegedly work for all kids. Unfortunately, as the history of phonics illustrates, no single educational methodology works well for all students. Phonics alone can teach many children to read. Whole language alone can teach many children to read. A combination of the two can teach many children to read. Other reading methodologies can teach many children to read. Some kids even teach themselves to read.
But we keep trying to stuff all kids in the same educational box, believing for some odd reason — despite almost a century of evidence to the contrary — that we just need the right box, and everything will be okay. Of course, it’s equally important that my box gets implemented and the other side’s box gets dumped. We cling to this format even though it doesn’t work, probably because it’s all we’ve known.
Empty Those Boxes
Liberals and their favorite advocacy group, the National Education Association (NEA), must abandon the bizarre notion that they alone know how to educate ALL children. They also need to stop demonizing educational approaches that differ from their own. They decry any alternative to the existing public school model, even though this model has been failing a large number of students for a very long time. Head, meet sand.
Conservatives need to let go of the “back-to-basics” mantra, first because it’s just another one-size-fits-all model and second because the good old days, as the history of phonics illustrates, have been falsely glorified. Conservatives also need to stop beating the drum for private school vouchers (as a long-term or permanent solution — I’m all for using vouchers to get kids out of bad schools ASAP). Local property tax money should be spent on community schools, not on for-profit businesses whose goals are to put each other out of business and to maximize profits (not learning).
Educational Choice
And we all need to stop thinking about schools for a moment and think about education. I’m an advocate for educational choice, which includes but isn’t limited to school choice. Children don’t all learn the same way, nor do they all fare equally well in the same environment. And in the end, families have different needs and preferences.
Therefore, I support any kind of homeschooling, which should be unregulated. Parents who opt out of public schools have decided, usually after much research and deliberation, to do things differently. No state should regulate homeschooling beyond requiring that parents report their intention to homeschool. Once. After that, assume nothing has changed until you hear otherwise, Mr. State. That means no tests, no approval of annual study plans, nothing. Just leave ‘em alone.
I also support charter schools, traditional and alternative private schools, learning communities, apprenticeships — any kind of learning format that families might want. And parents have proved that they like having choices. They flock to charter schools wherever they’re implemented. In fact, I think a great public school model is one based on a variety of charter schools, as has been working for Detroit and Boston for many years. The only problem in these towns: they don’t have enough charter schools to meet the demand.
But the NEA would have to give up its death grip on the nation’s public schools, teachers, and administrators. And conservatives would have to give up their desire to create a new business opportunity using public money. Both camps would have to let go of their authoritarian impulses (standardized curricula and tests, anyone?) and instead support several completely different educational approaches, learning goals, curricula, and assessment methods within each local public school system (charter schools are independently run public schools).
I’m not holding my breath. Such a tectonic shift in thinking won’t happen, at least not any time soon. But if it did, it would cause a rift in the space-time continuum the likes we’ve never seen. And it would be for the better.
