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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35132 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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It's a Vibes-based World for Us

The New Yorker recently printed a piece about a conflict among parents, politicians, and educators centered on childhood literacy. One group wants teachers to use a variation of whole language learning, a method based on immersing kids in books and showing them how to connect words with images. The other wants teachers to use a method called phonics where children are taught to sound out letters and groups of letters, allowing them voice whole words.

Currently, whole language learning dominates curricula in the US school system, with some 60% of children being taught using it--especially in urban areas. Which is surprising, given that researchers almost uniformly agree that phonics is more effective. It's been settled all the way back in the 60's.

This is why some states and cities have begun ordering their teacher to switch to phonics. It's happening in New York City, for example, where whole language learning has been the preferred method for almost twenty years. It's happening in Oakland, CA, where groups like NAACP or REACH (an educational advocacy group), are putting pressure on local school districts to get teachers to use phonics.

But to what do we owe the pleasure of putting tens of millions of kids through the less effective of the two teaching methods?

The New Yorker piece author points to vibes.

According to what she found, whole language learning gained popularity among both teachers and parents because it painted a rosy, feel-good image of literacy education. The method's supporters maintain that children should be put in a book-rich environment and the rest will take care of itself--"through proximity or osmosis", as the New Yorker writer sarcastically describes it. And the teacher's role? To ask encouraging questions, such as why an author chose to use a certain color or why a character was represented by a certain animal.

The author delicately points out another reason why so many favor whole language learning over phonics: politics. Through some clever rhetoric, whole language learning has positioned itself as a counter to the authoritarian, regimented phonics approach, where children have to go through regular letter-sounding drills and have to read the same set of books.

Kenneth Goodman, a famous proponent of whole language learning, said phonics is steeped in "negative, elitist, racist views of linguistic purity." Basically, phonics codes "conservative", and that often was enough to get whole school districts to move away from it, damn whatever researchers say about its effectiveness.

Well, this is all an interesting story that explains a lot about how the education system works. (I would also recommend this 1997 The Atlantic piece to get an even broader picture). But what really struck me about the whole thing is that it's not just vibes-based literacy, it's literally vibes all the way down:

Whole language learning is a vibes-based approach to teaching kids how to read. It's supported by vibes-based academics doing vibes-based science. It's put into practice by vibes-based policymakers. It's supported by vibes-based parents and vibes-based teachers.

Even the New Yorker writer, despite building a strong case for using science-backed phonics, abandons her position at the end, going instead for vibes. She concludes her piece by stating that it's tempting to focus our energies on changing concrete things like school curricula, but what we should really be doing is attacking larger, more abstract problems like poverty and structural racism.

It's a vibes-based world out there. So lay down your arguments, your charts and numbers, your ideas on cause and effect, and start vibing.

Whole word seems like throwing in the towel in recognition of the reality that English spelling is massively divorced from English pronunciation. The phonic "rules" work for the simplest vocbulary (sometimes) but by the time you hit the numbered grades you will encounter word after word where they simply do not apply. Exceptions to the rules are more common than the rules themselves, and at some point attempting to teach a systemic set of exceptions to the exceptions to the exceptions becomes impossible. As time goes on the separation will only get worse, and teaching phonics will become fully impossible, with english words becoming impenetrable hanzi-like clumps of meaning divorced from their constituent parts. You can teach phonics and be limited to learning 3 letter words (except pho) without a mountain of non-phonetic exceptions, or you can do whole word and admit defeat.

Exceptions to the rules are more common than the rules themselves, and at some point attempting to teach a systemic set of exceptions to the exceptions to the exceptions becomes impossible.

Zompist: hold my beer.

I wonder if any such controversy or split exists outside the English-speaking countries. In languages where the spelling doesn't lag behind pronunciation by several centuries as it does with English, something like phonics seems just obvious. In my Hungarian school we first learned the vowels (as they are easy to pronounce in isolation), the teacher would show big cards with these letters, and we pronounced it out loud, she would show another letter and we'd pronounce that etc. (We'd also do exercises of circling pictures in a workbook whose name contains the new letter/sound that we just learned.) Then after learning the vowels, we learned each consonant and immediately combined them into syllables. E.g. lesson about the letter "b": teacher writes syllables on the chalkboard like "ba, bá, be, bé, bi, bí, bo, bó, bö, bő, bu, bú, bü, bű" and we'd go over them, entire class pronouncing them. Then she may ask if any of these are meaningful words by themselves. Or if we know any word that starts with any of these syllables. This seems closer to phonics than to whole word. Then gradually we'd move to longer words, then very short sentences, then longer sentences in large font, short stories etc.

I'm a bit confused on the whole-word method though. Does it mean that they simply don't have a dedicated class/timeslot for each letter, they don't say that "hey this is the letter b, the capital letter looks like B and the cursive handwritten looks like this and this". That they don't do syllables? That it's all just "here's the word 'hello' and we pronounce it as hello", before the kid was ever told that the letters h, e, l, and o are things? Seems very silly. English spelling is far from pronunciation but isn't so far...

In Israel the corresponding methods are called “Phonetic” and “Global”. As far as I know, phonetic is leading, but there’s some global sprinkled in. In Hebrew it’s very common to read and write without all the vowels (the nikud) so some global reading is a must, but it’s not a good way to start learning.

Hungarian is more or less pronounced perfectly phonetically, though, right?

It seems that how French speaking kids learn to read is the obvious question- French being a language with similar orthographic problems to English.

And American kids taught using the whole word method are taught their letters, but not necessarily the way they go together to make sounds. They’re expected to memorize ‘sight words’ that need to be recognized on sight and not to parse individual letters.

FWIW, "sight words" can complement phonics, it doesn't have to replace them. I think it's actually a good thing both for some tricky spelling, and for quicker reading -- as long as it doesn't exclude phonics.

Sadly, there was a similar movement in Germany, where regarding spelling they allowed all manner of misspelling -- as long as it "looked like it would sound" (which doesn't really make sense as a concept). This has led to a ton of kids who can't spell properly, for no apparent gain (and lasting surprisingly late in life). It's really annoying. I see it in my kids, where I'm a much better German speller, even if they are better speakers (as they are native, and I'm not).

Hungarian is more or less pronounced perfectly phonetically, though, right?

Yes, just like pretty much all European languages, except English and French. But I think even French spelling is more regular than English. (To nitpick: it isn't pronounced phonetically, but written phonetically)

Hence my wondering if any such debate exists elsewhere. But probably not, just like the concept of "spelling bee" contests makes no sense and they don't exist for non-English, European languages (elsewhere I don't know). It's useful to think about, in order to understand how fundamentally human this topic is and how far reaching the conclusions can be.

Hence my wondering if any such debate exists elsewhere.

Yes, there has been a long-standing controversy in France about "méthode globale" (whole word method) as opposed to "méthode syllabique" (phonics), with the first being considered the modern, progressive approach and the second the traditional, no-nonsense one.

Which is surprising, given that researchers almost uniformly agree that phonics is more effective. It's been settled all the way back in the 60's.

Even when summarizing articles, please avoid "experts agree that" in favor of a few sentences on who the experts are, what the evidence / research is, etc. Because the entire case and article rests on that, "researchers agree" communicates very little about what is agreed on or why, and mottzizens have a lot of experience in when 'experts agreeing' were very wrong. "The science is settled" was a mocking term - and while "the science" was often correct, and the skeptics wrong, saying "it's been settled" is not useful.

In particular, the comments here seem confident that phonics works and the alternative doesn't, and the progressives are so ridiculous for believing it - but with little discussion of the methodology by which they settled it! But before you move to "clearly these people are wrong and making a stupid mistake because they are progressives that's what they do", you should take a look at how precisely it is a mistake.

As for vague reasons why "immersion" isn't just feel-good vibes, consider how people learned spoken language historically and still do today ... immersion, just picking things up as they go listening in context, rather than 'phonics'. It's not obviously wrong.

[will read article now and edit]

In fact, the brain of a very young child does perceive letters differently than an adult brain: not as fixed, flat symbols but as three-dimensional objects rotating in space. That’s why kids who are learning to write so commonly exchange “b” and “d,” for example, or “p” and “q.”)

Absolutely no idea what this means, or how it can be true at all. Kids who are learning to write exchange b and d or p and q because they're similar, not because they "rotate". That's like saying if you confuse a and q, it's because the tail is morphing in your brain.

Absolutely no idea what this means

They mean to say that kids, presumably, learn those shapes in a transformation invariant way, just like they would for other things. For example, a dog is a dog whether it faces towards the left or the right. But p isn't p if it faces the other way, then it's a q, which is its own separate thing. For real objects out there we have some mental 3d representation that we can mentally rotate (if we are shape rotators) and manipulate. But the same strategy doesn't work the same way for letters.

Even when summarizing articles, please avoid "experts agree that" in favor of a few sentences on who the experts are, what the evidence / research is, etc. Because the entire case and article rests on that, "researchers agree" communicates very little about what is agreed on or why, and mottzizens have a lot of experience in when 'experts agreeing' were very wrong. "The science is settled" was a mocking term - and while "the science" was often correct, and the skeptics wrong, saying "it's been settled" is not useful.

Good point. I'll be more careful about the curse of knowledge in the future.

I don't have access to my notes, but wikipedia does a good job summarizing what I've found myself (source):

The whole-word method received support from Kenneth J. Goodman who wrote an article in 1967 entitled Reading: A psycholinguistic guessing game.[127] Although not supported by scientific studies, the theory became very influential as the whole language method.[128][129] Since the 1970s some whole language supporters such as Frank Smith, are unyielding in arguing that phonics should be taught little, if at all.[130]

Yet other researchers say instruction in phonics and phonemic awareness are "critically important" and "essential" to develop early reading skills.[131][132][133] In 2000, the US National Reading Panel identified five ingredients of effective reading instruction, of which phonics is one; the other four are phonemic awareness, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.[134] Reports from other countries, such as the Australian report on Teaching reading (2005)[135] and the Independent review of the teaching of early reading (Rose Report 2006) from the UK have also supported the use of phonics.

Furthermore, a 2017 study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology compared teaching with phonics vs. teaching whole written words and concluded that phonics is more effective. It states "Our results suggest that early literacy education should focus on the systematicities present in print-to-sound relationships in alphabetic languages, rather than teaching meaning-based strategies, in order to enhance both reading aloud and comprehension of written words".[138]

The National Research Council re-examined the question of how best to teach reading to children (among other questions in education) and in 1998 published the results in the Prevention of Reading Difficulties in Young Children.[286] The National Research Council's findings largely matched those of Adams. They concluded that phonics is a very effective way to teach children to read at the word level, more effective than what is known as the "embedded phonics" approach of whole language (where phonics was taught opportunistically in the context of literature).

In 2000 the findings of the National Reading Panel was published. It examined quantitative research studies on many areas of reading instruction, including phonics and whole language. The resulting report Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and its Implications for Reading Instruction provides a comprehensive review of what is known about best practices in reading instruction in the U.S.[288] The panel reported that several reading skills are critical to becoming good readers: phonemic awareness, phonics for word identification, fluency, vocabulary and text comprehension. With regard to phonics, their meta-analysis of hundreds of studies confirmed the findings of the National Research Council: teaching phonics (and related phonics skills, such as phonemic awareness) is a more effective way to teach children early reading skills than is embedded phonics or no phonics instruction.

Chinese kids seem to learn to read just fine and they don't have any option but whole-word methods. I would expect phonics to help some students on the margins, but only in terms of time spent in the classroom and not their eventual level of literacy. A much larger impact could perhaps be achieved through orthographical reform, but that's never going to happen.

I thought I read somewhere that it takes Chinese kids longer to attain an equivalent level of literacy, but I can't find a source right now.

That's not exactly true. PinYin does exist.

Wouldn't phonics eventually wipe out regional dialects?

AAVE seems like it wouldn't survive long under phonics.

And if more liberal areas tend to go with whole word learning, and presumably conservative areas with phonics, could this be why (it seems) that southern dialects are disappearing?

Phonics associates letters and sounds - you can still memorize sound patterns that are different for different dialects, or make that association yourself by noticing how people speaking your dialect speak the same words. Keep in mind that you could teach British English with phonics, for instance.

Also, school indoctrination is far from omnipotent, regional dialects can survive even if the children are taught a standardized form in school and over the internet. Maybe that will stop being the case in the near future, but children interact with peers, their families, and other locals a lot more, and can make themselves understandable to foreign city-folk/mainlanders/whatever with little effort - whereas the opposite would involve internalizing and speaking the standard form while in an environment where everyone speaks differently, but switching back to the local dialect to speak to your own parents and friends, or weirding them out by speaking the standardized way. There isn't a lot of pressure to change. It can depend on mutual intelligibility, though - very minor differences may get smoothed out, very major differences can cause you to choose standard, I'm not sure it's predictable.

As an aside: Versions of a language can diverge pretty significantly. Diglossia is fascinating - it happened in Greece, before my time, but not that far back, just a few decades ago. What happened is that the "high-status" (official, pretentious, archaic, literary, ...) version of the language mostly disappeared, and is now only really used in sayings, when referencing history, for fancy labels, or for comedic effect. Of course part of the reason is that government changed what was taught in schools, it's not all natural - but the high-status language itself wasn't natural to begin with. Ordinary dialects based on geographic regions still very much exist.

deleted

You don't need all the racism and plantation aspects to explain the disappearance of dialects. The same is happening in many European countries with no such history. Dialect is associated with peasants, low skill workers, poor and uneducated people, etc. Probably due to infrastructure, media, urbanization, telecommunications, but also standardized schooling etc.

While I broadly agree that this is a common phenomenon in the West, I wanted to say that this disdain for dialects is less prevalent/important in India.

We've got a fuck-ton of dialects, which isn't a surprise given the thousands of distinct languages we have. As such, there really isn't all that much discrimination on the basis of dialect, and whatever there is usually mild, like girls speaking Hindi who seek to emulate the posh South Delhi Girl accent (exactly equivalent to the Valley Girl accent in the US).

If I had to guess, that's largely a consequence of the normal linguistic diversity, hard to care about accents when you hear 3 or 4 different languages on a daily basis.

My wife and I usually speak in dialect. A few weeks ago I spent a lot of time cloistered away at work and she spent a lot of time trading voice messages with a northern friend of hers. The friend does and my wife used to belong to the cultural left that try to distance themselves as far as they can from dialects, using that distance to signal tribal allegiance. After a while, my wife began speaking to me and our child in high german. I was honestly horrified. Our dialect is dear to me, a large part of my home memeplex, and I felt like an utter stranger when suddenly adressed in that artificial, impersonal and politically loaded high language.

It's back to normal now but aua did that sting. Felt like the clammy fingers of the cathedral sullying a sacred space.

In Hungary, the culture war angle seems a bit different than that. Here academic (usually leftist) linguists emphasize descriptivism and that no dialect should be stigmatized, there is no single correct way to speak, the standard language is more like customs of clothing while real language is organic and biological. I generally agree by the way. There's even a term, linguicism to describe prejudice against non-standard speakers, which may prevent people from getting hired etc. While there's a connection to the topic of Gypsies, these linguists also speak out in favor of not shaming non-Gypsy Hungarians for their dialect, inclusivity etc.

Why doesn't it work out like that in Germany?

Germans hate individualism with a passion. Blame it on protestant puritanism, or prussian uniformity, or whatever animation the nazis ran on, but each German thinks he knows exactly how things need to be in the world, and any aberration must be expunged with a vengeance. The right way to brew beer, the right way to build a machine, the right way to drive a car, the right way to engineer a society, the right way to respond to a novel virus, the right way to speak German. I'm fully prepared to believe that all of the current progressive mania is based on whatever the Frankfurt School did, because this modern big-government, small-individual ideology is exactly something Germans could come up with.

Maybe Hungary doesn't have the same hardon for collectivism?

I was specifically reacting to you attributing your wife's switch to standard German to some leftist influence. I would imagine German leftists would want to distance themselves from that Prussian style rigidity that you mention.

Superficially they do, and even substantially in some ways, but a leopard can't change its spots and more often than not they drift towards the same old uniformity-for-uniformity's-sake that most people here love.

There's even a term, linguicism to describe prejudice against non-standard speakers, which may prevent people from getting hired etc.

Language is for communication. If you speak in a dialect that is not mutually intelligible with the standard, or is only with difficulty, communication becomes more difficult. This is not "prejudice", this is a legitimate consideration.

That's not even the issue here. There are practically no speakers of dialects remaining who cannot make themselves understood without switching to the so-called standard. What we have is the remaining dialects, which are almost universally mutually intelligible given any but the dumbest or deafest listeners, being opposed by the dominant strain of cultural leftism.

Depends how close to the border you get. As a high-german speaker, I can say from experience that spoken Plattdeutsch is completely unintelligible to me. I'd have had more luck talking to that person in English - which is a problem if you're trying to book a room for the night! :) (We got through it with sign language.)

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That depends on whether the dialect actually hinders communication no?

This may or may not be the case, I might understand your accent perfectly well but still not like it for prejudicial reasons, e.g because it outs you as a backwards farmer or a privileged type worthy of resentment.

Motte: We're protecting against prejudice against those with clear but low-class dialects

Bailey: We're protecting people who speak unintelligibly and placing all the burden of communication on those who speak the standard dialect, and if they complain we call them bigots.

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This doesn't happen in Hungary though. There are specific stigmatized grammatical quirks that are present in some dialects but they don't make understanding harder.

Imagine for example if there was a German dialect where instead of "größer als" they'd say "größer von". L And people who learned it so in their village would be ridiculed for it or assumed uneducated. "Haven't you paid attention at school? That makes no grammatical sense! It makes me cringe like hearing nails on a chalkboard!"

I know that in German there are dialects that aren't mutually intelligible with the standard, so there it can make sense to require standard knowledge for a job (not sure whether that's legal though). But in Hungarian we only have slight pronunciation differences, some regional words and some minor grammatical differences.

The question still stands: why don't inclusive German leftists fight for the proud right to speak dialect and fight against linguicism, encourage dialect use as a form of diversity etc? (maybe they do)

a German dialect where instead of "größer als" they'd say "größer von"

In English there are relatively few grammatical differences between the American and British standard dialects, but 'different than' vs. 'different from' strikes me as a perfect analog here.

Though both of those have a whole country where they are part of the local standard.

I know that in German there are dialects that aren't mutually intelligible with the standard

Those are few, and spoken by very few people, and even then most of them are very well able to modulate their speech to find some compromise in which they're intelligible while still retaining as much of their dialect as possible. Unintelligibles used to be more prevalent of course, but they're nigh-nonexistent by now.

The question still stands: why don't inclusive German leftists fight for the proud right to speak dialect and fight against linguicism, encourage dialect use as a form of diversity etc? (maybe they do)

Because tribal ideologies aren't designed in advance and built on rigorously logical foundations. Instead they coalesce around condensation nuclei and after that only shift under pressure. German leftism coalesced around cosmopolitanism, antinationalism and high german with as many anglicisms as possible as its common tongue because this distancing from dialects and even your own language signals that you have no actual national allegiance.

Country music notably uses southern dialects and is very popular, just not with Hollywood tastemakers. And red tribers and working class whites(to the extent that there’s still a difference) still use southern dialects.

Also - radio, television, internet etc do a lot to remove dialects.

That's part of it, but a lot more of it is just the straightforward result of modernization.

Ocracoke Island is a good example.

The Outer Banks were fairly isolated until about 80 years ago. The Wright Brothers had plenty of room to try out their aviation experiment there, but today the area around their flight path is highly developed. But Ocracroke Island, which is a bit further south is one of those places that I think is still only accessible by ferry. It has a unique dialect, speakers are known colloquially as "High Tiders", and their accent sounds like British Isles with some Southern sprinkled in.

These early American immigrants lived in a community that was fairly isolated from the mainland for centuries and developed its own culture. I have always loved the stories of several of these Carolina island communities who celebrated 'Old Christmas', basically because they ignored the memo about shifting over to the Gregorian calendar in 1752. But then you get radio, television, and infrastructure that brings the barrier islands in closer contact with mainland people and culture. Today, fewer than 200 people on Ocracroke still speak the High Tider dialect, and the island is increasingly populated by 'dingbatters' or outsiders.

It's the same phenomenon playing out in black southern island communities that speak Gullah.

On the other hand, there are places in Appalachia where it works pretty much as described - JD Vance goes Ivy Leauge and learns to say "wash" not "warsh" and "toilet" not "towlet", etc. But within these communities themselves, all of which also have radio and television and infrastructure, etc., it does seem that the areas themselves remain somewhat isolated, with fewer migrants or tourists, and that differences persist.

The standard American English dialect doesn't correspond to a simple phonics, anyway. We're not Spanish and even Spanish has weird dialects like Argentinian.

It's a vibes-based world out there. So lay down your arguments, your charts and numbers, your ideas on cause and effect, and start vibing.

Sounds like phonics itself, if you take "vibes" to mean "vibrations" to mean "sounds." Probably less productive here, though.

On the subject of "vibes": "good vibes" etc is a phrase I started hearing only in the past 5 years or so, and I noticed the kind of people who used it were inarticulate socialites. I started also hearing more people talk about "radiating energy" and what not. Before, I used to think it was primarily something uncommon, only said by spiritual-yoga types.

I wonder if its a coincidence that vibrating particles is literally thermal energy, and if those phrases are somehow related in that way.

I didn't even consider that "vibes-based" education here could literally be referring to sound.

I'm not convinced the evidence for superiority of phonics over all other methods is as strong as you suggest it is. Even if that was the case, however, that fact by itself would not necessarily imply anything about how schools should operate.

Here's where I'm coming from. When I was young I transferred from a nontraditional school with relaxed reading expectations to a more normal one, so I ended up going to a remedial reading program for a few months. I don't recall anything phonics based, though this was a while ago. Either way, as far as I recall, I was reasonably literate within a year. As in I was rapidly able to read anything I wanted, though of course subtle literary senses took longer. What I do remember quite vividly is hating English class for the next two years, because as often as not it was just hours of identifying sounds in words I could already read just fine, followed by homework of more of the same, all while I would rather just be reading a book.

I should have added more meat to my post, my bad.

I collected some snippets straight from wikipedia on the subject in this comment: https://www.themotte.org/post/75/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/9901?context=8#context

So it appears that whole-word has no effect whereas phonics has a positive effect. Neither probably affect all kids, but given that phonics has a positive effect on at least some kids whereas whole-word has none, it seems like phonics should be used--at least until we find something more effective.

This forum may be one of the absolute worst places on the entire internet for the members to apply their individual experiences to this particular topic. If you are here, your language skills are extremely good. Everyone here is an outlier in the same direction on this topic.

Gifted and talented students are a special problem in education, much like the learning-disabled, but for the opposite reason. For those with disabilities, it's difficult to find the right strategies to achieve education. For the gifted, nearly every strategy works, and it's difficult to find the best strategy.

Though as you note, "failing to move on when education has been achieved" is by far the most common way for the system to fail gifted students.

What I do remember quite vividly is hating English class for the next two years, because as often as not it was just hours of identifying sounds in words I could already read just fine, followed by homework of more of the same, all while I would rather just be reading a book.

That just sounds like an argument in favor of better tracking. Students who have already mastered a topic, in any subject, should be allowed to test out of it and move on.

Phonics vs whole word learning is an interesting example of group utility in adopting incorrect beliefs.

Homeschoolers in general hate whole word learning, with a passion. The conservatives end of homeschooling(and the homeschooling community being what it is, this is the majority) believes and repeats a variety of bizarre conspiracy theories about whole word learning as an evil plot to do x, where x is usually something like ‘convince children that the world around them is completely arbitrary/changes on the will of liberal authorities, thus justifying atheism/lgbt/evolution/lockdowns’. I believe the liberal end has their own justifications for opposing whole word learning coming from the opposite direction.

Needless to say, whole word learning does not cause transgenderism. The only drawback is that is doesn’t work, which is a pretty big drawback. But making that argument is pretty difficult and involves a set of tools to prove it that were, until recently, unavailable to the homeschooling crowd. And whole word learning is less work for the educator, so it would have probably won out by inertia absent some kind of pitch.

From my own experience I didn’t learn to read until my catholic school switched from whole word learning to phonics(they switch back and forth every couple of years in my diocese). But anecdata.

But making that argument is pretty difficult and involves a set of tools to prove it that were, until recently, unavailable to the homeschooling crowd.

A lot of the tools were there back in 1955, in a bestselling book.

How many teacher education schools have to keep explicitly saying that their pedagogical approach is based on liberatory theories of critical social justice before you start believing them? Like, have you made any attempt to actually engage with the theories underpinning this educational model? Or are you just defaulting to the lazy idea that “conspiracies don’t happen” and satisfying yourself with that? There’s nothing “bizarre” about taking the literal words of widely-taught educational theory textbooks seriously, and drawing the conclusion that the people putting those theories into practice actually mean them and believe in them.

How many teacher education schools have to keep explicitly saying that their pedagogical approach is based on liberatory theories of critical social justice before you start believing them

But - in every other area, """these people""" just take random things and say they're racist or liberatory. Eating twinkies? Self care. Milk is racism. More black people in television ads? Helping little black children see themselves on TV, empowerment. Having long hair is conservative. But none of those things actually are that, and deciding that phonics is conservative doesn't actually mean whole-word is based in 'liberatory theories of critical social justice', or is even bad, it might be totally random.

‘X is racist’ is just how midwit college educated women say ‘I don’t want to do x despite it being a better idea than whatever I’m doing currently’.

Or 'I don’t want you to do x despite it being a better idea than whatever you're doing currently.

Can you please link an example of this? I really need to read this in all of its glory for myself.

See my below comment in this same thread about Paolo Freire and Lucy Calkins. You can find a bunch of their work and their public statements on Google.

'believes and repeats a variety of bizarre conspiracy theories about whole word learning as an evil plot to do x,"

There's a comment below that is a steelman of the homeschooler's paranoia- that Paolo Freiro explicitly calls for Marxist Revolutionary concepts to be taught/indoctrinated in school using techniques designed with such goals in mind, i.e. whole word learning.

It's not undue "paranoia" if the neomarxism is being pushed/funded from positions of money and authority.

It seems like nothing works well , or that no method is superior to any other method, which agrees with Freddie Deboer's posts on education. Educators have tried every possible approach , and yet nothing can overcome innate individual differences in learning ability. Smarter kids will pick up reading faster regardless of which method is used.

This seems right, phonics 'working' [might i will read more] come out of the same body of knowledge that produced learning styles, growth mindset, etc. The comparison to learning spoken language seems obvious - there isn't a "phonics" for spoken language, you just learn it via immersion!

No. Literacy does have to be taught, you don't just "pick it up". Phonics works. Whole word learning doesn't. I suspect that to the extent students in whole-word programs learn, it's because someone has been teaching them another way. So the question is why educators are so attached to a system which doesn't work?

I suspect that to the extent students in whole-word programs learn, it's because someone has been teaching them another way

this is obviously false, I'm confident you'll find someone who was homeschooled with whole-word only and learned it fine. People and intelligence are flexible, you can learn things in poor and slow ways and still learn them, and the claim was that whole-word was less effective than phonics, not that it didn't work. Just compare it to language learning - if you have a smart kid and he does whole-word, even if it is greatly inferior to phonics, couldn't the kid figure out all the tough bits themselves the same way a smart kid does that for other things?

from the article:

These students are more likely to be growing up in homes full of books, Shanahan said, among adults with the time and ability to read aloud to them. It is most likely these lucky children, in fact, who at some point “just know” how to read—who bear out Calkins’s theory of literacy by vibes, because these kids are already marinating in those vibes at home. “And that’s where this gets to be noxious,” Shanahan said. “It’s undoubtedly true that many kids will learn to read with this program. But it’s also probably true that the percentage of kids who learn to read will be lower, and the average achievement level will be lower.”

It’s a common belief among early-reading experts that roughly forty per cent of children can learn to read fluently without much direct instruction. “Those are the people who grow up to say, ‘I don’t remember how I learned to read; I just did it,’ ” Leah Wasserman, a pediatric speech-language pathologist in Brooklyn, told me. “But about sixty per cent need some level of explicit instruction, and those kids are not going to do well with Teachers College. If a kid doesn’t know how to match letters and sounds, or to sound out and segment and blend, they’re not learning to read. They’re not going to naturally intuit how to do that in twenty or thirty minutes of free reading.” And because those blocks of time are mainly devoted to silent reading, children aren’t demonstrating their understanding of letter sounds—they aren’t, to borrow a term from math class, showing their work.

What’s more, Susan Neuman told me, some clever members of the sixty per cent may be able to feint their way through books for early readers, and so the true extent of their lack of decoding skills may not emerge until as late as third grade. (In 2011, a national study of four thousand students found that a child who is not reading proficiently by third grade is four times as likely to drop out of high school or graduate late as those who are, or eight times as likely if that child is also Black or Hispanic and affected by poverty.)

So, this is the kind of argumentation that sounds like "evidence", because "shanahan said!", "wasserman, a pediatric speech-language pathologist, told me", but could easily be wrong. Going with it as true, though - the way the quotes are strung together seems to hint-hint that most of the "roughly forty per cent of children [that] can learn to read fluently without much direct instruction" learned it at home - but I don't think the parents are all doing phonics at home, and nowhere does it say that all of those 40% are explicitly taught it at home, especially with phonics. And taking the claim "It’s undoubtedly true that many kids will learn to read with this program. But it’s also probably true that the percentage of kids who learn to read will be lower, and the average achievement level will be lower." literally also suggests that both work.

None of this is really compatible with "Phonics works. Whole word learning doesn't. I suspect that to the extent students in whole-word programs learn, it's because someone has been teaching them another way".

this is obviously false, I'm confident you'll find someone who was homeschooled with whole-word only and learned it fine.

So you've got nothing?

but I don't think the parents are all doing phonics at home

I think they are. An unstructured version of it, but teaching them the sounds for the letters and having them try to figure out unfamiliar words by putting the letter-sounds together is pretty common.

so you've got nothing

just "It’s a common belief among early-reading experts that roughly forty per cent of children can learn to read fluently without much direct instruction. “Those are the people who grow up to say, ‘I don’t remember how I learned to read; I just did it,’ ” Leah Wasserman, a pediatric speech-language pathologist in Brooklyn, told me. “But about sixty per cent need some level of explicit instruction, and those kids are not going to do well with Teachers College"

I think they are. An unstructured version of it

sure, but 'whole word' style also has portions of an unstructured version of phonics! just showing single-syllable words together with their pronunciation is enough for that. And that's enough for a particularly smart kid to learn from.

How much of whole word learning is actually phonics? Two fifths of it maybe?

Homeschoolers hate whole word learning and I doubt you can find a homeschool curriculum that used it.

This is addressed a little bit in the New Yorker piece. Researchers agree that literacy teaching is difficult to measure because some kids just seem to pick it up quickly, some take a long time, and yet others learn to fake literacy very well until 3rd or even 4th grade. She also raises the point that the kids that do well in whole language learning programs probably come from well off households that have many books and where the family actually spends time reading.

That said, I believe the main point about phonics is that it is able to bring kids who struggle with reading up to speed faster than other methods. These struggling kids include both those with dyslexia as well as those from poor families. If this is true, then I would expect phonics to have little effect, except maybe annoyance, for the smart or lucky kids, but it would be a huge help for poor/dyslexic kids.

Anecdotally, some amount of private tutoring is incredibly widespread among rich kids in the US, and private tutoring(sylvan etc) uses phonics almost exclusively. Engaged parents also frequently teach some basic phonics rules about silent e’s and soft c’s, and smart kids tend to figure some out on their own without having to be explicitly taught.

Combine the three, and wealthy districts can achieve a fair amount of success with the whole word method then quietly shuffle anyone who fell through the cracks into remedial classes that use phonics until they’re caught up. Poor districts just suffer.

I think this correctly sidesteps the entire 'issue'. The only victims are the kids stuck with ever more elaborate schemes of learning designed for the innately illiterate or those with no mind for reading in the first place.

Recognizing the issue of innate differences, and assuming we do not consider school to be a rat race for our children, wouldn't the best teaching method be something that makes the kids happier at the same time as they are taught how to read? I wish that we could change our objectives away from ever more elaborate schemes designed for the innately illiterate or those with no mind for reading in the first place, towards something more aligned with making school a more 'harmonious' experience, for a lack of a better term.

Humans are vibes-based creatures. Always have been. It’s nothing new.

I can’t believe I of all people am going to defend progressive activists, but I think you and the author are both massively underselling how formalized and sophisticated the theoretical basis for these educators’ approach is. I’m surprised that at no point does the author mention the man whose ghost looms large over so much of modern literacy education: Paolo Freire.

Freire’s The Pedagogy Of The Oppressed, along with his somewhat lesser-known book The Politics Of Education, is one of the most influential texts in teacher education of the last century. Freire was one of the pioneers of critical education - which, like any other branch of critical theory, is explicitly Marxist, and seeks to use education as a tool to undermine and destroy the existing socio-economic system. James Lindsay, of the New Discourses website, did a series of lengthy and dense podcasts in which he went through Freire’s work in excruciating detail, explaining Freire’s theories and how they have influenced modern anglophone education. (For those of you who instinctively scoff any time a right-winger calls something Marxist, assuming that this is like when Republicans call any basic government function Communism, I encourage you to look into what Freire had to say about Maoism and Che Guevara.) Every major progressive educator and pedagogical theorist of the last few decades is using Freire’s work as a jumping-off point.

One of Freire’s key concepts is what he calls “the banking model of education.” He believed that the dominant educational paradigm of the 19th and early 20th centuries was one in which students were assumed to be passive and ignorant receptacles, into which teachers can pour all of the approved knowledge that the teachers have decided the students are required to know. This model is hierarchical; the teacher is the Authority - the Knower, who has a form of cultural capital called Knowledge - and the students, who lack the fundamental skills that would allow them to exercise any agency over their own education, are expected to sit down, shut up, and let the Knower deposit Knowledge into them. Freire’s insight was that this educational model, in addition to teaching kids the actual mechanical skill of reading, also smuggles in a “hidden curriculum”: the unstated hierarchical assumption that the point of school is for Society to tell children what they are supposed to know - what information is important and what isn’t - in order to turn them into effective and productive members of the existing society.

In opposition to this model, Freire developed what he called the “generative” or “constructive” model of education. In this approach, the educator strives to minimize any sense of hierarchical relationship between herself and the students; rather than being there as an Authority, the teacher acts as a collaborator with the students. She presents them with basic concepts and resources, and then allows them the greatest possible degree of freedom in choosing which of those concepts or resources to discuss and utilize. The teacher is, in this model, merely a facilitator for the students as they exercise their own creativity and agency. In doing so, the students not only generate their own insights and absorb knowledge, but they also cultivate a sense of their own potential as Creators.

In addition - and this is centrally crucial to Freire’s model - they begin to notice things about the world. See, the teacher has pre-selected the library of works that the students have on hand to explore; if she has a bunch of, say, thinkpieces about structural oppression, or books written from the perspective of poor and marginalized people, then as the students spontaneously discover and read those works, they begin to ask questions about what they find in those materials. And that’s where the teacher comes in; she can provide some answers, or even ask other questions that inspire students to think in a particular way about the society around them. A Marxist revolutionary way, specifically. Freire is not shy about this. Neither is Lucy Calkins, the educational activist and theorist whom the author presents as the primary driver of the “whole language” model. Calkins is very vocal about the centrality of “social justice” in her pedagogy, and about her insistence on exposing children to materials about racism, structural oppression, etc. For these people, teaching your children to read is not the point. The point is to turn them into revolutionaries against the existing society. The point is to give them the tools, and then the ideological guidance, to allow them to deconstruct, criticize, and eventually dismantle the socioeconomic status quo. Again, if you read Calkins and Freire, they’re not hiding this from you.

Now, as with a lot of the larger critical theory and DEI industries, it’s never really clear how many of the ground-level employees actually have any deep understanding of, or buy-in to, the intellectual infrastructure of the work they’ve been tasked with carrying out. I find it difficult to believe that the vast majority of young women going into primary school teaching are all doctrinaire Neo-Marxists. I believe the last time I looked into it I saw that the average IQ of a public-school teacher in the United States is about 102. These are not cognitively impressive people. They’re not serious adherents of critical theory. I think that for the vast majority of them, it is indeed true that they are primarily motivated by the sorts of self-aggrandizing narratives around teaching that are presented by films like Dead Poets Society and Freedom Writers: a charismatic teacher with boundless energy and an almost gnostic ability to unlock students’ inner creativity and knowledge-generating potential becomes a sort of mentor or guru for a whole classroom of students, inspiring them to lives of greatness. This model of teaching is inherently parasocial and allows the teacher to act as a manipulator and ideological guiding light for those students, which is why it is so useful for Marxists, but it’s also an extremely emotionally-satisfying narrative for those who are going into what is otherwise a dismally underpaid and punishing career path.

In general, when you are examining the actions of progressive activists, and you are asking yourself, “Why don’t their concrete policies and actions lead actually seem to further their stated goals”, your first instinct should be to assume that they know what they’re doing, and it’s not what you thought they were trying to do. The reason educators don’t seem to be doing a good job of teaching children to read is that their actual goal is something else. The reason why Black Lives Matter activism doesn’t seem to actually save any black lives - quite the opposite, in fact - is that their actual goal is something else. While the average schoolteacher is a mediocrity, in over her head and sustained only by self-serving heroic narratives about her Life’s Purpose, the people actually designing the pedagogical model she was trained on were extremely intelligent people with a strong grounding in a storied and sophisticated philosophical tradition. This is not in any sense an endorsement of these people’s methods - personally I would love to see them all in prison or worse - but they’ve got a lot more going for them than just “vibes”.

The reason why Black Lives Matter activism doesn’t seem to actually save any black lives - quite the opposite, in fact - is that their actual goal is something else

what specifically is their actual goal? Not to defend BLM, but I have no idea what you're hinting at.

Spitballing but it is generally going to go for using US racial minorities as footsoldiers for a Marxist revolution in the US. It has been pretty standard a refrain since the civil rights movement, but particularly the 1970s.

Thanks for sharing this. This is the first time I've encountered Paolo Freire. I've only skimmed the wiki article on him and on his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, but I think I need to dig a little more.

Both you and the wikipedia article on him say that he's been hugely influential on the US education system. How is this impact measured? I'm reading the City Journal article on this and it mentions that Pedagogy of the Oppressed is assigned to teachers-in-training very often--but does it actually change how teachers teach?

I can imagine that some more fiery educators will have done the heavy lifting and baked in some of Freire's ideas into curricula. But going off my assumption that most Marxist teachings are very abstract (almost postmodern), then most teachers would highlight a few juicy quotes and later forget about these ideas. My other assumption comes from going through a few grades in the US system and I'm struggling to find anything that would have a noticeable taint of Marxist thought--but then, I only did a few grades, and that was over 20 years ago.

(It's too easy to find low hanging fruit of a few teachers refusing to teach math because it's oppressive. I'm looking for more subtle but broader effects of Freire's thought).

One of Freire’s key concepts is what he calls “the banking model of education.”

I find this interesting because it seems like nothing new. I've met before with the constructivist theory of education, which seems to have begun assembling into a coherent theory somewhere in the early 20th century, though its roots go back to the mid 19th century. It's amazing to me that someone could take this idea, which, in the right hands, could produce so much good, and then cover it in Marxist nonsense.

“Why don’t their concrete policies and actions lead actually seem to further their stated goals”, your first instinct should be to assume that they know what they’re doing, and it’s not what you thought they were trying to do.

I think my emotion wasn't around the disconnect between their goals and actions, because it's pretty clear that whatever "good" they say they aim toward is subordinate to their real goals. Rather, it was about how openly they disdain science, reality, and human discourse as a tool for pursuing truth. While writing my post, I had a look at the Calkin's institute page and most of the messaging their is, indeed, about DEI stuff. So yeah, 100% WYSIWYG.

Anyway, I have more reading to do.

This is the first time I've encountered Paolo Freire

I don't have anything really substantial to add but Paolo Freire has been insanely influential. From some sources he is the the most, or at least one of the most highly cited scholars in the humanities. His influence is at least as large as Foucault in the academy, but the impact has probably been larger on society as a whole because pedagogy and education theory has a much more immediate and direct consequences on society, and his ideas are oriented towards 'praxis' and spread and filter down easily. Google Scholar has Pedagogy of the Oppressed at over 100000 citations (!!!) which as best I can tell, is the third most cited work on the site.

I've always found it hilarious that the actual Marxist countries don't buy into these feel-good education theories. China's education system is highly regimented and college entrance is gated by a test that you get one chance to take. They study Marx and Engels as a body of knowledge to be passed from teacher to student, not as some organic discovery that takes place when the student picks up a copy of Das Kapital.

AFAIK the USSR was the same way.

Do the Cubans or the North Koreans educate their children this way?

The marxists in charge of training and hiring teachers in marxist countries aren't trying to burn their society down. The marxists in charge of training and hiring teachers in non-marxist countries are, explicitly and openly. That's the difference.

Are you saying that the leftist educators (or the philosophers who came up with the justifications behind the techniques used in education) in western countries like the US intentionally want the kids to be dumber and learn less efficiently, in order to harm the country?

No, I'm saying that they are, by their own admission, hostile to the country as such. They consider our existing social structures to be deeply unjust, and they see their job as laying the groundwork to bring down that society by inculcating revolutionary ideals in their students. That's their first priority. Everything else, including outcomes for the students themselves, is secondary to that goal. If you give them a superior method of teaching that doesn't actually advance their revolutionary ideals, they'll resist using it. If you give them a very bad way of teaching that does seem to advance the revolution, they'll happily adopt it. They're happy to teach to the best of their ability, as long as what's being taught advances their values.

They don’t want the kids to be dumber, but they do intentionally want to avoid preparing the children to be productive participants in the existing social and economic order. By instilling in children a functional literacy in the values and prestige language of the bourgeois class, you are churning out good little cogs who can, and will, go get jobs in respectable fields. This will allow them to acculturate into the hegemonic order, and to accumulate cultural capital which will turn them into loyal members of society. This will enervate their revolutionary passion.

Like, I wish I was just reporting to you the beliefs of a wacky lunatic fringe, but I’m literally explaining the entire point of one of the most widely-taught teacher education textbooks in America. These pedagogical theorists genuinely believe that making students better at speaking middle-class “respectable” English is actually a bad thing.

"I believe the lasts time I looked into it I saw that the average IQ of a public-school teacher in the United States is about 102. These are not cognitively impressive people"

Being above average IQ would be impressive, especially for such a low playing job. What am I missing?

edit. I am nitpicking and was impressed by your steelman of activist teachers.

It's only a poorly compensated job if you don't count pensions and 3+ months of vacation per year.

Also, they still get paid even if their kids can't read. Point taken.

Better to destroy an entire generation than to allow a conservative approach to erudition.

Just wanted to add to the pile of “hooked on phonics worked for me”.

Seriously though, how are the “whole language” kids meant to learn new words?

I went to a catholic school which switched between whole word and phonics instruction every couple of years.

Phonics worked better and the whole word learning answer was to have every student keep a dictionary to look up any word they didn’t know how to pronounce at all times. Yes, seriously. Needless to say this idea is stupid because it will never happen. But it’s not the teacher’s fault that the students are lazy, is it?

every student keep a dictionary to look up any word they didn’t know how to pronounce at all times.

This is the absolute stupidest thing I have ever heard. The idea that somebody would suggest something this stupid, in earnest, is baffling to me. It seems the equivalent would be to have every child carry a book that had every combination of numbers added together in a lookup table, instead of teaching them how to do math.

Astonishing.

That was how they used to do logarithms and trigonometric functions.

I don't have a part of my brain dedicated to trig.

What does that have to do with anything? That was the best way, and those table were painfully calculated (e.g. by series expansion), and then shared with others so they wouldn't have to repeat the work.

With phonics (and word attack skills, as they were called when I learned them), you have a better way than "memorize each answer).

Even tables are better than this -- you interpolate between the given values to get the ones you need.

(Also, in some domains tables is pretty close to how those things are still done, it's just the computer is doing it for you. Admittedly for most there are fairly good functions or HW that converge on the answer quickly, so that's done rather than just a table, but even that is something of a blend, where a number of coefficients is saved, and the computer plugs the number into a long polynomial).

Did they teach the phonetic symbols but not the letter combinations that would most commonly produce them?

They didn’t teach phonetic symbols well enough to use the dictionary, no, but they did teach eg what a long versus short ‘a’ sound was.

the whole word learning answer was to have every student keep a dictionary to look up any word they didn’t know how to pronounce at all times.

Let me tell you, as a child who was once caught reading the dictionary for fun rather than doing my assigned homework, I am god-awful at pronouncing new words from reading them or reading phonetic keys, if I haven't heard the word.

Through vibes obviously...

I think that at least part of the issue is that pre-school/elementary age education is an overwhelmingly female-dominated field, which makes it far more influenced by emotions rather than reason. Phonics may teach kids how to read, but if it causes them to become anxious or bored or feel bad about themselves, the teachers aren't likely to think the trade-off is worth it - and they tend to empathize with their students, making them feel bad as well.

Basically, the feminization of early education has resulted in coddling at the expense of results.

That really doesn't explain it. Education in America has always been that way. Teaching schoolchildren was at one time one of the few professional opportunities open to women, provided they were unmarried. Women have always played a very large role in teaching, that's not a new thing.

The real reason is probably that whole word learning is less work for the teacher and its failures can be blamed on student laziness.

I'd like to see some evidence for that.

Early childhood education has been "feminized" since before the 1880s. Yet somehow literacy survived.

Yes. I somewhat anticipated a pushback there; what's new is the hyper-focus on emotionalism and safetyism.

Kids may have been taught by women, but the attitude towards it was a lot less coddling, I think.

My view is that the transition from strict rules, enforced by corporeal punishment to the present situation (with a hyper-focus on mental and emotional health) represents a feminization of education, in a way that is independent of the sex of those doing the teaching. Kind of like the sex/gender distinction, I guess, with the worst aspects of femininity taking the lead. So, I guess it would be fair to say that I view early education to be captured by toxic femininity.

Early Soviet and communist education, for how much it was insane, was founded on the idea that Socialism was superior because it was more rational, and that maths and logic could improve the capitalistic education system.

A good chunk of it was tossed away with Stalin, but at least they produced a very good STEM system.

This is beyond communism or left-wingism, is purely emotional-based policy made by emotional people and women.

It is not Lenin, it is the insane Church Lady with mental ilness.

Ironically the church ladies hate whole word learning and refuse to use it in their homeschool curriculum, for equally stupid reasons to the ones its proponents put forth.

My view is that the modern incarnation of Leftism largely is driven by the feminization of society - the modern Left with its concerns about "inclusion" and "representation" - making sure people don't feel bad, basically - may share some concerns with the Communists, but the focus is very different than the muscular, STEM and heavy industry focused Soviets.

This is probably a good thing; it means that it's quite a bit further of a stretch for the modern Left to get into torture, gulags, and mass murder.

another article about this from oakland schools

As a teacher in Oakland, Calif., Kareem Weaver helped struggling fourth- and fifth-grade kids learn to read by using a very structured, phonics-based reading curriculum called Open Court. It worked for the students, but not so much for the teachers. “For seven years in a row, Oakland was the fastest-gaining urban district in California for reading,” recalls Weaver. And we hated it.

The teachers felt like curriculum robots—and pushed back. “This seems dehumanizing, this is colonizing, this is the man telling us what to do,” says Weaver, describing their response to the approach. “So we fought tooth and nail as a teacher group to throw that out.” It was replaced in 2015 by a curriculum that emphasized rich literary experiences. “Those who wanted to fight for social justice, they figured that this new progressive way of teaching reading was the way,” he says.

Now Weaver is heading up a campaign to get his old school district to reinstate many of the methods that teachers resisted so strongly: specifically, systematic and consistent instruction in phonemic awareness and phonics. “In Oakland, when you have 19% of Black kids reading—that can’t be maintained in the society,” says Weaver

on the bright side, this guy belatedly realized that he was destroying kids' futures for the sake of sticking it to the man

My guess is that teachers find it much more enjoyable to teach using whole language compared to phonics, and so our non-consumer based public school system mostly uses whole language instruction.

Yeah, that's a point that's made as well.

Which is pretty damning, because it invites teachers to use a suboptimal method just because it feels good.

Using suboptimal methods just because it feels good is perhaps the most common failure mode for everything humans have done in all of history. The entire gambling industry exploits the extreme version of this feature of psychology.

Especially to the extent we are evolved to feel good using the suboptimal methods.

Edit: I don't need awards, this point is general enough it doesn't really contain much insight as far as I'm concerned.

Using suboptimal methods because it just feels good is perhaps the most common failure mode for everything in all of history.

I think this quip is question-begging, and just serves to muddy the waters by conflating several distinct phenomena:

  1. Conflict between a society's short-term and long-term preferences.

  2. Conflict between the preferences of distinct groups in a society.

  3. How individuals/groups establish preferences, and how they understand and express these preferences.

There are important questions of fact involved:

  • Are whole-language approaches more effective for teaching students literacy?

  • Should effectiveness in teaching students literacy be the unique factor determining instructional approach?

  • Are teachers well-positioned to evaluate the effectiveness of various instructional approaches?

  • Do teachers have insight into how they arrive at their own preferences?

  • Do teachers misrepresent the justifications for their preferences? Do they do so knowingly?

  • Are whole-language approaches easier/more fun for teachers?

  • Do teachers prefer whole-language approaches because they're more pleasant for teachers?

  • Do students have effective political advocates for their interests?

  • Etc.

Sure.

I'm must making the broader point that it wouldn't be surprising to see teachers preferring to utilize a method that makes them feel good even against evidence that it is less effective at teaching the subject it purports to teach.

One of the more reliable features of human psychology is the active avoidance of unpleasant or painful stimuli and preference for pleasurable or at least neutral ones.

So my general belief is that methods people enjoy more are not likely to be the best methods for achieving a stated goal, especially when the benefits of said goal accrue to others.

There are many options/potential solutions for resolving such a disparity, but it does require us to admit that such a disparity exists, first.

Undervalued comment. Thank you. How do I give you an award? Take this emoji.🥇

What blows my mind is how anyone can think the whole word method is a good idea. If someone suggested driver’s ed classes stop teaching traffic laws and instead just put kids behind the wheel until they absorb how to drive by osmosis, everyone would realize that’s dumb. If someone suggested teaching calculus without explaining the concepts but instead just showing the equations and hoping the funny symbols eventually make sense, everyone would realize that’s dumb.

If someone suggested driver’s ed classes stop teaching traffic laws and instead just put kids behind the wheel until they absorb how to drive by osmosis, everyone would realize that’s dumb

Right, but this is literally how we learn spoken language, and also one of the best ways to learn second spoken languages. So it's not obviously wrong or mindblowing that one might use it for written language too.

Here's a comparison: people innately learn the weird and complex rules of english grammar intuitively, just by listening, despite not being able to immediately describe them. Often, they're taught explicit 'rules' of the grammar separately, and much later. "If someone suggested teaching grammar without explaining the rules but just showing people sentences and hoping the funny rules eventually make sense"... except that actually works!

Spoken language is unique. It doesn’t need to be taught because our brains have been fine-tuned by evolution to learn language and grammar for at least hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years.

Writing is a few thousand years old, and since the invention of writing the majority of people have been illiterate. Evolution has not had time to optimize our brains to learn to read. Same with math, same with driving. These things have to be taught.

It doesn’t need to be taught because our brains have been fine-tuned by evolution to learn language and grammar for at least hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years

... sure, but written language shares that language and grammar, so it seems reasonable to expect some of that to transfer to written language. Compare to sign language - it's also quite recent, and uses physical motions that are seen with the eye (as is writing), but has the same complexity of grammar as normal language, also using the "same brain regions" (but take that with a grain of salt, because what do those regions actually mean)?

Evolution has not had time to optimize our brains to learn to read. Same with math, same with driving. These things have to be taught

Eh. Driving could be learned by experimentation and experience if not for the strict societal rules. And math is just really complicated and novel. Whereas the fairly close correspondence between written langauge and spoken language suggests they might be learned in the same way!

Elementary education is the worst paying end of a mediocrely paying field with few career prospects by the standards of a field with limited upward mobility to begin with. Most elementary school teachers are either robotic in their slavish conformity to pedagogical fashions, planning on not coming back after maternity leave, or a radical who doesn’t care if the methods work because that isn’t the goal.

It is the latter group that dominates curriculum writing for obvious reasons.

Those sound absurd, but it's more ambiguous which style is better for things like musical instruments (learn sheet music notation or just play songs until it sounds right) or foreign languages (memorize conjugation tables or just watch Netflix in the target language with subs and start speaking on day 1).

learn sheet music notation or just play songs until it sounds right

These are just variants on "whole word instruction for music". Take the Gary Karpinski pill, start with takadimi and scale degree syllables/movable-do solmization. Absolute cheat code for music, much in the way that phonics is the cheat code for the written word.

Music and spoken language are two unique categories of learning because evolution has been optimizing our brains for language and music acquisition for at least hundreds of thousands of years. These are basic human social technologies that our brains are tuned to acquire quickly.

With languages, I find the absorption style often leads to embarrassing situations.

It's the awful realization that the person you're talking to has no idea what the word they just spoke actually means. It's clear that they heard it in a similar-but-importantly-different context, made incorrect assumptions about its meaning, and are now re-using it liberally. Or worse, they haven't even guessed at its meaning, but are merely using the word or phrase because they want to sound impressive or charismatic, and other impressive/charismatic people say it so... ugh.

And what's even worse than THAT is that it's socially forbidden to correct them! It's insulting to point out their error - especially if they're a native speaker and it would make them look foolish.

Language and music existed before writing and sheet notation. You can obviously learn to speak or play an instrument without being able to read.

You really can't learn to read without reading though.

Is that really what "whole word learning" is about?

Immersing kids in books and teaching them to connect words with images

sounds a lot more like the practice part of learning to drive. Especially considering that kids will probably have been observing from the passenger seat for years by the time anyone lets them drive the family station wagon. It also doesn't preclude teaching the "rules of the road;" both approaches occur after an alphabet-training phase. The article starts with an example of a child who can clearly parse those funny symbols, but isn't (yet) trained to do it past the first phoneme.

The whole word method seems like a good idea 1) from a traditional perspective and 2) generalizing from how few adults explicitly use phonetics. That doesn't rule out phonetics as a more efficient strategy; I'm not sure it was obvious.

Adults don’t use phonetics in the same way that Magnus Carlsen doesn’t calculate chess moves. Over hundreds of hours, effortful mental activity becomes intuitive. The question is how this intuition is best paved.

It's nice to be able to fall back on a rote system to check one's work. I'm sure Magnus Carlsen can calculate chess moves explicitly.

I might intuitively feel the correctness of some quick mental math, but I can show my work in my head by laying out the calculations to prove it to be doubly sure.

When paving that intuition with a more holistic approach, how does one explain why a thing is correct?

Sure. My point is that either method seems more akin to how we actually teach other skills (like driving) than to just throwing them in the deep end.

Adults don’t use phonetics in the same way that Magnus Carlsen doesn’t calculate chess moves.

It's truly remarkable how many chess patterns are internalized by world-class chess players. Here's a video of a chess grandmaster solving simple chess puzzles in real time, as he narrates. What's amazing to me is how quickly the professional recognizes the solutions - often before I have any sense at all for the position. For him, it's like playing "Where's Waldo" if every non-Waldo character were dressed in all black - the correct result seems to just pop-out without any conscious processing.

So, I agree with the overall thrust of this comment. But it's also absolutely the case that top chess players often perform deep calculations, even in rapid games.

If someone suggested teaching calculus without explaining the concepts but instead just showing the equations and hoping the funny symbols eventually make sense, everyone would realize that’s dumb.

Well...

You have to understand, it was the cold war. At least we got a song out of it.

It's worth noting that this "new math" is the basis for all the contemporary complaints about Common Core math. Most of the parents complaining about it aren't aware that the "old fashioned" way of doing things that they learned was actually controversial when it was introduced in the 1960s. A lot of new math stuff like other base systems was eventually ditched, but new math subtraction is all most people who went to elementary school from the 1970s–1990s really know.

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I don't know that much about it, just that the New Math that Tom Leherer talks about in the song is the way that they were teaching subtraction at least as late as the mid-'90s (and probably later), and that Common Core subtraction is different enough that the people who learned subtraction they way I did complain about it. But I'm not a teacher or a curriculum expert or anything like that.

To me, the whole "You can't take three from two, two is less than three, so you look at the four in the tens place" etc. always seemed close to the way I do maths in head, expect just sung fast in an overtly complex way to make it seem sillier than it actually is.

Think about all the mini sequences involved in reading: training the eye to look at small etchings next to each other from left to right; converting those etchings into an audible (and later, subaudible) sound based on pattern recognition; remembering all of the cases where the pattern doesn’t work; hearing the sound and making sense of the sound; combining it with the next sequence (the following word); combining these sequences together a la sentences and paragraphs.

Surely whichever approach contains the most motivated deliberate practice of the constituent parts will be the best. Honestly these can be converted into a computer game pretty easily and probably be as good as any public school teacher.

remembering all of the cases where the pattern doesn’t work

Somehow the Greeks with access to both the Minoan syllabary and the Phoenician abjad birthed the evils of the alphabet on the world and thousands of years later we are still paying the price.

Hey, I like my writing system to include vowels. It's not a bug, it's a feature.

You can have vowels as completely different symbols than the consonants, like in Hebrew or Korean. Reading Korean is ridiculously easy to learn thanks to that.

In my own experience, phonics wins here.*

Going into school, you already know how to talk. So being able to turn squiggles into sounds allows you to "talk" with texts.

*I was dropped into the American school system in first grade. I did even speak English. A few months in, I was speaking, read, writing English like all my other classmates.

As far as we know, the way the brain works is actually stacking all those parts on top of each other and they are all important.

There are multiple forms of Dyslexia but they all stem from a difficulty or inability to have the brain recognize a certain level of abstraction of this process. For instance being unable to map letters to syllables and then to sounds and having to do the harder task of mapping letter sequences directly to those.

I don't recall if phonics or the neurology that vindicates it came first. But given this knowledge all the holistic methods are doing really is betting on the kids figuring out those separate skills on their own.

Given the stated goals of the "vibes" this is quite ironic.

Yep. And for the stacking to work effectively you ought to master the constituent parts. We find this in other domains too; good luck solving a complex math problem when you don’t have mastery over the smaller sub-problems. Good luck learning a piano piece without working out the left hand and right hand alone, or not knowing how to sightread. Even things like driving require mastery over a bunch of small parts. Just placing a kid in a car and saying good luck is going to get him into an accident.

It’s good to remember that reading is a totally unnatural human activity. A human has built-in instincts for learning to walk and speak. But writing and reading is as artificial as unicycling while playing the violin. So it needs to be trained.

Artificial except for those lucky rare of us with hyperlexia. I don’t remember learning how to read, because it happened before the age of childhood amnesia. Reading, writing, and computer programming come as naturally to me as swimming to a duck.

The method's supporters maintain that children should be put in a book-rich environment and the rest will take care of itself

I don't even remember learning to read, but I know I was taught at home before starting school, and I'm pretty sure my parents weren't raised on 'whole word' or the likes.

The problem with that method is it works - if you have a 'book-rich' environment, which in turn means parents with a reasonable education level themselves and more importantly, the impetus to educate and help educate their kids.

Not all kids are in such homes, however. I wasn't - we weren't 'book rich'. I was lucky in that my immediate family were interested in teaching me, but for instance, I can proudly claim never to have been the recipient of unfair privilege by having bedtime story books read to me.

There are kids where parents have low literacy levels themselves. There are kids living in homes where they don't have access to books. There are kids whose parents (if there are parents plural and not a lone parent) are about as disengaged as it is possible to be and just leave the kids to raise themselves (sometimes this is because the parents are struggling with mental health and other issues and can barely take care of themselves, sometimes it's because they're scum). Those kids are not getting a helping hand at home about "this entire word is 'cat' and look, that is the picture of a cat, link the sound and the image to learn to read 'cat'" to learn off entire words.

Old-fashioned, learn it off by heart, do drills and repetitive learning is boring and unsexy and not shiny bright novelty, but it works (not perfectly, there is no perfect system). The downside of the old methods is a lot of rote learning without understanding, kids who could parrot off an answer but who had no idea how to solve problems if the mantra didn't apply, which is why the newer educational theories revolted against that, and rightly. But the downsides of the new ideas is that there was an unexamined presumption that parents and the home environment would be taking up the slack, so that the teachers only had to guide the little darlings on self-directed learning, to be facilitators and encouragers which was a much more flattering self-image than that of the traditional strict schoolmarm.

Mr. "negative, elitist, racist views of linguistic purity" can go whistle for himself; a lot of us came from what would now be called disadvantaged backgrounds and this teaching opened up avenues of experience to us, by making books accessible, that we would never otherwise have encountered.

I honestly do feel that being unable to read is a handicap, not just for the economic notion of 'you are unemployable' but for the entire range of human excellence it cuts you off from. And people whose pet theories have resulted in a lot of children being handicapped because the theoretic ideal didn't work out for them in practice should be put into the stocks and pelted with wadded-up copies of the textbooks.

to be facilitators and encouragers which was a much more flattering self-image than that of the traditional strict schoolmarm

Why? I think this is a key question. Why is it more flattering to one's self-image to be a pseudo-peer to the kids than to be feared, obeyed, and hierarchically much higher than the kids? When did it become so? Previous generations of teachers didn't seem to have a problem with being authoritative. Is it a kind of expanding empathy? Or is it because it's too militaristic and after WW2 got associated with Nazi-"vibes"? Is it because the teachers don't want to grow up and want to "relate" to the "fellow kids" as we are supposed to be eternal teenagers now? Is it like when a mother and a daughter say they are "besties" and use first names to call each other?

Also I don't think it's exactly a book-rich parental environment that you need. Rates of higher education have shot through the roof in recent decades, especially in poorer countries like Eastern Europe, bringing many first-generation educated people, who did not have an academically oriented home environment. But still there are styles of existence that can better foster learning and academic success later on. I mean when the parents are conscientious, have a long time horizon etc. For example they may have no books at all, but if they discuss plans at the dinner table, like "next year we are going to have X chickens, I'll go and buy them two weeks from now at the market", "once we have 3 pigs and sell them, we can earn X money, which will allow us to build a new shed", "tomorrow we'll have to go fix the fence that the neighbor's horse kicked down". As opposed to, eg. shouting, fighting, drinking, leaving the yard to disarray, with garbage everywhere, no plans beyond the next hour, etc. In a good, sober, smart environment a kid can pick up the necessary skills for academic success even if the parents never talk about Shakespeare. What's needed is something else, something deeper. Similarly I don't think it's the reading of a bedtime story, but probably simply the affection, attention and time for the kid. It could also be an evening chat about stories about when grandma was young or what happened at school. (And of course there's the argument that all these parental behaviors are simply indicators of genetic propensities that anyway already get inherited by the kid.)

Whole language learning sounds more enjoyable so I would stick with that. Does it really matter whether they learn to read at 6 or 7 as long as they get there in the end? Most smart kids will learn at home before they're school aged anyway.

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Amazon might pay a team several million dollars over five years to shave .1% off of total delivery costs by optimizing routing. And this has massive benefits both for amazon's profits and for our delivery costs. A million pieces like that make up a part of why modern technology and society is so powerful. 6 vs 7 is a 1% difference in literacy-averaged-over-years-of-life for everyone. Having children sit in reading class for an extra year wastes billions of hours of time, time that could be spent on ... anything valuable, learning more, doing more, etc.

... not that phonics actually does that, the evidence for which is strangely not debated at all in this thread. But it does matter! We could still be using roman numerals for math. "Does it really matter how long it takes to add CXXVMI and VXMCMII as long as they get there in the end?"

In New York, 63% of fourth grade students are not reading at their grade level.

A lot of the lower IQ kids taught under whole word learning never do get there, and taking up several additional years learning to read actually is bad because something had to get bumped to make room for endless spelling tests.

Most smart kids will learn at home before they're school aged anyway.

Then it isn't for the smart kids, and the point isn't fun.

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