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Notes -
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.
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.
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.)
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