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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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