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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35200 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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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.

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