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