by Samuel L. Blumenfeld
For the past fifty years a great debate has been raging among educators over how to teach children to read. Lately the debate has degenerated into a tug of war between the advocates of intensive phonics and the advocates of whole language. The education establishment prefers whole language, while most parents and some teachers prefer a phonetic approach. A very concise and accurate description of the essential elements of that debate was given by a writer in Collier's magazine in 1954 as follows: Two basic teaching methods are in conflict here. One is the phonetic approach (known as phonics) . . . [in which] youngsters try to sound out letters and syllables. The other method . . . is the word-memory plan -- also known as "sight reading," "total word configuration" or "word recognition." It has the more friendly nickname of "look and say," since the youngster is supposed simply to look at a word and say it right out. He memorizes the "shape" of the word, the configuration, and identifies it with pictures in his workbook. Often he is taught to recognize phrases or whole sentences in his picture book, or on flash (poster) cards, before he can independently sound out and pronounce such simple words as cat or ball. The fundamental difference in approach in the two methods reaches deep into philosophy and scientific theory. Thinkers have wrangled for centuries over which comes first, the whole or its parts (an argument perhaps as endless as that over the priority of the "chicken or the egg"). The phonics advocates say the parts come first; the word-memory people say we start with the whole and the parts fall into place in due course. Now that was written 39 years ago. You would think that by now the dispute over teaching methods would have been resolved. After all, all you need to prove your case are two schools, one using phonics and one using look-say. It would be quite easy to determine which group of children learned to read better. But that was never done, even though comparisons between private schools which use phonics and public schools which use a whole-word approach could have been made at any time at very little cost. According to Rudolf Flesch, author of Why Johnny Can't Read, the teaching of reading -- all over the United States, in all the schools, in all the textbooks -- is totally wrong and flies in the face of all logic and common sense. Flesch then went on to explain how, in the early 1930s, the professors of education changed the way reading is taught in American schools. They threw out the traditional alphabetic-phonics method, which is the proper way to teach children to read an alphabetic writing system, and put in a new look-say, whole-word or sight method that teaches children to read English as if it were Chinese, an ideographic writing system. Flesch argued that when you impose an ideographic teaching method on an alphabetic writing system you cause reading disability. Flesch, of course, was not the first to write about the harm the look-say method could cause. As far back as 1929, Dr. Samuel T. Orton, a neuropathologist, pointed out in an article in the Journal of Educational Psychology that the sight method could cause reading problems. His article was entitled "The 'Sight Reading' Method of Teaching Reading as a Source of Reading Disability." He wrote: I wish to emphasize at the beginning that the strictures which I have to offer here do not apply to the use of the sight method of teaching reading as a whole but only to its effects on a restricted group of children for whom, as I think we can show, this technique is not only not adapted but often proves an actual obstacle to reading progress, and moreover I believe that this group is one of considerable size and because here faulty teaching methods may not only prevent the acquisition of academic education by children of average capacity but may also give rise to far reaching damage to their emotional life. Today, the bubbly promoters of whole language will tell you that their programs are different from the Dick and Jane programs of yesteryear. Indeed they are. They are much worse, if that is possible. Why are they worse? Because they not only denigrate the alphabetic nature of our writing system but they even deny the basic nature of reading. For example, in defining reading, the pro-whole language authors of Whole Language: What's the Difference? write: From a whole language perspective, reading (and language use in general) is a process of generating hypotheses in a meaning-making transaction in a sociohistorical context. As a transactional process, reading is not a matter of "getting the meaning" from text, as if that meaning were in the text waiting to be decoded by the reader. Rather, reading is a matter of readers using the cues print provide and the knowledge they bring with them (of language subsystems, of the world) to construct a unique interpretation. Moreover, that interpretation is situated: readers' creations (not retrievals) of meaning with the text vary, depending on their purposes for reading and the expectations of others in the reading event. This view of reading implies that there is no single "correct" meaning for a given text, only plausible meanings. How can anyone be taught anything when it is assumed there is nothing really "there" to be taught in the first place? This is more psycho-babble parading as "authoritative fact" - and it is destroying the ability of the future generation to think! Every parent should read this book and begin demanding the removal of whole language approaches to reading from the public schools.
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