**Previously recorded by Phyllis Schlafly // July 2005 **
The controversy over how to teach a child to read is not a narrow, technical dispute. It is a broad, philosophic disagreement, with crucial education implications. The advocates of phonics maintain that human knowledge is gained objectively, by perceiving the facts of reality and by abstracting from those facts. These phonics proponents, therefore, teach the child directly and systematically the basic facts – the sounds that make up every word – from which the abstract knowledge of how to read can be learned.
Supporters of the contrary method, which is called whole language, by contrast, believe that the acquisition of knowledge is a subjective process. Influenced by John Dewey and his philosophy of Progressive education, they believe that the child must be encouraged to follow his feelings and his opinions regardless of the facts. So, the child is told to memorize the “whole word” without learning the syllables. The whole language method is used in most public schools despite overwhelming evidence that phonics instruction works and whole language does not.
Systematic phonics instruction teaches a child to get the connection between the black marks he sees on paper and the spoken words he already understands. Phonics teaches a child how to sound out each word through recognizing its letters. This reduces reading to a set of rules that enable a child to read almost any word – and to experience reading as something easy, pleasurable and mind-opening.
Here is what some whole-language advocates suggest the child do when he encounters a word he has not yet memorized. He must guess! “Look at the pictures,” “Ask a friend,” “Substitute another word.” Of course, the child is not told to look in a dictionary – because, crippled by whole language, the child cannot read a dictionary. It is a lie to call this a method of reading. The use of whole language results in nothing but illiteracy. What our schools need most of all is phonics instruction.
This post originally appeared at https://phyllisschlafly.com/family/education/whats-behind-the-reading-controversies/
Ryan Hite