cause it's the right thing to do??? i learned that way and so did all our kids...
Posted on 04/28/2012 11:57:58 AM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
For more than 40 years, Mona McNee has been fighting the good fight on behalf of intelligent reading instruction. She is the author of "Step By Step" (a phonics program) and "The Great Reading Disaster" (with Alice Coleman, 2007, 335 pages), which chronicles the incompetence of the UK's Education Establishment.
I always think of Mona McNee as the Patron Saint of Reading.
Mona has recently prepared a booklet called "Why Billy can't read," which sums up her message in 30 pages. You can find a pdf of this booklet, and as well her free phonics program, on phonics4free.org (link below).
Mona is a hard campaigner. The kind of person who has gone to endless meetings, sent lots of letters, and tried to call up the Minister of Education to tell him what he should be doing if he had any sense. Here are a few characteristic quotes from her new booklet:
"In 1931 the Hadow Report said that 'The curriculum is to be thought of in terms of activity and experience rather than of knowledge to be acquired and facts to be stored.'... This simply cancels out the whole purpose of education! Utterly mad, but official wisdom, never challenged and still around."
"All I want is an end to this terrible scourge of needless failure in reading. It has been and is a major factor in the collapse of our culture and high government spending....This is the worst scandal ever, 1000 times worse than the News of the World hacking, and it still goes on, still protected by the establishment."
"Is this confusion at the top based on honest ignorance or (worse) is it deliberate? Government will not even discuss it with me, and the meddling goes on and on."
"Keeping these strategies is part of the idea that because 'all children are different,' they can expect to be taught different ways, and this is not so. There is one alphabet, and one way to teach all children, of any age, adults and dyslexics."
"Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath: 'First do no harm.' Untold, uncountable harm has been done to millions for life by many thousands of hard-working, well-meaning teachers under the thumb of the establishment."
"In 40 years I have found a total absence of genuine professional curiosity, at all levels."
"The lost potential for half a century is a tragedy beyond our grasp.... Today teachers still get the blame, and the guilty teacher-trainers are never challenged. It has crippled millions and still there is nowhere to turn."
ARTICLE CONCLUDES BELOW
I believe that for people in the USA, observing the UK situation can be instructive. It's a smaller country with a more centralized government authority. Sadly, we may become more like the UK, because Common Core Curriculum will permit greater federal control.
First, this background: All the bad ideas found here during the last 75 years also appeared in the UK but in more virulent doses. Labour (i.e., Socialist) Governments did brazenly what American schemers had to do on the sly. But why, in the first place, did the UK embrace such an array of bogus theories?
Here's my take on the years after the Russian Revolution. The USSR wanted to destroy the USA most of all, but England was second on the hit list. It was closer and easier to sabotage. Simply fill the government with Fabian Socialists and "useful idiots" ready to advance their careers at the expense of kids and country. There is no satisfying explanation for idiotic reading policy unless you factor in that the people at the top wanted to sabotage the country. Education statistics tell us that Whole Word never worked. Everybody at the top had to know this.
As the great Samuel Blumenfeld noted in a recent article about the US experience: "We have known for quite some time that there is a socialist political agenda behind the movement to do away with systematic phonics and replace it with Whole Language and other similar sight-reading programs."
The thing that has saved American public schools from the worst ravages of our own far-left Education Establishment is our history of local control. As noted, I'm afraid that Common Core Curriculum will move our schools closer to the UK situation. In practice, what this means is that one bureaucrat in Washington, D.C. can persuade an obscure committee that Plan X should be adopted. Suddenly this clunker appears in every local school, for years and years, and you can't do anything about it. An incurable disease. (Reform Math, introduced around 1980, is still with us, a perennial example of incurable disease.)
What we saw in the recent Race to the Top campaign is the Obama administration using taxpayer money to bribe taxpayers, pretending all the while it was a friendly takeover. Not so, I predict. Hostile is as hostile does.
The astonishing thing about this story, in my part of Virginia, is how many newspapers, leading citizens, foundations, and retired military officers were willing to jump on the bandwagon. All of them should have enough sense to recognize a Ponzi scheme when they see one.
At this time, Americans can still communicate with their school officials in their city or state capitol. If you want to see what the future might look like, consider the world described in Mona McNee's booklet. The real power is further away and less accessible. Aloof politicians maneuver and dissemble. The basic gimmick is to continually diminish content, make tests easier, inflate grades, and proudly announce: look, achievement is rising!!! Of course, it's not. Achievement is less each year.
Meanwhile, your job is to stay home, watch TV, and don't get in the way. Experts are at work destroying another generation of readers.
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Phonics4free.org is a site created by Alan O. for Mona McNee. You can find a pdf (and other formats) of the new booklet “Why Billy can’t read.” (Site also includes Mona’s entire phonics program.)
“Step by Step” program can be found on Mona McNee’s own site: http://www.catphonics.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/contents.htm
“The Great Reading Disaster” is available on Amazon. Here’s a link to the five-star review by me: http://www.amazon.com/The-Great-Reading-Disaster-Educational/product-reviews/1845400976/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1
For my own short analysis of the reading wars, see “42: Reading Resources” on Improve-Education.org.
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cause it's the right thing to do??? i learned that way and so did all our kids...
The school system in which I teach uses a word memorization program. There is also very little grammar instruction. The results: Classrooms full of functioning illiterates. We will never deviate from the reading program because it is entirely scripted. The teacher does nothing except make photo copies. There is very little grading because the focus is on group dynamics and students helping each other (i.e. the smart kid does all the work).
Liberals oppose phonics because they work. Illiterate, ignorant people are much easier to control. For liberals, that is the ONLY thing that matters.
I learned in Montessori training that 80+% of English words can be sounded out through the use of phonics. What better reason to abandon phonics by the NEA establishment & derelict teacher training programs all hell-bent on ignoring its proven success. This is intentional destruction - get your kids out of public school and any govt. pre-K program.
I’m dyslexic. The “Whole Word” scam would have doomed me to illiteracy. Damn those liberals who keep pushing it!
not to mention that if you know what prefixes and suffixes mean(as we were taught), you also have a good idea what the word means even if you've never seen it before...
Forcing kids to see "whole words" rather than starting off with the individual letters can make them dyslexic. It's training the brain to work wrong end up, and when the kid later figures out he's been snookered, it's an uphill climb to unlearn the bad habits.
I disagree with nearly everything the good conservative freepers have posted in this thread. Whole word memorization is the best way to teach kids to read. They learn phonics on their own once they memorize enough words.
The problem with whole word memorization is that it needs to be initiated prior to the age of 3 (earlier the better). Whole word method probably sucks for school age kids. The fact is the method advocated by the NEA is the best except - they start it at an age when it may not be useful.
Don’t let the liberals see my post or they will use it as justification to put kids in public school at the age of 2.
just out of curiosity, how many children do you have and how many of them learned to read symbolically??? because that's what it is
I homeschooled my kids for some years and tutored or taught several handfuls of other kids. I did it purely by phonics. I read a book I found somehwere:
http://www.amazon.com/Lets-Linguistic-Approach-Leonard-Bloomfield/dp/0814311156
That looks like it. I couldn’t afford any of the manuals or classroom stuff so I made my own little lists and reading booklets for kids and they all learned how to read very easily.
Copying the first review:
I have joyous memories of learning to read from Lets Read when I was three, and my mother, who taught one of my brothers and me, still speaks of it fondly. So when I went on line, without much hope, to try to find a copy for my small niece, I was thrilled to see that it was still in print.
What a shock, however, to discover that it was written by the linguist Leonard Bloomfield! It appears that he devised the method and materials for his young son, who wanted to learn to read.
Looking at it now, as an adult (and, coincidentally, a one-time linguist), I find the book’s approach fascinating. It is based, seemingly, on a simple assumption: that if you give children carefully controlled examples that demonstrate specific rules of written English, they will extrapolate and internalize those rules on their own without too much conscious effort. Bloomfield went systematically through the English language, figured out the rules of representation of sound in our occasionally bizarre writing system, and grouped words together in ways that demonstrate the rules automatically to an absorbent young mind.
There is no commentary for the child, no lesson as such, merely words combined to make them easy to master as one acquires a broader and broader knowledge base. The heavy use of rhyme adds to the pleasure, for the child, and is part of the system at first. The text advances from two, three or four word sentences at the beginning (”Nan can fan Dan. Can Dan fan Nan?”) to a complex “big kid” story at the very end. It is a relaxed and enjoyable program and very accessible to a child who wants to learn to read but is still too young to go to school. It assumes an eager child and a mild schedule of perhaps 15 minutes per day for several months. A patient and willing teacher (I was extremely fortunate in mine) is also a necessary part of the deal.
Bloomfield’s introduction remarks: “Purely formal exercises that would be irksome to an adult are not irksome to a child, provided he sees himself gaining in power.” The phrase reflects precisely the sense of empowerment that I as student and my mother as teacher vividly remember coming with each successive chapter.
Of course, it is more than 50 years now since Bloomfield and his colleague Clarence Barnhart (who learned of the materials when he mentioned to Bloomfield that he was looking around for a text to teach his own child) first began to look for a publisher. The reading samples in the Let’s Read text, once you move beyond the “Dan Nan fan” stage, are unmistakably dated. It’s startling to remember that in 1949 textbook mothers ironed and cooked while fathers took trains to work. The Nans and Dans would probably divide up their activities differently now, but I did not see anything in a quick glance-through that made me terribly worried of fostering an anti-feminist brainwashing of the next generation. If one is bothered by the stereotypes in the old texts, however, one can easily take the words from each chapter - a useful index is included — and use them to write little stories of one’s own.
I am not a teacher and know nothing of the other systems of teaching reading, but I suspect that Bloomfield’s approach may be a good one. It may lead to practices of analyzing language that go beyond simply learning to read English text. At any event, it should certainly do the latter. And it was wonderful for us.
See Sammy the Snake Slither....
Yeah, but you can be sure they teach phonics on the sly, at home to their own kids.
And it's even higher than that if taught by an extended phonics program. English stuffs 44 sounds into 26 letters and is also an amalgam of several different languages. It is complex -- but it is also, despite ignorant liberal claims to the contrary, phonetic.
Yes! Adults tend to devise instructional methods that please other adults -- thus the abhorrence of memorization. But Maria Montessori figured out, over a century ago, that there is a stage in a child's development where the brain is particularly adept at memorizing and, as your author points out, the child actually enjoys it if progress is being made.
You've brought out a very important point.
Children really like poetry that has rhyme and meter. I don’t know if girls still do jump rope, but that was all rhyme and meter years ago. I loved that sort of poetry when I went to and English school for one year, many years ago.
You clearly have no idea what you are talking about.
I concur with you a thousand percent.
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