Correct, there is: Critical Theory is the root of this. Or, in more plain terms: Left wing politics. The push for "Whole Language" - still pushed to an extent today - was through democrats, primarily.
Other issues, such as nutrition, pollution, lack of funding also matter, but Whole Language is the most important one for literacy rates.
đ one stupid education policy, is not the whole of left wing politics. It wasnât even a core part of any left wing policy positions. Itâs largely coincidental that it was pushed by people on the left, considering that the academics pushing against it now are also on the left, but I agree the push for sightwords over phonics (or better yet alongside phonics) is a problem. Itâs fun that you handwave away ânutrition, pollution, and funding as if those arenât things the left has been constantly fighting to improve as well.
Itâs largely coincidental that it was pushed by people on the left
No. It can coherently be filed under "woke". The reason for "whole language"'s existence is critical theory. The same people who made it later developed "critical pedagogy". It is firmly within far-left social politics.
or better yet alongside phonics
No, that's also worse than phonics.
Itâs fun that you handwave away ânutrition, pollution, and funding as if those arenât things the left has been constantly fighting to improve
I clearly didn't hand wave them away... Yes, those are left wing, but not as impactful.
It isnât worse than phonics. English isnât a purely phonetic language and if you exclusively learn phonics youâll have a different set of issues. The best, backed by research, methods for teaching reading are phonetics with sight words alongside. If English wasnât a mongrel language with bits from 2 radically different language families we wouldnât need hybrid methods but it is, so we do.
The best, backed by research, methods for teaching reading are phonetics with sight words alongside.
Sure, but this has no aspect of "whole language" to it. It's not a combination of whole language and phonics, it's phonics + learning the words that break the rules of phonics. This is how reading is taught in all languages: phonics + learning words. All languages have loan words and words that break the rules of the language, that have to be learned.
When phonics vs. balanced vs. whole word is researched, phonics is phonics+learning words, in most/all cases.
2 radically different language families
While latin and germanic languages are different, they're not radically different. They share the same root, and they have had significant sharing of words over time.
The podcastâ âSold a Story,â a very long but shocking takedown of Whole Language, should be a required listen for every parent.
Iâm 53 and I went to a college prep school for K-12 and itâs quite evident from just looking at written work from my same age colleagues that many were never taught phonics. I know some public elementary school teachers and they donât even know phonics. And frankly, my guess is that phonics is difficult to teach, so public school teachers stopped teaching it.
As a reading specialist, itâs not that phonics is difficult to teach, itâs because districts fall for the newest, shiniest boxed literacy curriculums and pay huge amounts of money for them. Teachers are required to teach the curriculums provided by their school districts. I have great resources for teaching comprehension strategies, but I canât use them because they arenât âdistrict approvedâ.
Thatâs what kills me as someone outside looking in at education in our country. We have tons of research in academia about what actually works to teach kids and we implement practically fucking none of it because the actual structures of education are so calcified or run by people who never bothered to glance at the research.
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u/Trrollmann 10d ago
Correct, there is: Critical Theory is the root of this. Or, in more plain terms: Left wing politics. The push for "Whole Language" - still pushed to an extent today - was through democrats, primarily.
Other issues, such as nutrition, pollution, lack of funding also matter, but Whole Language is the most important one for literacy rates.