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Speculations on Underlying Causes of Poor Reading Instruction
Proposal to the Education Commission
In mid-March 1997, the author of this report sought and obtained
the approval of Dr. Moorehead to fulfill the major research paper
requirements of EDU 505 by the preparation and submission of a
proposal to the Virgin Islands Education Commission, together with an
accompanying commentary on anthropological and sociological issues
relating to the proposal. Thereafter, the proposal was prepared and
submitted to the Virgin Islands Education Commission (and the Virgin
Islands Literacy Task Force). Attached hereto is a copy of the March
31, 1997 proposal, the cover letter to Liston Davis (the Commissioner
of Education and the Chairman of the Education Commission), and a copy
of the cover letter transmitting the proposal to Virgin Islands union
leaders. This accompanying paper is the anthropological/sociological
commentary.
The proposal suggests that the Virgin Islands public school system
should institute voluntary phonics-based reading programs in Virgin
Islands public schools. The proposal implies that reading instruction
in Virgin Island public schools, currently, is not
phonics-based. In his books Why Johnny Can’t Read (1955) and
Why Johnny Still Can’t Read (1981), Rudolph Flesch reviews
the history of reading instruction for written English and explains
that most American school reading instruction moved away from
phonics-based instruction during the 1930s, and has never returned.
The Virgin Islands public school system is no exception, in recent
years using the series Our World of Reading; and this year
switching to Literature Works, neither of which is phonics-based.
Our Phonetic Alphabet
Let’s step back and take a quick look at our writing system. Spoken
English is reduced to writing through the means of a phonetic
alphabet. Phonetic alphabets are used in all of the Germanic, Romance,
Scandinavian, and Slavic languages of Western Civilization. Robert K.
Logan in The Alphabet Effect, rightfully asserts:
Of all mankind’s inventions, with the possible exception of
language itself, nothing has proved more useful or led to more
innovations than the alphabet. It is one of the most valuable
possession in all of Western culture, yet we are blind to its
effects and take its existence for granted. It has influenced
the development of our thought patterns, our social
institutions, and our very sense of ourselves. The alphabet,
as we shall discover, has contributed to the development of
codified law, monotheism, abstract science, deductive logic,
and individualism, each a unique contribution of Western
thought. ... The twenty-six letters of the English (or Roman)
alphabet are the keys not only to reading and writing but also
to a whole philosophy of organizing information. ... Western
children take the same time [in learning to read as the
Chinese, who have a logographic (pictographic) writing system]
because along with reading and writing they are learning many
other things. (Citation omitted.) What they learn are the
intellectual by-products of the alphabet, such as abstraction,
analysis, rationality, and classification, which form the
essence of the alphabet effect and the basis for Western
abstract scientific and logical thinking.
[Logan, 1986, pp. 17-18; 21]
In his book, Dr. Logan makes a compelling argument for his
assertions quoted above. He reviews the differences between Western
culture, with its phonetic alphabets, and Eastern culture, such as
those of China and Japan, where the spoken languages are reduced to
writing using a logographic (or pictographic) system "in which each
spoken word is represented by its own unique visual sign, which
denotes or depicts the word symbolically or pictorially." (Logan,
1986, p. 20)
The History of Teaching to Read - Phonics,
Look-and-Say,
Basal Readers, and Whole Language
Although the history of teaching reading is strewn with occasional
"reading heretics," by and large, prior to the Enlightenment (better
understood as the Endarkenment), virtually everyone using European
phonetic alphabetical writing systems learned to read by learning the
names and sounds of letters and groups of letters, and learning to
"sound-out" words on the page - fully utilizing the wonderful
invention of writing systems where symbols stand for the sounds of the
spoken language. This focus results in mastery of the written language
system. But by the time Rudolph Flesch wrote Why Johnny Can’t Read,
reading instruction in the vast majority of schools in the United
States was no longer focused on the alphabetic principle. As teaching
reading through focus on the phonetic alphabet (that is, phonics-based
reading instruction) waned, the reading abilities of the United States
population fell.
Now, from the corridors of the universities, to the conference
rooms of state boards of education, to the offices of school system
superintendents, to public meetings conducted by local school boards,
to the halls of Congress, to the state of the union address by the
president of the United States, everyone seems to be wringing his
hands over the pathetic state of American public education, which
produces so many poor readers and writers and illiterates after years
and years in our nation’s classrooms.
The educators who control the disaster we call reading instruction
in most of our schools today are the intellectual progeny of the
"almost solid opposition of teachers, school officials, and
educational ‘experts’" against whom Dr. Flesch posited his "little
compendium of arguments against [the] current system of teaching
reading." (Flesch, 1955, p. xiii) Back then, the predominant fad was
to teach children to read primarily through the use of a series of
textbooks called "readers," stretched out from kindergarten or first
grade through perhaps fifth or sixth grade. Children would be taught
new words primarily by "sight." The first stories presented in the
first reader in the series would use just a few words, and use them
repeatedly, with the object of getting the children to associate the
specifically ordered group of letters constituting the written word,
with the spoken word it represented. The children were not expected to
seek to know the "sound values" of each of the letters in each of the
words they encountered. In his book, Dr. Flesch refers to this gradual
exposure to "sight" words through a series of basal readers as
"look-and-say," although it has gone by a number of other names such
as look-say, look-see, the sight method, the word method, or simply
the basal reader method.
Nowadays, introducing words to children through a highly structured
basal reader series is frowned upon by the dominant university reading
instruction intelligentsia. That system is seen as "inauthentic,"
artificial, "nonrelevant," unexciting, and culturally narrow. So now,
the idea is to "immerse" the children in a variety of "meaningful
print," instead of teaching them about 1,500 words primarily by
"sight" in a structured basal reader system over the first five or six
years of schooling. Basal readers were popular before Rudolph Flesch
wrote Why Johnny Can’t Read and have continued to be popular
right up to the present time, but over the last thirty years there
have been attempts to break out of the "cultural straight jacket" of
basal-reader based reading instruction - through "language
experience," which sought to use primarily the language of the student
himself in teaching reading, through to the current fad - whole
language.
At first blush it would appear that the old-style, highly
structured basal reader system for teaching reading is fundamentally
different than the whole language system currently en vogue. After
all, in the basal reader system the teacher uses a set of readers
published by one of several huge educational publishing houses and
confines reading instruction primarily to those materials and their
associated workbooks and the like. The use in whole language of
written English from a variety of sources in a non-structured program
would appear to be radically different from reliance upon the
look-and-say basal readers. Although the look-and-say basal reader
system and the whole language classroom have obvious differences,
their similarities are deeper than their differences; they are brother
and sister of the same parent: the rejection of the use of the
alphabetic principle as the foundation for all reading instruction.
Because look-and-say and whole language are children of the same
parent - branches of the same tree - and because the alphabetic
principle is the same today as it was in 1955 - Why Johnny Can’t
Read is a timeless classic: an education paperback still in print
forty-two years after it was first published.
What does this mean - that look-and-say and whole language are
children of "the rejection of the alphabetic principle as the
foundation for all reading instruction"? As mentioned earlier, unlike
the written representation of Chinese, the written representation of
English - written English, if you will - is based upon the alphabetic
principle. In written English, as a manifestation of the alphabetic
principle, words are composed of letters, which stand for sounds (or,
sometimes, the lack of sound). Thus, by combining and recombining
letters, a reader who understands the rules of letter/sound
correspondence in written English can read any unfamiliar word, no
matter what. We have about forty-four sounds in spoken English and
only twenty-six letters. It is true that a number of the letters
change the sounds they stand for depending upon the word in which they
appear and their relationship with other letters. This is particularly
true of the vowels and a few of the consonants, but the rules of
English spelling - the rules of letter/sound correspondence - the
rules of phonics - can be learned. Any person with normal intelligence
(and many with significantly below-normal intelligence) can learn the
rules of phonics. It takes a little work, as anything worthwhile does,
but it can be done - and if focus on the alphabetic principle is made
a mainstay of a child’s efforts at reading, it will surely, in a
reasonable program, produce good readers. In contrast, look-and-say,
language experience, and whole language reject the the claim that
children should be taught to use the alphabetic principle - their
knowledge of letter/sound correspondence - habitually as their
method for figuring out each new word.
In his preface to Why Johnny Can’t Read, Dr. Flesch explains
that his book is addressed to fathers and mothers because the
teachers, school officials, and so-called educational experts are too
stiff-necked in their opposition to phonics-based reading
instruction. Dr. Flesch gives a history of the teaching of reading in
Why Johnny Can’t Read. The history related by Dr. Flesch relied
upon the book American Reading Instruction by Nila Banton
Smith. In his 1981 sequel, Why Johnny Still Can’t Read: A
new Look at the Scandal of our Schools, Dr. Flesch confesses that
it "turned out that Professor Smith and I were wrong. In 1966, eleven
years after I wrote Why Johnny Can’t Read, there appeared
Teaching to Read, Historically Considered by Dr. Mitford Mathews,
the famous linguist and editor of the monumental Dictionary of
Americanisms." (Why Johnny Still Can’t Read,
p. 15) Dr. Flesch in his 1981 follow-up book provides corrected
historical information. What it boils down to, in short, leaving out
virtually all the details, is that from the beginning of alphabetic
language writing systems, including written English, which developed
little by little over time, reading instruction was focused on the
alphabetic principle. As mentioned earlier, here and there "reading
instruction heretics" popped up, but the modern American deviation
away from phonics was given its principal push by Horace Mann in the
mid-1800s; by Colonel Francis Wayland Parker in the late-1800s; by
John Dewey, from his time at the University of Chicago in the 1890s
through to his death in the 1950s; and by Professor Arthur I. Gates of
Columbia and Professor William S. Gray of the University of Chicago in
the first half of this century. Perhaps the most significant event
occurred in 1929, when "the Scott Foresman Company invited Professor
Gray to revamp their Elson Readers and this marked the birth of Dick
and Jane. A year later, Professor Gates joined up with Macmillan and
produced a look-and-say series for them. Gradually most major textbook
houses fell in line and the "Dismal Dozen" of basal readers came into
being. By the middle thirties look-and-say had completely swept the
field. Virtually all leading academics in the primary reading field
were now authors of basal reader series, and collected fat royalties.
They had inherited the kingdom of American education." (Why Johnny
Still Can’t Read, p. 23)
Dr. Flesch goes on to point out in Why Johnny Still Can’t
Read:
Inevitably that huge bonanza created problems.
Look-and-say, after all, was still essentially a gimmick with
no scientific foundation whatsoever. As it had for 150 years,
it produced children who couldn’t accurately read unfamiliar
words. From the fourth grade up, textbooks in all subjects had
to be "dumbed down" to accommodate them. Grade promotions had
to be based on age rather than achievement. High school
diplomas were given to functional illiterates. Colleges had to
adjust to an influx of students who couldn’t read. The
national illiteracy rate climbed year after year after year. (Why
Johnny Still Can’t Read, p. 23)
Dr. Flesch starts Why Johnny Can’t Read with his
Chapter 1 "A Letter to Johnny’s Mother," where he writes "I have
looked into this whole reading business" (p. 1) and reveals "What I
found is absolutely fantastic. 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. Johnny
couldn’t read until half a year ago [when he was 12] for the simple
reason that nobody ever showed him how. Johnny’s only problem was that
he was unfortunately exposed to an ordinary American school." (p. 2)
In the whole language classroom the children are encouraged to
guess at words. They are encouraged to try to predict what the word
should be based upon the context, including pictures. They are
encouraged to try to memorize words by their shape without necessarily
understanding the "sound values" of all the letters in the words. They
are taught that it is perfectly o.k. to look at a word and based upon
an initial letter or letter blend they may know, or based upon a
little word they already know within a longer word, to attempt to
guess, basically, at what the complete word is. These guessing
techniques become ingrained and result, many times, in sloppy,
imprecise readers, who fail to fully utilize the logic of our phonetic
alphabet.
Anthropological and Sociological Speculations on the
Abandonment of
Phonics-based Reading Instruction (and Roman
Catholicism)
So, written English uses a phonetic alphabet. Logan argues
persuasively that the phonetic alphabet was a critical factor in the
development of Western Culture, including the rise of systematic
science and logic. Focusing on the phonetic alphabet in teaching
reading results in good readers. Shoving phonics off to the side as
"one facet of a multi-faceted program" leads to the disastrous
consequence of our society filling up with semiliterates and
illiterates. What anthropological and sociological comments can we
make on this abandonment of phonics-based reading instruction in our
schools? Has it affected our culture, our society?
Anthropology is the study of mankind and his cultures. Sociology is
the study of human society. If Logan is correct that "abstraction,
analysis, rationality, and classification" are an effect of the
phonetic alphabet "and the basis for Western abstract scientific and
logical thinking" (p. 21), does our soft-pedaling of the alphabet in
reading instruction affect our culture and the organization of our
society? Is the failure to use phonics-based reading instruction
related to the rise of the popularity of deconstructionism,
post-modernism, and critical theory in our universities? This paper is
too short to tackle these issues in a detailed way, but the outline of
an argument can be formed.
The rise of Western Civilization is intimately related to the
emergence and domination of the Roman Catholic Church. The Church
maintains that there are absolute truths, including moral truths. The
Church contends that the Church, in the form of its college of
bishops, and, especially in the person of the Pope - the Vicar of
Christ - is inspired by the Holy Spirit to faithfully articulate the
absolute truths of faith and morals.
The leaders of the Protestant Revolution of the 1500s rejected this
view, claiming that each man must find his own way to the truth. The
leaders of the Protestant Revolution did not reject the idea of
absolute truths, including moral truths. But they insisted on leaving
the determination and articulation of these truths to each man
individually. This destroyed the (somewhat) universal Western
agreement on the basics of theological and philosophical truths
regarding God, the universe, the world, and man. To the Protestants,
ultimately, it was "every man to himself" (as embodied in the Baptist
tradition).
The Protestant Revolution was followed by the Enlightenment (the
Endarkenment), which rejected the idea of relying upon Revealed
truths, and instead embraced rationalism - a form of idolatry
involving the worship of the rational abilities of man. Under the new
regime of Enlightened Protestantism, the thought naturally arises:
since each man is to rely ultimately on himself for the discernment of
truth as he sees it, what justification do we have in imposing
upon our children in school the world view of the currently dominant
adult culture?
This question led John Dewey, the dominant American philosopher of
education, to his advocacy of "child-centered" education. No longer,
according to Dewey, should schooling be God-centered, focused
primarily on forming children into good little Christians, who have
learned how to overcome their natural sinful tendencies arising from
concupiscence, the echo of Original Sin.
No, Dewey reasoned that children were naturally good,
uncontaminated by Original Sin, and (in modern day parlance) they have
the right to "create their own reality." Thus, the teacher is no
longer the dispenser of theological and philosophical truths - the
loving taskmaster. Not anymore. Now, school is best seen (according to
Dewey) as a discovery cottage, where the teacher is reduced to a
facilitator in the child’s own, child-directed process of discovery of
the elements of reality. In Dewey’s view the ultimate goal of
schooling is simply "growth." But what kind of growth? Which growth is
healthy and which is cancerous?
Robert Maynard Hutchins, the great long-term president of the
University of Chicago earlier this century, emphasized the importance
of this question What is good? President Hutchins was concerned about
John Dewey’s leadership in American education because John Dewey did
not understand the importance of this question. Because of this,
President Hutchins criticized John Dewey’s claim that the purpose of
schools is simply to promote growth - without grappling with the
essential question of what "growth" is good and what is bad.
(Hutchins, 1953, p. 53) In one of his writings, Dewey, devoting to the
question only about one page, gave a couple of examples of morally
cancerous "growth" within an individual - the development of an
acknowledged vice, for example - and asserted that this type of
"growth" stymies "growth" in other areas, and therefore has the
overall effect of being a growth inhibitor, and therefore bad since to
Dewey "growth" is the ultimate good. This would appear to be an
implicit statement by Dewey that he favors the (morally) good ("true"
growth) and disfavors the bad. A major problem with Dewey’s
educational philosophy, however, is that nowhere (it would appear) in
Dewey’s writing about education does he define good and bad, or give
us guidelines to distinguish the good from the bad. This failure to
define what is good and what is bad is rooted in Dewey’s relativistic
value system, leaving each individual to devise his own (perhaps
ever-changing) value system. This failure by Dewey to answer the
question What is good? is the reason Robert Maynard Hutchins writes:
The failures of which I think they have been guilty result from
the defects of their philosophies. Pragmatism, the philosophy of
Dewey and his followers, like positivism, the philosophy of
Reichenbach and Carnap, is not a philosophy at all, because it
supplies no intelligible standard of good or bad. Pragmatism and
positivism hold that the only knowledge is scientific knowledge.
As the Mad Hatter and the March Hare in Alice in Wonderland
celebrated unbirthdays so pragmatism and positivism are
unphilosophies. They are even anti-philosophies. [Hutchins, 1953,
53.]
Unfortunately, mainstream modern American education is grounded in
Dewey’s relativistic "anti-philosophy", which fails to define the
good, and therefore leads to the worship of Change. But the
question What is good? cannot be ignored in sound educational
philosophy.
Has the rejection of primary emphasis on the alphabetic principle
in the teaching of reading, and has rejection of God-centered
schooling in favor of child-centered schooling, had other effects on
our culture and society? One could argue that they have; that they
have contributed to the rise of deconstructionism, post-modernism, and
critical theory.
According to Wayne K. Hoy and Cecil G. Miskel, "post-modernism ...
is uncompromisingly against logical empiricism, and holds to a highly
personal individual, nongeneralized, emotional form of knowledge."
(Hoy & Miskel, 1996, p. 18) According to Hoy & Miskel, under
deconstructionism, "no interpretation is correct, but rather there are
multiple interpretations. For post-modernists, the world consists of
plural constructions and diverse realities. Post-modernists are
anti-foundational; that is, they contend that questions of fact,
correctness, validity, and clarity can neither be posed nor answered
by science." (p. 18) Under Deweyism, it is illegitimate to inculcate
into the child the adult’s world view - the child is left to construct
his own reality. In reading instruction based on whole language, the
teacher refuses to dictate to the child how he should go about
reading, instead treating every and any approach as a legitimate
"reading strategy."
Logan claims the phonetic alphabet led to the development of
monotheism, abstract science, and deductive logic, as well as
analysis, rationality, and classification. For sixty years and more
our educational system has de-emphasized the phonetic alphabet in
learning to read. The reading instruction intelligentsia in our
universities have little appreciation for the logic of our phonetic
alphabet, instead seeing written English as a mess, whose phonics
rules are of little use in teaching children to read. Many of our
children now go through school with only a tenuous grasp of the
alphabetic principle. The result is a lessening familiarity with
mainstays of Western Culture, previously absorbed through
phonics-based reading, such as abstraction, analysis, rationality, and
classification "which form the essence of the alphabet effect and the
basis for Western abstract scientific and logical thinking." (Logan,
1986, p. 21)
This leaves our children and our society fertile ground for the
bias against logical empiricism, and the inclination towards "a highly
personal individual, non-generalized, emotional form of knowledge"
(Hoy & Miskel, 1996, p. 18) which forms the basis for
deconstructionism and post-modernism, which in turn accelerate
rejection of Christianity as the theological, philosophical, ethical,
and moral foundation of our culture and society.
This deconstruction of Christian culture leaves us exposed to the
aggressive critical theorists and radical feminists who seek to
deconstruct Christian patriarchy and reformulate our society and
culture, with a view to imposing on us through the modern nation state
their views of human emancipation, whether we like it or not.
References
Flesch, R. (1955). Why johnny can't read - And what you can do
about it. New York: HarperCollins.
Flesch, R. (1981). Why johnny still can't read - A new
look at the scandal of our schools. New York: HarperCollins.
Hoy, W.K. & Miskel, C.G. (1996). Educational administration:
Theory, research, and practice. (5th Ed.). New York: McGraw -
Hill, Inc.
Hutchins, Robert M. (1953). The conflict in education in a
democratic society. New York: Harper & Brothers.
Logan, R.K. (1986). The alphabet effect: The impact of the
phonetic alphabet on the development of Western Civilization. New
York: St. Martin’s Press.
Mathews, M.M. (1966). Teaching to Read, Historically Considered.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
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