Worlds die when a child never learns to read. Worlds of imagination, worlds of enterprise, worlds of love and valor, all die. Myriad worlds have died or never came to be for three generations of children in the West all because of a progressive experiment, aggressively promoted and executed despite evidence that the idea was wrong. The idea has ruined millions. This is NOT hyperbole, and States still spend millions of dollars promoting, despite years of scientific evidence it is ruining our kids.
The idea: Whole Language Reading, also known as “Cuing Theory.”
It goes by other names, but the idea is that words are actually symbols and that human beings don’t really read by sounding out letters, but rather use context and syntax to determine what a word might be. Children are taught “strategies” such as memorizing words with the help of pictures and repetition. Children are not taught phonetic rules and therefore cannot “sound out” words. But when confronted with a new word, readers fail and very quickly despise and dread reading.
And my little son was nearly a victim of this ignorance. He was not learning to pronounce words in English. He was memorizing them, with great anxiety, his little eyes darting from face to face, object to object searching for a clue as to what a word might be. In short, he was learning to cope like illiterates must, only this was official pedagogy.
We caught it time, barely, and taught him ourselves. Homeschoolers knew about this travesty year before Common Core became a controversy. The cure: simple phonics.
I have recently run across a series of podcasts that investigates this progressive tragedy. If you care about reading, about children, the future of books and literature, Greek, Latin and all the languages that use the Roman script, you will listen to SOLD A STORY by American Public Media.
Godspeed
https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/