A story about reading

I was interested to read at reference 1 how large chunks of the US primary education system have or had been taken over by snake-oil, that is to say a method for teaching children to read which did not work and which did a lot of damage to a lot of children. The full strength method was called whole word reading while the diluted version was called balanced literacy. The general idea was that phonetics was stuffy and old-speak - and, worse still in many liberal eyes, promoted by President Bush the younger. Something he was doing, as it happens, when he was told of the terrorist attack on the twin towers.

Damage notwithstanding, we are told of at least three people did very nicely out of it. And I dare say there were lots more.

One of the features of this method is the use of cueing. When the learner hits a new word, rather than try to decipher it letter by letter, he or she is invited to guess using the context, a guessed word which might be the right sort of word - while being entirely the wrong word, say pony instead of horse. I am reminded of all the people working on artificial intelligence who think that they have cracked it when they can get their computer to have a reasonable go at predicting the next word on the basis of what has gone before. Perhaps forgetting that an important part of intelligence is being able to say something new.

The story is told in greater detail at reference 2, but I have not yet got very far there.

On the other hand, we are pointed to the Dehaene book at reference 6, published in 2009 and which I now know I read back in 2015. A book in which the snake-oil in question is roundly condemned. So this is very much old news and I was left rather irritated that reference 1 had not been clearer about the time line, about key milestones in the story.

And while the damage is the most important part of this story, another element is the way in which a faddish cure for difficulty in learning to read swept through the US. With one of the conclusions of the Dehaene book being that too much of teaching is hijacked by fashions and fads imposed by politicians, parents and educationalists. Something which my mother, who taught for many years in what in Cambridge were then called village colleges, went on about when I was a child and BH, a reception teacher in Kentish Town at the time, rather more recently. From which I deduce that not all that much has changed.

PS: turning up my copy of the book, I quickly learn that maybe one in ten adults in countries like the US have trouble reading, are not competent readers. I remember that my mother always asserted that there were lots of people about who never managed to learn to read, despite the efforts of their teachers. A big problem which was generally swept under the carpet and not talked about. Much less make a serious effort to do something about it. In which connection, I think that Dehaene argues towards the end of his book that tools which could have helped are only now becoming available.

References

Reference 1: Misreading the Cues: The “balanced-literacy” method of teaching children to read has predominated in American schools since the 1990s. It has been a failure - Christine Smallwood, New York Review of Books - 2023.

Reference 2: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong - an American Public Media podcast created by Emily Hanford.

Reference 3: https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/.

Reference 4: https://www.americanpublicmedia.org/. A not for profit outfit - but I have not yet managed to work out whether that means that their stuff is free.

Reference 5: https://hechingerreport.org/sold-a-story/. But it does seem to be free here.

Reference 6: Reading in the brain - Stanislas Dehaene - 2009.

Reference 7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcast. I thought it best to look up what one of these was.

Reference 8: https://mollygreen.com/homeschooling/. One of the many sites turned up by Bing that offers whole word reading. The source of the homely snap above.