March 27, 2023 by Darren Pasek (‘25)
Compared to education, there are few debates that are more polarizing. Education is an issue people are unapologetic about; nothing gets in the way of a parent and their kid’s success. Should it be public, private, charter, or in-house? How much money goes toward salaries, research, and technology? Should there even be technology in the classroom?
But the most relevant and worthwhile debate is about actual instruction—that is why all the other facets of the education system even exist in the first place. Within instruction, though, the most important skill being taught is reading. Despite reading being only one component of literacy (writing, speaking, and listening are the others), it is the one that is most necessary to teach and complement the other components in a classroom setting.
Speaking and listening are functions ingrained in the human brain. Even when not of formal education, people who are around a language develop their own ability to speak and understand the language. Reading and writing, however, require a systematic teaching approach so students can become proficient.
The problem herein lies with finding what approach is the most effective, ethical, and economical. There are also countless factors that are out of a school’s control when it comes to reading education. It makes a colossal difference if a student is being read to at home, for example.
The approach widely used for the past 50 years or so is called Whole Language (WL). It involves exposing students to texts and passages relevant to their own lives. Because it is based on the practical use of language, WL fails to teach grammatical structure. WL also fails in the sense that if a student approaches a word they do not understand, they have no technique to “sound out” the word or find pieces of the word that they know. For instance, if a young WL reader finds the word “transaction” in a sentence, they would freeze and lack the ability to figure it out on their own. The solutions often suggested for this are to look at pictures and context clues, or just to skip the word. All these solutions have been proven ineffective for most students.
The other main system is called phonics. Phonics emphasizes learning how the letters you see become the sounds you speak and hear. A student educated with phonics who does not know the word “transaction” would now be able to say aloud: “trans-ac-tion.” A student may have heard that word used in conversation before, and they can apply that meaning to the word now that they know the phonetics of it. This method, however, fails if a reader has never heard aloud the word “transaction.” They can say it, but that does not mean they know what it means. Proficient readers still, of course, do not know some words. So, phonics leads learning readers closer to complete comprehension than WL does.
The problem with implementing phonics, and partially why it was moved away from to begin with, is because it holds back earlier, higher-level readers. For phonics to be effective, it must be taught with insistence on repetition and a very orderly, arguably mundane style to ensure that the syllables’ sounds are fully comprehended and memorized by the student. If they are teaching this in, say, pre-K through first grade, there will be a sizable portion of students who are already reading beginner novels at this age. Opponents of phonics think this unnecessary teaching could suck the life and joy of reading out of already phonetically proficient readers.
In this emerges an ethical question that education deals with all the time. Currently, American education tends to slow down to whoever the least skilled student in the class is. This fact becomes less true as students go through middle and high school; high school students, for example, can elect for AP classes that challenge them, and they will find other skilled students in their class.
In the younger years of a student’s educational life, however, elementary schools often fail to challenge the classroom’s more school-savvy minds in any way. This leaves it in the hands of the parents and students themselves for the student to develop their skills. On the contrary, other countries tend to have schools’ function to push students to their limit the whole time, and those who do not make it are considered not “cut-out” for academic life. These “less talented” students are ostracized from the professional world and end up in often less prestigious and less talent-necessitating jobs.
There are many countries that follow this model, but China and Japan are two that do it very definitively. It is successful for them; these nations produce armies of educated workers and thinkers. And when it comes to literacy rates, in 2021 China had a staggering 99.83% literacy rate. The USA on the other hand, had a mere 79% rate.
With China as a main competitor to the US, it makes one wonder why we have not taken a more active role in improving literacy rates by listening to the research. Although one could theorize an ulterior motive behind the USA’s actions, it seems most probable that governments just have trouble allocating the funds to retrain teachers, buy and plan new curriculums, etc. The data clearly illustrates that phonics is the most effective way to teach literacy and the ability to read to students, but due to low funding and constant bureaucratic political nonsense, the methods are elusive to implementation.
Correction: In print, this article was inaccurately titled “Opinion: The Lose-Lose Dilemma of the Willow Project.”