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Book bans, chatbots, pedagogical warfare: What it means to read has become a minefield.
But maybe the real problem is that children aren’t being taught to read at all. As test scores have slumped — a trend exacerbated by the disruptions of Covid — a long-smoldering conflict over teaching methods has flared anew. Parents, teachers and administrators have rebelled against widely used progressive approaches and demanded more emphasis on phonics. In May, David Banks, the chancellor of New York City’s public schools, for many years a stronghold of “whole language” instruction, announced a sharp pivot toward phonics, a major victory for the “science of reading” movement and a blow to devotees of entrenched “balanced literacy” methods.
The reading crisis reverberates at the higher reaches of the educational system too. As corporate management models and zealous state legislatures refashion the academy into a gated outpost of the gig economy, the humanities have lost their luster for undergraduates. According to reports in The New Yorker and elsewhere, fewer and fewer students are majoring in English, and many of those who do (along with their teachers) have turned away from canonical works of literature toward contemporary writing and pop culture. Is anyone reading “Paradise Lost” anymore? Are you?
Everyone Likes Reading. Why Are We So Afraid of It?
Book bans, chatbots, pedagogical warfare: What it means to read has become a minefield.www.nytimes.com
This bothers me everyday. I Think about declining reading scores everyday.
Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.
Carl Sagan
"To give to every citizen the information he needs...to understand his duties to his neighbors and country...to know his rights..."
- Thomas Jefferson, 1818
The disagreement in how best to teach kids to read is a tale as old as time. The whole language v. systematic phonics instruction v. balanced literacy has been going on for decades now. I've been teaching just about 20 years now. My observations have been that if a child is read to as a baby, toddler and child, then he is more likely to read well no matter which type of instruction they are getting in kindergarten and first grade. Those children were more likely talked to, read to, played with, allowed to explore. They will do fine with whatever instruction they're given because they're already ahead of the curve.
The kids from families who just sat them in front of the TV or phone, who were not read to as babies, toddlers and children usually have low vocabulary skills, lack of background knowledge of a variety of areas, expressive language issues, lack of imagination and a lack of phonological awareness. They are the kids who don't need to be sat in the hallway with an aide working on worksheets all day --- they need what they missed. They need to be read aloud to for enjoyment. They need to hold conversations with their peers and adults about a variety of people, places, events, things. They need to explore the world they didn't get to see when they weren't in school. They need to play, experiment, analyze and synthesize information. Creating an environment where these kids are talking to each other, listening to each other and listening to books will help build their background knowledge, vocabulary and their phonological awareness. These kids are going to need more phonemic awareness and phonics instruction than the kids who have been working on it since they were babies. But books should always be the central theme to the classroom -- not worksheets.
My question always is --- how do we teach the parents who don't know or don't care to know what they should be doing with their children years before school even starts?
