Phonics Can Cure Cancer

Evidently phonics instruction can cure cancer.

Well, perhaps I slightly overstate, but a recent New York Times column by Nicholas Kristoff offered some mighty powerful claims of phonics instruction as an educational panacea.

According to Kristoff and nearly all New York Times commenters, it is the absence of proper phonics teaching that causes nearly all educational woes in America. Along the way, Whole Language served as the villain in what became a journalistic morality tale.

This is a blog, not a research journal, so I intend no academic treatise. But the chest-thumping assertions about phonics are mostly a distraction from the factors that should be addressed.

First, a dose of common sense theory: written language is a relatively recent and anomalous human skill. Before the advent of the printing press, reading as we know it was largely irrelevant. It is quite necessary now, as all the “agonizing” rightfully notes. But the whole language/phonics “debate” is absurd. Written language is comprised of phonetic elements that represent speech, which in turn carries implicit and explicit grammar, thereby conveying meaning.

These elements are seldom conscious in spoken language. Much of speech is internally wired. Small humans acquire language quite nicely without a Phonics First kit. (It is lovely to note that music predated speech as a form of human communication. It’s still better, methinks!)

Although Paul Lockhart’s marvelous essay, A Mathematician’s Lament, is about teaching - duh -math, it is quite germane to reading too. Therein he describes the absurdity of teaching music only by looking at notes on a page. I highly recommend clicking the link. It is a lovely reminder of the barren nature of most rote “instruction.”

So separating whole language from phonics is pointless. Reading is both things. But most people, I argue from academic and professional experience, never need the phonics bit at all. It is the meaning that matters, and the phonemes are merely a code that carries the meaning and beauty quite naturally.

In the right social and cultural milieu, most children never need formal reading instruction.

For most kids, “studying” phonics is quite boring. Any teacher of young children can tell you that it’s a two-way street. Understanding the meaning of a word, sentence or story allows a child to reverse engineer the phonetic elements if she wishes. But for most, it’s intuitive, and breaking it back into pieces is not necessary or useful. In the other direction, some kids find the phonetic clues and cues the best pathway into the magic of meaning and beauty. Good teachers know each child well and can use whichever lane works best.

The inordinate emphasis on phonics is like teaching kids about a beautiful forest by sitting them still at desks, examining pieces of bark and various shapes and colors of leaves. Take them for a walk! Similarly, if children’s imaginations are lit, they will love to learn reading and learn to love reading.

The literacy problem in this country is not caused by a lack of phonics instruction and won’t be solved by an abundance of phonics instruction. The literacy problem is a social and cultural problem, not an educational one. The association between poverty and illiteracy is undeniable.

In many education systems, especially European, reading is not “taught” until first grade or age seven. In communities of relative privilege, there and here, kids are already reading anyway, coming from social environments filled with conversations and books.

Poor children in the Unites States have far fewer books, if any, at home. Research some years back proposed that poor children had a supposed “30 million word gap.” On further examination, the number of words was not the relevant variable. It was the deficit of words in social context that affected literacy. Poor children often have parents (or a single parent) who work long hours and commute many miles, often to serve middle and upper class families. They are lucky to have dinner together, much less a leisurely conversation about everyone’s day.

Then they go to schools, often hungry, with unwieldy class size and a premium on keeping one’s mouth shut (or else). One unsurprising study about superior literacy levels in Finland mentioned class sizes as small as 8 -10 compared to 30-40 in many urban American schools. And we have a phonics problem?

In many ways, we are a failing society. Income, wealth and opportunity are increasingly inequitably distributed. Education is the secret to upward mobility, most politicians claim. Then they bash teachers, cut budgets, and support charter and voucher schemes that further exacerbate inequality.

We don’t have a phonics problem. We have racism/poverty/equity problems and we won’t solve our literacy woes until we honestly address those issues.