The Futility of "Reading Wars"

The so-called “reading wars” are the gift that keeps giving.  For much of the 20th century and all - so far - of the 21st, educators, parents, politicians and pundits have incessantly bickered.  Is a phonics first approach mandatory based on what is claimed to be irrefutable “scientific”evidence?   Or is whole language best, as eloquently espoused by such luminaries as psychologist Frank Smith, literacy scholars Ken and Yetta Goodman, and linguist Noam Chomsky?

The issue re-emerged this week with a New York Times article about the partial surrender of reading titan Lucy Calkins of Teachers College, Columbia University.  Calkins long argued for a more holistic approach, based on “cueing,” much more aligned with the whole language movement than with phonics.  Her curricula over the years have been widely popular and wildly profitable.  Calkins now seems quite amenable to the inclusion and primacy of instruction based on phonics and decoding strategies.   

For decades many policy makers and educators have tried to thread the sharp needle of disagreement with an approach termed “balanced literacy.”  It is fair to say that a middle ground has not satisfied devotees of either method.   The Times article has quickly collected nearly 800 comments, a majority celebrating Calkins’s retreat and re-emphasizing the superiority - necessity - of phonics instruction.  Some have gone so far as to suggest a class action lawsuit against Calkins for foisting an unscientific theory on America’s youth, resulting in high rates of illiteracy or harmful delays in reading development.

As with all “wars,” I find this one needless and unproductive.  Among the many education arguments that cannot be easily resolved, reading is particularly complex.  A significant contributor to the unresolved complexity is the question of what is being assessed.  Critics, including me, of “phonics primacy” assert that phonics training is not education.  At the extreme, a child can excel at decoding and reading out loud without the faintest idea of meaning.  When considering comprehension, extension of ideas to a different realm, apprehending meaning and beauty, critical capacity and more . . . it is not clear that phonics is a rich enough approach, even in early years.   But I write to make a much broader point about reading - about education generally.

As the head of a school for several decades, I'm intimately aware of the practical and intellectual aspects of reading and I have always found the debate rather odd.  

First, language is inarguably a human phenomenon that predates, by millennia, the need to decode print.  Although encoding concepts in symbols goes back seven millennia (or so) BCE (a secular acronym to the Christian BC), oral language goes back to the beginning of communication.  Many scholars would assert that music is the precursor to all language, an assertion I find validated by Otis Redding or Bach - take your pick.  In any event, the importance of decoding symbolic language did not arise until the advent of the printing press, long after stories, ideas and beauty were passed through oral and aural means.  

But back to the current strategic debate.  It is, to borrow a trite contemporary convention, both/and not either/or.

Printed language is both the symbolic representation of spoken language and the ideas carried by the symbolic representation.  One can learn in either direction: extrapolate meaning from the symbols you learn to decode: and/or understand the symbolic representation by first apprehending the meaning that is implicit in the sequence of letters and words.  Good teaching uses both directions, often depending on how an individual student responds.  An approach exclusive to either is a fool’s errand.  

Although the analogy is slightly flawed, it is nonetheless helpful to think of music once more.  Hearing and producing beautiful musical phrases requires no ability to understand or use music notation.  But at a certain point notation literacy is absolutely needed to record, perform and advance the art form.   I highly commend the wondrous essay A Mathematician’s Lament, which makes a parallel argument about the beauty of mathematics and the ineffective and barren nature of much rote math teaching.

The real problem in education is not one methodology or the other.  It is that an "industrial" model of education became dominant in the early 20th century and has rendered thoughtful teaching difficult or impossible.  Brisk efficiency could be realized by moving large numbers of kids through a production line, like a Ford Motors plant.  Curricula were standardized and class sizes grew.  And then to compound the problem, the children who most need individual attention are the ones least likely to receive it.

Education can't be standardized because real children are not standard.  It is one of the bases for my total rejection of standardized tests.  Also, developmental timelines naturally vary.   This is why many of the nations we claim as models of “excellence” don’t formally teach reading until age seven or later.  

Teaching "reading" to children younger than six or seven can be an exercise in damaging futility for many of them.   Yet we do it anyway.  I invite you to read this important parable and think about early reading policy.

I remembered one morning when I discovered a cocoon in the bark of a tree, just as a butterfly was making a hole in its case and preparing to come out. I waited a while, but it was too long appearing and I was impatient. I bent over and breathed on it to warm it. I warmed it as quickly as I could and the miracle began to happen before my eyes, faster than life. The case opened, the butterfly started crawling out and I shall never forget my horror when I saw how its wings were folded back and crumpled; the wretched butterfly tried with its whole trembling body to unfold them. Bending over it, I tried to help it with my breath, in vain.

It needed to be hatched out patiently and the unfolding of the wings should be a gradual process in the sun. Now it was too late. My breath had forced the butterfly to appear, all crumpled, before its time. It struggled desperately and, a few seconds later, died in the palm of my hand. That little body is, I do believe, the greatest weight I have on my conscience. For I realize today that it is a mortal sin to violate the great laws of nature. We should not hurry, we should not be impatient, but we should confidently obey the eternal rhythm

Perceptive teachers, working in small classes, will readily discern how each of their students best unlocks the loveliness of printed language.  Until we recognize that child development is richly varied, and classes must be small, these arcane and needless debates will rage on and on.