Soviet agriculture went down the drain when ideology took over from science.
The recent Fairfax County, Virginia, school board elections featured a battle between right-wing and liberal candidates. According to the Washington Post, at least 12 of the 35 candidates favored teaching creationism in the schools. Other hotly debated issues included "what to teach about homosexuality and how big a role phonics should play in reading instruction" (October 21, 1995). A commentator describing the election said, "What is at stake is the ability to educate our children in the values that both sides hold dear." Values? Wait a minute! What you want your children to learn about homosexuality is a matter of values -- or ideology. But should science be subject to an ideological test? Or methods for teaching reading?
All of this sounds unpleasantly familiar. Once upon a time, in a country called the Soviet Union, the validity of science was decided on political grounds. Many Westerners still remember the story of a fellow named Lysenko. His theory of genetics was more consistent with Marxism than was Mendelianism, which was the scientific standard everywhere else in the world. So Lysenko and his genetics were elevated, and the others learned they had better shut up. We laughed at the Soviets for deciding science on the basis of ideology; yet we are making that mistake with education.
In the so-called Reading Wars, two groups are battling for control over how children learn to read. According to supporters of phonics, children must be taught to connect words that are part of their spoken vocabulary with the unfamiliar combinations of letters on the page, and they do this by learning how to "sound out" letters and letter combinations. Phonics supporters also say that youngsters need lots of practice in decoding -- making the connection -- until it becomes automatic. Phonics supporters are absolutely correct in these beliefs. But more extreme advocates of phonics -- we might call them the phonics-only people -- favor a dry and mechanistic approach to introducing children to the world of reading and writing.
Purist whole-language advocates, on the other hand, believe that reading is as natural as speaking. The best way to teach reading, they say, is to expose children to stories they will want to read, and let them figure out words from their context in the sentence or story, guessing if necessary. Sooner or later, they will get it right.
But as a group of articles in the Summer 1995 issue of American Educator makes clear, children learn best in a system that combines aspects of phonics and whole language. Researchers have exploded the whole-language contention that children learn to read as naturally as they learn to speak. (If they did, there wouldn't be any illiterate societies because there aren't any societies where people can't talk.) Some children learn without being given systematic, explicit instruction in sounding out words. Many do not -- and that is where phonics comes in. However, researchers stress that, while knowing how to decode is essential, it is not enough. They agree with whole-language advocates that teachers must also expose their students to materials the youngsters are eager to read. Otherwise, youngsters may have little interest in reading, probably won't read much, and will never get enough practice to be skilled readers.
You'd think that most school districts would opt for the system good reading teachers have always used: a combination of phonics and whole language. That hasn't happened. Instead, the teaching of reading has become an ideological football. The left wing, with its romantic ideas about how children learn, has adopted whole language as the sole path. And for the past several years, it has been tremendously popular. The right wing, on the other hand, which believes that learning doesn't have to be fun and that children need to be shaped up by discipline, has seized on phonics. As a result, parents whose only interest is in making sure their children get a good start have become frustrated and infuriated because they see that, in order to get phonics instruction, they might be forced to vote for school board candidates who favor teaching creationism and gay bashing.
But there are signs that evidence is beginning to prevail over ideology. After seven years of whole language -- and plummeting reading scores -- California recently decided to reintroduce phonics into its reading program. That needs to happen all over the country -- in phonics-only and whole-language-only districts. We have sound research on the subject of how children learn to read. It is up to the people in central offices and school boards to make policy decisions on the basis of this research. Soviet agriculture went down the drain when ideology took over from science. We ignore that lesson at our peril.