Fighting Words

Why the reading wars aren't over.

Suddenly, everyone's hooked on phonics. After the reading scores of California students dropped precipitously, a bipartisan majority of the state legislature voted to mandate that teachers be trained in phonics. In Texas, the other key state for influencing textbook publishers, Gov. George W. Bush pushed through a similar law. Massachusetts, too, now mandates phonics instruction in every public school. Pro-phonics bills are pending in many other states as well, and phonics products are selling briskly. Two major recent reports-one by a division of the National Academy of Sciences, the other by the Learning First Alliance, which includes the top two teachers' unions and the national PTA- recommend phonics instruction.

The triumph of phonics would be great news, if only it were true. The news accounts may give the impression of triumph, but parents need to read between the lines.

Ever since Rudolph Flesch's 1955 blockbuster Why Johnny Can't Read, proponents of phonics have been arguing that the schools should resume teaching kids to read by connecting the written word to its sound. They believe children should receive systematic instruction in the alphabetical code-in how letters represent the 44 sounds of the English language and how combinations of letters blend those sounds and string them together. Then children will be able to read, and to decode unfamiliar new words, by sounding them out. Before too long, they will be doing this so quickly that they will not even realize that's how they're reading.

In recent years, however, the dominant approach to reading in the schools and, even more, in the teachers' colleges has stressed not phonics but "whole language." The debates over phonics and whole language came to be called "the reading wars" because of their intensity, but it's important to understand that these debates have not concerned how to teach reading. The question has been whether to teach reading at all.

Whole-language theorists such as Kenneth Goodman believe that just as children learn to speak naturally, by exposure to the speech of others, so can they learn to read and write by exposure to literature and "print-rich environments." Goodman, a professor emeritus at the University of Arizona, says that parents and teachers should read to children and encourage them "to experiment with reading and writing," "to build on their natural tendency to make sense of the world around them, including the print around them." Context cues will help children make sense of words, a process Goodman has notoriously called a "psycholinguistic guessing game."

I asked Goodman whether spelling errors in children's early experiments should be corrected. His response: "What's an error? . . . Language is a social invention and it's also personal. My voice isn't yours, my dialect isn't yours. . . . You learn to spell through misspellings. A skilled teacher can look at a child's writing and see that though some of the spellings aren't conventional they show the children's growing skills at the spelling system."

Phonics advocates such as Robert Sweet, founder of the National Right to Read Foundation, describe whole language derisively: "Put somebody in a house and put a hammer in his hand and he'll become a carpenter." Whole language is, however, not a new fad but an ancient heresy. Phonics instruction has not been the norm in American schools since at least the 1930s. Hostility to phonics goes back all the way to Horace Mann, the father of American public education, who inaugurated a tradition among educational theorists in disparaging phonics and its supposedly deadening drills. As Andrew Coulson points out in Market Education, Mann either misunderstood or misrepresented phonics-another tradition that continues to this day.

Influenced by Thomas Gallaudet, the pioneering teacher of the deaf, Mann thought that reading instruction should begin with whole words- with units of meaning, not units of sound. His wife published a reader that taught words by illustrating them, an approach that came to be called "look and say" or "sight word" and to be employed in the vapid Dick-and-Jane books many of today's adults grew up with. Whole language takes this approach, and progressive education's disdain for authority and structure, to a logical conclusion.

Says Goodman, the whole-language theorist, "Learning is something people are uniquely capable of, and when the time comes they learn to respond to the need for written language." In the history of the species, though, that time didn't come for tens of thousands of years. When MIT linguist Steven Pinker wrote a book called The Language Instinct a few years ago, his point was that human beings appear to have a universal grammar, rooted in biological affinity, for spoken language. Only a minority of societies has devised written representations of language, through glacially slow trial and error.

Children are unlikely to recapitulate that process in a few years. Building up a written vocabulary is hard enough. For most of this century, American schoolchildren have been introduced to fewer and fewer words per year because the prevailing method of whole-word memorization cannot accommodate more. Whole language makes the problem worse because now children are supposed to start out reading "quality children's literature" rather than readers designed to acquaint them with everyday words.