Whither (Wither?) Whole Language

...they fear that a clear naming of what they do
will reveal how little it needs doing, and they will
find themselves on the streets selling wind-up
toys. [Richard Mitchell. The underground grammarian, 1, January, 1977.]

Most pedagogues...are simply dull persons who have found it easy to get along by dancing to whatever tune happens to be lined out.  At this dancing they have trained themselves to swallow any imaginable fad or folly, and always with enthusiasm...Their  programs of study sound like the fantastic inventions of comedians gone insane. The teaching of the elements is abandoned for a dreadful mass of useless fol-de-rols... (H. L. Mencken.  From "The war on intelligence," December 31, 1928, published in A second Mencken chrestomathy. Vintage, 1994)

Unsurpassed in the murkiness of their brains, incomparable in the stupidity of their natures, the thorniness of their doctrine, and the blackness of their hearts... They will explain the precise nature of...a thousand other more sublimated and refined niceties of notions, relations, quantities, formalities, quiddities, haeccites and such like abstrusitiesas one would think no one could pry into, except he had such cat's eyes as to see best in the dark.   [Ersamus.  Praise of folly]

Riding cultural currents of egoism, sappy new age writing, and anti-reason; relentlessly disseminating nutty "theories" of reading and shamefully inane critiques of Western society; and appointing themselves stewards of America's children and champions of social justice--a group of education professors conceived a way to transform reading instruction (which had been straightforward) into a body of esoteric beliefs and practices of which they would be self-anointed priests.  They called it "whole language"--apparently believing that if they called it "baloney" (truth in advertising) they wouldn't get customers.

Fortunately for them, ed schools typically turn well-meaning new students into graduates with little knowledge of instructional design and less knowledge of "research" on the self-serving and rarely effective "innovations" served up by the desperate-for-legitimacy-and-tenure education professoriat--and who, therefore, rely on doctrinaire ed professors for "the truth."

The whole language wave swept the land--leaving in its wake illiterate, disengaged students and burned out teachers. [The only teachers NOT upset by their students' illiteracy were teachers who didn't KNOW their students couldn't read because whole language professors convinced them you shouldn't use "objective" measures to assess achievement.] 

Naturally, parents knew their children couldn't read.  So did many veteran teachers who had been forced to stop teaching in a systematic, direct fashion by school administrators and district "literacy coordinators" bedazzled by the whole language cult frenzy.

Eventually, state and national tests confirmed what parents and many teachers knew for years--namely, that feel-good, teacher-as-facilitator, nothing-taught-directly whole language helped make one or two generations of students illiterate and/or learning disabled.   These official revelations were followed by large scale studies and  massive literature reviews on the most reliably effective features of successful reading instruction.  This research showed that most students learn to read when phonemic awareness, sound/symbol relationships ("phonics"), comprehension, and spelling are taught in a carefully arranged logical progression of tasks by a teacher who knows exactly what she is trying to teach; who provides clear directions, models, feedback, and error correction (i.e., teaches systematically and explicitly); and ensures that all students master every task before going on. In other words, the principles of effective instruction are the opposite of what is preached with deluded confidence and unashamed arrogance by whole language gurus and ed school disciples.

Whole language cult diehards neither examine what they are doing nor admit they might be wrong--despite their endless pseudo-scholarly prattle about "reflection" and "higher-order thinking."  [But one oughtn't expect mere data to remedy intellectual dishonesty and curricular irresponsibility.]   Instead, they employ the old tricks of

(1) trying to taint the motives of their critics and discredit the evidence against them; and

(2) renaming what they do.  "Whole language" suddenly became "balanced literacy."  [Same bunk in a different package.]   

And socially disadvantaged first and second graders--already at least two years behind advantaged peers--became "emergent readers."  [As if they had all the time in the world to learn at a "developmentally appropriate" pace.  THIS is how social inequality is reproduced.]    However, the word play shows that whole language diehards are at least consistently immoral.

Comments

[Baker]

Dear Professor Plum,

Can you please reduce the font size? I have to scroll to the desired portion, get up, walk to the back of my room, read the few words on the screen, walk forward, sit, scroll down a bit, get up, walk to the back of the room,...

The fridge with the lemons is in the back so I really can't make too many trips before... well, you know.

And don't you think a few more pictures would help me decode the text? Especially after a few trips back to fridge to read the big (large, not many-lettered) words?

Hippidy Hop

Baker

[Stephen]

Congratulations on the terrific new weblog!

[Mike]

On whole language: If indeed it's the idea that you recognize entire words, possibly by their shape, then it seems to me that it's very much like learning Chinese characters. Which Chinese do very well indeed - up to about 3000 or 4000 characters.

Maybe there are even basic forms, from which you can understand compounds.

But there's still a limit to how many word-shapes you can remember. 52 letter symbols (and a dozen others, for numbers and punctuation) is a lot easier.

Does anyone have any idea what physical and mental processes go on when someone speed-reads with good comprehension? I'm stuck around 200-300wpm, and I'm greatly afraid that if I stop and analyze what's going on I'll forget how to do it - like the man with the beard who became insomniac when someone asked him if he slept with his beard under the covers or out.

All I'm sure of is that after a while, it gets to be non-verbal - the words translate directly into thought patterns.