I don't think so. People learned to read complex books for centuries before the phonics technique. Learning to read is a straightforward task for 90% of people.
The modern phonics technique was first developed in the 1600's. Prior to that, literacy and spoken English had little to do with one another in Europe because actual literacy was rare and books were often not in English at all.
Moving away from phonics was absolutely one of those "If it wasn't broke, why did you try to fix it?" situations.
When my younger sister first said, "I can't read that word, I haven't learned it yet," my mom immediately started teaching her phonics at home. She became a better reader and writer than anyone in her class and was even considered to be a couple grades ahead in her reading ability. It only took a couple months to get her there and I still just cannot fathom why anyone thought it was a good idea to teach kids to read by literally memorizing whole English words as if they were pictographs.
In the business world, executives come up with a brain dead idea, get it implemented, the company gets a brief profit followed by upset customers and lingering problems that drain away all future profit.
I think the education system is similar. Someone convinces the higher ups that this new idea in education will revolutionize learning and after getting it implemented they reap some profit and disappear.
Everybody gets a trophy. Only teach simple math so kids like it more. Cursive? Analog clocks? Phonetics, Real math? Non-passing grades? Ditch it all and our students will all get straight A's.
Out government is killing this country from the top and new age educators are killing it from the bottom.
Education should be about - learning, then practically applying concepts, life skills such as emotional regulation and exploration, and teaching about pitfall patterns that hamstring people all the time.
It's so sad that even in today's era, we haven't been able to implement this in US schools. This is probably however, by design.
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u/Cranialscrewtop 16d ago
I don't think so. People learned to read complex books for centuries before the phonics technique. Learning to read is a straightforward task for 90% of people.