From Schwartz Media. I'm Ruby Jones. This is seven Am. It's been called a forever war, the fight over how to teach children to read. For decades, an outdated method has lingered in Australian classrooms as states protect school's right to teach how they wish. Now, with a third of Australian children not being able to read well, we've hit a turning point, with Victoria joining other states in finally
mandating the best way to teach reading. Today, Associate editor of The Saturday Paper, Martin Mackenzie Murray on why vibes based learning stuck around for so long and how children should actually be taught to read. It's Friday, August night. Your daughter has recently started school. Tell me when you were trying to decide where to send her, what kinds of things were you weighing up and what did you notice about the way that schools were communicating their ethos.
I live in a state, Victoria, that has long preferred school autonomy, and so there exist all these kind of differences in teaching philosophy between schools, which I was largely kind of ignorant of, and I think the kind of ideological differences and ideological commitments of certain schools, principles and teachers is obscured by a lot of wishy washy language.
So in reading stuff like child centered learning, you know, my eyes would have kind of glazed over previously, but I now realized that that phrase itself is like really significant and kind of concealed or maybe announces in its funny way, this very particular ideology.
Okay, so what is the child centered approach? What does that mean?
It really comes down to what was once called whole language, and it kind of mutated into what's now known as balanced literacy.
We seeing a character a little bit about how they're feeling a story, and we can infer hall characters feeling three ways in a story.
We can infer hollow characters feeling.
Everyone by what they love. Say, well, we do that.
We have our emoji posters behind us, and our emojis help us to understand our characters a little bit better than.
Any So I think it was popularized in the late nineteen sixties in the United States, and like many kind of ideological fashions, Australia followed and was very much born of the zeitgeist at the time. By that, I mean this suspicion of authority, that children should be empowered and acceptance that children have their own inner lives, their own emotional lives, that they might learn differently and at their own time, and that should be deferred.
Two.
So this is another story about those characters.
So we know Kate's name is going to start with a what kay, and nicked Sing's going to start with capital and because it's a name, and Jane's.
Er see Kate.
Practically, whole language sought to immerse children, just immerse children in reading in words, in language. You surround them by beautiful books, you read to them often, and they would acquire it as easily and naturally as speaking.
Right, Okay, So that sounds kind of nice and intuitive, this idea that children can learn to read in an organic way. Tell me, Madi about the proponents of whole language and how they justify its teaching.
There's two of them, Irene Fountas and Gay Supernel.
And I know from working with children who found literacy learning very difficult that for some children they can focus on learning about letters, sounds, and words out of context, but there's a wall and they don't connect what they've learned to what they're reading or what they're writing. So we feel that as teachers we need to break down that wall. Kids need to know why they're learning what they're learning about letters, sounds, and words.
Now, let me read for you their own defense. This is from twenty twenty one. They said, the goal for the reader is accuracy using all sources of information simultaneously, so they're referring to these cues like visual cues. They go on to say, if a reader says pony for horse because of information from the pictures, that tells the teacher that the reader is using meaning information from the pictures as well as the structure of the language, but he's neglecting to use the visual information.
Of the print. His response is partially correct.
But it's not a pony, it's a horse, or the other way around.
Yes, Ruby exactly.
And to say about this hypothetical student that has said pony instead of horse, it is a bizarre generosity to say that that is partially correct, I would say, and plenty of others would say it's not partially correct, and there's no such thing as partially correct.
It's just simply wrong.
Okay, So it's less about accuracy and more about.
Vibes, Yeah, definitely. But the problem with that is explicit instruction and systematic instruction about the fundamentals of reading was eroded in favor of, or in preference for more romantic assumptions about children's learning. But as cognitive scientists, linguists, speech pathologists have been asserting for decades now regarding the acquisition of reading, regarding the development of literacy, we all have the same brain structure and we require explicit instruction to
acquire that reading. So increasingly, like I think, really loudly and vociferously, cognitive scientists are saying, like vibes based literacy teaching has to be replaced with something systematic, that is the explicit instruction of phonics, and that is teaching children to decode words by learning the correspondence between certain letters and their sounds.
So that's the sound ah and the letter A, the triangle with the line through it.
That's it yes or sh is made by S and H together.
Okay, So, Maddy, how is it then that we got into this situation where a method that is supposed to teach children how to read it doesn't work or it doesn't work well, but nevertheless it's taught in schools.
Yeah, well, it's become highly politicized.
And somewhere along the line, I think the teaching of phonics explicit instruction, empowering the teacher and not the students or the children. It became coded as a conservative thing. There was a suspicion of wrote learning it might bore or dispirit students. And I should say, like a very famous proponent of phonics teaching was George wa there.
Is one area where the teaching research is definitive. The best way to teach children to read is phonics.
And when he was running for office in two thousand, a very prominent feature of the Republican platform that year was phonics, offering very very large sums grants to schools that adopted a federally approved plan for phonics.
No new theory or method has ever improved on it, as the people of this great state, no better than anyone the national institutions of health, in the kind of rigorous research we need, has proven that phonics works and that children can learn to read much earlier than we have assumed.
So there's been for a long time this kind of ideological resistance to it.
After the break the children and teachers who've been failed. So, Marty, we've been talking about this long running ideological debate about how to teach children how to read. Let's speak about how it's affected teachers, the people who are actually on the frontlines of this issue.
One of the people I spoke to for this article is Sue Hyland, who is a teacher, an instructional coach, and she's also an associate lecturer in education at La Trobe University here in Melbourne. And she said a lot of things that were interesting. One thing that really struck me was her sort of painful discovery. When she was learning how to become a teacher, she was buzzing with enthusiasm. She was really optimistic. She goes into teach prep and year ones and she realizes this giant hole in her
own education. No one had taught her his basic fundamental thing, how to teach children how to read. And so this was a painful discovery. And she used the word grief. She said, for three years she was teaching whole language method and she came to the painful realization that she was not doing the best by her own students. She's also angry, and she tells me that there are other teachers who were angry as well. They're saying, why weren't we taught this? Why weren't we made aware of alternatives?
We didn't know what we didn't know?
Okay, so you've got teachers coming to this realization that they may have failed children who they were supposed to help. But what about the children who went through school and learned under this method. Obviously many of them did learn how to read, but how many didn't? Who are the children who were failed?
I mean the metaphor that I've used is that like some kids will learn to swim if you throw them into a swimming pool, but also many will drown. So those whose families couldn't afford tutoring, private tuition might make up for or mitigate the inadequacies of their formal education. And those who weren't born to educated parents, whose parents might you know, their educated attentions might help mitigate the failures of their education. Kids who aren't surrounded by books,
kids whose parents aren't reading to them. So those poorer students, either materially or environmentally poorer, were more vulnerable to the inadequacies of whole language because it wasn't being mitigated by other things, and.
This is a very haunting thing.
Like time and time and time again, teachers told me children were not given the basics, were not given explicit instruction in the basic fundamentals of reading, and as such struggled. Now as children, that struggle manifests quite despairingly. If you struggle as a child, you can feel shame inadequacy, and it becomes aversive. You start avoiding the thing that causes
that shame. And time and time and time again, teachers told me that they encountered or knew of students that were diagnosed with learning disorders, when in fact the fault lay with the education. The student wasn't at fault. They weren't lazy, they were abandoned, they were not taught properly. Now, if these things are kind of grounded early, like a sense of shame, a sense of inadequacy, and an ultimately avoidance of reading, that lingers that can be life long.
Yeah. I think that's what's so sad about this story. In a lot of ways, it's this well intentioned but ineffective policy that's ultimately led to more inequality.
I think so, yeah, And that's the sort of perversity of it is that there were these very grandiose, romantic assumptions about children, about their development, about their cognitive architecture, about empowering students, and respecting that idiosyncrasies and individualism, all made in good faith, but ultimately I think it's harmed and compounded literacy.
Marty, Thank you so much for your time.
Thank you.
Also in the news today, the EU, France and UK have condemned a senior Israeli minister for suggesting it might be justified and moral to starve people in Gaza. In a speech this week, Israel's finance minister said Israel was bringing in humanitarian aid because it has no choice. The EU said the deliberate starvation of civilians is a war crime. And Jack Carlson, the man who mortalized the phrase this is democracy manifest, has died at age eighty two. Gentlemen,
this is democracy man i beshed. Carlson was a serial prisoner, skapee and small time crook who shot to fame after a news clip of his nineteen ninety one arrest later went viral in which he theatrically boomed.
What is the charge eating a mele? A sirculent Chinese.
Old seven am is a daily show from Schwartz Media and The Saturday Paper. It's produced by Shane Anderson, Zultan Veecho, and Zaia Artunggrel. Our senior producer is Chris Danegate. Our technical producer is Atika as Basto. Sarah McVie is our head of audio. Eric Jensen is our editor in chief. Mixing by Travis Evans, Ataica Sbasto and Zultan Veccho. Our theme music is by Ned Beckley and Josh Hogan of Envelope Audio. Seven Am is hosted by Daniel James and me Ruby Jones. See you next week.