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by Elizabeth Clarke

Since I began teaching in the early 1950s in Queensland, I have seen unbelievable changes in education. In writing this article I am thinking of the new generation of five-year-olds now starting their formal education. Nothing is as important as their learning to read, but I have found it impossible to circulate a few truths.

From time to time, The Australian (for the informed reader) prints a large article on our literacy problems, particularly that of learning to read. The term “The Reading Wars” is used: the unresolved argument between teachers who support the teaching of reading through phonic analysis and those who still believe in the whole-word/text approach.

After its last lengthy article presenting both sides of the argument, I wrote an article citing vital information that should have settled the matter. Not published. The cynic in me reasons that education is good copy for the occasional newspaper article; however, if the problem is solved, no more articles.

Disastrous Pedagogy

Here is the little-known (and never-printed) truth. Just before 1920, based on the flimsiest of research, alphabetic-phonic teaching was discarded in favour of whole-word recognition in phrases. Called “phrase-reading”, within a decade its disastrous failure (especially for boys) was apparent. Cause and effect were identified, and the new method abandoned.

Queensland used the situation to review materials used in teaching infants. On June 6, 1934, The Courier Mail reported that a complete new set of Years 1 to 7 readers had been prepared that would replace the previous Queensland “phrase-reading” readers from the beginning of July of that year. Eventually, four comprehensive primers (introductory books for teaching infant children to read) were completed for the Preparatory Grade.

The four Preparatory primers were used with great success in teaching infant children how to read using a phonics approach in the 1940s and 1950s. No child of average intelligence failed to learn, and no parental help or extra tutoring was required.

“A failed method should never be used again” is a good axiom for all of us to follow.

Unfortunately, this axiom was not followed by the Queensland Education authorities when, in the early 1950s, they consulted an “expert” in remedial education. This worthy gent had co-authored a set of colourful readers for remedial use and quickly saw an opportunity to promote them for general use in all schools.

If anyone said, “Our phonics system is working quite well,” arguments for young children learning more quickly with more fun by emphasising a whole-word system were immediately and persuasively presented – and those arguments worked.

B.O.R.I.N.G. phonics – OUT!

Brightly coloured whole-word primers – IN!

In no time at all, parental help was necessary at home and at school and children were increasingly failing to read. But this time around, a disorder named dyslexia was blamed, not the books or the teaching methods used.

In the 1950s, I successfully taught phonics to classes of 35 to 40 students in Year Two using the Queensland Readers. When forced to use the new whole-word books prescribed for second year, the children seemed to be reading, but problems really became apparent by Years 4 and 5.

By the 1980s, I could not accept anymore the latest theory from so-called “education experts” (whom I like to call “Ediots”) that, while many children were having trouble with “learning to read by reading”, things would improve if we would just ask them to “learn to write by writing”.

The teacher was to be “the guide at the side” as these five, six, or seven-year-olds tried to work out how to read and write by themselves, with the teacher circulating to give a word of advice to this one or the other. I realised then that we had reached the stage where we as teachers were being expected to tolerate non-teaching, funded failure.

I resigned and started to read psychology to try to find the evidence that proved the need for phonic teaching. I even wrote to some of the authors, linking facts that they had stated about the brain to the need for explicit phonic teaching. Their replies were along the lines of: “I’ve never taught a child to read.”

This also applied to lecturers who were training future teachers. They had little or no hands-on experience yet formulated theories of teaching which were expected to be accepted by their eager listeners and eventually implemented in their classrooms. After 35 years of studying, writing sub­missions and so on, I found it!

Back to Basics

I picked up a book on higher-level research entitled, Cognitive Neuroscience: The Biology of the Mind (by M. Gazzaniga, R. Ivry, G. Mangun, W.W. Norton, 2002).

Whereas psychologists study human behaviour, neuroscientists study the basic working of the brain; how it actually learns to see by constructing an incredibly complex system to process information coming to it through the eyes.

Similarly, the brain deals with stimuli from the other sensory organs, as well as forging connections between systems where necessary – for example, learning to read demands the combination of visual and auditory information.

These researchers are interested in the how, not the what. They generalise by calling anything to be looked at and processed “an object”. So, a horse, a face, a scene, a printed word – anything – is simply an object. All are processed in the same way.

Believe me, Cognitive Neuroscience is almost indigestible for the ordinary reader as the authors use vocabulary that relates to their esoteric study – words they expect their readers to understand. Were it not for the index, I would never had dared to buy the book. But there were references to reading, to word recognition.

In a few “by the way” lines on page 237 of this 680-page tome, I found the simple truth, expressed simply:

“Object recognition – Analysis by parts is essential for reading and is central for recognising objects. – Words (i.e., printed words) represent another special class of objects, but at the other extreme. Reading requires that the letter strings (words) be successfully decomposed into their constituent parts. We benefit little from noting general features such as word length or handwriting (or print). We have to recognise the individual letters in order to differentiate one word from another.”

Needless to say, when I read the truth about the brain deconstructing all objects, including printed words, I immediately wrote to The Australian (as I mentioned earlier), thinking that the vital information about how the brain sees anything would resolve the reading wars forever. It wasn’t printed. This made me realise that in every sphere of influence, the Ediots are in charge.

Bumbling Bureaucrats

This control of information is a matter that really concerns me. The Ediots who supported the failing whole-word/text reading are on their way out. They are being replaced by other Ediots who now promote phonic teaching/word analysis. Remember, teaching reading using alphabet phonics has not been emphasised for about 60 years. There is more to it than simply decoding a variety of words.

The Queensland primers and school readers were the best ever produced as they taught incrementally, sequentially in lessons designed for a week’s study. The use of phonic knowledge was used in various ways to vary the work on each week’s lesson. The teaching needs to be embedded and not hurried. Two years preparation of the developing infant’s brain is necessary.

But the new people in control know it all – thank you very much. New primers and other books have been written and printed. By whom? Again, by the people who have never taught classes over many years or picked up ways of teaching and questioning using phonic construction.

Questioning as a means of encouraging the brain to build on basic information is a lost art. Rote learning – which has been banished from the classroom – was the best way to supply the repeated input needed to embed basic information. Seeing, hearing and saying facts helped fix them in the brain to be used as mental “tools” for problem-solving.

For example, the child who has learned various phonic elements can look at a new word such as “thatch” and put the sounds together (th … at … ch). The child asked to recall whole words without phonic knowledge, when asked to try harder, can only stare harder. Then, of course, there’s the obvious truth: a word may well be identified as a whole, but in order to write it, it must be written letter by letter.

I challenge anyone to consult TROVE and find any articles prior to the 1950s on the urgent need to improve the Queensland education system. There weren’t any because the system was working as well as it was humanly possible to make it – and all involved in teaching were monitored to ensure they were doing the best for each and every child. Quality control in education has since then been totally destroyed.

I doubt that the Queensland system of teaching reading will eventually change for the better. This is because our infants and all the children in the vital primary school years will only be taught reading in the way that the new hierarchy of Ediots mandates. If only they could learn the same lessons that I learned through my research backed up by discoveries during my many years of teaching experience, but they have reversed this process. They read a theory and project it onto the child without having any real teaching experience.

Over the last 60 years, education has become a business and a job opportunity for those who have only read about it. No longer is education at school considered to be the child’s right. As well, the financial cost to society today in providing primary education is incalculable, whereas, in the past, the essential primary school education cost next to nothing.

I could go on and on. So much has been lost from the past, but the new “educated experts” in control are not interested in learning from the successes of the past by consulting any of those teachers who had actually participated in those successes. It is almost as if they believe they have the authority to rewrite history because they control the present.

George Orwell saw all of this coming when he wrote in 1984: “Who controls the past, controls the future; who controls the present, controls the past.” If they would only just end this mindset, then we would have a real hope that the reading wars would be finally and permanently resolved.

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Elizabeth Clarke is an experienced Early Years teacher who has lobbied for literacy reform in Queensland for over 40 years.

This article was originally published in the February 2022 edition of Education Uptake, the newsletter of the Queensland DLP Education Committee.

Republished with thanks to News Weekly. Image courtesy of Adobe.