""Phonics is the only effective way to teach reading"
Have you ever wondered why right-wing Christian parents and educators are so intent on promoting phonics (a method of teaching reading that stresses basic symbol-sound relationships) and so abhor "whole language" learning (in which children learn words by reading them in context)?
The answer you'll get from phonics advocates is simply that it works, as indicated by better test scores (at least when the tests include questions on phonics!). But there appears to be consensus among researchers outside the Religious Right that the most effective approach is a broad, integrated one that incorporates some phonics training and a lot of reading.
The most pertinent research I've seen on the Christian phonics fixation (by the way, why do those last two words begin with different letters?) was done by Mark Thogmartin. Here are excerpts of some of the reasons he heard from phonics enthusiasts, as he listed them in a 1997 issue of Home Education magazine:
- "More holistic approaches to reading instruction are more child-centered and seem to assert the inherent goodness of the child, which is opposed to the basic Christian doctrine of a sinful nature derived from the fall of Adam."
- "A phonics approach to reading instruction, with its usual dependence on drill and rote memorization, is more compatible with the rigidly disciplined environment of most Christian schools."
- "Often, theorists who believe in a more holistic, meaning-centered reading instruction philosophy have ... suggested that a child's ability to extract the meaning from print is the primary objective of reading any passage. This may sound almost blasphemous to Christians who believe in the literal, verbal inspiration of scripture."
Probably the chief reason for the Christian Rights's crusade against whole-language learning is a concern about its association throughout the 20th century with the left side of the U.S. political spectrum. Indeed, conservative Christian writer Samuel Blumenfeld has suggested, according to Thogmartin, that whole-language-style methodology "was initiated as a deliberate attempt by socialists to lower the literacy rates in America. An illiterate society would be more dependent on the 'Big Brother' socialist government, making a socialist takeover much easier.""
I'd always wondered why they were so crazy about phonics. The fundies have moved on to an entirely new level of delusion.
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Clonophobia: Why are we so freaked out by the idea of our mirror image?
"Parents are full of stories about how their offspring displayed character traits from a very young age that would stay with them throughout their lives. Cheerful, optimistic adults were almost always cheerful, optimistic kids. Introverted children may gain confidence as they grow older, but they rarely turn into extroverts.
What this means is that the basic core of who we are is fixed well before we are old enough to make conscious decisions to change it. And by that time our fundamental preferences and inclinations are fixed anyway. Our so-called free choices are made within the perimeters of a personality that was not freely chosen at all.
Facts and fantasies about cloning merely shove in our faces what is already right under our noses: if we have free will, it is never absolute, because we do not choose who we fundamentally are. We have to choose within the constraints of personality and dispositions that are set first by our genes, and only then by upbringing.
For those who dream of humankind’s divine nobility, it gets worse. Our genetic origins point to another threat clones accentuate: they make us confront directly our own animality. It is more than a century since Darwin offered the astonishing hypothesis that we were not created from dust in the image of God, but have evolved from the same common ancestor as chimpanzees. Now, I quite like chimpanzees, so I’m rather pleased by this kinship."