Chris Woodhead is a reactionary idiot
Well, we all knew that; what’s depressing is how unimaginative a reactionary he is. On Today this morning (RealAudio), he said that the only two options are entirely privatised education (funded by vouchers — his preffered scheme), or central government micromanagement of every aspect of education. Well, no — what about local democratic control of schools by teachers, children and parents? Once again, ‘choice’ is presented as the entire spectrum of political possibility.
The actual subject that Woodhead was supposed to be talking about was teaching reading, in particular, the ’synthetic phonics’ method (reading by building up words from letter sounds, rather than recognising the words as a whole). I don’t really know anything about the empirical research that supports phonics, or otherwise, but it was interesting that Woodhead (an anti-intellectual par excellence, of course) argued for the method only by claiming it ‘obvious’ that we read words letter-by-letter. Obvious it may be, but it’s also false. It’s unfortunate that synthetic phonics has been taken up as a cause by paranoid reactionary nutters (check their links section, where you’ll find an article claiming that opponents of phonics specifically want the population to be unable to read, for dark reasons of their own), as their monopolisation of the case for it with silly arguments and rants about progressive education make it hard to discover how valuable it actually is.
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Good post, Tim. The Today programme’s time-filling pseudo debates are maddeningly stupid at the best of times, but hearing Woodhead and his fellow self-styled voice-of-reason trying to outbid each other as to who could be more anti-educationalist was spirit crushingly awful. Incidentally, Laura volunteers as a literacy tutor and they use synthetic phonics. The organisation’s celeb sponsor is Fergie (this one, not this one, or this one). True story.
Comment by Stefan @ 6/3/2005 3:03 pm
Brilliant. Fucked up all three links. Tim, could you add “http://” to them all?
Comment by Stefan @ 6/3/2005 3:04 pm
Thing I read about synthetic phonics yesterday had a woman talking about how she’d got her kid onto it from 3 years old and he’s been way ahead of his classmates ever since. The whole point of these things seems to be to get your kids “ahead” - i.e. to have something to brag about where the only effect on your kid is a singling out. They might as well be behind. In the end everyone learns to read and no one’s standing over your shoulder with a stopwatch when you’re 18.
Stef - love the “fergie with puppies” shot. The only one without danny in, and thus apparently unconnected to all the others.
Comment by leila @ 6/4/2005 7:32 am
In the end everyone learns to read
Um, no they don’t. There’s plenty of year 6 kids that have been referred to us who cannot read, and it’s hard to see how they would be able to learn once they got to Secondary School.
How is it about getting kids ahead? It’s about getting kids to read full stop. Believe me it’s impossible to teach a dyslexic 8 year old whole words and phonics is the only solution, at least in my experience.
Comment by Laura K @ 6/4/2005 12:47 pm
OK I see. The only thing I’ve seen about it was this woman banging on about how she’d got her kid reading before he was 4 and how he’s always been years ahead.
Comment by leila @ 6/4/2005 1:55 pm
Ah okay. Don’t see what’s wrong with getting kids ahead though. If a child is ready to read then there’s no harm in teaching them before they go to school. My mum taught me through phonics when I was three because I was gagging fer it and it never harmed me. Just got to do less work once I got to school which is never a bad thing.
Comment by Laura K @ 6/6/2005 10:45 am
It’s the pointless pride of the parents that annoys me - what I call, “Whyumphance”. (Incidentally, I believe Stefan is on record as naming the Dutch as the most whyumphant people.)
…surely it’s the kids who were kept back a year that go on to become the Ace Rimmers of this world.
Comment by Leila @ 6/6/2005 1:18 pm
… It’s not really, though, is it?
Comment by Stefan @ 6/7/2005 9:37 am
The rules of the fictional Red Dwarf universe are good enough for me, and should be good enough for you too.
Comment by leila @ 6/7/2005 6:58 pm
They very, very rarely keep kids back these days.
Further unnecessary information revealed to me by someone who works in literacy and has an MA in Education:
There is no REAL debate in the field about phonics vs. “look, say” methods because all experts and teachers [including those that have been placed into one of the two camps by the press] agree that a combination of methods should be used. The methods should not be pitted against each other because they are not mutually exclusive [… to place them against each other is really old fashioned]. Children learn in different ways and some suit phonics whilst some suit “look, say”. More importantly the majority of kids are taught to read at the very basic level using phonics [personally I can’t see how you could teach whole words straight away to a 5 year old] but phonics can only go so far because not all words have regular patterns and can be “sounded out”. This means that as kids get older and better at reading then they HAVE to use the “look, say” method.
The opinion of my friend was that all debate in the media was absolute bollocks and the press and politicians did not have a clue what they were on about and were trying to put words into people’s mouths.
Comment by Laura K @ 6/8/2005 2:28 pm
They’re “trying to put words into people’s mouths”? Well that’s precisely the point! BOOM BOOM! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
Comment by Stefan @ 6/8/2005 5:44 pm