Not many of us can remember how we learned to read. It might have been by hearing words spoken as we studied their written form, or it might have been by looking for clues in the pictures that always accompany early reading texts. Most likely it was a combination of both. The "phonics" debate has always sounded academic in more than one sense. A preference for one technique hardly precludes the other. If both work for some children, use both.
Unfortunately, in the way of these things, people develop firm allegiances to the way they were trained, or to a change they have embraced, and the alternative becomes fiercely resisted. Education seems particularly prone to wholesale changes of pedagogical fashion which brook no recognition of value in a previous practice. The costs of single-mindedness can be severe.
Several international studies in recent years have recorded very poor levels of literacy in this country. Parliament's education and science select committee is the latest body to draw attention to the problem. In its inquiries around the country, the committee heard conflicting testimony about resistance to teaching reading by "phonics" - the sound of words and syllables.
Officially, phonics seems to be a permitted technique in schools but the committee also heard evidence that it was actively discouraged. The preferred method is for struggling readers to try to decipher words with the help of pictures and the context. The idea that people learn best when they must work things out for themselves permeates the entire school curriculum these days. Teachers are no longer supposed to teach, they are to "facilitate learning".
That might be a good principle for most children most of the time, but reading is too important to be left to chance. Not everyone needs to master science or social studies or even mathematics in the earliest years of school. But if a child falls behind in reading, he or she is going to struggle in all subjects where information takes written form.
As the select committee points out, in times past, when there was ample demand for manual labour, it might not have mattered that a certain proportion of pupils left school with no more than a rudimentary ability to read and write. But today low literacy is a severe handicap, the more so as keyboards and computer screens become the predominant instruments of business communication, market information and trade.
One of the unsung consequences of the new technology is the renewed importance of the written word. If the telephone, radio, film and television have encouraged a more oral culture over the past century, the internet is giving writing a resurgence now. It is time for schools to stop kidding themselves that oral skills are as valuable as reading and writing, and that film and video are as valid as books for acquainting their pupils with language and literature.
There is no social problem more fundamental than low levels of literacy in perhaps 20 per cent of today's school-leavers. It is a lamentable statistic in an education system that has long congratulated itself on its reading recovery programmes. Doubtless they are good, but they are no more than a second chance for infants. If a child needs a third and fourth remedial programme, it may not be available. Automatic promotion is likely to see the child move up year by year, receiving such special attention as teachers in the classroom can spare, and leaving at age 16 with little to offer.
The cycle is likely to be repeated when children are born to parents barely able to read to them and spend their first, most formative years in a household without books. By the time they start school they are behind many of their peers and the school's efforts for them might never be enough if reading is not encouraged at home.
To break the cycle, schools should use every technique available for teaching children to read. It is astonishing that the select committee finds the teaching of reading to be deficient in teacher training colleges. It ought to be the first subject. Unless people learn to read and write, their education is a cruel charade.
<i>Editorial:</i> Reading, writing must take priority
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