Sold A Story - How adult politics created an American illiteracy epidemic

[DocWatts]

Thought I might share this podcast series, about a disastrous social experiment that's contributed to an illiteracy crisis in the United States,

The podcast traces out how American educators were sold a story about a now-discredited paradigm about how people learn to read and write, called 'whole word comprehension'. The idea with this approach is that phonics (learning how to decode printed words by sounding them out) was outdated and unnecessary, and that kids learn to read through contextual clues alone.

What wasn't understood at the time is that the whole word approach isn't actually teaching kids how to read - it's how functionally illiterate people muddle their way through sentences. The podcast traces out how something as seemingly apolitical as basic reading and writing got politicized, and how well intentioned people working from bad information were training kids throughout the country to be functionally illiterate.

Sold A Story Podcast:
https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/
 

 

Edited 4 hours ago by DocWatts