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 The idea with this approach is that phonics (learning how to decode printed words by sounding them out) was outdated and unnecessary, and that kids learn to read through contextual clues alone.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 Friday at 06:14 PM by DocWatts

[Hardkill]

That's good to know.

I'd like to see how much of a change this will make many years from now.

[Leo Gura]

Yeah, I saw that recently.

People are getting so lazy they are too lazy to learn to read.

They are still teaching English wrong. The right way to learn English is to memorize every single word the way Chinese memorize their kanji.

English words are just kanji made of letters.

Memorize 5,000 words and you will know English.

You can't sound out English words because English spelling is nonsensical.

Edited 5 hours ago by Leo Gura