Speaker 1: From Schwartz Media. I'm Ruby Jones. This is seven Am.
Speaker 1: It's been called a forever war, the fight over how
Speaker 1: to teach children to read. For decades, an outdated method
Speaker 1: has lingered in Australian classrooms as states protect school's right
Speaker 1: to teach how they wish. Now, with a third of
Speaker 1: Australian children not being able to read well, we've hit
Speaker 1: a turning point, with Victoria joining other states in finally
Speaker 1: mandating the best way to teach reading. Today, Associate editor
Speaker 1: of The Saturday Paper, Martin Mackenzie Murray on why vibes
Speaker 1: based learning stuck around for so long and how children
Speaker 1: should actually be taught to read. It's Friday, August night.
Speaker 1: Your daughter has recently started school. Tell me when you
Speaker 1: were trying to decide where to send her, what kinds
Speaker 1: of things were you weighing up and what did you
Speaker 1: notice about the way that schools were communicating their ethos.
Speaker 2: I live in a state, Victoria, that has long preferred
Speaker 2: school autonomy, and so there exist all these kind of
Speaker 2: differences in teaching philosophy between schools, which I was largely
Speaker 2: kind of ignorant of, and I think the kind of
Speaker 2: ideological differences and ideological commitments of certain schools, principles and
Speaker 2: teachers is obscured by a lot of wishy washy language.
Speaker 2: So in reading stuff like child centered learning, you know,
Speaker 2: my eyes would have kind of glazed over previously, but
Speaker 2: I now realized that that phrase itself is like really
Speaker 2: significant and kind of concealed or maybe announces in its
Speaker 2: funny way, this very particular ideology.
Speaker 1: Okay, so what is the child centered approach? What does
Speaker 1: that mean?
Speaker 2: It really comes down to what was once called whole language,
Speaker 2: and it kind of mutated into what's now known as
Speaker 2: balanced literacy.
Speaker 1: We seeing a character a little bit about how they're
Speaker 1: feeling a story, and we can infer hall characters feeling
Speaker 1: three ways in a story.
Speaker 3: We can infer hollow characters feeling.
Speaker 4: Everyone by what they love. Say, well, we do that.
Speaker 1: We have our emoji posters behind us, and our emojis
Speaker 1: help us to understand our characters a little bit better than.
Speaker 2: Any So I think it was popularized in the late
Speaker 2: nineteen sixties in the United States, and like many kind
Speaker 2: of ideological fashions, Australia followed and was very much born
Speaker 2: of the zeitgeist at the time. By that, I mean
Speaker 2: this suspicion of authority, that children should be empowered and
Speaker 2: acceptance that children have their own inner lives, their own
Speaker 2: emotional lives, that they might learn differently and at their
Speaker 2: own time, and that should be deferred.
Speaker 1: Two.
Speaker 2: So this is another story about those characters.
Speaker 1: So we know Kate's name is going to start with
Speaker 1: a what kay, and nicked Sing's going to start with
Speaker 1: capital and because it's a name, and Jane's.
Speaker 3: Er see Kate.
Speaker 2: Practically, whole language sought to immerse children, just immerse children
Speaker 2: in reading in words, in language. You surround them by
Speaker 2: beautiful books, you read to them often, and they would
Speaker 2: acquire it as easily and naturally as speaking.
Speaker 1: Right, Okay, So that sounds kind of nice and intuitive,
Speaker 1: this idea that children can learn to read in an
Speaker 1: organic way. Tell me, Madi about the proponents of whole
Speaker 1: language and how they justify its teaching.
Speaker 3: There's two of them, Irene Fountas and Gay Supernel.
Speaker 4: And I know from working with children who found literacy
Speaker 4: learning very difficult that for some children they can focus
Speaker 4: on learning about letters, sounds, and words out of context,
Speaker 4: but there's a wall and they don't connect what they've
Speaker 4: learned to what they're reading or what they're writing. So
Speaker 4: we feel that as teachers we need to break down
Speaker 4: that wall. Kids need to know why they're learning what
Speaker 4: they're learning about letters, sounds, and words.
Speaker 2: Now, let me read for you their own defense. This
Speaker 2: is from twenty twenty one. They said, the goal for
Speaker 2: the reader is accuracy using all sources of information simultaneously,
Speaker 2: so they're referring to these cues like visual cues. They
Speaker 2: go on to say, if a reader says pony for
Speaker 2: horse because of information from the pictures, that tells the
Speaker 2: teacher that the reader is using meaning information from the
Speaker 2: pictures as well as the structure of the language, but
Speaker 2: he's neglecting to use the visual information.
Speaker 3: Of the print. His response is partially correct.
Speaker 1: But it's not a pony, it's a horse, or the
Speaker 1: other way around.
Speaker 3: Yes, Ruby exactly.
Speaker 2: And to say about this hypothetical student that has said
Speaker 2: pony instead of horse, it is a bizarre generosity to
Speaker 2: say that that is partially correct, I would say, and
Speaker 2: plenty of others would say it's not partially correct, and
Speaker 2: there's no such thing as partially correct.
Speaker 3: It's just simply wrong.
Speaker 1: Okay, So it's less about accuracy and more about.
Speaker 2: Vibes, Yeah, definitely. But the problem with that is explicit
Speaker 2: instruction and systematic instruction about the fundamentals of reading was
Speaker 2: eroded in favor of, or in preference for more romantic
Speaker 2: assumptions about children's learning. But as cognitive scientists, linguists, speech
Speaker 2: pathologists have been asserting for decades now regarding the acquisition
Speaker 2: of reading, regarding the development of literacy, we all have
Speaker 2: the same brain structure and we require explicit instruction to
Speaker 2: acquire that reading. So increasingly, like I think, really loudly
Speaker 2: and vociferously, cognitive scientists are saying, like vibes based literacy
Speaker 2: teaching has to be replaced with something systematic, that is
Speaker 2: the explicit instruction of phonics, and that is teaching children
Speaker 2: to decode words by learning the correspondence between certain letters
Speaker 2: and their sounds.
Speaker 1: So that's the sound ah and the letter A, the
Speaker 1: triangle with the line through it.
Speaker 3: That's it yes or sh is made by S and
Speaker 3: H together.
Speaker 1: Okay, So, Maddy, how is it then that we got
Speaker 1: into this situation where a method that is supposed to
Speaker 1: teach children how to read it doesn't work or it
Speaker 1: doesn't work well, but nevertheless it's taught in schools.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, it's become highly politicized.
Speaker 2: And somewhere along the line, I think the teaching of
Speaker 2: phonics explicit instruction, empowering the teacher and not the students
Speaker 2: or the children. It became coded as a conservative thing.
Speaker 2: There was a suspicion of wrote learning it might bore
Speaker 2: or dispirit students. And I should say, like a very
Speaker 2: famous proponent of phonics teaching was George wa there.
Speaker 5: Is one area where the teaching research is definitive. The
Speaker 5: best way to teach children to read is phonics.
Speaker 2: And when he was running for office in two thousand,
Speaker 2: a very prominent feature of the Republican platform that year
Speaker 2: was phonics, offering very very large sums grants to schools
Speaker 2: that adopted a federally approved plan for phonics.
Speaker 5: No new theory or method has ever improved on it,
Speaker 5: as the people of this great state, no better than
Speaker 5: anyone the national institutions of health, in the kind of
Speaker 5: rigorous research we need, has proven that phonics works and
Speaker 5: that children can learn to read much earlier than we
Speaker 5: have assumed.
Speaker 2: So there's been for a long time this kind of
Speaker 2: ideological resistance to it.
Speaker 1: After the break the children and teachers who've been failed. So, Marty,
Speaker 1: we've been talking about this long running ideological debate about
Speaker 1: how to teach children how to read. Let's speak about
Speaker 1: how it's affected teachers, the people who are actually on
Speaker 1: the frontlines of this issue.
Speaker 2: One of the people I spoke to for this article
Speaker 2: is Sue Hyland, who is a teacher, an instructional coach,
Speaker 2: and she's also an associate lecturer in education at La
Speaker 2: Trobe University here in Melbourne. And she said a lot
Speaker 2: of things that were interesting. One thing that really struck
Speaker 2: me was her sort of painful discovery. When she was
Speaker 2: learning how to become a teacher, she was buzzing with enthusiasm.
Speaker 2: She was really optimistic. She goes into teach prep and
Speaker 2: year ones and she realizes this giant hole in her
Speaker 2: own education. No one had taught her his basic fundamental thing,
Speaker 2: how to teach children how to read. And so this
Speaker 2: was a painful discovery. And she used the word grief.
Speaker 2: She said, for three years she was teaching whole language
Speaker 2: method and she came to the painful realization that she
Speaker 2: was not doing the best by her own students. She's
Speaker 2: also angry, and she tells me that there are other
Speaker 2: teachers who were angry as well. They're saying, why weren't
Speaker 2: we taught this? Why weren't we made aware of alternatives?
Speaker 2: We didn't know what we didn't know?
Speaker 1: Okay, so you've got teachers coming to this realization that
Speaker 1: they may have failed children who they were supposed to help.
Speaker 1: But what about the children who went through school and
Speaker 1: learned under this method. Obviously many of them did learn
Speaker 1: how to read, but how many didn't? Who are the
Speaker 1: children who were failed?
Speaker 2: I mean the metaphor that I've used is that like
Speaker 2: some kids will learn to swim if you throw them
Speaker 2: into a swimming pool, but also many will drown. So
Speaker 2: those whose families couldn't afford tutoring, private tuition might make
Speaker 2: up for or mitigate the inadequacies of their formal education.
Speaker 2: And those who weren't born to educated parents, whose parents
Speaker 2: might you know, their educated attentions might help mitigate the
Speaker 2: failures of their education. Kids who aren't surrounded by books,
Speaker 2: kids whose parents aren't reading to them. So those poorer students,
Speaker 2: either materially or environmentally poorer, were more vulnerable to the
Speaker 2: inadequacies of whole language because it wasn't being mitigated by
Speaker 2: other things, and.
Speaker 3: This is a very haunting thing.
Speaker 2: Like time and time and time again, teachers told me
Speaker 2: children were not given the basics, were not given explicit
Speaker 2: instruction in the basic fundamentals of reading, and as such struggled.
Speaker 2: Now as children, that struggle manifests quite despairingly. If you
Speaker 2: struggle as a child, you can feel shame inadequacy, and
Speaker 2: it becomes aversive. You start avoiding the thing that causes
Speaker 2: that shame. And time and time and time again, teachers
Speaker 2: told me that they encountered or knew of students that
Speaker 2: were diagnosed with learning disorders, when in fact the fault
Speaker 2: lay with the education. The student wasn't at fault. They
Speaker 2: weren't lazy, they were abandoned, they were not taught properly. Now,
Speaker 2: if these things are kind of grounded early, like a
Speaker 2: sense of shame, a sense of inadequacy, and an ultimately
Speaker 2: avoidance of reading, that lingers that can be life long.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I think that's what's so sad about this story.
Speaker 1: In a lot of ways, it's this well intentioned but
Speaker 1: ineffective policy that's ultimately led to more inequality.
Speaker 2: I think so, yeah, And that's the sort of perversity
Speaker 2: of it is that there were these very grandiose, romantic
Speaker 2: assumptions about children, about their development, about their cognitive architecture,
Speaker 2: about empowering students, and respecting that idiosyncrasies and individualism, all
Speaker 2: made in good faith, but ultimately I think it's harmed
Speaker 2: and compounded literacy.
Speaker 1: Marty, Thank you so much for your time.
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 1: Also in the news today, the EU, France and UK
Speaker 1: have condemned a senior Israeli minister for suggesting it might
Speaker 1: be justified and moral to starve people in Gaza. In
Speaker 1: a speech this week, Israel's finance minister said Israel was
Speaker 1: bringing in humanitarian aid because it has no choice. The
Speaker 1: EU said the deliberate starvation of civilians is a war crime.
Speaker 1: And Jack Carlson, the man who mortalized the phrase this
Speaker 1: is democracy manifest, has died at age eighty two. Gentlemen,
Speaker 1: this is democracy man i beshed. Carlson was a serial prisoner,
Speaker 1: skapee and small time crook who shot to fame after
Speaker 1: a news clip of his nineteen ninety one arrest later
Speaker 1: went viral in which he theatrically boomed.
Speaker 2: What is the charge eating a mele? A sirculent Chinese.
Speaker 1: Old seven am is a daily show from Schwartz Media
Speaker 1: and The Saturday Paper. It's produced by Shane Anderson, Zultan Veecho,
Speaker 1: and Zaia Artunggrel. Our senior producer is Chris Danegate. Our
Speaker 1: technical producer is Atika as Basto. Sarah McVie is our
Speaker 1: head of audio. Eric Jensen is our editor in chief.
Speaker 1: Mixing by Travis Evans, Ataica Sbasto and Zultan Veccho. Our
Speaker 1: theme music is by Ned Beckley and Josh Hogan of
Speaker 1: Envelope Audio. Seven Am is hosted by Daniel James and
Speaker 1: me Ruby Jones. See you next week.