WEBVTT - Is Australia failing to teach kids to read? 0:00:01.240 --> 0:00:08.960 From Schwartz Media. I'm Ruby Jones. This is seven Am. 0:00:09.000 --> 0:00:11.799 It's been called a forever war, the fight over how 0:00:11.800 --> 0:00:15.840 to teach children to read. For decades, an outdated method 0:00:15.840 --> 0:00:19.840 has lingered in Australian classrooms as states protect school's right 0:00:19.960 --> 0:00:22.919 to teach how they wish. Now, with a third of 0:00:22.960 --> 0:00:26.360 Australian children not being able to read well, we've hit 0:00:26.400 --> 0:00:29.720 a turning point, with Victoria joining other states in finally 0:00:29.760 --> 0:00:34.160 mandating the best way to teach reading. Today, Associate editor 0:00:34.200 --> 0:00:37.720 of The Saturday Paper, Martin Mackenzie Murray on why vibes 0:00:37.760 --> 0:00:41.000 based learning stuck around for so long and how children 0:00:41.080 --> 0:00:50.920 should actually be taught to read. It's Friday, August night. 0:01:00.160 --> 0:01:03.280 Your daughter has recently started school. Tell me when you 0:01:03.320 --> 0:01:06.960 were trying to decide where to send her, what kinds 0:01:06.959 --> 0:01:09.120 of things were you weighing up and what did you 0:01:09.200 --> 0:01:13.800 notice about the way that schools were communicating their ethos. 0:01:14.240 --> 0:01:17.280 I live in a state, Victoria, that has long preferred 0:01:17.440 --> 0:01:21.320 school autonomy, and so there exist all these kind of 0:01:21.360 --> 0:01:26.039 differences in teaching philosophy between schools, which I was largely 0:01:26.160 --> 0:01:30.160 kind of ignorant of, and I think the kind of 0:01:30.200 --> 0:01:35.120 ideological differences and ideological commitments of certain schools, principles and 0:01:35.160 --> 0:01:39.680 teachers is obscured by a lot of wishy washy language. 0:01:39.920 --> 0:01:43.399 So in reading stuff like child centered learning, you know, 0:01:43.520 --> 0:01:46.160 my eyes would have kind of glazed over previously, but 0:01:46.240 --> 0:01:49.720 I now realized that that phrase itself is like really 0:01:50.000 --> 0:01:53.760 significant and kind of concealed or maybe announces in its 0:01:53.800 --> 0:01:56.720 funny way, this very particular ideology. 0:01:57.160 --> 0:02:00.680 Okay, so what is the child centered approach? What does 0:02:00.720 --> 0:02:01.040 that mean? 0:02:01.520 --> 0:02:05.120 It really comes down to what was once called whole language, 0:02:05.200 --> 0:02:08.480 and it kind of mutated into what's now known as 0:02:08.600 --> 0:02:09.520 balanced literacy. 0:02:09.680 --> 0:02:12.000 We seeing a character a little bit about how they're 0:02:12.000 --> 0:02:15.760 feeling a story, and we can infer hall characters feeling 0:02:15.800 --> 0:02:16.840 three ways in a story. 0:02:16.960 --> 0:02:19.040 We can infer hollow characters feeling. 0:02:18.760 --> 0:02:25.200 Everyone by what they love. Say, well, we do that. 0:02:25.280 --> 0:02:28.720 We have our emoji posters behind us, and our emojis 0:02:28.840 --> 0:02:31.400 help us to understand our characters a little bit better than. 0:02:31.360 --> 0:02:36.280 Any So I think it was popularized in the late 0:02:36.360 --> 0:02:40.600 nineteen sixties in the United States, and like many kind 0:02:40.639 --> 0:02:44.600 of ideological fashions, Australia followed and was very much born 0:02:44.720 --> 0:02:47.560 of the zeitgeist at the time. By that, I mean 0:02:48.000 --> 0:02:52.359 this suspicion of authority, that children should be empowered and 0:02:52.480 --> 0:02:55.000 acceptance that children have their own inner lives, their own 0:02:55.000 --> 0:02:58.240 emotional lives, that they might learn differently and at their 0:02:58.240 --> 0:03:00.560 own time, and that should be deferred. 0:03:00.639 --> 0:03:00.839 Two. 0:03:01.240 --> 0:03:03.560 So this is another story about those characters. 0:03:03.919 --> 0:03:06.040 So we know Kate's name is going to start with 0:03:06.120 --> 0:03:09.640 a what kay, and nicked Sing's going to start with 0:03:10.440 --> 0:03:13.360 capital and because it's a name, and Jane's. 0:03:13.960 --> 0:03:15.079 Er see Kate. 0:03:15.440 --> 0:03:20.400 Practically, whole language sought to immerse children, just immerse children 0:03:20.400 --> 0:03:24.399 in reading in words, in language. You surround them by 0:03:24.560 --> 0:03:27.799 beautiful books, you read to them often, and they would 0:03:27.840 --> 0:03:30.440 acquire it as easily and naturally as speaking. 0:03:35.720 --> 0:03:38.880 Right, Okay, So that sounds kind of nice and intuitive, 0:03:38.960 --> 0:03:41.800 this idea that children can learn to read in an 0:03:41.920 --> 0:03:45.960 organic way. Tell me, Madi about the proponents of whole 0:03:46.040 --> 0:03:48.400 language and how they justify its teaching. 0:03:49.000 --> 0:03:51.720 There's two of them, Irene Fountas and Gay Supernel. 0:03:52.000 --> 0:03:55.560 And I know from working with children who found literacy 0:03:55.640 --> 0:03:59.840 learning very difficult that for some children they can focus 0:03:59.840 --> 0:04:03.160 on learning about letters, sounds, and words out of context, 0:04:03.360 --> 0:04:06.240 but there's a wall and they don't connect what they've 0:04:06.320 --> 0:04:09.320 learned to what they're reading or what they're writing. So 0:04:09.520 --> 0:04:12.520 we feel that as teachers we need to break down 0:04:12.520 --> 0:04:15.120 that wall. Kids need to know why they're learning what 0:04:15.200 --> 0:04:17.160 they're learning about letters, sounds, and words. 0:04:17.400 --> 0:04:21.279 Now, let me read for you their own defense. This 0:04:21.400 --> 0:04:24.200 is from twenty twenty one. They said, the goal for 0:04:24.240 --> 0:04:28.000 the reader is accuracy using all sources of information simultaneously, 0:04:28.279 --> 0:04:31.520 so they're referring to these cues like visual cues. They 0:04:31.560 --> 0:04:33.400 go on to say, if a reader says pony for 0:04:33.560 --> 0:04:37.000 horse because of information from the pictures, that tells the 0:04:37.000 --> 0:04:40.159 teacher that the reader is using meaning information from the 0:04:40.200 --> 0:04:43.599 pictures as well as the structure of the language, but 0:04:43.680 --> 0:04:46.040 he's neglecting to use the visual information. 0:04:45.680 --> 0:04:48.839 Of the print. His response is partially correct. 0:04:48.920 --> 0:04:51.920 But it's not a pony, it's a horse, or the 0:04:51.960 --> 0:04:52.520 other way around. 0:04:52.600 --> 0:04:53.760 Yes, Ruby exactly. 0:04:53.960 --> 0:04:56.880 And to say about this hypothetical student that has said 0:04:56.920 --> 0:04:59.800 pony instead of horse, it is a bizarre generosity to 0:04:59.800 --> 0:05:03.080 say that that is partially correct, I would say, and 0:05:03.880 --> 0:05:06.560 plenty of others would say it's not partially correct, and 0:05:06.560 --> 0:05:08.120 there's no such thing as partially correct. 0:05:08.120 --> 0:05:09.919 It's just simply wrong. 0:05:10.720 --> 0:05:15.320 Okay, So it's less about accuracy and more about. 0:05:15.920 --> 0:05:21.279 Vibes, Yeah, definitely. But the problem with that is explicit 0:05:21.400 --> 0:05:26.320 instruction and systematic instruction about the fundamentals of reading was 0:05:26.360 --> 0:05:30.720 eroded in favor of, or in preference for more romantic 0:05:30.720 --> 0:05:34.960 assumptions about children's learning. But as cognitive scientists, linguists, speech 0:05:35.000 --> 0:05:40.080 pathologists have been asserting for decades now regarding the acquisition 0:05:40.160 --> 0:05:43.520 of reading, regarding the development of literacy, we all have 0:05:43.640 --> 0:05:47.880 the same brain structure and we require explicit instruction to 0:05:48.000 --> 0:05:52.520 acquire that reading. So increasingly, like I think, really loudly 0:05:52.600 --> 0:05:58.000 and vociferously, cognitive scientists are saying, like vibes based literacy 0:05:58.040 --> 0:06:02.200 teaching has to be replaced with something systematic, that is 0:06:02.200 --> 0:06:06.480 the explicit instruction of phonics, and that is teaching children 0:06:06.520 --> 0:06:11.040 to decode words by learning the correspondence between certain letters 0:06:11.560 --> 0:06:12.520 and their sounds. 0:06:12.960 --> 0:06:16.080 So that's the sound ah and the letter A, the 0:06:16.120 --> 0:06:17.560 triangle with the line through it. 0:06:17.680 --> 0:06:21.280 That's it yes or sh is made by S and 0:06:21.520 --> 0:06:22.080 H together. 0:06:22.880 --> 0:06:25.760 Okay, So, Maddy, how is it then that we got 0:06:25.800 --> 0:06:29.000 into this situation where a method that is supposed to 0:06:29.040 --> 0:06:32.400 teach children how to read it doesn't work or it 0:06:32.440 --> 0:06:36.080 doesn't work well, but nevertheless it's taught in schools. 0:06:36.440 --> 0:06:38.600 Yeah, well, it's become highly politicized. 0:06:38.800 --> 0:06:41.120 And somewhere along the line, I think the teaching of 0:06:41.160 --> 0:06:45.600 phonics explicit instruction, empowering the teacher and not the students 0:06:45.680 --> 0:06:49.240 or the children. It became coded as a conservative thing. 0:06:49.640 --> 0:06:52.600 There was a suspicion of wrote learning it might bore 0:06:53.000 --> 0:06:56.200 or dispirit students. And I should say, like a very 0:06:56.240 --> 0:07:01.360 famous proponent of phonics teaching was George wa there. 0:07:01.240 --> 0:07:06.039 Is one area where the teaching research is definitive. The 0:07:06.080 --> 0:07:09.279 best way to teach children to read is phonics. 0:07:10.520 --> 0:07:13.239 And when he was running for office in two thousand, 0:07:13.360 --> 0:07:16.680 a very prominent feature of the Republican platform that year 0:07:17.120 --> 0:07:21.480 was phonics, offering very very large sums grants to schools 0:07:21.480 --> 0:07:24.400 that adopted a federally approved plan for phonics. 0:07:24.720 --> 0:07:27.360 No new theory or method has ever improved on it, 0:07:28.280 --> 0:07:30.320 as the people of this great state, no better than 0:07:30.360 --> 0:07:34.960 anyone the national institutions of health, in the kind of 0:07:35.040 --> 0:07:39.280 rigorous research we need, has proven that phonics works and 0:07:39.320 --> 0:07:41.800 that children can learn to read much earlier than we 0:07:41.880 --> 0:07:42.480 have assumed. 0:07:44.400 --> 0:07:46.800 So there's been for a long time this kind of 0:07:46.840 --> 0:07:49.520 ideological resistance to it. 0:07:51.720 --> 0:08:07.000 After the break the children and teachers who've been failed. So, Marty, 0:08:07.080 --> 0:08:10.600 we've been talking about this long running ideological debate about 0:08:10.640 --> 0:08:14.200 how to teach children how to read. Let's speak about 0:08:14.200 --> 0:08:16.880 how it's affected teachers, the people who are actually on 0:08:17.120 --> 0:08:18.960 the frontlines of this issue. 0:08:19.240 --> 0:08:22.320 One of the people I spoke to for this article 0:08:22.880 --> 0:08:26.640 is Sue Hyland, who is a teacher, an instructional coach, 0:08:26.880 --> 0:08:30.560 and she's also an associate lecturer in education at La 0:08:30.600 --> 0:08:34.240 Trobe University here in Melbourne. And she said a lot 0:08:34.240 --> 0:08:36.360 of things that were interesting. One thing that really struck 0:08:36.400 --> 0:08:40.360 me was her sort of painful discovery. When she was 0:08:40.960 --> 0:08:45.840 learning how to become a teacher, she was buzzing with enthusiasm. 0:08:46.160 --> 0:08:49.960 She was really optimistic. She goes into teach prep and 0:08:50.080 --> 0:08:55.839 year ones and she realizes this giant hole in her 0:08:55.880 --> 0:08:59.800 own education. No one had taught her his basic fundamental thing, 0:09:00.160 --> 0:09:03.880 how to teach children how to read. And so this 0:09:03.960 --> 0:09:06.160 was a painful discovery. And she used the word grief. 0:09:06.840 --> 0:09:09.000 She said, for three years she was teaching whole language 0:09:09.280 --> 0:09:12.360 method and she came to the painful realization that she 0:09:12.480 --> 0:09:15.600 was not doing the best by her own students. She's 0:09:15.640 --> 0:09:18.280 also angry, and she tells me that there are other 0:09:18.320 --> 0:09:21.120 teachers who were angry as well. They're saying, why weren't 0:09:21.160 --> 0:09:25.040 we taught this? Why weren't we made aware of alternatives? 0:09:25.480 --> 0:09:27.600 We didn't know what we didn't know? 0:09:28.679 --> 0:09:31.840 Okay, so you've got teachers coming to this realization that 0:09:31.880 --> 0:09:34.800 they may have failed children who they were supposed to help. 0:09:35.000 --> 0:09:37.720 But what about the children who went through school and 0:09:37.800 --> 0:09:41.080 learned under this method. Obviously many of them did learn 0:09:41.080 --> 0:09:43.199 how to read, but how many didn't? Who are the 0:09:43.280 --> 0:09:44.680 children who were failed? 0:09:45.600 --> 0:09:47.959 I mean the metaphor that I've used is that like 0:09:48.280 --> 0:09:51.120 some kids will learn to swim if you throw them 0:09:51.160 --> 0:09:54.439 into a swimming pool, but also many will drown. So 0:09:54.520 --> 0:10:00.640 those whose families couldn't afford tutoring, private tuition might make 0:10:00.720 --> 0:10:04.679 up for or mitigate the inadequacies of their formal education. 0:10:05.200 --> 0:10:09.240 And those who weren't born to educated parents, whose parents 0:10:09.320 --> 0:10:12.960 might you know, their educated attentions might help mitigate the 0:10:13.040 --> 0:10:16.679 failures of their education. Kids who aren't surrounded by books, 0:10:17.200 --> 0:10:21.839 kids whose parents aren't reading to them. So those poorer students, 0:10:22.280 --> 0:10:26.520 either materially or environmentally poorer, were more vulnerable to the 0:10:26.520 --> 0:10:30.360 inadequacies of whole language because it wasn't being mitigated by 0:10:30.400 --> 0:10:31.719 other things, and. 0:10:31.720 --> 0:10:33.400 This is a very haunting thing. 0:10:33.720 --> 0:10:36.120 Like time and time and time again, teachers told me 0:10:36.720 --> 0:10:41.280 children were not given the basics, were not given explicit 0:10:41.320 --> 0:10:46.479 instruction in the basic fundamentals of reading, and as such struggled. 0:10:47.120 --> 0:10:52.440 Now as children, that struggle manifests quite despairingly. If you 0:10:52.520 --> 0:10:57.880 struggle as a child, you can feel shame inadequacy, and 0:10:57.920 --> 0:11:01.880 it becomes aversive. You start avoiding the thing that causes 0:11:01.920 --> 0:11:05.439 that shame. And time and time and time again, teachers 0:11:05.440 --> 0:11:09.400 told me that they encountered or knew of students that 0:11:09.520 --> 0:11:14.280 were diagnosed with learning disorders, when in fact the fault 0:11:14.320 --> 0:11:19.040 lay with the education. The student wasn't at fault. They 0:11:19.040 --> 0:11:25.360 weren't lazy, they were abandoned, they were not taught properly. Now, 0:11:25.400 --> 0:11:28.600 if these things are kind of grounded early, like a 0:11:28.640 --> 0:11:32.240 sense of shame, a sense of inadequacy, and an ultimately 0:11:32.400 --> 0:11:36.640 avoidance of reading, that lingers that can be life long. 0:11:37.800 --> 0:11:39.880 Yeah. I think that's what's so sad about this story. 0:11:39.920 --> 0:11:43.120 In a lot of ways, it's this well intentioned but 0:11:43.800 --> 0:11:48.120 ineffective policy that's ultimately led to more inequality. 0:11:48.600 --> 0:11:51.040 I think so, yeah, And that's the sort of perversity 0:11:51.040 --> 0:11:53.360 of it is that there were these very grandiose, romantic 0:11:53.400 --> 0:11:58.280 assumptions about children, about their development, about their cognitive architecture, 0:11:58.600 --> 0:12:03.440 about empowering students, and respecting that idiosyncrasies and individualism, all 0:12:03.480 --> 0:12:06.720 made in good faith, but ultimately I think it's harmed 0:12:06.760 --> 0:12:08.040 and compounded literacy. 0:12:10.120 --> 0:12:11.800 Marty, Thank you so much for your time. 0:12:12.120 --> 0:12:12.480 Thank you. 0:12:25.840 --> 0:12:28.880 Also in the news today, the EU, France and UK 0:12:29.120 --> 0:12:32.400 have condemned a senior Israeli minister for suggesting it might 0:12:32.440 --> 0:12:36.440 be justified and moral to starve people in Gaza. In 0:12:36.480 --> 0:12:39.960 a speech this week, Israel's finance minister said Israel was 0:12:39.960 --> 0:12:44.160 bringing in humanitarian aid because it has no choice. The 0:12:44.200 --> 0:12:47.559 EU said the deliberate starvation of civilians is a war crime. 0:12:48.600 --> 0:12:51.640 And Jack Carlson, the man who mortalized the phrase this 0:12:51.760 --> 0:12:56.520 is democracy manifest, has died at age eighty two. Gentlemen, 0:12:57.400 --> 0:13:03.040 this is democracy man i beshed. Carlson was a serial prisoner, 0:13:03.080 --> 0:13:06.000 skapee and small time crook who shot to fame after 0:13:06.040 --> 0:13:08.880 a news clip of his nineteen ninety one arrest later 0:13:08.920 --> 0:13:11.839 went viral in which he theatrically boomed. 0:13:11.520 --> 0:13:15.720 What is the charge eating a mele? A sirculent Chinese. 0:13:15.600 --> 0:13:21.160 Old seven am is a daily show from Schwartz Media 0:13:21.240 --> 0:13:25.440 and The Saturday Paper. It's produced by Shane Anderson, Zultan Veecho, 0:13:25.600 --> 0:13:29.120 and Zaia Artunggrel. Our senior producer is Chris Danegate. Our 0:13:29.160 --> 0:13:32.800 technical producer is Atika as Basto. Sarah McVie is our 0:13:32.800 --> 0:13:35.800 head of audio. Eric Jensen is our editor in chief. 0:13:36.360 --> 0:13:40.120 Mixing by Travis Evans, Ataica Sbasto and Zultan Veccho. Our 0:13:40.200 --> 0:13:42.640 theme music is by Ned Beckley and Josh Hogan of 0:13:42.720 --> 0:13:46.679 Envelope Audio. Seven Am is hosted by Daniel James and 0:13:46.800 --> 0:13:49.160 me Ruby Jones. See you next week.