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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones. This is 7am.

It’s been called a forever war: the fight over how to teach children to read.

For decades, an outdated method has lingered in Australian classrooms, as states protect schools’ right to teach how they wish.

Now, with a third of Australian children not being able to read well, we’ve hit a turning point, with Victoria joining other states in finally mandating the best way to teach reading.

Today, associate editor of The Saturday Paper Martin McKenzie-Murray on why vibes-based learning stuck around for so long and how children should actually be taught to read.

It’s Friday August 9.

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RUBY:

So, Marty, your daughter has recently started school. Tell me when you were trying to decide where to send her, what kinds of things were you weighing up? And what did you notice about the way that schools were communicating their ethos?

MARTY:

I live in a state, Victoria, that has long preferred school autonomy. And so there exist all these kinds of differences in teaching philosophy between schools, which I was largely kind of ignorant of. And I think the kind of ideological differences and ideological commitments of certain schools, principals and teachers is obscured by a lot of wishy-washy language. So in reading stuff like ‘child centred learning’, you know, my eyes would have kind of glazed over previously, but I now realise that that phrase itself is really significant and kind of conceals or maybe announces in its funny way, this very particular ideology.

RUBY:

Okay, so what is the child-centred approach? What does that mean?

MARTY:

It really comes down to what was once called ‘whole language’. And it kind of mutated into what's now known as balanced literacy.

Audio excerpt — Teacher 1:

“You understand a character a little better about how they're feeling in a story, and we can infer how characters are feeling three ways in a story. We can infer how a character is feeling, everyone, by what they…"

Audio excerpt — Children:

“...Look like, what they say and how they act.”

Audio excerpt — Teacher 1:

“We do that. We have our emoji posters behind us and our emojis help us to understand our characters a little bit better with how they're feeling.”

MARTY:

So I think it was popularised in the late 1960s in the United States and like many kind of ideological fashions, Australia followed and was very much born of the zeitgeist at the time. By that I mean this suspicion of authority, that children should be empowered, an acceptance that children have their own inner lives, their own emotional lives, that they might learn differently and at their own time. And that should be deferred to.

Audio excerpt — Teacher 2:

“So this is another story about those characters. So we know Kate's name is going to start with a what?”

Audio excerpt — Children:

“K.”

Audio excerpt — Teacher 2:

“And Nick’s name is going to start with?”

Audio excerpt — Children:

“N.”

Audio excerpt — Teacher 2:

“A capital N because it's a name and James?”

Audio excerpt — Children:

“J.”

MARTY:

Practically, whole language sought to immerse children, immerse children in reading, in words, in language. You surround them by beautiful books. You read to them often and they would acquire it as easily and naturally as speaking.

RUBY:

Right, okay so that sounds kind of nice and intuitive. This idea that children can learn to read in an organic way. Tell me Marty about the proponents of whole language and how they justify its teaching?

MARTY:

There's two of them. Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell.

Audio excerpt — Irene Fountas:

“And I know from working with children who found literacy learning very difficult that for some children they can focus on learning about letters, sounds and words out of context. But there's a wall and they don't connect what they've learned to what they're reading or what they're writing. So we feel that as teachers, we need to break down that wall. Kids need to know why they're learning, what they're learning about letter sounds and words.”

MARTY:

Let me read for you their own defence. This is from 2021. They said “the goal for the reader is accuracy using all sources of information simultaneously”. So they're referring to these cues like visual cues.

They go on to say “if a reader says pony for horse because of information from the pictures, that tells the teacher that the reader is using meaning information from the pictures as well as the structure of the language, but is neglecting to use the visual information of the print”. His response is partially correct.

RUBY:

But it's not a pony, it's a horse. Or the other way around.

MARTY:

Yes Ruby. Exactly! And to say about this hypothetical student that has said pony instead of horse, it is a bizarre generosity to say that that is partially correct. I would say and plenty of others would say it's not partially correct and there's no such thing as partially correct. It's just simply wrong.

RUBY:

Mmm okay, so it’s less about accuracy and more about vibes.

MARTY:

Yeah, definitely. But the problem with that is explicit instruction and systematic instruction about the fundamentals of reading was eroded in favour of, or in preference for more romantic assumptions about children's learning. But as cognitive scientists, linguists, speech pathologists have been asserting for decades now regarding the acquisition of reading regarding the development of literacy. We all have the same brain structure, and we require explicit instruction to acquire that reading. So increasingly, like I think really loudly and vociferously, cognitive scientists are saying vibes based literacy teaching has to be replaced with something systematic, that is the explicit instruction of phonics, and that is teaching children to decode words by learning the correspondence between certain letters and their sounds.

RUBY:

So that's the sound 'aa' and letter A, the triangle with the line through it.

MARTY:

That's it. Yes. Or ‘sh’ is made by S and H together.

RUBY:

Okay. So Marty, how is it then that we got into this situation where a method that is supposed to teach children how to read, it doesn't work or it doesn’t work well. But nevertheless it's taught in schools?

MARTY:

Yeah. Well it's become highly politicised. And somewhere along the line, I think the teaching of phonics, explicit instruction, empowering the teacher and not the students or the children – it became coded as a conservative thing. There was a suspicion of rote learning. It might bore or disparate students, and I should say like a very famous proponent of phonics teaching was George W Bush.

Audio excerpt — George Bush:

“There is one area where the teaching research is definitive. The best way to teach children to read is phonics.”

MARTY:

And when he was running for office in 2000, a very prominent feature of the Republican platform that year was phonics and offering very, very large sums, grants to schools that adopted a federally approved plan for phonics.

Audio excerpt — George Bush:

“No new theory or method has ever improved on it. As the people of this great state know better than anyone. The National Institution of Health, in the kind of rigorous research we need, has proven that phonics works and that children can learn to read much earlier than we ever assumed.”

MARTY:

So there's been for a long time this kind of ideological resistance to it.

RUBY:

After the break: the children and teachers who have been failed.

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RUBY:

So Marty, we've been talking about this long-running ideological debate about how to teach children how to read. Let’s speak about how it has affected teachers, the people who are actually on the front lines of this issue.

MARTY:

One of the people I spoke to for this article, is Sue Hiland, who is a teacher, an instructional coach, and she's also an associate lecturer in education at La Trobe University here in Melbourne. And she said a lot of things that were interesting. One thing that really struck me was her sort of painful discovery. When she was learning how to become a teacher, she was buzzing with enthusiasm. She was really optimistic. She goes in to teach prep and year ones, and she realises this giant hole in her own education. No one had taught her this basic, fundamental thing: how to teach children how to read. And so this was a painful discovery and she used the word ‘grief’. She said for three years she was teaching a whole language method and she came to the painful realisation that she was not doing the best by her own students. She is also angry, and she tells me that there are other teachers who are angry as well. They're saying, why weren't we taught this? Why weren't we made aware of alternatives? We didn't know what we didn't know.

RUBY:

Okay, so you've got teachers coming to this realisation that they may have failed children who they were supposed to help. But what about the children who went through school and learned under this method? Obviously, many of them did learn how to read, but, but how many didn't? Who are the children who were failed?

MARTY:

I mean, the metaphor that I've used is that, like, some kids will learn to swim if you throw them into a swimming pool, but also many will drown. So those whose families couldn't afford tutoring, private tuition that might make up for or mitigate the inadequacies of their formal education. And those who weren't born to educated parents and whose parents might, you know, that their educated attention might help mitigate the failures of their education. Kids who aren't surrounded by books, kids whose parents aren't reading to them. So those poorer students, either materially or environmentally poorer, were more vulnerable to the inadequacies of whole language because it wasn't being mitigated by other things.

And this is a very haunting thing, like time and time and time again, teachers told me, children were not given the basics, were not given explicit instruction in the basic fundamentals of reading. And as such, struggled. Now, as children, that struggle manifests quite despairingly. If you struggle as a child, you can feel shame, inadequacy, and it becomes aversive. You start avoiding the thing that causes that shame and time and time and time again teachers told me that they encountered or knew of students that were diagnosed with learning disorders, when in fact the fault lay with the education. The student wasn't at fault. They weren't lazy, they were abandoned. They were not taught properly. Now, if these things are kind of grounded early, like a sense of shame, a sense of inadequacy, and an ultimately avoidance of reading, that lingers. That can be lifelong.

RUBY:

Yeah. I think that's what's so sad about this story in a lot of ways. It's this well intentioned but ineffective policy that's ultimately led to more inequality.

MARTY:

I think so, yeah. And that's the sort of perversity of it, is that there were these very grandiose romantic assumptions about children, about their development, about their cognitive architecture, about empowering students and respecting their idiosyncrasies and individualism, all made in good faith. But ultimately, I think it's harmed and compounded illiteracy.

RUBY:

Marty, Thank you so much for your time.

MARTY:

Thank you.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today,

The EU, France and UK have condemned a senior Israeli minister for suggesting it might be “justified and moral” to starve people in Gaza.

In a speech this week, Israel’s finance minister said Israel was bringing in humanitarian aid because it has no choice.

The EU said the deliberate starvation of civilians is a “war crime”.

And

Jack Karlson, the man who immortalised the phrase “this is democracy manifest” has died at age 82.

Audio excerpt — Jack Karlson:

“Gentleman, this is democracy manifest.”

Karlson, was a serial prison escapee and small time crook who shot to fame after a news clip of his 1991 arrest later went viral in which he theatrically boomed:

Audio excerpt — Jack Karlson:

“What is the charge? Eating a meal? A succulent Chinese meal?”

7am is a daily show from Schwartz Media and The Saturday Paper.

It’s produced by Cheyne Anderson, Zoltan Fecso, and Zaya Altangerel.

Our senior producer is Chris Dengate. Our technical producer is Atticus Bastow.

Sarah McVeigh is our head of audio. Erik Jensen is our editor-in-chief.

Mixing by Travis Evans, Atticus Bastow, and Zoltan Fecso.

Our theme music is by Ned Beckley and Josh Hogan of Envelope Audio.

7am is hosted by Daniel James and me, Ruby Jones.

See you next week.

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