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Driving a car seems effortless to most of us. Our eyes, hands, and feet work together seamlessly, automatically, without conscious thought. But we first had to learn the basics of driving.
Remember your driving lessons? You were taught how to turn the steering wheel, where the gas and brake pedal was, how to stay in your lane, turn signals and stop signs, use of mirrors, keeping to speed limits, looking ahead. All these basics took time and practice to learn. Now, most of us who have been driving for many years, take these basics for granted. We drive "automatically" and with skill.
The same process applies to the skill of reading. Without learning the basic skills reading is not possible.
Socialist education experts think otherwise. Why teach children phonics? Why put children through the boredom, drudgery, and hard work of phonics and spelling drills? How can reading be joyful if literature becomes drills? Why would children's self-esteem and self-expression be improved with tests and standards and high expectations?
These experts want to teach children whole words instead of drilling on the alphabet and letter sounds. All the pain is gone, they claim. Do not teach children to sound out F-A-T-H-E-R or M-O-T-H-E-R. Have them memorize what the word looks like, teach them word-pictures,
so they recognize the word. Today's educators teach children to read Dick and Jane learning books that repeat each word a hundred times, so a child comes to recognize it.
If children are not able to recognize a word, socialist educators teach them to just guess what the word is or to skip the word and come back to it. Or ask a friend who also cannot read it. Then finally, when all else fails, ask the teacher, because teachers will never steer a child wrong.
Socialist educators teach: Context, not basics. Group discussions, not letters, sounds, drills and independence. Results are inevitable. Half the nation's high-school grads cannot read a bus schedule.
When children are taught phonics they will be able to read thousands of words in a few semesters.
Socialist educators want to dumb down our kids. Thousands of frustrated teens drop out of school, turn to crime, and end up in prison because they can't get a decent job.
Yet, in the face of such failure, such disaster for our children, educators turn a blind eye and a deaf ear.
Buy why? What do they gain? There is always a reason for irrational behavior, and socialist educators have many.
They claim it is the child's fault he has attention-deficit disorder! Or the parents' fault, they don't get involved! Or society's fault for racism or not enough money for the schools!
So what can you, as a concerned parent, do to protect your child? As long as public schools are run by the socialist educators, they will never change. Parents, I urge you to look into other alternatives, before your children are irreparably harmed by public-school whole-language, anti-phonics, "reading" instruction.
Socialist educators think they are gurus with special skills no parent can possess. Rather, they are education buffoons who don't want to teach our kids how to read and think but rather what to read and think.
Good day!
Robert Ware
French Creek