American literacy lost a generation to the premise of 'Whole Language', a heretical public school dogma that skips over the pieces that make the mosaic.
The nemesis of phonics and a delusion of kooky liberal Ken Goodman - President of the Center for the Expansion of Language and Thinking, along with other manipulative social scientists like Marie Clay, Irene Fountas, Gay Su Pinell, Lucy Calkins and their minions and devotees - the negligence of the Whole Language Guessing Game forgives the lack of certainty, encourages ‘cueing’, congratulates ambiguity, makes reading miserable, and prolongs illiteracy. No wonder America doesn’t read.
A kid can't comprehend what he can't read, but who can argue with the President of Thinking?
Although Whole Language has been roundly discredited well after its victims packed society's lower strata, its history exemplifies the virality of mass movements.
After finally sounding-it-out, the unapologetic education industry is reverting back to phonics while trying to redress its capstone catastrophe by grasping at AI, where empowerment is the pitch and dependency is the business model. Software’s not a solution for illiteracy, it’s been failing for forty years. Any kid relying on a machine to think for him will accrue cognitive debt with compound interest, completely reliant on a machine he thought he controlled.
“There is no wealth like knowledge, there is no poverty like ignorance.” ~ Buddha
Post-Buddha Script: Well aware of looming failure, public schools in France, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland [annual winners in the World Happiness Report] are going Old Skool in a shift from digital format to wood pulp format, realizing that reading words on paper results in better comprehension, self-reliance and improved memory, and that hand-writing activates spatial awareness, language processing and motor coordination, and that in the words of the brilliant Sophie Winkleman, “ease forgets and effort remembers.” New York and LA have joined in, to the great dismay of AI vendors who unimaginatively call the backlash a 'tech-lash', depriving 600,000 NYC grammar schoolers of their [~$150 per kid per year] electronic 'learning companions'. Wiping off the mud of these insults to EdTech, the AI crowd glorifies Miami-Dade for its Google-contracted 'AI-powered approach to learning'.