/lit/ - Literature

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/11/opinion/reading-kids-phonics.html
>A lovely aphorism holds that education isn’t the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.
>But too often, neither are pails filled nor fires lit.
>One of the most bearish statistics for the future of the United States is this: Two-thirds of fourth graders in the United States are not proficient in reading.
>Reading may be the most important skill we can give children. It’s the pilot light of that fire.
>Yet we fail to ignite that pilot light, so today some one in five adults in the United States struggles with basic literacy, and after more than 25 years of campaigns and fads, American children are still struggling to read. Eighth graders today are actually a hair worse at reading than their counterparts were in 1998.
>One explanation gaining ground is that, with the best of intentions, we grown-ups have bungled the task of teaching kids to read. There is growing evidence from neuroscience and careful experiments that the United States has adopted reading strategies that just don’t work very well and that we haven’t relied enough on a simple starting point — helping kids learn to sound out words with phonics.
>“Too much reading instruction is not based on what the evidence says,” noted Nancy Madden, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who is an expert on early literacy. “That’s pretty clear.
>“At least half of kids in the U.S. are not getting effective reading instruction.”
>Other experts agree. Ted Mitchell, an education veteran at nearly every level who is now president of the American Council on Education, thinks that easily a majority of children are getting subpar instruction.
>Others disagree, of course. But an approach called the “science of reading” has gained ground, and it rests on a bed of phonics instruction.