The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home

by Susan Wise Bauer

Unfortunately, illiteracy is still soaring in states where whole-language classrooms dominate. There are several reasons for this. First, many whole-language teachers, while insisting that their methods differ from look-say, are still using look-say drills. They read texts over and over again, pointing to each word and encouraging the children to join in. Children eventually learn to recognize many of the words through sheer repetition. This, of course, does nothing to teach them how to read real literature, which might contain words they haven’t seen in the classroom. Second, most whole-language teachers will insist that they don’t rely on look-say alone; they also teach something called “incidental phonics.” If, for example, the child has seen the words smile, smoke, small, smog, and smith over and over again, the teacher will finally point out that sm makes the same sound every time. Incidental phonics teaches the connections between words and sounds only as the child runs across them in texts. Which means that a child who doesn’t encounter many words ending in -ough could get to sixth grade or so before finding out that -ough can make an f sound. This guessing game is labeled “developing phonemic awareness.” It’s also called “whole-to-parts phonics instruction” because the student is given the “whole” (the entire word) and only later is told about the “parts” (the letter sounds) that make it up. Granted, it’s an improvement on pure look-say, which never lets on that th...