In 1994 I wrote an article for the Evening Post (R.I.P.) about a remarkable woman named Doris Ferry. Doris, who was then 78, was a retired teacher who lived on the Kapiti Coast. All she wanted to do was devote herself to her large garden, but instead she found herself spending half of each day providing individual tutoring at home to local kids who had fallen behind at school. The reason they were failing, without exception, is that they couldn’t read. Parents came to her in desperation after word got around that Doris was succeeding where schools were failing. By the time I interviewed her, she had brought 1500 kids up to speed with their reading – kids who, in many cases, had fallen hopelessly behind at school, even after completing so-called reading recovery courses. The difference to their lives was dramatic.
I’m sure Doris’s empathetic manner and one-on-one tuition helped, but there was
no doubt in her mind that what counted most was her use of the teaching
method known as intensive phonics, whereby children learn to read by
recognising letters or combinations of letters and the sounds associated with
them. Many readers of this blog will recognise that description, because until
the 1960s it was how reading was taught in all New Zealand schools. Then, in
one of those sudden theory-driven shifts in direction to which the education
system seems fatally susceptible, phonics was supplanted by a method known as whole-language.
Under the whole-language approach, children are taught to recognise
words by the context in which they occur.
Critics of the phonics method – and here I’m quoting from my 1994
article – say it takes a mechanical approach and inhibits understanding of
words by divorcing them from their context. Advocates of phonics, on the other
hand, argue that the whole-language method takes a “near enough is good enough”
approach, encouraging children to guess words from their context or the
illustrations accompanying them.
The results achieved by Doris, and the gratitude of
the parents whose kids’ lives were transformed under her tuition, demonstrated
convincingly that the phonics method often succeeded where whole-language
failed. At least one academic – Tom Nicholson, now an emeritus professor of
education at Massey University, and still an advocate of phonics – endorsed
Doris’ approach. But what seemed both incomprehensible and reprehensible when
I wrote that story was the education system’s single-minded zealotry in
enforcing the whole-language approach. The teaching of phonics, which had previously
been mainstream, was now deemed heretical. Official disapproval was so vehement
that the parents of Doris’s pupils feared serious repercussions if their kids’
schools found out they were learning from her. Children would crouch down out
of sight when their parents delivered them to Doris’s address, or make their
way to her house using a neighbour’s gate further down the street. Parents
spoke to me only on the strict condition that I didn’t use their names in my story. I was exaggerating only slightly when I
described Doris’s clandestine teaching activity as reminiscent of Resistance operations in Nazi-occupied France.
It had somehow been my impression in recent years that this battle was now history - that the
Ministry of Education had relaxed its uncompromising opposition to phonics. But no: according to Morning
Report today, some schools are raising large sums of money – hundreds of
thousands of dollars in one case – to fund the teaching of phonics because the ministry still refuses to, despite clear evidence the officially approved
method, which is apparently now known as “balanced literacy”, isn’t working. RNZ reporter
Ruth Hill interviewed several principals whose schools had adopted phonics –
sometimes against initial resistance from teachers who had to unlearn the
officially approved method – and all were emphatic about the benefits, which
one described as “phenomenal”. Another said it was impossible to put a price on
what her pupils had gained. All sounded exasperated by the ministry’s refusal to provide
funding for alternatives to “balanced literacy”, especially when the ministry
throws more than $29 million a year at reading recovery programmes of dubious
benefit. (Incidentally, no one from the ministry
was available for an interview. Fancy that.)
These schools have learned, at considerable expense,
what was obvious to Doris Ferry and the parents of her pupils 30 years ago, yet
still the bureaucrats cling doggedly to their failed doctrinaire model. We can only wonder how many New Zealand children
– those not fortunate enough to attend schools that are prepared to buck the
system – are being penalised as a result by being denied the opportunity to
achieve their full potential.
