In mid-March 1997, the author of this report sought and obtained the approval of Dr. Moorehead to fulfill the major research paper requirements of EDU 505 by the preparation and submission of a proposal to the Virgin Islands Education Commission, together with an accompanying commentary on anthropological and sociological issues relating to the proposal. Thereafter, the proposal was prepared and submitted to the Virgin Islands Education Commission (and the Virgin Islands Literacy Task Force). Attached hereto is a copy of the March 31, 1997 proposal, the cover letter to Liston Davis (the Commissioner of Education and the Chairman of the Education Commission), and a copy of the cover letter transmitting the proposal to Virgin Islands union leaders. This accompanying paper is the anthropological/sociological commentary.

The proposal suggests that the Virgin Islands public school system should institute voluntary phonics-based reading programs in Virgin Islands public schools. The proposal implies that reading instruction in Virgin Island public schools, currently, is not phonics-based. In his books Why Johnny Can’t Read (1955) and Why Johnny Still Can’t Read (1981), Rudolph Flesch reviews the history of reading instruction for written English and explains that most American school reading instruction moved away from phonics-based instruction during the 1930s, and has never returned. The Virgin Islands public school system is no exception, in recent years using the series Our World of Reading; and this year switching to Literature Works, neither of which is phonics-based.

Let’s step back and take a quick look at our writing system. Spoken English is reduced to writing through the means of a phonetic alphabet. Phonetic alphabets are used in all of the Germanic, Romance, Scandinavian, and Slavic languages of Western Civilization. Robert K. Logan in The Alphabet Effect, rightfully asserts:

In his book, Dr. Logan makes a compelling argument for his assertions quoted above. He reviews the differences between Western culture, with its phonetic alphabets, and Eastern culture, such as those of China and Japan, where the spoken languages are reduced to writing using a logographic (or pictographic) system "in which each spoken word is represented by its own unique visual sign, which denotes or depicts the word symbolically or pictorially." (Logan, 1986, p. 20)

Although the history of teaching reading is strewn with occasional "reading heretics," by and large, prior to the Enlightenment (better understood as the Endarkenment), virtually everyone using European phonetic alphabetical writing systems learned to read by learning the names and sounds of letters and groups of letters, and learning to "sound-out" words on the page - fully utilizing the wonderful invention of writing systems where symbols stand for the sounds of the spoken language. This focus results in mastery of the written language system. But by the time Rudolph Flesch wrote Why Johnny Can’t Read, reading instruction in the vast majority of schools in the United States was no longer focused on the alphabetic principle. As teaching reading through focus on the phonetic alphabet (that is, phonics-based reading instruction) waned, the reading abilities of the United States population fell.

Now, from the corridors of the universities, to the conference rooms of state boards of education, to the offices of school system superintendents, to public meetings conducted by local school boards, to the halls of Congress, to the state of the union address by the president of the United States, everyone seems to be wringing his hands over the pathetic state of American public education, which produces so many poor readers and writers and illiterates after years and years in our nation’s classrooms.

The educators who control the disaster we call reading instruction in most of our schools today are the intellectual progeny of the "almost solid opposition of teachers, school officials, and educational ‘experts’" against whom Dr. Flesch posited his "little compendium of arguments against [the] current system of teaching reading." (Flesch, 1955, p. xiii) Back then, the predominant fad was to teach children to read primarily through the use of a series of textbooks called "readers," stretched out from kindergarten or first grade through perhaps fifth or sixth grade. Children would be taught new words primarily by "sight." The first stories presented in the first reader in the series would use just a few words, and use them repeatedly, with the object of getting the children to associate the specifically ordered group of letters constituting the written word, with the spoken word it represented. The children were not expected to seek to know the "sound values" of each of the letters in each of the words they encountered. In his book, Dr. Flesch refers to this gradual exposure to "sight" words through a series of basal readers as "look-and-say," although it has gone by a number of other names such as look-say, look-see, the sight method, the word method, or simply the basal reader method.

Nowadays, introducing words to children through a highly structured basal reader series is frowned upon by the dominant university reading instruction intelligentsia. That system is seen as "inauthentic," artificial, "nonrelevant," unexciting, and culturally narrow. So now, the idea is to "immerse" the children in a variety of "meaningful print," instead of teaching them about 1,500 words primarily by "sight" in a structured basal reader system over the first five or six years of schooling. Basal readers were popular before Rudolph Flesch wrote Why Johnny Can’t Read and have continued to be popular right up to the present time, but over the last thirty years there have been attempts to break out of the "cultural straight jacket" of basal-reader based reading instruction - through "language experience," which sought to use primarily the language of the student himself in teaching reading, through to the current fad - whole language.

At first blush it would appear that the old-style, highly structured basal reader system for teaching reading is fundamentally different than the whole language system currently en vogue. After all, in the basal reader system the teacher uses a set of readers published by one of several huge educational publishing houses and confines reading instruction primarily to those materials and their associated workbooks and the like. The use in whole language of written English from a variety of sources in a non-structured program would appear to be radically different from reliance upon the look-and-say basal readers. Although the look-and-say basal reader system and the whole language classroom have obvious differences, their similarities are deeper than their differences; they are brother and sister of the same parent: the rejection of the use of the alphabetic principle as the foundation for all reading instruction. Because look-and-say and whole language are children of the same parent - branches of the same tree - and because the alphabetic principle is the same today as it was in 1955 - Why Johnny Can’t Read is a timeless classic: an education paperback still in print forty-two years after it was first published.

What does this mean - that look-and-say and whole language are children of "the rejection of the alphabetic principle as the foundation for all reading instruction"? As mentioned earlier, unlike the written representation of Chinese, the written representation of English - written English, if you will - is based upon the alphabetic principle. In written English, as a manifestation of the alphabetic principle, words are composed of letters, which stand for sounds (or, sometimes, the lack of sound). Thus, by combining and recombining letters, a reader who understands the rules of letter/sound correspondence in written English can read any unfamiliar word, no matter what. We have about forty-four sounds in spoken English and only twenty-six letters. It is true that a number of the letters change the sounds they stand for depending upon the word in which they appear and their relationship with other letters. This is particularly true of the vowels and a few of the consonants, but the rules of English spelling - the rules of letter/sound correspondence - the rules of phonics - can be learned. Any person with normal intelligence (and many with significantly below-normal intelligence) can learn the rules of phonics. It takes a little work, as anything worthwhile does, but it can be done - and if focus on the alphabetic principle is made a mainstay of a child’s efforts at reading, it will surely, in a reasonable program, produce good readers. In contrast, look-and-say, language experience, and whole language reject the the claim that children should be taught to use the alphabetic principle - their knowledge of letter/sound correspondence - habitually as their method for figuring out each new word.

In his preface to Why Johnny Can’t Read, Dr. Flesch explains that his book is addressed to fathers and mothers because the teachers, school officials, and so-called educational experts are too stiff-necked in their opposition to phonics-based reading instruction. Dr. Flesch gives a history of the teaching of reading in Why Johnny Can’t Read. The history related by Dr. Flesch relied upon the book American Reading Instruction by Nila Banton Smith. In his 1981 sequel, Why Johnny Still Can’t Read: A new Look at the Scandal of our Schools, Dr. Flesch confesses that it "turned out that Professor Smith and I were wrong. In 1966, eleven years after I wrote Why Johnny Can’t Read, there appeared Teaching to Read, Historically Considered by Dr. Mitford Mathews, the famous linguist and editor of the monumental Dictionary of Americanisms." (Why Johnny Still Can’t Read, p. 15) Dr. Flesch in his 1981 follow-up book provides corrected historical information. What it boils down to, in short, leaving out virtually all the details, is that from the beginning of alphabetic language writing systems, including written English, which developed little by little over time, reading instruction was focused on the alphabetic principle. As mentioned earlier, here and there "reading instruction heretics" popped up, but the modern American deviation away from phonics was given its principal push by Horace Mann in the mid-1800s; by Colonel Francis Wayland Parker in the late-1800s; by John Dewey, from his time at the University of Chicago in the 1890s through to his death in the 1950s; and by Professor Arthur I. Gates of Columbia and Professor William S. Gray of the University of Chicago in the first half of this century. Perhaps the most significant event occurred in 1929, when "the Scott Foresman Company invited Professor Gray to revamp their Elson Readers and this marked the birth of Dick and Jane. A year later, Professor Gates joined up with Macmillan and produced a look-and-say series for them. Gradually most major textbook houses fell in line and the "Dismal Dozen" of basal readers came into being. By the middle thirties look-and-say had completely swept the field. Virtually all leading academics in the primary reading field were now authors of basal reader series, and collected fat royalties. They had inherited the kingdom of American education." (Why Johnny Still Can’t Read, p. 23)

Dr. Flesch goes on to point out in Why Johnny Still Can’t Read:

Dr. Flesch starts Why Johnny Can’t Read with his Chapter 1 "A Letter to Johnny’s Mother," where he writes "I have looked into this whole reading business" (p. 1) and reveals "What I found is absolutely fantastic. The teaching of reading - all over the United States, in all the schools, in all the textbooks - is totally wrong and flies in the face of all logic and common sense. Johnny couldn’t read until half a year ago [when he was 12] for the simple reason that nobody ever showed him how. Johnny’s only problem was that he was unfortunately exposed to an ordinary American school." (p. 2)

In the whole language classroom the children are encouraged to guess at words. They are encouraged to try to predict what the word should be based upon the context, including pictures. They are encouraged to try to memorize words by their shape without necessarily understanding the "sound values" of all the letters in the words. They are taught that it is perfectly o.k. to look at a word and based upon an initial letter or letter blend they may know, or based upon a little word they already know within a longer word, to attempt to guess, basically, at what the complete word is. These guessing techniques become ingrained and result, many times, in sloppy, imprecise readers, who fail to fully utilize the logic of our phonetic alphabet.

So, written English uses a phonetic alphabet. Logan argues persuasively that the phonetic alphabet was a critical factor in the development of Western Culture, including the rise of systematic science and logic. Focusing on the phonetic alphabet in teaching reading results in good readers. Shoving phonics off to the side as "one facet of a multi-faceted program" leads to the disastrous consequence of our society filling up with semiliterates and illiterates. What anthropological and sociological comments can we make on this abandonment of phonics-based reading instruction in our schools? Has it affected our culture, our society?

Anthropology is the study of mankind and his cultures. Sociology is the study of human society. If Logan is correct that "abstraction, analysis, rationality, and classification" are an effect of the phonetic alphabet "and the basis for Western abstract scientific and logical thinking" (p. 21), does our soft-pedaling of the alphabet in reading instruction affect our culture and the organization of our society? Is the failure to use phonics-based reading instruction related to the rise of the popularity of deconstructionism, post-modernism, and critical theory in our universities? This paper is too short to tackle these issues in a detailed way, but the outline of an argument can be formed.

The rise of Western Civilization is intimately related to the emergence and domination of the Roman Catholic Church. The Church maintains that there are absolute truths, including moral truths. The Church contends that the Church, in the form of its college of bishops, and, especially in the person of the Pope - the Vicar of Christ - is inspired by the Holy Spirit to faithfully articulate the absolute truths of faith and morals.

The leaders of the Protestant Revolution of the 1500s rejected this view, claiming that each man must find his own way to the truth. The leaders of the Protestant Revolution did not reject the idea of absolute truths, including moral truths. But they insisted on leaving the determination and articulation of these truths to each man individually. This destroyed the (somewhat) universal Western agreement on the basics of theological and philosophical truths regarding God, the universe, the world, and man. To the Protestants, ultimately, it was "every man to himself" (as embodied in the Baptist tradition).

The Protestant Revolution was followed by the Enlightenment (the Endarkenment), which rejected the idea of relying upon Revealed truths, and instead embraced rationalism - a form of idolatry involving the worship of the rational abilities of man. Under the new regime of Enlightened Protestantism, the thought naturally arises: since each man is to rely ultimately on himself for the discernment of truth as he sees it, what justification do we have in imposing upon our children in school the world view of the currently dominant adult culture?

This question led John Dewey, the dominant American philosopher of education, to his advocacy of "child-centered" education. No longer, according to Dewey, should schooling be God-centered, focused primarily on forming children into good little Christians, who have learned how to overcome their natural sinful tendencies arising from concupiscence, the echo of Original Sin.

No, Dewey reasoned that children were naturally good, uncontaminated by Original Sin, and (in modern day parlance) they have the right to "create their own reality." Thus, the teacher is no longer the dispenser of theological and philosophical truths - the loving taskmaster. Not anymore. Now, school is best seen (according to Dewey) as a discovery cottage, where the teacher is reduced to a facilitator in the child’s own, child-directed process of discovery of the elements of reality. In Dewey’s view the ultimate goal of schooling is simply "growth." But what kind of growth? Which growth is healthy and which is cancerous?

Robert Maynard Hutchins, the great long-term president of the University of Chicago earlier this century, emphasized the importance of this question What is good? President Hutchins was concerned about John Dewey’s leadership in American education because John Dewey did not understand the importance of this question. Because of this, President Hutchins criticized John Dewey’s claim that the purpose of schools is simply to promote growth - without grappling with the essential question of what "growth" is good and what is bad. (Hutchins, 1953, p. 53) In one of his writings, Dewey, devoting to the question only about one page, gave a couple of examples of morally cancerous "growth" within an individual - the development of an acknowledged vice, for example - and asserted that this type of "growth" stymies "growth" in other areas, and therefore has the overall effect of being a growth inhibitor, and therefore bad since to Dewey "growth" is the ultimate good. This would appear to be an implicit statement by Dewey that he favors the (morally) good ("true" growth) and disfavors the bad. A major problem with Dewey’s educational philosophy, however, is that nowhere (it would appear) in Dewey’s writing about education does he define good and bad, or give us guidelines to distinguish the good from the bad. This failure to define what is good and what is bad is rooted in Dewey’s relativistic value system, leaving each individual to devise his own (perhaps ever-changing) value system. This failure by Dewey to answer the question What is good? is the reason Robert Maynard Hutchins writes:

Unfortunately, mainstream modern American education is grounded in Dewey’s relativistic "anti-philosophy", which fails to define the good, and therefore leads to the worship of Change. But the question What is good? cannot be ignored in sound educational philosophy.

Has the rejection of primary emphasis on the alphabetic principle in the teaching of reading, and has rejection of God-centered schooling in favor of child-centered schooling, had other effects on our culture and society? One could argue that they have; that they have contributed to the rise of deconstructionism, post-modernism, and critical theory.

According to Wayne K. Hoy and Cecil G. Miskel, "post-modernism ... is uncompromisingly against logical empiricism, and holds to a highly personal individual, nongeneralized, emotional form of knowledge." (Hoy & Miskel, 1996, p. 18) According to Hoy & Miskel, under deconstructionism, "no interpretation is correct, but rather there are multiple interpretations. For post-modernists, the world consists of plural constructions and diverse realities. Post-modernists are anti-foundational; that is, they contend that questions of fact, correctness, validity, and clarity can neither be posed nor answered by science." (p. 18) Under Deweyism, it is illegitimate to inculcate into the child the adult’s world view - the child is left to construct his own reality. In reading instruction based on whole language, the teacher refuses to dictate to the child how he should go about reading, instead treating every and any approach as a legitimate "reading strategy."

Logan claims the phonetic alphabet led to the development of monotheism, abstract science, and deductive logic, as well as analysis, rationality, and classification. For sixty years and more our educational system has de-emphasized the phonetic alphabet in learning to read. The reading instruction intelligentsia in our universities have little appreciation for the logic of our phonetic alphabet, instead seeing written English as a mess, whose phonics rules are of little use in teaching children to read. Many of our children now go through school with only a tenuous grasp of the alphabetic principle. The result is a lessening familiarity with mainstays of Western Culture, previously absorbed through phonics-based reading, such as abstraction, analysis, rationality, and classification "which form the essence of the alphabet effect and the basis for Western abstract scientific and logical thinking." (Logan, 1986, p. 21)

This leaves our children and our society fertile ground for the bias against logical empiricism, and the inclination towards "a highly personal individual, non-generalized, emotional form of knowledge" (Hoy & Miskel, 1996, p. 18) which forms the basis for deconstructionism and post-modernism, which in turn accelerate rejection of Christianity as the theological, philosophical, ethical, and moral foundation of our culture and society.

This deconstruction of Christian culture leaves us exposed to the aggressive critical theorists and radical feminists who seek to deconstruct Christian patriarchy and reformulate our society and culture, with a view to imposing on us through the modern nation state their views of human emancipation, whether we like it or not.

Flesch, R. (1955). Why johnny can't read - And what you can do about it. New York: HarperCollins.

Flesch, R. (1981). Why johnny still can't read - A new look at the scandal of our schools. New York: HarperCollins.

Hoy, W.K. & Miskel, C.G. (1996). Educational administration: Theory, research, and practice. (5th Ed.). New York: McGraw - Hill, Inc.

Hutchins, Robert M. (1953). The conflict in education in a democratic society. New York: Harper & Brothers.

Logan, R.K. (1986). The alphabet effect: The impact of the phonetic alphabet on the development of Western Civilization. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Mathews, M.M. (1966). Teaching to Read, Historically Considered. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

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