"Teaching is pointless..."

The arguments of Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff in the book Einstein Never Used Flash Cards, and BrillBaby's response:

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff:

[Whole word reading] is simply memorization and has little merit beyond the performance.

BrillBaby's response:

The authors draw the above conclusion after describing a scene in which a toddler who can read is brought by his mother to see the neighborhood psychologist (and one of the authors), Kathy Hirsh-Pasek. The child reads a set of words shown to him by his mother, but when Hirsh-Pasek asks him to read some different words, he becomes flustered and flees. Conclude the authors, "He had learned how to memorize words, perhaps from their shape… but he had not really learned to read."

Critics of early reading tend to pit whole word reading ("bad") against phonics-based reading ("good"). Hearing their arguments, you would be forgiven for thinking it's a case of either-or. In reality, almost all children learn to read by a combination of the whole word and phonics-based approaches. Whole word reading is easier, so most children learn their first words by this method, before they know the sounds that the letters make. Many kindergarten and lower-grade-school teachers teach some words by sight before starting on phonics.

If children begin reading by the whole word method at what is considered a normal age, no one criticizes them. But some people find it unsettling, even "wrong," for a very young child to be reading - and so they attack the method in order to prove that the child isn't "really" reading.

Whole word reading is just the first rung on the ladder of learning to read - as we can see from an analogy drawn by another critic of early learning, David Elkind. Elkind compares reading whole words to understanding the concept of nominal numbers (numbers as names) - which is the first rung of the ladder in learning math. Likewise, he compares reading phonetically (sounding out words) to understanding the concept of ordinal numbers (numbers as part of a sequence), and reading phonemically (recognizing that letters can be pronounced differently depending on context) to understanding the concept of interval numbers (numbers as abstract concepts, divorced from particular objects).

There comes a point at which reading cannot progress any further without phonics - because there are just too many words to rely on memory alone. Children must move on to phonetic reading followed by phonemic reading in order to become successful readers. But just as we do not criticize a child who reads phonetically but has not graduated to the phonemic level, it seems uncharitable, to say the least, to pour scorn on the abilities of a toddler who simply has not graduated from whole word reading to phonetic reading. (Aren't the critics of early learning always telling us that education isn't a race?)

Amazingly, babies taught to read using the whole word method usually begin figuring out the rules of phonics for themselves - just as babies learning their native language figure out the rules of grammar without being taught them. At the same time, to facilitate the process, we recommend teaching children phonics as soon as they are ready to start reading books.

Some critics of early reading worry that children taught by the whole word method will not know to read a word from left to right. However, both Robert Titzer's Your Baby Can Read! DVDs and the Little Reader Learning System from BrillKids include a directional arrow to teach just this. In addition, we recommend pointing to every syllable of every word in the books you read to your child. Teaching the direction of reading in this way greatly assists children in deducing some basic rules of phonics.