Phonics in the Current American Educational System

To understand the place of phonics in the current American educational system, one must first come to a greater understanding of the way that educational policy and curricula come about. Goals in American education have change dramatically over the years. That rate of change seems to have increased in recent years, with what is most desirable for American schoolchildren to learn seeming to shift dramatically from one school year to the next.

The reason for these changes stems in some small part from the fact that new research in education points up new ways to teach children and so schools and teachers adapt themselves to what is currently believed to be the most efficient way to convey information to students. But a far greater influence on the way that any subject matter is taught is the kind of person that the schools aim to produce upon graduation, a point eloquently argued by Kliebard (1986, pp. ix-xi).

This aim has very little to do with the state of educational research or the capabilities of the schools themselves but results from far wider and deeper social and cultural goals. A society, for example, that is undergoing a significant amount of economic and cultural upheaval is likely to favor schools that call for a back-to-basics approach to teaching, an approach that might be expected to produce people with sufficient skills to support themselves in an uncertain economy as well as a belief in the importance of rules and order. Likewise a society that sees itself as

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it seems likely that either one of these or some variation on one of these will be in place during the next several decades. These ideologies are as follows: religious orthodoxy, in which teachers use what they consider to be God's message to define the aims and conditions of educational practice; rational humanism, which dictates that students be trained in reasoning; progressivism, in which education is designed to produce citizens that will help shape the world for the better; reconceptualism, which urges schools to pay attention to individual thought processes and to abandon a means-end mentality; and cognitive pluralism, which takes as its central tenet the fact that human beings are able to create and manipulate symbols. The current debate concerning phonics and whole language learning seem to fall somewhere between religious orthodoxy and progressivism, which seems an odd combination. But education - being, like war, politics by other means - is quite capable of welcoming strange bedfellows. The current debate combines the almost fanatical element of moral certainty (which is certainly similar to belief in a particular religious doctrine cited by Eisner in the religious orthodoxy curriculum) with a belief that it is impera

Category: Psychology - P