Discernment-Ministries Inc.

Whole Language: Deconstruction in the Primary School

By Samuel L. Blumenfeld, posted with permission.

Excerpted from The Whole Language/OBE Fraud,
(Boise, Idaho: The Paradigm Company, 1995), Chap. 14, pp. 149-166.

[Note: Discernment Ministries does not necessarily agree with the political and/or Reconstructionist beliefs of Sam Blumenfeld, but we do highly recommend his writings on phonics and literacy. An excellent curriculum for teaching phonics to children or illiterate adults is Sam's Alpha-Phonics, which is also quite inexpensive].

The ultimate goal of the whole language movement'described by its promoters as 'nothing short of a grass-roots revolution in education''is the replacement of our biblically based Christian civilization by a world pagan, socialist system. This may sound like an extreme statement, but is is clearly the unadorned truth if one examines the importance of whole language as a socio-political weapon in the cultural war between humanism and Christianity. It certainly fits in nicely with the Gramscian strategy for an anti-Christian cultural revolution.

Perhaps the silliest anti-Biblical statement to be found in the Whole Language Catalog is a quotation from James Moffett's book, Storm in the Mountains: A Case Study of Censorship, Conflict, and Consciousness. Mr. Moffett writes (p. 71):

'God believes in the beauty of phonics' means that those who see themselves as God's spokespeople prefer phonics, precisely, I think, because it shuts out content by focusing the child on particles of language too small to have any meaning. In other words, what phonics really amounts to for those who are sure they have a corner on God's mind but are very unsure of being able to hold their children's minds is another way to censor books (unconsciously, of course) by nipping literacy itself in the bud.

Have you ever read anything quite as ridiculous as that? In the first place, phonics permits a child to become an independent reader, so that he can read anything he wants. In our world of bookstores and public libraries there is no way that any parent can censor a child's reading forever. Phonics does not 'shut out content' by focusing the child on letter sounds. Nor do children who are taught to read by intensive phonics spend the rest of their lives reading nonsense syllables. First of all, the phonics phrase in an intensive, systematic program is generally completed in six months to a year, after which the focus is indeed not only on content but also on spelling, vocabulary development, grammar, composition, literature, etc. It is not only God's people who prefer phonics, but any individual with common sense, for our writing system is an alphabetic one, and requires a phonetic method of instruction.

Mr. Moffett is considered 'a major foundational thinker of the whole language movement.' He had his baptism of fire in 1974 when one of his books, published by Houghton Mifflin, became the object of the famous Kanawha County, West Virginia, textbook protest by parents who objected to the anti-Christian content in public school reading materials. From that, Mr. Moffett has made the giant leap to the belief that phonics is a subtle form of censorship, when actually it is whole language that is a not-so-subtle form of censorship by denying children the ability to read the printed word with accuracy and precision.

But one must ask what do people like James Moffett believe in? If he is not a believer in the Bible, what does he believe in besides whole language? Is he a humanist, environmentalist, or eco-pagan? Is he into earth worship or New Age mysticism?

The eco-summit meeting in Rio de Janeiro in July 1992, where the political leaders of the world showed more admiration for Fidel Castro than for George Bush, is a sample of what is to come if the plans of the 'environmentalists''the new name for socialists'come to fruition. Green-theology prevailed at the summit where Senator Al Gore, who led the U.S. Senate delegation, called for a new spiritual relationship between man and earth. According to New American reporter William F. Jasper (7/13/92), who attended the summit:

A centerpiece of the Global Forum opening ceremony was the Viking ship Gaia, named for the Greek goddess of earth. At the culmination of that program, a group calling itself the 'Sacred Drums of the Earth' struck up a solemn cadence. The ceremony program said that the drummers would 'maintain a continuous heartbeat near the official site of the Earth Summit, as part of a ritual for the healing of our Earth to be felt by those who are deciding Earth's fate.' (p. 5)¹

At Rio, President Bush [Sr.], whether he knew it or not, represented the conservative, Christian resistance to the paganist forces in the environmentalist movement. The pagans know that the strongest center of resistance to their plans lies among believing Christians in the English-speaking world. If they can break that resistance, they will be able to bring about the new world, socialist, pagan order.

The easiest and simplest way to do this is to 'educate' Christian children to become pagans. Since humanists and pagans control the government education systems in all of the English-speaking countries, and since 85% of Christian parents send their children to these pagan schools, the job can be done in about two generations. The resisting remnant of Christians will be dealt with when the time comes.

Incidentally, the difference between humanists and pagans is that the latter practice pre-Biblical idolatry, while the former are atheists who have made science and reason their gods. But what both have in common is an abiding hatred of Biblical religion, particularly the orthodox Christian variety.

The centerpiece of the liberationist, paganizing curriculum in the primary school is whole language, which is based on the deconstructionist philosophy of language. What is 'deconstruction'? Webster's New World Dictionary (Third College Edition), published by Simon & Schuster, Inc., defines deconstruction as, 'a method of literary analysis originated in France in the mid-20^th century and based on a theory that, by the very nature of language and usage, no text can have a fixed, coherent meaning.'

And that's exactly how whole-language educators define the reading process. The authors of Whole Language: What's the Difference? (Heinemann, 1991) write:

From a whole language perspective, reading (and language use in general) is a process of generating hypotheses in a meaning-making transaction in a sociological context'. This view of reading implies that there is no single 'correct' meaning for a given text, only plausible meanings. (p. 19)²

Note the concept of reading as a 'process of generating hypotheses' or as a 'transactional process.' The process is totally subjective with the text providing some sort of mental stimulus. Obviously, this is a recipe for the destruction of literacy, not its improvement. For further clarification, the authors write:

Whole language represents a major shift in thinking about the reading process. Rather than viewing reading as 'getting the words,' whole language educators view reading as essentially a process of creating meanings'. It is a transaction, not an extraction of the meaning from print in the sense that the reader-created meanings are a fusion of what the reader brings and what the text offers.

'In a transactional model, words do not have static meanings. Rather, they have meaning potentials and the capacity to communicate multiple meanings. (p. 32)

Compare the above with what is said about deconstruction in the Academic American Encyclopedia, (Vol. 6, p. 76):

Deconstruction is a theory about language and literature that developed in the 1970s'. Its initial premises were first formulated by the French philosopher and critic Jacques Derrida, whose works converted a number of U.S. academics'.

What most characterizes deconstruction is its notion of textuality, a view of language as it exists not only in books, but in speech, in history, and in culture. For the deconstructionist, language constitutes everything. The world itself is 'text.' Language shapes humanity and creates human reality'. Yet, upon close examination, words seem to have no necessary connection with reality or with concepts or ideas.³

Note the strange contradiction: language creates human reality, but words have no necessary connection with reality. Whole language educators promote the same contradiction. Children are expected to 'read for meaning,' but are encouraged to invent any meaning they want. After all, when they speak of 'reader-created meanings,' what limits do they place on the reader's creativity? The article continues:

'Given the numerous hidden links of a text to its cultural and social intertext, the text's content and meaning are, essentially, indeterminate. Texts, therefore are unreadable, and the practice of interpretation may be defined as misreading.

[Derrida attacks] what he calls 'logocentrism,' the human habit of assigning truth to logos ' to spoken language, the voice of reason, the word of God. Derrida finds that logocentrism generates and depends upon a framework of two-term oppositions that are basic to Western thinking, such as being/nonbeing, thing/word, truth/lie, male/female. In the logocentric epistemological system the first term of each pair is privileged (TRUTH/lie, MALE/female). Derrida is critical of these hierarchical polarities, and seeks to take tradition apart by reversing their order and displacing , and thus transforming, each of the terms ' by putting them in slightly different positions within a word group, or by pursuing their etymology to extreme lengths, or by substituting words in other languages that look and sound alike'.

Deconstruction has been regularly attacked as childish philosophical skepticism and linguistic nihilism. Nevertheless, it became the leading literary critical school in the United States during the period following the Vietnam War.

Thus, deconstruction is basically an attack on the notion of absolute truth and literal comprehension of a written text. Western thinking, linear thinking is 'logocentric' in that it relies on the word methods of conveying truth. Critics of traditional teaching methods are keenly aware of the difference between the logocentric approach and the whole-language approach. In an article entitled, 'Political Philosophy and Reading Make a Danger Mix,' published in Education Week, Feb. 27, 1985, the authors wrote:

After spending six years observing the efforts of the self-styled 'New Right' to influence education throughout the country, we have found a pattern of activities that could, if some members of the New Right are successful, cause a very limited model for teaching reading to prevail in both public and private schools. The model is based on the belief that literal comprehension is the only goal of reading instruction. Because it trains children to reason in a very limited manner, it is a model that we believe could have serious political consequences in a country where the ability of citizenry to read and think critically is an essential determinant of democratic governance'.

'By attempting to control the kinds of materials and questions teachers and students may use; by limiting reading instruction to systematic phonics instruction, sound-symbol decoding, and literal comprehension; and by aiming its criticism at reading books' story lines in an effort to influence content, the New Right's philosophy runs counter to the research findings and theoretical perspectives of most noted reading authorities.⁴

Obviously, the authors of the above, in their rejection of the logocentric model of reading instruction and thinking, agree with the deconstructionists. The common enemy is clearly 'literal comprehension' because it represents a Biblical view of the word. An article on Derrida in Contemporary Authors (vol. 124, p. 112) states:

[D]econstruction emphasizes the reader's role in extracting meaning from texts and the impossibility of determining absolute meaning.⁵

Which is exactly what whole language teaches. In other words, the written word can be nullified by the reader at will. Frank Smith, our whole-language wonderboy, writes (Phi Delta Kappan, Feb. 1992, p. 438):

Authors don't mind if readers skip difficult or boring passages, and they have no temptation to bring a child to order every time attention wanders or a mistake is made. Authors give children control; they give them the power to read as they want rather than as a teacher expects.⁶

I don't know how many authors Smith has interviewed, but I would venture to guess that they want to be understood by their readers. Otherwise, why do they write and why do they choose their words so carefully? Apparently authors have something that readers want: information or an interesting story. But if the reader is to regard the author's work as linguistic putty to be molded by the reader, then there is not much point in creating works of literature with precise things to say.

When children are encouraged to 'take control' of an author's text, they will no doubt continue to do so as adults'if they bother to read at all. I doubt that Smith himself would approve of readers putting words into his mouth. In fact, we have been overly careful to quote Smith and other whole-language writers and state their positions as accurately as possible. We doubt that whole-language advocates of reading as a subjective process of creating meaning would want that concept applied to their own writings by, say, critics of whole language.

When all is said and done, the aim of the whole-language movement along with deconstructionism is simply to destroy individualism, capitalism, and religion or absolute truth. Individualism is undermined by the classroom emphasis on group work, cooperative learning, and peer dependency; capitalism is undermined by emphasizing collectivist activities; and religion is undermined by attacking the word, logos, the word of God as absolute truth. Religion is also undermined by what the teachers give the children to read: stories about the occult, witchcraft, death, and other depressing, nightmarish subjects.

In other words, if you want to change civilization you must change the way language is learned and used. For example, feminists have already changed our vocabulary with such words as 'chairperson,' 'Ms.,' 'sexism,' etc. Homosexuals have appropriated the word 'gay' and coined the word 'homophobia.' Words describing every facet of perverted sex are now commonly used in sex education classes to educate children about AIDS, and no value judgment is made about such practices except that they may be considered 'risky' and contrary to the doctrine of 'safe sex.' The result is that today's children acquire a vocabulary and concept of human behavior that would have been inconceivable forty years ago.

Also, the elimination of Biblical terms and concepts from general usage has given American culture a decidedly secular tone. Words like 'sin' and 'abstinence' are ridiculed as quaint and outdated, and prayerful references to Jesus Christ by professional football players interviewed by the media are met with embarrassment and a quick change of subject. Blasphemy is now commonplace, particularly among comedians and in motion pictures. The prevailing humanist culture shows no respect and little tolerance for Christianity. The inability of humanists to tolerate even the most insipid, watered-down, one-minute prayer at a high-school graduation is indicative of an intolerant, persecutive mindset. Obviously, the public school must be sealed tight against any intrusion of religion, for fear that it will interfere with the process of paganization that goes on for seven hours a day, five days a week, ten months a year, for twelve years.

One of the social scientists considered important in the development of whole-language philosophy is the British-born linguist Michael Halliday, Professor of Linguistics at Sydney University in Australia. In his book, Learning How to Mean: Explorations in the Development of Language, Halliday describes the phases a child goes through in learning to speak his own language. He views the entire process as a sociolinguistic one in which the child learns about his social culture as he learns language. He writes:

Early language development may be interpreted as the child's progressive mastery of a functional potential'. Here the concept of meaning, and of learning to mean, is in the last analysis interpreted in sociological terms, in the context of some chain of dependence such as: social order'transmission of the social order to the child'role of language in the transmission process'functions of language in relation to this role'meanings derived from these functions'. (p. 5)

Outside language, we turn to some kind of social theory'. Here the most obviously relevant work is that of Basil Bernstein, whose theory of social structure and social change embodies a concept of cultural transmission within which he has been able to identify a number of what he calls 'critical socializing contexts', types of situation involving the use of language which play a key part in the transmission of culture to the child'. The fact that in Bernstein's work language is the central factor in cultural transmission makes it likely that contexts which Bernstein recognizes as critical for cultural transmission will also be critical in the language learning process. (p. 18)⁷

The above provides an important clue as to why whole language educators insist that children learn to read the same way they learn to speak. They go through similar sociolinguistic phases without any need for formal education. Frank Smith, whose writings are gospel to whole-language educators, believes, as John Dewey did, that 'learning is social, not solitary.' And, of course, if your aim is to change the culture, then this sociolinguistic doctrine must be applied to reading instruction. Smith writes in the same Kappan article already cited (p. 432):

The original philosophy of whole language, even before it acquired the label, had nothing to do with methods, materials, or techniques. There was no attempt to tell teachers what they should do to teach children to read; rather, the aim was to tell teachers what their attitudes should be. The basis of the philosophy was respect'respect for language (which should be natural and 'authentic,' not contrived and fragmented) and respect for learners (who should be engaged in meaningful and productive activities, not in pointless drills and rote memorization). The philosophy has attracted the enthusiastic support of scores of thousands of teachers. It is without doubt the most vital movement in education today, and its political and social influence has been enormous.⁸

In summing up the phases a child goes through in learning to speak his mother tongue, Halliday writes:

We started with the hypothesis that learning the mother tongue consists of mastering certain basic functions of language and in developing a meaning potential in respect of each'. It is presumed that these functions are universals of human culture, and it is not unreasonable to think of them as the starting point not only for linguistic ontogeny but also for the evolution of the linguistic system. (p. 33)⁹

In other words, the child, in learning to speak his own language, goes through the same process that the human race did in its evolutionary development of speech. Of course, if you believe the Bible then you believe that Adam was created with a fully developed power of speech and could converse with God in the Garden of Eden. As we read in the Gospel of St. John, 'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.' The absolute Word, or Logos, is the very foundation of Biblical religion. The deconstructionists and whole language advocates know that the future of Christianity depends on this belief in the absolute Word. By destroying this concept in the minds of children, the atheists and pagans can finally destroy Christianity as a cultural and spiritual force.

Another part of the overall paganist plan is to sexualize the children sufficiently so that they will find themselves in emotional conflict with Christian doctrines opposed to premarital, recreational sex. Day in and day out, the entire humanist-hedonist culture wages a relentless campaign in the media to sexualize Americans, to produce sexual addiction to the point that Americans will reject the self-restraining standards of orthodox Christianity. This is done by creating 'cognitive dissonance,' a conflict between the children's prematurely aroused sexual desires and their family religion. In trying to resolve the conflict, which is painful and stressful, the children will choose the humanist moral philosophy with its sexually permissive creed and reject the values of their families. In short, the purpose of creating cognitive dissonance is to enable the child get rid of his Christian conscience.

Paganism, as we know from history, is associated with perverted sexual practices, phallic worship, temple orgies, etc. Thus, the sexualization of American children is a needed ingredient for the creation of a pagan culture. When you consider that children will now be given sex education in kindergarten as part of the AIDS prevention program, and at the same time will be taught that there is no absolute Word, and that the ultimate purpose in life is social and sexual intercourse, we can expect the rising generation to be the most licentious and depraved in American history.

Pagan societies are characterized by idolatry, occultism, sexual promiscuity, flagrant homosexuality, violence, murder, human sacrifice, incest, infanticide, child abuse, widespread disease, despotism, political instability, a low level of productivity, and a wide disparity between the very rich and the very poor with few in the middle.

The key to paganizing America is by controlling how children learn language, for as Halliday writes,' language comes to occupy the central role in the processes of social learning.' He states further:

A child who is learning his mother tongue is learning how to mean. As he builds up his own meaning potential in language, he is constructing for himself a social semiotic [a system of abstract signs and symbols]. Since language develops as the expression of the social semiotic it serves at the same time as the means of transmitting it, and also of constantly modifying and reshaping it, as the child takes over the culture, the received system of meanings in which he is learning to share. (p. 60)

In this way a child, in the act of learning language, is also learning the culture through language. The semantic system which he is constructing becomes the primary mode of transmission of the culture. (p. 66)¹⁰

What all of this means is that those who control the teaching of language to children can control the future of our culture. Since, in this country, we are in a cultural war of increasing intensity between Christians and humanists (i.e., socialists, atheists, pagans, new agers, etc.), it is the height of folly for Christians to put their children in schools controlled by humanists. Obviously many of these children, subjected to twelve yeas of humanist indoctrination, will forsake their Christian heritage and become the all-American pragmatic pagan for whom a taste in perversion will simply mean living according to an alternative lifestyle.

Thus, the full implications of the whole-language movement cannot be appreciated or understood until we recognize that the cultural war we are in is being waged with an intensity we have never seen before in this country. That its philosophical roots can be traced to the nihilist depths of deconstruction should not surprise us since the academic world has become the spawning ground of every anti-Biblical idea that the human mind can conceive of. Philosophical nihilism in high places preceded the French and Russian revolutions, both of which were unbelievably bloody and cruel.

But not only do the whole-language deconstructionist reject the concept of the absolute word'the logos'but they reject the very system of logical thinking that made Western civilization possible. They not only reject the Bible, they reject Aristotle's A is A. Their new formula is A can be anything you want it to be, which can only be the basis of a pre-literate or non-literate culture in which subjectivism, emotion and superstition prevail as the means of knowing.

That, of course, is simply a form of insanity'the inability not only to deal with objective reality but to recognize and admit that it exists. A mind so inclined is a mind that will leads its owner to destruction.

But I suspect that the leaders of the whole-language movement know all of this. They have not suspended their own ability to deal with objective reality in ways beneficial to themselves. They know how to collect their paychecks, get government grants, arrange seminars, buy airline tickets, rent cars, hire lawyers, read publishers' contracts as they are actually written. After all, in contract disputes, the word is all important. These men and women are no fools even thought their ideas are foolish. They are simply conmen and charlatans who fancy themselves as latter-day utopians. The mischief they spread harms millions of children and perverts our culture.

How does whole-language deconstruction translate itself into classroom practice? First, the educators deconstruct our alphabetic system. That is, the nature of our alphabetic system is ridiculed and its benefits kept from students. And so the teaching of phonics is strongly discouraged. Frank Smith writes in Reading Without Nonsense (p. 129):

Children do not need a mastery of phonics in order to identify words that they have not met in print before. The very complexity and unreliability of the 166 rules and scores of exceptions make it remarkable that anyone should think that the inability to use phonics explains 'Why Johnny still can't read.' Once a child discovers what a word is in a meaningful context, learning to recognize it on another occasion is as simple as learning to recognize a face on a second occasion, and does not need phonics. Discovering what a word is in the first place is usually most efficiently accomplished by asking someone, listening to someone else read the word, or using context to provide a substantial clue.¹¹

On page 53 of the same book, Smith writes:

The spelling-to-sound correspondences of English are so confusing that in my judgment children who believe they can read unfamiliar words just by 'blending' or 'sounding' them out are likely to develop into disabled readers, the type of secondary students who are condemned for being 'functionally illiterate' because they do exactly what they have been taught and try to read by putting together the sounds of letters.

Besides, I think it would be difficult to exaggerate the complexity and unreliability of phonics. To take just one very simple example, how are the letters ho pronounced? Not in a trick situation, as in the middle of a word like shop, but when ho are the first two letters of a word? Here are eleven common words in each of which the initial ho has a different pronunciation ' hot, hope, hook, hoot, house, hoist, horse, horizon, honey, hour, honest. Can anyone really believe that a child could learn to identify these words by sounding out these letters?

Obviously, Smith doesn't know how intensive phonics is taught. Children are taught the letter sounds in their spelling families. Thus, the child knows how to pronounce hot because it rhymes with cot, dot, pot. He knows how to pronounce hope because it rhymes with cope, mope, rope. He knows how to pronounce hook because it is the same spelling family as book, cook, look. He knows how to pronounce all of these words not because they begin with ho but because he knows their spelling families. As for shop, after the child has been taught the sound the consonant digraph sh stands for, he can decode any number of words beginning with sh: ship, sham, shell, shut, etc. If Smith had ever taught intensive phonics he'd know that there are millions of children who have no problem learning how to read these words on the basis of their letters.

What Smith doesn't say in his book is that an alphabetic writing system is a phonetic system that requires the reader to develop a phonetic reflex, that is, an automatic association between letters and sounds. And that phonetic reflex can only be acquired by rote memorization so that the child doesn't have to think about the sounds the letters stand for. Our alphabetic system is 85% regular with 95 percent of the irregularities consisting of slight variations in vowel pronunciation.

And the reason why children have little difficulty mastering the irregular words is because their pronunciations are obvious. For example, even though the word was is in the as, has spelling family, a child knows it is pronounced wuz simply because waz is not a word and doesn't make sense. The spoken word provides the correct pronunciation. It is the same with the word have, which is pronounced hav, even though it is in the same spelling family as cave, gave, save. But in a word like behave, the pronunciation of h-a-v-e is perfectly regular.

The important characteristic of an alphabetic writing system is that it is a phonetic representation of the spoken language. Meaning is derived when the written letters are articulated in speech or internally vocalized or subvocalized by the reader. Alphabetically written words are not ideographs or hieroglyphics. They are graphic representations of speech. Whole-language theorists reject this simple fact. Smith writes in Understanding Reading (p. 27):

Written language does not require decoding to sound in order to be comprehended; the manner in which we bring meaning to print is just as direct as the manner in which we understand all speech. Language comprehension is the same for all surface structures.¹²

In other words, we should all read as if we were deaf and that printed words are little pictures conveying meaning directly. But this is really impossible to do, for if we do not relate the printed word to its spoken equivalent then we cannot think, for the thought process'as opposed to daydreaming'is carried out with language, not a series of still pictures. In other words, whole-language educators see no difference between the word Men and the little picture of a man that appears on restroom doors in airports. To whole-language educators, both are little pictures. The authors of Whole Language: What's the Difference? Write (p. 9):

Oral language, written language, sign language'each of these is a system of linguistic conventions for creating meanings. That means none is 'the basis' for the other; none is a secondary representation of the other.¹³

Unfortunately, saying it doesn't make it so. Alphabetic writing is a representation of the spoken equivalent. That's what made alphabetic writing superior to ideographic writing. For educators not to know this is tantamount to an architect not knowing how to read blueprints, or a concert pianist not knowing how to read music. In fact, alphabetic writing is the same as musical notation in that both forms of writing stand for sounds. The written notes stand for musical sounds. The alphabetically written words stand for their articulated equivalents in speech.

Even Vygotsky understood this quite well. In his book, Thought and Language, published in 1934, he wrote:

Writing' requires deliberate analytical action on the part of the child. In speaking, he is hardly conscious of the sounds he pronounces and quite unconscious of the mental operations he performs. In writing, he must take cognizance of the sound structure of each word, dissect it, reproduce it in alphabetical symbols, which he must have studied and memorized before. In the same deliberate way, he must put words in a certain sequence to form a sentence. Written language demands conscious work because its relationship to inner speech is different from that of oral speech'.

Inner speech is condensed, abbreviated speech. Written speech is deployed to its fullest extent, even more complete than oral speech'. The change from maximally compact inner speech to maximally detailed written speech requires what might be called deliberate semantics ' deliberate structuring of the web of meaning'.

The opinion has even been voiced that school instruction in grammar could be dispensed with. We can only reply that our analysis clearly showed the study of grammar to be of paramount importance for the mental development of the child'.

Just as the child realizes for the first time in learning to write that the word Moscow consists of the sounds m-o-s-k-o-w and learns to pronounce each one separately, he also learns to construct sentences, to do consciously what he has been doing unconsciously in speaking. Grammar and writing help the child to rise to a higher level of speech development. (pp. 98-101)¹⁴

In short, Vygotsky's conception of primary education is much closer to our traditional view of the three Rs than to anything presently advocated by our progressive educators. In other words, whole-language educators are perpetrating a fraud. They are telling parents that whole language is a new and better way of teaching children to read when, in reality, it is nothing of the sort. For all intents and purposes, whole language is a way of preventing children from becoming fluent, accurate phonetic readers. It is a new way of creating reading disability, a new way of creating academic confusion and learning frustration, a new way of crippling the children's linguistic development. Whole-language teachers may think they are doing a wonderful job in their first-grade classes. After all, they don't have to pick up the pieces in the grades that come after.

Endnotes:

1.        William F. Jasper, 'Eco '92: Launching Pad for International Global Goverance,' The New American, Vol. 8, No. 14, July 13, 1992, p. 5.

2.        Carole Edelsky, et al, op. cit., pp. 19, 32.

3.        Academic American Encyclopedia (Danbury, CT: Grolier, 1990), Vol. 6, p. 122.

4.        Dianne Sirna Mancus and Curtis K. Carlson, 'Political Philosophy and Reading Make a Dangerous Mix,' Education Week, Feb. 27, 1985, p. 29.

5.        Contemporary Authors (Detroit, MI: Gale Research, Inc., 1988), Vol. 123, p. 112.

6.        Frank Smith, 'Learning to Read: The Never-Ending Debate,' Phi Delta Kappan, Feb. 1992, p. 438.

7.        Michael Halliday, Learning How to Mean: Explorations in the Development of Language (London: Edward Arnold, Publishers, Ltd., 1975), pp. 5, 18.

8.        Frank Smith, Phi Delta Kappan, Feb. 1992, p. 432.

9.        Michael Halliday, op. cit., p. 33.

10.     Ibid, pp. 60, 66.

11.     Frank Smith, Reading Without Nonsense, op cit., pp. 53, 129.

12.     Frank Smith, Understanding Reading, op. cit., p. 27.

13.     Carole Edelsky, et al, op. cit., p. 9.

14.     L.S. Vygotsky, Thought and Language (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1962), pp. 98-101.

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