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Andrews UK - Mona McNee

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211 pages

English

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By the late 1980s half the nation's children were receiving eleven years of progressivist schooling that failed to give them even the elementary basis of education that was completed by the age of seven in earlier days. This great reading disaster was caused by the 'look-say' method of teaching, which presented whole words not individual letters. This book explains the causes and provides the solution to this problem.In 2006, the Secretary of State for Education and Skills has ordered schools to use the phonic method but there seems little evidence that its implications are properly understood or that any serious re-training programme for teachers is being put in place. The authors believe their explanations and recommendations in this book are thus needed just as much as ever.

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Publié par	Andrews UK
Date de parution	20 février 2012
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781845403829
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0674€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Title Page
THE GREAT READING DISASTER
Reclaiming Our Educational Birthright
Mona McNee & Alice Coleman

Copyright Page
Copyright © Mona McNee & Alice Coleman, 2007
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism and discussion.
Originally published in the UK by Imprint Academic
PO Box 200, Exeter EX5 5YX, UK
Originally published in the USA by Imprint Academic
Philosophy Documentation Center
PO Box 7147, Charlottesville, VA 22906-7147, USA
Digital version converted and published in 2012 by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com

Epigraph
Never must we despair. Never must we give in, but we must face facts and draw true conclusions from them.
Winston Churchill, House of Commons, 1935.

Acknowledgements
First, we acknowledge each other. We have worked closely together and now regard ourselves as equal partners in the authorship of the book. We both recognise that it would not have come to fruition without the other’s contribution. But its existence also depends on many others. We owe a great debt to all those who kept the flame of learning alight during the dark decades, sometimes at the expense of losing their jobs. They are the “few” in the Educational Battle of Britain but still too many to list in full here. Their importance will be apparent from our mention of their writings and actions in the course of the book. Some, however, must be singled out for special acknowledgement.
Dr. Joyce Morris has been fighting the good fight longer than any of us. A truly scientific research worker, she showed, over half a century ago, the dire effect of the decline in phonics teaching and has been unflagging in her subsequent defence of effective English teaching in our schools. She has been honoured on both sides of the Atlantic.
John Daniels and Hunter Diack were authors of the 1954 Royal Road Readers, which provided a phonics lifeline during the early decades of the great whole-word tsunami and armed Mona McNee for her career in remedial teaching.
Sue Lloyd’s records show how the initial teaching alphabet (i.t.a.) gave slightly above average results when used with the whole-word method but became quite outstanding when used with phonics. After Progressivism suppressed i.t.a., she devised a version using the ordinary alphabet and worked with the publisher Chris Jolly to spread the phonic message both in Britain and abroad.
Two educational psychologists are Martin Turner, who courageously publicised the disaster of the “real books” method, in Croydon and then across the country, being sacked for his honesty, and later supported phonics in the Dyslexia Institute, and Marlynne Grant, who persuaded a Gloucestershire school to adopt phonics and its excellent standards.
Dr. David Harland, a former Senior Schools Medical Officer in Norfolk, devoted much time to testing children and helped Mona McNee towards her understanding of dyslexia.
Bonnie Macmillan has pursued research in depth, exposing the myth that mixed reading methods are beneficial. She assembled 500 research reports as a basis for her Why Schoolchildren Can’t Read, and explained the brain structures that make boys four times as prone to dyslexic illiteracy as girls in her Why Boys are Different.
Baroness Caroline Cox and John Marks ran a valuable information exchange group that enabled supporters of better education from all over the country to meet each other in the House of Lords. Together they produced evidence that comprehensive schools had a dumbing-down effect. John Marks has also impeccably investigated other important aspects of education and has been a leading light in the Campaign for Real Education (CRE).
Debbie Hepplewhite took on editing the Reading Reform Foundation’s Newsletter when Mona McNee, its founder, felt it needed new voices, and devoted much time and energy to the RRF’s campaign. Jennifer Chew, the present editor, is active within both the RRF and the CRE. As a sixth-form teacher, she carried out incisive research into poor spelling. She is gentle but persistent and extremely well-informed - always ready to answer our questions.
Joyce Watson and Rhona Johnston performed a signal service with their superb Clackmannan research project. They confirmed the many earlier proofs of phonics’ superiority in a masterly way that created a public stir and, we hope, bodes well for the future.
Last but not least - quite the reverse - Nick Seaton, who set up the Campaign for Real Education and enthused its members to form an energetic campaigning body with a wide remit of constructive activities. This is now the leading fount of practical efforts to rid education of the dictatorial stranglehold of Progressivism.
What these people have in common is their motivation to ensure that every child should be able to read, and their resistance to all the pressures to accept fashionable but counterproductive non-phonic ideas.
Alice Coleman
Mona McNee

Preface
This book has had a long gestation period. It was initiated by Mona McNee in the late 1980s after her success in teaching backward children to read fluently had shown her that their problems had been artificially created in school by the use of Progressivist methods.
One study revealed that Progressivism left 33% of school leavers illiterate and a further 17% able to read only so precariously that by the time they were 20 they had not read a single book in the preceding year. Half the nation’s children were being subjected to eleven years of schooling that failed to give them even the elementary basis of education that was completed by the age of seven in pre-Progressivist days. This great reading disaster was caused by the look-say method of teaching, which presented whole words and not individual letters.
Mona McNee therefore embarked upon a campaign to restore the successful phonics method that taught letters and their sounds, and how to build them up into words. If it again became the norm, as it was before World War II, the illiteracy rate would drop back to 1%, as it was then. The damage to our children’s intellects, and especially those of dyslexics, is completely unnecessary.
She was crusading for what should have been self-evident but everywhere she met stonewalls of resistance. She realised that the faulty teaching techniques had achieved their dominance through concerted pressure by what Baroness Blatch later called the “Progressive Mafia”. Its diktat had taken over every corner of state schooling, including educational publishers. It was perfectly possible to publish fanciful accounts of meeting aliens in UFOs but a proven practical way to reverse our educational decline was considered too fanciful even to contemplate, and the first draft of this book was repeatedly rejected.
Mona McNee suspected (wrongly) that her literary skill might be at fault and handed her typescript to Alice Coleman to edit. The result was a new structure and more background explanation of the issues at stake. The partnership coincided with the Conservative government’s launch of the National Curriculum and national testing, and for a while we hoped that these would bring a dénouement that would make this book a historical record instead of an active campaign.
It was not to be. The powerful Progressivist Mafia fought back, mostly in a subterranean way but still masquerading as the road to improvement. Labour’s National Literacy Strategy typifies its pious promises and its failure to deliver. Our observations of such ploys have been incorporated into Part III of this book, entirely as an addition to its original concept. Several battles have been won by the supporters of high standards but the war is far from being over and we hope that this book will provide further ammunition.
Both authors regret being robbed of the true meaning of the word “progressive” since it was commandeered by “progressive education” and used to cast a rosy glow over what has really been a regressive decline. The whole progressive ideology is an “ism” and so, in this book, we write of “Progressivism” and “Progressivists” with a capital “P”, in the hope that the adjective “progressive” can be reclaimed for its traditional use.
The Progressivist mystique alleges that there is a profound professional complexity in the teaching of reading. There is not. The claim is only a cover-up to excuse Progressivism’s high failure rate and Part IV of this book will explain a straightforward alternative. This is not merely a return to traditional phonics, excellent though that was, but is better described as “traditional-plus”. Mona McNee’s reading scheme, Step by Step, adds many refinements to simplify and accelerate the process of becoming a reader. It was originally intended to help strugglers damaged by Progressivist teaching but its simplification has made it easy for parents to teach their three- and four-year-olds to read and thus “school-proof” them before they are exposed to school muddlement and possibly handicapped by lifelong illiteracy.
Because Progressivist publishers rejected the phonics-based Step by Step, Mona McNee printed it privately and relied on the recommendations of satisfied users to sell it. Their enthusiasm proved very positive. Recently, a publisher did take it on but printed only 2000 copies and sold them in a desultory way, claiming there was no demand. Shortly after this, Step by Step was mentioned by John Clare, the Education Editor of the Daily Telegraph, and nearly 700 more orders poured in. Sales have reached almost 21,000 copies and now, interestingly, the proportion of children able to read before starting school has risen to 2