Another inane educational concept–WORD ATTACK SKILLS

This essay discusses a really stupid idea.

Words are pretty simple to understand if one thinks of them signifying something that has a meaning and must be spelled a certain way. Learning the sounds of letters and words makes symbolic language correspond to verbal language.

All this word attach nonsense is a way to deemphasize phonics.

Then they are given words to site memorize in the look see methods, which limits the vocabulary but produces good little illiterates.

My father, a physician, went wild one day when he asked one of my brothers, who was in 2nd grade, to read the word on a stop sign, and he couldn’t because he couldn’t do the s sound, the t sound, the o sound, or the p sound–he hadn’t been taught to memorize stop yet. Needless to say, that brother along with his brother who was in 1st grade at the time…