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Current promoters of these failed ideas are Carole Adelsky, Bess Altwerger, and Barbara Flores. They wrote in their book Whole Language: What’s the Difference?:
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 meaning from print, in the sense that the reader-created meanings are a fusion of what the reader brings and what the text offers.
Whole Language advocate Julia Palmer, then President of the American Reading Council, wrote in a November 28, 1986 article in The Washington Post that it is acceptable if a young child reads the word “house” for “home,” or substitutes “pony” for a “horse.”
She said:
It's not very serious because she understands the meaning. Accuracy is not the name of the game.
Donald Potter, an educator in Odessa, Texas wrote to Blumenfeld and Newman to let them know of the disaster the whole language method has brought to the classroom. He said:
One of the cardinal signs of whole-language instruction is the confusion of “a” and “the.” I know they look totally different, but the kids continually confuse them. The sentence will always make sense, even though they have read the wrong word.
Those who engineered this shift promised an educational boon. What we received was a cultural dark age. Just as the leftists promise a Marxist utopia but deliver, every time, a Hell on earth!
The legislature appears poised to
return Oklahoma to the robust
education our forefathers knew.
The McGuffey Readers were exceptionally popular in America and sold about 120 million copies between 1836 and 1960. This placed the readers sales in the same category as the Bible.
Since 1961, they have continued
to sell 30,000 copies a year!
The McGuffey Rider was a phonics-based reading system.
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