Government policy to force strong readers in schools to learn phonics

Government policy to force strong readers in schools to learn phonics is 'a form of abuse', claims leading educator

Credit: The Independent

Children who are fluent readers are being damaged by the Government’s insistence on using synthetic phonics in the classroom, a leading academic warns today.

Dr Andrew Davis, from Durham University’s School of Education, argues that the insistence on being taught to read through phonics is tantamount to “a form of abuse”.

In a pamphlet to be launched tomorrow night, he will claim rival camps in the debate over how to teach children to read are acting like “religious fundamentalists”. The evidence that phonics or any other prescriptive method for teaching children to read is fundamentally flawed, he says.

Able readers, he argues, are likely to be put off by the Government’s requirement that they read books specially written only to feature words for which they have been taught through phonics in class - rather than a wider range of books which they might find more interesting.

“To subject either the fully fledged readers or those who are well on their way to a rigid diet of intensive phonics is an affront to their emerging identities as persons,” he says in the pamphlet - to be published by the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain.

“To require this of students who have already gained some maturity in the rich and nourishing human activity of reading is almost a form of abuse.”  Read more >>

Source: The Independent