Not the Right Kind of Provocation - Freddie deBoer

Helen Lewis dives into the reading wars for The Atlantic. You are likely already aware of this controversy, but if you aren’t, the basic story is that an earlier way to teach reading, phonics, is now considered more effective than a later method that became widespread, sometimes called whole language. This has led to all sorts of recriminations, which get laundered through the typical partisan lens. And the controversy has of course invited the kind of misguided hyperventilating about how we’re going to fix/disrupt/revolutionize schooling and education, close the achievement gaps or whatever, which is odd considering that many thousands of schools have taught reading using phonics and produced the same (normal) distributions of student ability that cause the endless gnashing of teeth about our supposedly-failing schools.

The piece is fine, fine enough; the consideration of how phonics has become a culture war football - whole language learning is woke, somehow - is particularly useful, if depressing. But Lewis’s article is also an indication of how, with education, our media is still clinging to an incredibly narrow script. We’re living in a period with a large and ever-growing branch of the media that’s willing to reconsider dominant narratives - sometimes intelligently, often not. Call it heterodox media or outsider media or whatever you want. Lewis has become a part of that wing of media, albeit on the more staid and traditionalist side; that The Atlantic, of all magazines, has cultivated a reputation recently as a heterodox-adjacent publication says curious things about modern media. (In particular, about how to stay alive financially in modern media.) Yet despite this friendliness with the contrarian side of the industry, the piece reflects the same stultifying conformity that absolutely dominates education coverage, maintains the same sclerotic attachment to the Official Dogma, refuses to ask the obvious and essential questions that underlie the phonics controversy. And yet nothing could be more valuable for our country than for a high-profile publication like The Atlantic to break with our broken consensus.

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