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While prepping for an upcoming talk about content production tools, I've been digging into the history of early childhood literacy education, with a particular focus on the "Reading Wars" of the 80s and 90s.

Traditional "skills-based" education, dating back to the 1600s (!!!!!!) relied heavily on phonics: teach a kid the sounds that each letter of the alphabet corresponds to, allowing them to "sound out" any written word. Voila! Their existing spoken vocabulary is linked to written words.

@eaton
My kid didn't really learn phonics, certainly didn't drill them in school. I don't know how he ever learned to spell anything.

Katherine Senzee

@KidOrnery @eaton A few kids pick up reading naturally, just by being read to. Other kids don't need full-on phonics drilling: they get taught the basic idea that, say, F makes a ffff sound, and they figure out how to apply it. It's the kids who struggle with reading who really need the phonics drills, so it's painfully ironic that those are precisely the kids who get put into Reading Recovery–type programs.

@ksenzee Yyyyyyyup. It's a complex space, and I think the worst outcome is for folks to smugly condemn “academics" for abandoning "the tried and true" when most of this stuff emerged out of earnest attempts to address places where the "tried and true" wasn't working well