The Scientific Method in Education?

As a child in elementary school, I learned reading through the magic (to me) of phonics. This secret code to written language gave me the tools I needed to master any piece of text I came across. I taught my son to read the same way, and at the age the five he could tackle at the least the sound of the words in any writing he encountered, if not always the sense of those words.

Today's children don't often have that same pleasure. Sometime in the past twenty-five years, the principle of "whole-word" reading gained ascendancy and reading success scores have steadily eroded ever since. This teaching method requires the learned to grasp the meaning of words strictly from context and to memorize their spelling and meaning for future use. How does such a reader ever decipher or look up an unfamiliar word? Furthermore, how do such readers make sense of a statement like "f u cn rd ths, u cn gt a jb in crt rprtng"?

In this article on The Empire Page, author Onkar Ghate identifies the logical flaw in the thinking of the proponents of whole-word reading and argues that reading scores will never improve until educators abandon the approach completely.

I agree.