00:00:00.000Over the past few years, there's been a growing and somewhat uncomfortable realization in education.
00:00:06.320We may be facing a real decline in literacy among children, not just in isolated pockets, but across the entire system.
00:00:14.500Here in Canada, the picture is subtle but concerning.
00:00:17.880Reading scores have been gradually declining over time, and a significant portion of students, roughly 1 in 5, are not reaching basic levels of reading proficiency.
00:00:27.380That means many students are struggling with something as fundamental as understanding written information well enough to function effectively in everyday life.
00:00:38.000When a foundational skill like reading begins to erode, gradually it raises deeper questions about how we're teaching, how students are learning, and whether our assumptions about education still hold up.
00:00:51.280Well, when we expand the lens to the United States,
00:00:54.780the picture becomes sharper and more alarming.
00:00:58.520Recent data shows significant drops in reading scores
00:07:41.420And they reported, and this was a complaint from parents of children who were struggling to learn in the current school system.
00:07:52.460And the Ontario Human Rights Commission had to get involved because it had gotten so bad that children with dyslexia, with learning disabilities, marginalized kids, were not being taught properly how to read.
00:08:10.400Now, I went to the report and searched critical literacy and got zero results.
00:08:16.580So critical literacy was not brought up.
00:08:18.920Instead, what was brought up was something called balanced literacy.
00:08:42.920Balanced literacy emerged in the 1980s and 2000s as a dominant approach to many school systems.
00:08:47.920It was influenced by whole language theories, and this is the key, whole language methods of reading.
00:08:56.620So rather than sounding out words letter for letter to figure out what the word is, you're supposed to, I don't know exactly,
00:09:04.900but look at the word as a whole to recognize its meaning and how to read it, I guess.
00:09:09.800Interesting. So it focuses on reading authentic text, student choice, writing workshops, contextual guessing strategies, meaning making from text. This is a lot of claptrap, really. It's sort of, it sounds very holistic, but ultimately it's just not very effective.
00:09:30.360so this came out in the 1990s as supposed to be this this better alternative to phonics
00:09:34.520i guess or better alternative to um to teaching to teaching reading but ever since it's been
00:09:41.240implemented it's been abundantly clear that it's not an effective way to teach reading
00:09:49.160and the pushback on it has have we found ourselves back in the phonics realm with that age group
00:09:57.160well in Ontario yes so in Ontario after the after the report was made Ontario did actually
00:10:05.080put initiatives forward to focus on evidence-based
00:10:11.640literacy teaching particularly phonics but this has been an issue especially in Canada and the
00:10:18.600US the US has also switched over to balanced methods and there's been a lot of fights about
00:10:23.640getting phonics back into um into schooling kind of begs the question and i think it's good that
00:10:29.560we advance uh society through education i mean we'll do that with technology we'll do that with
00:10:35.960discovery and advancements um but i have to ask it it just seems to me and and you've been an
00:10:42.120educator um shouldn't we just leave some of the basics alone uh the basics being how to communicate
00:10:50.040how to write being able to frame it so that marginalized students or uh students with
00:10:58.580different challenges and learning to read and write have a margin against which we can measure
00:11:04.600it seemed like it worked very well for my generation and that sounds like an old guy
00:11:09.660thing to say yeah uh maybe there's better ways to teach it maybe there's better but the basics of
00:11:15.860things like phonics um you know creating sentence structure using um you know that kind of teaching
00:11:22.900method shouldn't that maybe just be left alone um well in this case it should have been left alone
00:11:29.060um you know of course you know i could understand why researchers educators would want to find new
00:11:35.380ways and even better ways of course teaching of teaching uh children how to read um if there are
00:11:41.460more effective ways but unfortunately not all new ideas are good ideas and this was not a good idea
00:11:47.140it seems and you know there there had the the human rights commission had to get involved
00:11:52.260you know at this point because they've been using this this um like theoretically unproven method
00:11:57.460for two decades that's a great point the education system would have been left to do this continue
00:12:04.100with this unless another branch of the government looking out for our human rights got involved yeah
00:12:11.460Yeah, it is, you know, it is outrageous. It's absolutely outrageous. I can't believe that, was it nearly 30 years? We've been using inferior methods to teach children how to read. And yeah, so, you know, in terms of, you know, what I would say to other parents, you know, who are in my same situation, it would be that, you know, you should check with your children's schooling and see if they are using evidence-based methods.
00:12:39.400And if not, insist that they do get it.
00:12:42.440And if they can't get phonics education, unfortunately, you may have to go, you know, outside the system.
00:12:51.200Hooked on Phonics still exists, and it exists for this reason.
00:15:32.000It's so funny because many universities that have big literature programs and also big math programs, their math skill set and the students skill set is enormous.
00:15:44.020And the literacy side of things, they fall off entirely.
00:15:47.260And where you have to blend in university, that's where they get the most turbulent waters for these students.
00:15:53.000yeah technically speaking math related science related very strong communication skills very
00:16:00.960poor yeah and uh i think i think chat gpt and things like this could be also be a culprit i
00:16:06.600mean writing is reading so if you're if you're sending all of the even the simplest writing
00:16:12.200that you're doing through chat gpt you're losing that skill you're having that thing right for you
00:16:17.240you know. Yeah, tons and tons of issues regarding reading. You know, it's very complicated
00:16:24.900in this regard, but definitely balanced literacy. Got to go.
00:16:30.560I heard a teacher recently say to their students, make spelling mistakes. That's how I know it's you.