England came fourth out of the 43 countries that tested children of the same age in the Progress International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), announces the government. Singapore, Hong Kong, Russia, England. Yes, dear highly literate Samizdata readers, your own reading skills have not failed you. English schoolchildren are the fourth best readers in the world and the best in Western Europe.
Pinching myself, I offer my sincere congratulations to England’s teachers and to the Department of Education, in particular Nick Gibb MP, the Minister of State for Schools. Mr Gibb is serving the third of three non-contiguous stints in this ministerial role. That suggests he is genuinely interested in education, and indeed his Wikipedia biography says “Gibb is a longstanding advocate of synthetic phonics as a method of teaching children to read”. He himself says, “Our obsession with phonics has worked”.
Tomorrow I will get back to calling the teachers “the Blob” and the government “the government” in a voice that suggests I can think of no worse insult. Today, I give credit where credit is due. For British education nerds, this is like our own little 1989. OK, perhaps that is over the top, but a wall that seemed no more than slightly cracked as recently as January 2022 has finally fallen. By the “wall”, I mean the side in the so-called “Reading Wars” that wasn’t phonics. The Not!Phonics side has had many names, “Look and Say”, “Whole Word”, “Whole Language”, and most recently “Balanced Literacy”. That last name was an attempt to paper over the cracks in the wall. Or perhaps, since I am allowed more than one metaphor, it was a deliberate breach in the wall of a dam, done in an failed attempt to stop the whole damn dam wall collapsing.
To see what the wall looked like in the days of its Krushchev period, discredited but still seemingly impregnable, read this 1998 paper that Brian Micklethwait originally wrote for the Libertarian Alliance: “On the Harm Done by Look-and-say: A Reaction to Bonnie Macmillan’s Why Schoolchildren Can’t Read”, and this one written in 2002: “The Failure of Politics and the Pull of Freedom: Reflections on the Work of the Reading Reform Foundation.” I wish I could ask Brian what he thinks about this now, but thanks to the Brian Micklethwait Archive you can see what he thought about it then, and be reminded that truth stays true. Read those two papers and you will know most of what you need to know about the battle that raged across the Anglosphere over how to teach children to read, including these cynical words of wisdom:
The phonics-persons have pretty much proved their case, probably even in the eyes of many of the look-and-say people. But the look-and-say “experts” at the DfES are in an arkward position. (The inverted commas around “experts” being there because these people don’t know things which are true, they “know” things which are untrue.) Suppose their bad techniques are completely swept away and completely replaced by completely good ones. The teaching of literacy in schools would leap forward. A mass of seemingly “complex” problems, like the recent huge rise in “dyslexia”, the spiralling cost of “special needs” education, and the general inability of several generations of people to learn how to spell, will be revealed as not so complex after all. These problems will be revealed to all as having been caused by the government’s own literacy “experts”. Thus it is that even – especially – those “experts” who have been completely convinced of the wrongness of their own former opinions now face a huge, career-saving incentive to perpetuate their follies as much as they can, to disguise the enormity of the disaster they have caused.
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That would have been a fine, dramatic line with which to end the post, but I must add a couple of footnotes and admit that my inner Phineas Taylor Barnum enjoyed inserting the “Read more” HTML button at exactly that point.
Firstly, I have seen several people ask if the PIRLS tests all over the world are all conducted in English. Obviously it would not be much of an achievement for English children to be fourth best in the world at reading English. However the tests for each country are in the first languages of the children concerned, and I believe provision is made for minority languages. Given that, for all its beauty, the Chinese writing system is notoriously difficult to learn, it is notable that large percentages of pupils in the two top-scoring countries in the 2022 PIRLS (Singapore and Hong Kong) must have sat the test in Chinese. However there is some evidence that the visual distinctiveness of each Chinese character makes Chinese words easier to perceive “in a flash”, especially for fluent readers. In Chapter 10 of his book Writing Systems, Geoffrey Sampson argues that “the logographic principle for writing is by no means self evidently inferior than the more familiar phonographic principle”. Noam Chomsky of all people has argued that, once learned, the irregular spellings of many English words offer a similar benefit of instant extra recognisability. The “Whole Word” people were wrong about the way children learn to read but they might turn out to be right about the way fluent readers perceive words.
Secondly, note that the constituent countries of the UK are counted separately in this PIRLS test. Northern Ireland was only just behind England, coming fifth. We do not know how Scotland would have done because the Scottish Government pulled out of the survey in 2010. The Scottish government also pulled out of several other international educational tests, studies or surveys or whatever you want to call them, including what is probably the best-known worldwide comparison of different countries’ success in education, PISA or the Programme for International Student Assessment. Like Scotland, Wales does not take part in either PIRLS or PISA. Both countries withdrew for excellent financial and pedagogical reasons and not at all because they were frit.