Undoing damage

So if the educational authorities in California decide it's time for that state to go back to a phonetic approach to the teaching of reading, while a judge in Hawaii decides it's legal for two homosexuals to be married to each other, is society--on balance--moving forward or backward?

In both cases, you have to think about the ripple effect. We are, after all, the United States. One reason the reading decision in California makes so much difference is that textbook publishers pay attention to the Golden State's huge population. Textbooks for the rest of the country have a tendency to follow the direction set by educators in California. In a parallel manner, legal experts are pondering how, in these mobile times, a couple married in Hawaii could then become unmarried just because they move somewhere else. It's hard today to do such things in isolation.

But besides the ripple effect, in both cases you also have to think about what it takes, when you make a major societal change that proves later to be wrong, to undo the damage of the wrong turn. Even if you don't claim, as Christians do, to have an ultimate reference point in life, there's a big warning sign to be very careful about huge decisions and grand experiments in social engineering that glibly set aside centuries of wisdom. Are we really prepared for the unexpected consequences we might bring about?

WORLD has pictured from time to time, and will continue to revisit, the devastation inflicted on a whole population through the carelessness in construction and operation of nuclear power plants at Chernobyl in Eastern Europe. The "Children of Chernobyl" have become an image of pathos we want to run from but know we cannot ignore.

The "Children of California" are a lot like them. I remember hearing in the 1960s about a teacher in California who resisted when told by her superiors that she could no longer teach the alphabet to first graders. After months of bureaucratic hassle, she finally won a small victory: "You can teach the alphabet," her principal relinquished, "but not in order."

Even if the story is apocryphal, the disorder sown in the lives of tens of millions of children is not. Having foolishly tinkered with such profound issues since the 1960s, we find ourselves now with a population that, by some estimates, is 30 to 45 percent "functionally illiterate." That means they can't read bus schedules to get to work, or employee manuals if and when they get to work, or prescription labels if and when they stay home sick. A third of our population never write letters, and never write anything else. It's not that they don't enjoy it. They simply don't know how.

Trying to teach the delights of reading (and writing) without developing phonetic skills is like asking an ice skater to score 6.0 in artistic competition while getting 4.8s and 4.9s in technical drills. It just doesn't happen. People who try to skip the basics in their zeal to reap the tasty fruits of any enterprise find themselves splattered all over the ice in very embarrassing postures.

I am not a phonics nut; my unprofessional sense is that in the best of all worlds, learners of reading tend to move from the building blocks of phonics to the speedy recognition of whole language--just as accomplished ice skaters speed into a triple axel without still consciously spelling out every mechanical detail of the feat. So it's not phonics vs. whole language; it's just a matter of getting them in the right order--and always having the option of going back to basics when problems arise.

Nobody today denies that big problems have arisen. That's why the California Board of Education this month voted to mandate a whole new series of instructional materials intended to ensure that approaches in "mathematics and reading in grades 1 to 8, inclusive, are based on the fundamental skills required by these subjects, including, but not limited to, systematic, explicit phonics, spelling, and basic computational skills." Actually, the Board of Education didn't have much choice in the matter. Those words came in a directive from the state legislature. The only question was whether members of the board had the reading skills to interpret them accurately.

So California is backing out of its earlier mistakes and trying to set things right on the reading front. That's great for kids in the generation ahead; it doesn't do much for those of the generation past whose literacy has been sacrificed to the whims of educational know-it-alls.

Which brings us back to my original question. Is there anyone out there who really thinks it's any less profound to start tinkering with basic ideas about marriage than it was to fool around a generation ago with basic ideas about reading?

Anyone who defends homosexual marriage also logically has to defend polygamy, or marriage between siblings, or marriage between a man and a nanny goat--for they're all based on personal preference rather than the external, God-established standards governing heterosexual marriage. The consequences down the road of setting out now on such horrible wanderings will make repairing mistakes about phonics seem like child's play.