These are all incredible goals to strive for once the kids are literate in the trivial basic sense of being capable, when handed an unfamiliar text, of working out what the words are.
If they are literate in that simple trivial way, instilling the love of reading and writing is a worthy goal and they are capable of becoming literate in the various wider political / social senses you describe. Even if they can't yet read in the sense of knowing what all the words and concepts mean, they can at least now encounter and name the things they don't know, and so have paths they can follow to find those things out.
If they are not in this way literate, no amount of instilling the love will help. The texts they are presented with might as well be in Linear A. There is no path to get the words from the page into the child or vice versa, and so the child cannot come to love the activities of reading and writing, wrestle with the ideas they encounter or any other fun enlightened things.
Teaching must begin with the basic building blocks before any other structure can be built above them. Any call to skip that first step before a child has mastered it is a call for lifelong ignorance.
I agree and so do the people who run the Reading and Writing Workshop!
What is missing from the criticism is any sort of purpose or ideal for education in the first place.
Literacy starts with phonics but it must never end there!
It’s sort of like bikeshedding. I guess we can all agree that, yes, we use a phonetic alphabet and learning how to sound things out is going to be a valuable lifelong skill. It’s also hilarious when the technique is applied to names from other languages.
This is the key part.
These are all incredible goals to strive for once the kids are literate in the trivial basic sense of being capable, when handed an unfamiliar text, of working out what the words are.
If they are literate in that simple trivial way, instilling the love of reading and writing is a worthy goal and they are capable of becoming literate in the various wider political / social senses you describe. Even if they can't yet read in the sense of knowing what all the words and concepts mean, they can at least now encounter and name the things they don't know, and so have paths they can follow to find those things out.
If they are not in this way literate, no amount of instilling the love will help. The texts they are presented with might as well be in Linear A. There is no path to get the words from the page into the child or vice versa, and so the child cannot come to love the activities of reading and writing, wrestle with the ideas they encounter or any other fun enlightened things.
Teaching must begin with the basic building blocks before any other structure can be built above them. Any call to skip that first step before a child has mastered it is a call for lifelong ignorance.