“Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.”-2 Corinthians 10:5
“Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start…” -“Do-Re-Mi”
Order is being restored. After a generation of failing to teach phonics, many schools are returning to the tried-and-true methods of literacy instruction. There’s been in-depth reporting and insightful commentary on the subject, of which I know but little.
To sum it up in crude generalities: Educational theorists introduced “whole language” reading instruction, which focused on teaching children to “recognize” complete words instead of learning to sound out different phonemes. The phonics approach, which was ubiquitous in English language reading instruction of past centuries, as far as I am aware, was jettisoned in favor of a new and exciting approach.
This disastrous results of failing to teach children phonics is a generation or two that responds with the bewildering assertion that they “don’t recognize a word” while lacking the skills to analyze the word and begin to discern sound and meaning. This also explains, if you have ever come across a preschool stuck in the 1990s, why three-year-olds are sent home with dull and repetitive texts which they guess at the meaning of and “read.” Occasionally a neat party trick, but that is not reading.
The irony of all the fretting about literacy is that the few people who make it out of school with the ability to read read full length books. There is a misunderstanding of the purpose of education: Are we training preschoolers to do tricks or are we teaching people to read for the rest of their lives?
Interestingly, some of the reporting on the phonics debate noted that proficient readers do “recognize words.” Once you know a word, you no longer have to “sound it out” each time but immediately perceive the whole word. In other words, once people know how to read, they operate like the “whole language” approach suggests we should. However, without the prerequisite step of learning the underlying phonics and reading the word in its parts, we cannot effectively read the whole words. In some ways, perhaps, the whole word approach was trying to get to the end result without the intervening work required.
Just as we have forgotten how to read and teach reading, we are a culture fixated on feelings but have forgotten the dynamics of emotion. It is commonly believed that feelings happen to you. This is true of passions; they come upon us, beyond our control. How we feel on any given day, however, can be channeled by choices.
How? Learning the fundamentals of feeling. The best explanation I heard to articulate how and why we feel many of the emotions we do was from two women who studied life coaching. The genre of “life coaching” might sound hokey, but it’s hard to argue with results. I have not delved into the origins of this school of life coaching or all of its implications, but it offers not quick fixes but sound principles to modify thoughts and behavior over long horizons. That’s generally a pattern you can depend on.
Sterling Jacquith, a married mother of six, on her now defunct podcast Mama Tools (thankfully preserved on the world wide web!) offered the best explanation I’ve come across. With examples that offer clarity and specificity, she explains how individual thoughts lead us to a course of action and how interrogating those thoughts can lead to feeling differently and changing the actions we take. At first, this strategy can seem confusing, but with practice, you can learn to identify more quickly the specific thoughts that lead to a cascade of feelings and resulting actions that are so out of line with what we say we want and value.
It brings new meaning to the verse from St. Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians quoted at the beginning of this article. “Bringing every thought into captivity” requires discipline in the way we entertain our ideas.
