Another Reason Why My Kids Will Never Attend Public School
Here is one of several examples Jeff Culbreath cites in THE OLD DAYS: PART TWO:

'In 1882, fifth graders read these authors in their Appleton School Reader: William Shakespeare, Henry Thoreau, George Washington, Sir Walter Scott, Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Bunyan, Daniel Webster, Samuel Johnson, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others like them. In 1995, a student teacher of fifth graders in Minneapolis wrote to the local newspaper, "I was told children are not to be expected to spell the following words correctly: back, big, call, came, can, day, did, dog, down, get, good, have, he, home, if, in, is, it, like, little, man, morning, mother, my, night, off, out, over, people, play, ran, said, saw, she, some, soon, their, them, there, time, two, too, up, us, very, water, we, went, where, when, will, would, etc. Is this nuts?"’

This latter teacher's experience bears all the hallmarks of the Whole Language (WL) approach, one of the worst disasters in the history of education. English, an alphabetic language, is taught as if it were Chinese, an ideographic language. Teaching the relationship between sounds and letters is strictly verboten; rather, "invented spellings" are encouraged to foster student creativity. Those who fail under the WL regime are labelled as dyslexic or learning disabled.

My female professors tried to push the application of this approach in the second language classroom in my Ed.M. program. I was at the time too young and miseducated to undertsand the ideological implications behind this approach, or even recognize the obvious error of basing a system largely on the findings of a Soviet psychologist (Lev Vygotsky). Once in the classroom, however, I quickly learned that the tried and true methods of language teaching, used in the West since the days of the Greeks, were best.

WL proponents, like all leftist ideologues*, aim to erase Tradition from human memory and, like Pol Pot, start over at Year Zero. Like all utopian schemes, the end result is an inhuman dystopia. Learn more here: Whole-Language Boondoggle.

*A tautology; true conservatives by definition cannot be ideologues.