Phonics Publicity Perils
The brief outbreak of publicity in both the national and social media early in 2014 associated with my ”To Read or not to Read: Decoding Synthetic Phonics” was disturbing. Never before had I encountered such a combination of hostility and the deliberate and radical departure from the norms of civilised rational debate. I was accused of lying (I didn’t! ), of comparing phonics teaching to child abuse (I really didn’t! ) and of (indirectly) bringing the previously wonderful PESGB into disrepute. Well.. perhaps that’s not for me to judge..
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Given the role of social media in contemporary society, should philosophy embrace it? Individual philosophers of education only speak to small numbers of people – most of them like-minded Higher Education colleagues, if they restrict their output to academic publications.
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As I began to explore social media, I found I was very late for the party. To embarrass a few by naming them, David Aldridge, Robert Price, Darren Chetty and others were already there blogging, tweeting and so forth with the aim of bringing philosophical illumination to conversations about education. I noted that such exchanges are potentially open to huge audiences.
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Three long-running threads on the TES Opinion Forum resulted from someone posting extracts from my 2012 PESGB conference paper “A monstrous regimen of Synthetic Phonics”. Many thousands of responses piled up, some of them distinctly unfriendly. These threads are no more, but related twitter activity continues intermittently. Robert Price (@Informutation), an English teacher based in London, is a prolific tweeter and blogger. He began a series of (largely supportive) commentaries about the issues – the first, as far as I know was ‘The Empiricist and the Philosopher: a modern unromance’ at http://informutation.blogspot.co.uk/2014_02_01_archive.html.
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A well-known education blogger styled ‘OldAndrew’ developed a series of attacks on “To Read or not to Read” – the first one at (http://teachingbattleground.wordpress.com/2014/01/03/phonics-denialism-and-rational-debate/. I understand him to be a secondary maths teacher. Many read his postings and some responded. I would never have given OA more than a moment’s attention had I not learned that he actually might be influencing education policy and was sometimes mentioned in parliament. My view of OA, shared by many others, has nothing to do with the fact that he is a teacher, rather than, say a DfE employee, policy maker, producer of reading materials or academic.
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OA had been quiet for a while (at least, about my contributions), when, at the end of June 2014 some of us published an Open Letter to Michael Gove, urging that the Phonics Screening Check should be abandoned. (See https://www.tes.com/news/school-news/breaking-views/open-letter-michael-gove-why-year-1-phonics-check-must-go) David Aldridge wrote a clear, sophisticated and measured commentary around this time entitled “On ‘phonics denialists’ “. (You can find this at http://davealdridge.brookesblogs.net/2014/06/29/on-phonics-denialists/. ) This in turn provoked more onslaughts from OA and others.
And I haven’t yet mentioned a veritable multitude of postings from Debbie Hepplewhite, who calls herself an ‘independent consultant’ on phonics. Her inputs can be found both inside and outside the closed electronic portals of the Reading Reform Foundation. For some time after the publication of “To Read..”, the latter enjoyed themselves rehearsing what they called ‘the nonsense in Davis’s paper’. To this day, members of the Reading Reform Foundation and their associates will pounce randomly on blogs and posts from me and like-minded people who dare to depart from any kind of synthetic phonics orthodoxy.
Some of the online reaction to my pamphlet was, deep down, non-rational and destructive. However, I have also gained immensely from others, including those of a good number of practising classroom teachers. I am in touch with some of them, both online and directly, and have been ever since the beginning of the phonics episode. I am deeply grateful to them for their expertise, generosity and time. They have a range of views about phonics and how it should be taught.
If social media participants such as OA are actually influencing policy and media, then academic philosophers need to be out there even more than they are already, or so I believe, attempting to engage with intelligence, humour and restraint. It is far from easy, partly because what Bob Davis called ‘blogocrats’ have spent some years sharpening their skills in the kinds of interactions to which I am drawing attention.
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What, if anything, would increased social media involvement by philosophers actually achieve? I just don’t know. Wiley now offers Altmetric scores for some of its publications – these broadly relate to associated media activity, including social media ‘impact’. Altmetric has tracked 2,506,330 articles across all journals so far. They report that compared to these, “To Read” has done particularly well and is in the 99th percentile. Should philosophy of education rejoice? You tell me.
I have long understood and applauded the prestige of science in popular culture. However, a significant element in the reaction to "To Read or not to read" has been a kind of 'scientism', according to which all claims can be settled by appealing to evidence. Yet little of “To Read or not to Read..” was justified by appealing to empirical evidence and it never occurred to me that it would therefore be found wanting. Dissecting the relationship between ‘decoding’ words and reading for meaning was a matter of conceptual analysis and careful scrutiny of examples. That the very idea of clear specifiable teaching interventions, necessarily assumed by empirical research into early reading, was either a myth or incompatible with teaching, involved analytical and conceptual discussions. Whether research favouring a particular kind of teaching intervention would actually justify requiring all teachers to implement it was a normative question, and therefore (obviously, I thought) not a matter for scientific investigation.
Many of my critics accused me of making claims without evidence. The nearest to that in ”To Read..” was the point that a few children, who could read on arriving at school, might be damaged by rigid phonics programmes. Many have been in touch with me since the publication of "To Read.." supporting this concern, so I now do have at least anecdotal evidence for that tiny quasi-empirical element. The percentage of pupils concerned is very small, but, nevertheless, that still means that quite a number are affected, and every child matters..
There is an urgent need to improve the public understanding of philosophy, let alone of philosophy of education. Many of our ultimate beliefs concerning personal flourishing, the good society, and the meaning of life are not matters for scientific investigation. Even some of the criteria to be found in current Ofsted frameworks fall into the same category. Philosophy can and should contribute to our thinking and reasoning about these ultimate beliefs.
At Gregynog in the summer of 2014 I was delighted to hear Angie Hobbs, who is Professor of the Public Understanding of Philosophy. What about the public understanding of Philosophy of Education?
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I am now writing a full-length book on these topics entitled 'A Critique of Pure Teaching Methods: the case of Synthetic Phonics'. This will be published some time in 2017.