‘And you’re better off’ teaching children before they learn ‘wrong methods’
If parents want their children to be good readers, they should keep them away from public schools.
The advice came during a recent “Eagle Forum Live” radio show with conservative legend Phyllis Schlafly, who is known for her effort to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment.
She was interviewing international journalist and educator Alex Newman, who contends public schools are harming children by teaching the “whole-word method” of reading, which had children memorize words rather than sound them out phonetically.
“The fact is if you want your child to be a reader, you have to do it [teach reading] yourself,” Schlafly said Saturday on her show. “And you’re better off to do it when the kid is 5 or 6 years old, maybe even 4, than to try to wait ’til after he’s had some of the wrong methods taught to him.”
Explained Newman: “If you actually look at the neuroscience and the brain scans that they do on the children who learned how to read using the whole-word method versus the phonics method, you see that there’s actual brain problems in the people who learned using the whole-word method, because you’re trying to get the right brain to do a left-brain function.”
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