“From September 2014 the National Curriculum requires children in primary schools throughout England to be taught to read using systematic synthetic phonics. This is the first time that the National Curriculum has so explicitly and definitively established phonics as the required approach to teach reading. This book explains clearly why this change is so important and exposes the arguments that misunderstand and misrepresent phonics.” Blurb on back of ‘Phonics and the Resistance to Reading’ by Mike Lloyd-Jones.
Here is a quote from the first chapter: ‘The Roots of Resistance’:
“Charles Adderley, the mid-nineteenth-century vice-president of the government’s Committee of the Council on Education, declared that “any attempt to keep children of the labouring classes under intellectual culture after the very earliest age at which they could earn their living, would be as arbitrary and improper as it would be to keep the boys at Eton and Harrow at spade labour”.
Today, in 2014, we are governed by Eton graduates while a national debate continues 
about low expectations of white working class children….
Read this book – recommended.
Reblogged this on The Echo Chamber.