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Dear Editor: Reading is Everything records a milestone that remedied the education establishments greatest failure of the past three decades namely its trenchant rejection of phonics, which is the only proven method to teach kids to read who do not have enriched homelives. It took Mississippis stunningly effective adoption of phonics Mississippi! to bring us to our senses.

Not mentioned, however, is a key omission highlighting our humble need to understand that we liberals suffer from our own tribalism, not all that dissimilar to the right-wing, whom we routinely mock.

Tragically, the reason liberal educators willfully ignored 30 years of research inexcusably leaving generations of Black youth functionally illiterate in todays information age is because it was conservatives who first loudly championed phonics. In our own tribal shortsightedness, our brethren could not admit that "the other" might be right.

This rot within from overweening pride has become a pattern. Progressives have a long history that they should be proud of. But today those traditions have become corrupted by sincere but feverish bouts of badly counterproductive and performative morality plays. But because its advocates claim the progressive mantle, we are unable to see the glaring contradictions.

Thus, some now contend that the left should oppose free speech, support loyalty oaths, adopt McCarthy tactics, reject free thinkers, champion bowdlerizing the great classics of literature and succumb to the delusion that racial progress can come out of anger and revenge.

Hopefully understanding the phonics debacle will bring us to our senses.

Peter Anderson

Madison

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Letter | Liberal tribalism led to downfall of phonics - The Capital Times

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