The Fierce Phonics War

The way of the educational reformer is not smooth. From California, from Illinois, from Wyoming, and from several other states I receive detailed reports of unscrupulous and intemperate attacks upon such folk as believe that our public schools still can be, and ought to be, improved.

Strange to say, some school administrators and teachers reject any suggestion for the reform of instruction in reading, as if some sinister knot of political conspirators were bent upon undoing the American democracy. Or so the administrators in question profess to believe. Thinking always is painful; and it is easier for a school administrator whose chief interest is his own emoluments to cry aloud that the insidious John Birch Society is after his scalp. His school’s reading program, he feels, is perfect: thus the motives of critics must be unutterably evil.

RK

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Russell Kirk

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The way of the educational reformer is not smooth. From California, from Illinois, from Wyoming, and from several other states I receive detailed reports of unscrupulous and intemperate attacks upon such folk as believe that our public schools still can be, and ought to be, improved.

Strange to say, some school administrators and teachers reject any suggestion for the reform of instruction in reading, as if some sinister knot of political conspirators were bent upon undoing the American democracy. Or so the administrators in question profess to believe. Thinking always is painful; and it is easier for a school administrator whose chief interest is his own emoluments to cry aloud that the insidious John Birch Society is after his scalp. His school’s reading program, he feels, is perfect: thus the motives of critics must be unutterably evil.