John Heiss

[James Lindsay, anti-Communist @ConceptualJames]

I recently listened to the Texas Commissioner of Education talk about how to get children (or anyone) to learn to read, and it was compelling enough that I want to share.

As he presented it, there are basically two ingredients to becoming literate, but actually there are three (which he presented, just organized differently):

1) Enable student readers to recognize/decode words;
2) Make sure student readers know words;
3) Make sure student readers know idioms, references, allusions, etc.

The two ingredients, as he presented them, were to know how to decode words and to know the meanings of the things they're technically able to read.

I would consider these the basic foundations of reading and add a fourth component as reading skill develops:

4) Develop the capacity to work through, retain, and understand an argument that spans a paragraph, pages, section, chapter, or book.

Let's look into these.

(1) Learning to decode written language and recognize words:

The Commissioner rightly pointed out that the only known way in English, at least, to consistently and effectively teach new readers to decode words from written language to something they can recognize is with phonics, sounding words out. He is absolutely correct. Any basic literacy program that doesn't emphasize phonics as the main tool for decoding written language is wrong. Full stop.

He identified that there are, as he put it, 44 basic sounds in English encoded across combinations of 26 letters, plus some foreign imports. Teaching new readers, perhaps especially children, to associate sounds with letters and their combinations and to "sound-out" words is the most effective way that has been developed to get them taking words off the page and into comprehension.

(2) Knowing lots of words; lots and lots of words

Again, rightly, the Commissioner then explained that it doesn't do a reader much good to be able to correctly sound out words if he doesn't know what they mean. We have to teach readers vocabulary, lots and lots and lots of vocabulary. Any literacy program that isn't teaching a huge volume of words to new readers sucks.

I have a neat first-hand experience with this phenomenon aside from my own education in English. I tried for a while to learn Korean, which is a language with an alphabet, somewhat similar in that regard to English. I learned the alphabet in Korean, and I can (slowly) read Korean writing in the sense that I can make all the right sounds (kind of) for the words written on the page. I don't know what almost any of them mean. I don't have very much Korean vocabulary. It doesn't matter almost at all that I can sound out Korean words because I can't read Korean without knowing what those words mean. That requires learning LOTS of words (and grammar, to be clear).

There's a double benefit to combining phonics and vocabulary (plus grammar) in a literacy program: when you increase your vocabulary, you start learning to recognize words much more quickly and to associate them with meanings rather than with sounds (phonemes and their combinations). This increases the speed of comprehension, not just the depth of comprehension, at the same time. I am palpably aware of that with my faltered efforts to pick up Korean, and I'm certain it's generally true.

3) Knowing expressions, idioms, references, allusions, etc.

It isn't enough to know words and grammar, which will unlock the most basic levels of literacy. Language is much more symbolic than that in real use. Our use of language is riddled with expressions, idioms, reference, allusions, and other clever constructions where the plain meaning of the words and phrases on the page is not actually instructive of what is being communicated. For a simple example, a reader encountering the word "cool" with regard to a person who doesn't understand the very common slang meaning of that term is going to be lost when he comes across it.

A more poignant example involving an actual idiom that I witnessed myself was with a child who ran into the phrase "don't put your cart before your horse." She couldn't figure out why it was suddenly talking about horses when the story didn't have anything to do with horses. She was a little too concrete, you might say, and wasn't aware of the meaning of the idiom. Other idioms are even more abstruse, like, "it's my North Star." Anyone who has helped a new English speaker who is technically proficient but unskilled has had this experience, and every new reader has it too.

Literary allusions and other cultural references can be even more confusing for new readers. Saying "calm down, Hamlet," to someone who just launched into a melodramatic soliloquy (*vocabulary!) is confusing or meaningless to someone who doesn't know the play. The same goes for more contemporary allusions, like identifying a situation as "Friday night lights." Knowing what it means when someone says an economic argument is "very Hayekian" is also important for similar reasons.

It is imperative that student readers learn not just what these allusions mean, when they're allusions, but the stories and lessons to which they refer. If characters such as Socrates, Solomon, or the harpies are invoked, a literate person understands not just the reference but the contents of the reference. This adds subtle depth that is required for full literacy.

The point is that learning readers need to develop this kind of second dimension of vocabulary which includes all of the fundamental idiomatic constructions, common and deep cultural references, etc., that are part of written communication to be truly literate. For example, while he's a fantastic writer in all regards, famously so, I found some of Christopher Hitchens's writing to be almost impossible to understand due to the density of literary references and allusions he conjured, as I was raised in physics and math and didn't read widely beyond the basic classics of core curriculum. I simply wasn't literate enough to understand him in many cases.

Thus, literacy means having some familiarity with, well, the literature, at least the foundational literature of your language and culture, even as that evolves (e.g., "Friday night lights" isn't exactly an old allusion).

Eventually, even, to be truly literate requires knowing idioms and allusions even from certain foreign languages, notably including Latin, French, and, to a lesser extent, German, for the English speaker/reader.

Therefore, beyond phonics, grammar, and lots and lots of vocabulary, becoming literate requires lots and lots and lots of just plain reading, and reading not just anything, but lots of cultural reference points.

4) Reading comprehension

Once you have someone who can actually make sense of what they are reading, the new reader also has to develop the capacity to follow the argument and themes presented in writing. Whether it's nonfiction and argumentation, in which case the argument has to be followed, or fiction and storytelling, in which case themes, lessons, and plot have to be recognized, there's a deeper element to literacy beyond the basic mechanics of recognizing and understanding words and phrases.

While it's true that vocabulary and cultural background are places where reading comprehension break down for many people, at least sometimes, here is where the rubber really meets the road for literacy. Can the reader understand what is written and take away what it communicates?

We have a term for people who are reasonably skilled at (1) and (2) and maybe even (3) above but who are incompetent at (4): functionally illiterate.

These people can read words on a page (phonics), make sense of them (grammar and vocabulary), and even understand specialized constructions in speech (idioms, allusions, etc.) to a degree, but they cannot extract the meaning from the text. They can read but not truly comprehend what they have read.

The functionally illiterate might be able to read a list of instructions, for example, and then still not know what to do to follow them. They might be able to read an argument without ever getting its point, even when it isn't subtle. They might be able to read a story and never discover its underlying themes or even to fully follow the plot (which they might follow easily in film format or even in oral storytelling).

When I was teaching at university almost 20 years ago, it was estimated by the admissions department that perhaps 50% of new admits to the school were functionally illiterate, which I certainly saw reflected in my classrooms. I hear this is much worse today, and I believe it.

As we transition from a largely written communicative society to a largely oral (via reels, videos, clips, etc.) society again at a rapid rate, functional illiteracy should be expected to increase, even if the schools aren't failing at teaching literacy. As we transition to less time on the page (including digital pages) and more time on social media (very short form posts), videos, audios, etc., we fail to develop or even lose the capacity to comprehend, follow, and restate (in our own words) an argument, story, plotline, theme, etc. This is a crisis in the making that is already developed to an alarming degree.

The key to this last, deepest, and most important aspect of literacy, and to unlocking all its benefits in terms of how we are able to think (for ourselves!), is to have to spend slow time reading increasingly long and intricate things while being required, in some way or another, to demonstrate that we can accurately and reliably communicate back what has been communicated to us on the page. Only reading, and reading a lot, and reading difficult things, can develop this capacity and maintain it. There's no other way: a lot of time on the page, and some accountability measures to make sure we're actually getting it.

Imagine a world where most people are actually functionally illiterate in this sense. At that point, even the people teaching literacy cannot adequately assess the contents of written work, so they cannot adequately assess if their students have done so. What you end up with in terms of literacy education is truly the blind leading the blind. Reaching that state would be an emergency, and it might be as little as a generation away.

To summarize

Literacy is a skill. Literacy can be taught. Almost everyone can become not just literate but highly literate.

Teaching literacy has certain ingredients that cannot be left out that increase in complexity. True literacy requires being able to read a long-form argument and to understand it reliably enough to explain what you read in your own novel yet accurate terms.

The fundamental steps in literacy education are not negotiable. They are:

1) Learn to decode written words. Phonics is the only way. If there is no phonics education (in languages with a roughly phonetic alphabet), there is no literacy education. Some grammar instruction is required here as well.

2) Learn to recognize the words being decoded. Vocabulary and grammar lessons are nonnegotiable. Understanding the construction of language and learning to know the meanings of lots and lots and lots and lots (tens of thousands) of words is foundational. Linking them to familiar spoken language is foundational.

3) Learning to recognize speech constructions that go beyond basic vocabulary, including idioms, references, allusions, etc., which must include understanding the context of those constructions. Literacy is a huge network of knowledge, understanding, and comprehension all located in long strings of the written word.

4) Becoming literate requires large volumes of accountable reading. Long-form writing must be engaged and produced to become literate.

Any literacy program (e.g., in K-12) that isn't based on these elements is not a literacy program. It is a sham, at best, and a cheat, at worst. This is all nonnegotiable for creating literate people.

Literacy, though, as I said, is a skill. It can be taught. It's up to people who want to teach literacy to do that.

PS: Woke "literacy" programs are usually mechanically anti-literacy programs, and in purpose are actually "political literacy" programs, at least since Paulo Freire insisted that political literacy is the true literacy. Of course, "political literacy" means adopting a "critical theory" lens applied to one's personal circumstance as generated and evoked through reading assignments. They are worse than a disaster. They are a catastrophe. They should be avoided, even at high cost.

[Stephen C. Meyer @StephenCMeyer]

Dr. Stephen Meyer and Oxford mathematician Dr. John Lennox dismantle the cultural myth that modern science inherently opposes a belief in God.
Link below

[Hugh Ross @RTB_HRoss]

Social Media Question of the Week: Can you briefly explain what’s wrong with canopy theories for a young earth, a global flood, & long pre-flood lifespans?
My Answer: There are 3 canopy hypotheses: a water ice, a liquid water, and a water vapor canopy above Earth's surface. For young-earth creationists these canopies must be thick enough to stop deadly cosmic & solar radiation & provide enough water for a global as opposed to a worldwide flood. For the first 2 hypotheses, gravity brings them immediately crashing into Earth's surface. For the latter, gravity causes the canopy to quickly dissipate into interplanetary space. To their credit, nearly all young-earth creationist leaders concede that none of their canopy hypotheses work. For much more on canopy hypotheses, see A Matter of Days, 2nd edition.

[Stephen C. Meyer @StephenCMeyer]

It's interesting that @RichardDawkins seems remarkably willing to entertain the possibility of conscious intelligence being behind AI-based large language model (LLM) chatbots, while overlooking a far stronger case staring him in the face from his own discipline of biology.
Link in comments 👇

[Stephen C. Meyer @StephenCMeyer]

The human genome, it turns out, supports a view of human uniqueness rather than shared evolutionary origins.
https://t.co/yxB6RlsA77

[American Journey Experience @aje1776]

Thomas Jefferson tried to end slavery in 1769.
He was barely in the Virginia colonial legislature before he put forward legislation to emancipate slaves under the British Crown.
The King vetoed it.
So when Jefferson sat down seven years later and wrote that the King had "suppressed every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain" the slave trade — that wasn't just a political grievance.
That was personal.
And we almost missed it entirely. This document was sitting in our collection, nearly went on air upside down, and the moment we read it the only question we could ask was — how were we not taught this?
This is robbery of our heritage.
Does knowing this change how you see Jefferson? Drop it in the comments. @glennbeck

[Wimbledon @Wimbledon]

55th Grand Slam semi-final. 15th at Wimbledon.

Novak Djokovic outlasts Felix Auger-Aliassime in the longest quarter-final of all-time at #Wimbledon

[Eric Metaxas @ericmetaxas]

“To use language to obscure reality is to show ‘indifference regarding the truth’— to lie to the public and cease to treat our fellow citizens as equals.” —Justice Clarence Thomas https://t.co/QUYaPaLH3F

[Caroline Glick @CarolineGlick]

Erdogan and his top officials can't stop calling for Israel to be eradicated. They do it every day.
Silence in the face of their calls for genocide fuels them and encourages escalation.

[Cynical Publius @CynicalPublius]

Please spread far and wide to rebut the libelous lies of Kristof and the New York Times against @elonmusk.

[The Vigilant Fox 🦊 @VigilantFox]

JD Vance notices something hilariously ironic about those hideous “We believe” signs in people’s yards.

VANCE: “Those hideous signs in their yard that say, ‘In this house, we believe’… that sign is such a disgusting butchering of the Nicene Creed.”

[Michael Knowles bursts out laughing]

VANCE: “You realize, ‘Oh, my God,’ people still have this desire to profess very publicly and even do it in this kind of cadence that you see in the Nicene Creed. And of course, they do it in this very politically motivated way.”

Leftists mock religion, but they literally created their own. They just deleted the God part.

[Imtiaz Mahmood @ImtiazMadmood]

Before the Crusades, two-thirds of the Christian world had already fallen under Islamic rule.
Your school probably skipped that part.

They taught you the Crusades began in 1095, as if Christians just woke up one morning and decided to march east for no reason.

But history did not begin in 1095.
By then, Islamic armies had already conquered massive portions of the Christian world:
Syria.
Egypt.
North Africa.
The Holy Land.
Spain.
In 711 AD, Islamic forces crossed into Spain.
By 732 AD, they had pushed all the way into France.
That is where Charles Martel met them at the Battle of Tours and stopped the advance into Western Europe.
Some historians consider it one of the most decisive battles in world history.
So when people talk about the Crusades without mentioning the 400 years before them, they are not giving you history.

They are giving you a narrative.
Were the Crusades complicated?
Of course.
Were Christians perfect?
No.

But the idea that the Crusades were some random act of Christian aggression is historically dishonest.
The real story begins long before 1095.

And once you know what happened before the Crusades, the entire conversation changes.

They buried this.
Now you know.

[Robert P. George @McCormickProf]

I had the pleasure of moderating a discussion of the Declaration of Independence hosted by the American Academy of Sciences and Letters, featuring Akhil Amar of Yale, Harvey Mansfield of Harvard, and Julia Mahoney of the University of Virginia. A video is available at the link.

[The Babylon Bee @TheBabylonBee]

Supreme Court Rules Any Baby Born At Olive Garden Is An Italian Citizen

[Kristen Waggoner @KristenWaggoner]

Today you will read many sympathetic media stories about B.P.J., the male athlete who challenged WV’s law and lost at SCOTUS.

I’m guessing none will mention that B.P.J. defeated 470+ girls 1,400+ times (including a state title) and sexually harassed our client Adaleia (pictured) in the girls’ locker room. Sadly, Adaleia stopped playing the school sports she loved due to B.P.J.’s ongoing presence in girls’ sports and spaces.

But we’ll probably be lucky if those girls get even a passing mention—let alone a front-page photo.

This has been the pattern on this issue from far too many institutions of power. Boys’ feelings are the focus. Girls’ safety, fairness, and opportunity take a back seat.


I’m so thankful today that the Supreme Court reversed that pattern, acknowledged the reality of biological sex, and remembered the girls.

[Federalist Society @FedSoc]

One vote stood between America and independence. The man who had to cast it was 80 miles away, battling cancer, as a violent thunderstorm raged. His name was Caesar Rodney.

A lesser-known founder of the American Revolution, Rodney rode overnight on horseback from Delaware to Philadelphia, arriving just in time to cast the deciding vote for independence and sign the Declaration of Independence. 🇺🇲

[Hugh Ross @RTB_HRoss]

Have you ever wanted a brief, well-illustrated article on what the Bible and science say about the age of the universe that is so simply and clearly written a fifth grader can understand it? We have one our new website: https://t.co/wqHUtQG2JU

[Joel Berry @JoelWBerry]

This was Benjamin Franklin's proposed seal of the United States of America.

His pitch to the seal committee read as follows:

"Moses in the Dress of a High Priest, standing on the Shore, and extending his Hand over the Sea, thereby causing the same to overwhelm Pharaoh who is sitting in an open Chariot, a Crown on his Head and a Sword in his Hand. Rays from a Pillar of Fire in the Clouds reaching to Moses, to express that he acts by Command of the Deity."

Thomas Jefferson proposed a similar design, with an emphasis on the pillar of fire and cloud that led the Israelites through the wilderness.

The Founding Fathers saw America as an echo of Israel, often invoking the Exodus as a picture of our separation from Britain.

[DataRepublican (small r) @DataRepublican]

https://t.co/FoaSRNtwOM