The March of Folly 2

Published: July 13, 2007, 11:41 am

by Charles J. SykesIn the late 1950s, "language experience" was discredited in the collapse of "life adjustment" education, but its impulses toward a more democratic, humanistic classroom have proven impervious to failure, rejection, and miserable test scores. Indeed, the movement that was a rollicking bust in the 1950s is reemerging as an educational innovation and "reform" in the 1990s. Moreover, it is spreading without any research or evidence to show that it works. Its foremost advocates take the lack of such research as a badge of honor. "So dynamic is the whole language movement," Kenneth Goodman crowed in 1989, "that innovative practice is leaping ahead of research and rapidly expanding and explicating the fine points of theory." In other words, educationists are adopting whole language programs without waiting for any indication that they work and insist that the lack of research to support what they are doing is not a sign of recklessness or wishful thinking, but rather an

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