Publick Screwels vs. Common Sense

Hitchens:

'Special needs' sounds really alarming, as if the child involved is in some way physically or mentally damaged. In a small minority of cases, this may be so. But for the most part children with 'special needs' didn't have those needs until they were subjected to the disastrous teaching methods of so many of our primary schools. All they specially need is to be made to sit in rows and learn things by heart, after having been swiftly taught to read. Fat chance in much of the state system, however, as the woeful figures on literacy and numeracy show.

These schools are very glad to pretend that their serial failure to teach children to read can be blamed on the invented 'disease' of dyslexia or the invented 'disorder' of ADHD and its many allies. Actually it results from their ideological hatred of synthetic phonics, a wholly reliable and successful reading teaching method, whose virtues have been repeatedly proven by research over more than half a century, which many modern teachers apparently regard as being beneath them. In much the same way, they seem to despise chanting times tables or correcting spelling.

Acerbically re-affirming the "Great City Schools" Committee report.

HT: Relapsed Catholic