Headmistress, thank you for that link. I can think of a couple people right away to whom I’ll be forwarding it.

Athor, I agree completely with you about adjusting to the child – that’s one of the many benefits of home education. However, I firmly believe that if you’re not using phonics as a starting point, you’re a) deceived by the propaganda against phonics, b) ignorant without having understood the propaganda and/or c) not serious about the kid learning to read.

Most “professionals” qualify for all three.

I couldn’t possibly agree more with your statement:
Kids want to learn. It takes a teacher to make them want to stop learning.

I started to relate an anecdote to confirm how right you are and realized that it’s too long to put here and too good to be hidden in the comments. I’ll make it a blog post.

A teacher is someone that forces you memorize something against your will. Notice I did not say learn, I said memorize, because they are two separate things.

Phonics is just one method. It happens to fit many people. Thing is, everybody is different so if you want your kids to learn in the best possible way then you have to figure out what works for them. And that could be any number of things.

Use what works and tell the people with the formulaic methods to stuff it.

My next-in-line little brother was hyperactive (they’d call it ADHD today but I think he was just full of monkey energy) and they put him in a special “developmental first grade” to get him ready for big school. The school proper had run away with some whole-language idiocy, I think, but this class taught solid, no nonsense phonics. Within months, Monkey Boy was reading the text in TV commercials out loud. Within a year, Mom put him in a kitchen chair to read recipes to her as she cooked. Big Sis (me), eight years old, used to sit on the couch with him and read Narnia or other books about that level using a “you read this page out loud and I’ll read the next page” method.

Second little brother, at about the same age, had a teacher who was pretty useless. So Big Sis and Big Bro taught HIM to read, more or less behind our parents’ backs. He was never all that interested in reading on his own, though.

I spell perfectly (spelling champion); my brothers are near that. My dad is a Hungarian immigrant and insisted that we always pronounce things properly; I think that has a lot to do with it.