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A wicked light shines from the cloning laboratory
Reality defies fiction or, in plain English, you couldn't make it up. Last Friday's news was so sensational that science fiction would hardly dare compete. It was announced that this Christmas a baby girl was born in America in almost miraculous circumstances and, with heavy-handed significance, she was called Eve, after the first mother of mankind. If it isn't all a fake, she is not a human in the ordinary sense but a clone - the first cloned human baby - and she was created by a company owned by a sect which believes that humans were created by scientists from another planet.
The story truly defies belief. It seems that the sect in question was started by a French motor racing journalist who, one day in 1973, happened to drive to an extinct volcano in the Auvergne. There, he says, he saw a flying saucer and from it emerged an extraterrestrial who told him, in fluent French, the real truth: humans were created in laboratories by little green aliens with long hair and almond-shaped eyes, called Elohim. Thereupon, and thus enlightened, the journalist changed his name to Rael and set about spreading the word, gathering followers called the Raelians, who are keen to achieve eternal life by recycling people's DNA. The Raelians founded Clonaid, which claims to have cloned Eve.
This wacky group and its wacky beliefs demonstrate clearly the difficult problem facing reasonable people trying to consider the rights and wrongs of cloning. The Raelians stand a long and scary way down a slippery slope of which most sensible people are rightly frightened. For if cloning were possible, or is already, it is horrifying to think that such people, and worse people, could be messing about with the creation of human beings.
Messing about is the right expression. Human cloning is already theoretically possible and, in a crude sense at least, not very difficult to achieve. One scientist, who is strongly opposed to cloning, said last week that any PhD student could do it. The trouble is that the process is still very little understood and the risks are enormous and terrifying.
It's true that great progress has been made in techniques of animal cloning, particularly in Britain, which is a world centre. But even so, most attempts at animal cloning have a low success rate and have led to miscarriages, deformities and serious problems such as chronic sickness, premature ageing and early death. Dolly the sheep, the first successfully cloned animal, is sick and in pain. That is because there is no guarantee that genetic information will be perfectly passed on in the process of cloning, or what damage the process itself may do.
Genetic mistakes can be terrible, as in the suffering of humans who have been born naturally with genetic disorders or mutations. People with Down's syndrome, for instance, frequently have heart disease, premature senility and Alzheimer's as well as low intelligence. There are plenty of other conditions that are infinitely worse. To take on such known risks, and unimaginable risks as well, on behalf of unborn babies seems to me to be wrong. Who would do it? The answer is obvious; the wickedly irresponsible and the wicked. The right response is to ban it - not that such a ban would have much effect worldwide.
However this argument is based on the fact that reproductive cloning is still risky. There will probably come a time when the risks are negligible; then the more difficult question will arise of whether cloning babies is wrong in principle. I am not sure it is. People always talk anxiously about playing God or breaking time-honoured taboos. But the truth is that we already play God - or at least scientists do - all the time. It is simply a question of whether we play at being a good or bad god. We cannot avoid the game.
As for taboos, they do not have a very respectable history, to put it mildly: there's a sentimental argument that taboos, however odd, have hidden truths and meaning and should be respected. In fact many of them have to do with excluding women, mutilating people or avoiding perfectly healthy food. Such superstitions have little place in advanced scientific societies, although it is still considered offensive to say so. The great taboo of modern society is risk, and even that one is being broken with enthusiasm.
Not so long ago in vitro fertilisation treatment for infertile couples was experimental, and considered risky. People had it anyway and produced healthy babies. The same could theoretically be true for reproductive cloning, with one obvious difference. The baby would be 99.9% genetically identical to one parent. This might not matter; what makes a child a person is only partly genetic. But it might be startling to see your child grow up as an image of yourself, and it would present some serious problems of identity, especially for the child.
Besides, I think there would be a strange kind of moral vanity in creating a child just like oneself; one's merits may not be very great and one's faults are surely not things to impose deliberately on another creature. And how the child would rightly blame you.
The great advantage of normal human reproduction is that there is always a chance that all your weaknesses will be lost in the genetic mix with another person, which is, of course, the point of evolution.
Successful evolution depends on the enormous genetic variety of sexual reproduction; cloning, in contrast, defies evolution. Defying evolution is something we do all the time, but it is incalculably dangerous.
Even more disturbing, however, than reproductive cloning is research cloning. Reproductive cloning, much though it might be abused, does at least seek to produce wanted babies, even if they are grinning, gummy Raelist spokeswomen or baby Osama Bin Ladens. Research cloning, in contrast, seeks to produce cloned embryos not for themselves but for any useful bits of them that might be wanted. The remainder would then be thrown away.
Obviously this is an even more slippery slope. Almost every respectable scientist, quango and government is against research cloning, for the time being. But given the enormous temptations, that might change. And illegal research cloning will certainly be done; it is almost certainly going on right now.
This represents an even greater moral challenge to the developed world; the therapeutic possibilities for research and for customised transplants seem almost miraculous. Terrible illnesses could be cured, serious injuries could be repaired and ageing, perhaps, could be held back. But the price would be deliberately cloning human embryos as spare parts, as a means to other people's ends, and then sluicing them away.
I am not sure why it feels wrong; I have no difficulty with early abortion or stem cell research on foetuses only a few days old, which are unwanted byproducts of IVF treatment. I do not think of such groups of cells as human or as people in the making. I would not hesitate, if my child were sick. But to most people it does feel wrong. It feels, somehow, like the beginning of a crime against humanity. And the taboo against that is a taboo, for once, with real moral meaning.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, December 29, 2002 | Comments (0)
I swear by St Betjeman, this was a bad speech
The Archbishop of Canterbury is no doubt a good and serious man. He is also, in the words of the Old Testament and of the immortal Alan Bennett's spoof sermon, a hairy man. This ought not to affect my attitude towards him; there are those of all faiths, and of none, who see bushy beards as a sign of gravitas. But I am not one.
Both the archbishop's beard and his Richard Dimbleby lecture last week reminded me of my dismay at the intellectual muddle of the Church of England and my delight at the satirists of the 1960s who mocked it so brilliantly.
Now, much later, I am not at all delighted by mockery of the Church of England. I have come to realise that I loved it or, at least, some idealised childhood version of the Church of St John Betjeman. That is or was my tradition and I feel the loss of it. But it is very hard to cling to any vestiges of respect for a church whose archbishop talks as Rowan Williams did last Thursday.
His much discussed address, his launch of an ambitious crusade to bring God back into politics, was a dreadful muddle. Of course, muddle has been the mainstay of the Church of England; muddle traditionally kept it broad and wide, and perhaps one should accept the lecture in that spirit as an offering of well-meaning, vague, inclusive and decent noises.
However, it was not meant that way. It was meant as a serious, intellectual and political Anglican agenda, so perhaps it is excusable to do the lecture the unkindness of taking it seriously. The archbishop argues that the nation state is being blown away by the winds of global change, abandoning us all to new draughts of insecurity.
It is being replaced by an amoral, globalised "market state", which is destroying social bonds and leaving us yet more unprotected from risk. The answer is, or rather might be, "to do with the willingness of the market state government to engage with traditional religious communities in a new way".
What can he mean? It is very hard to recognise what he is talking about. He says that the state has lost its power to guarantee the general good of society. And he talks of the withdrawal of the state from many areas where it used to bring moral pressure to bear. Yet never at any time in history has there been a greater commitment by the state to do both.
The state now spends more than ever before on protecting us from all imaginable ills and even from some which don't exist - from illness, unemployment, disability, discrimination, unsafe sex, racist parking, junk food, getting "heavy" and even from unkind words in case anyone might be offended.
Heart bypasses are standard.
A disabled person can get a free car at the age of 16. A child with a learning disability can get a free full-time personal assistant all day at school.
There are even a couple of cases in which some asylum seekers were given relaxing massages. Many of us would say that there is far too much intrusion by the state, but we must admit that it is done in the name of support, inclusion and the relief of suffering, which is to say in the name of a shared morality.
All this may be very ineffective and it may be too expensive, and the pensions mess is frightening, but there is absolutely no sign that the government is indifferent to the people's welfare. And there is no sign that any government could be elected on a tax-cutting, free-marketeering ticket either, neither here nor anywhere in Europe. Such deregulation and privatisation as we have may be mistaken, as some think, but both are merely different means to the same end - better public services and more wealth for all in a civilised society.
The archbishop says that the arrival of the market state "means that government is free to encourage enterprise but not to protect against risk; to try and increase the ... purchasing power of individuals but not to take for granted anything much in the way of agreement about common goals or social good". This is very odd.
He cannot have had much to do with business and enterprise - otherwise he might have noticed that although this government may pay lip service to encouraging enterprise, in practice it is very severely discouraging it, with extreme overregulation and taxation, and in the name of what? Social good. The same is true all over Europe.
The nation state is very far from dead; on the contrary, all over the world there are serious troubles caused by nationalist feelings, small and large. Wars are still being waged and blood is still being spilt in the name of nationalism in Ireland and in Israel and in Chechnya, for instance.
It is true that the European Union does in some senses threaten the nation state, but not in the sense to which the archbishop objects so much, with his view of the state as protector of welfare. The EU is even more committed to social welfare and state intrusion than Britain, and very much more against the market state and globalisation. It is, in fact, a protectionist cartel and is strenuously resisting the global forces that the archbishop laments so much.
I would also argue that the golden age of post-war welfarism, whose passing he also laments, has actually been responsible for much of the social dislocation that he describes today.
The welfare state attempted to take over every aspect of life from womb to tomb, and in the process it nationalised charity, duty and family feeling. It also nationalised personal responsibility - everything, from looking after granny to supporting the truly workshy, was left to the state and the taxpayer.
It was a perfect recipe for weakening the social ties that bind and it did great damage.
The archbishop is wrong to imagine that he has spotted a window of opportunity for the ailing Church of England in all this. I would be amazed if there were a return to organised faith, least of all to Anglicanism.
It is a curious thing about religious people, but they seem to imagine that everybody, believer or not, thinks that Christianity is basically rather nice and good and provides, as the archbishop says, "space" to think about humanity.
They fail completely to understand that agnostics and atheists do not want religion - they find it intellectually incoherent and like Laplace, the French scientist, "feel no need of that hypothesis".
They cannot forget the evil that has been done in the name of organised religion and may actually disapprove of it. They fear blind, irrational faith. The suggestion of bringing religion back into politics is genuinely quite shocking to them, especially in a multi-faith society. For some non-believers it summons up the stench of theocracy and the burning flesh of the auto-da-fe and the suicide bomber.
The archbishop may be right to suggest that we could do with rather more morality, not least in politics. But morality does not depend upon religion - rather the contrary, sometimes.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, December 22, 2002 | Comments (0)
Children are the victims of juggling mother syndrome
I'd just like to point out that I am a very, very busy person and I have lots of balls in the air: I am deeply devoted to my children, my family, my husband, my many trips abroad, my charities, my beauty treatments, my gym and my hectic social life, quite apart from my work, and if I write anything misleading in this column, then all I can say is I'm sorry. Obviously all this isn't good enough for some people.
Actually it isn't. The people it isn't good enough for are children. Cherie Blair's notorious apology made blindingly, glaringly obvious something that most people don't say, or won't say. You cannot do all these things and be a good mother.
There are many, many ambitious and successful women who grasp at every opportunity their talents or their connections present, as if merit lies only in doing that. The real merit would lie in sacrificing some of those glittering prizes for the sake of their children. I hate to say this, but I have learnt it the hard way, and I do believe it: women's opportunities have led to the serious neglect of children.
I don't want to attack those women who are forced by necessity to work long hours, and who long to be able to spend more time with their children. I have every sympathy with them. What interests me are those many women who can choose; they are not forced to take on all that they do, but they choose to.
What irritates me is their air of self-congratulation. How can they see themselves as devoted mothers when they are never at home? Children need lots of time. They don't want quality time by appointment; they need their mothers (and fathers) around, to do things with and to talk to. As they get older, they need adult company more and more for conversation, for guidance, for encouragement, for their problems. Instead they get affluent neglect.
I know of countless cases, among my friends and acquaintances, where mothers (and fathers) hardly ever have dinner with their children. It is very difficult, if you work late all the time, and go out very often in the evening, networking and schmoozing and broadening the mind. I can think of one famous woman whose offspring, now grown-up, were literally latchkey children: they let themselves into an empty house after school and found themselves something to eat.
This is commonplace. In other households the children are left to the ministrations of a series of neurotic foreign teenagers with broken English - anorexic, vegetarian, obsessive compulsive or nymphomaniac. I've come across all this and more. The well-to-do are neglecting their children just as much as those struggling to make ends meet, and with their hectic schedules away from home, probably much more. This is not cause for self-congratulation.
Faced with this obvious problem, the cry across the land is for more childcare. More tax relief, more nurseries, more training! But this is quite absurd. There is an absolute shortage of good childcare, for a very obvious reason. The hard truth is that before women had equal opportunities and earlier, before the working classes had opportunities at all, the well-to-do could choose nannies from a large number of intelligent, capable women who had very few other prospects.
Now bright girls have plenty of other prospects and ambitions, and few of them choose childcare. Those that do are likely to be those who can't aspire higher. And even if none of this were true - even if it were "misleading" - there is a problem with numbers. Reliable research suggests that babies and young children need at least one third of a minder. Anyone can do the sums: they don't add up.
The result is there for all to see - child neglect. And I believe it gets much, much worse as children get older. Women talk of going back to work after maternity leave, but I don't think there is any real leave from maternity. It gets more demanding with time, in some ways. Children who can catch buses on their own sometimes need even more careful attention than children still in nappies.
And what about children with disabilities or special needs? Yet from the affluent teenager, with nobody but the Filipina maid to talk to about his Proust or his problems, to the middle-class girl plonked in front of videos with frozen pizza, to the sink estate child who hasn't even been to school, there is neglect everywhere. And this at a time of sentimental child worship, where advertisements play on men with delicious babies and pop stars use toddlers as design accessories.
All this has coincided with a collapse in certain standards. People talk of feral children and it is not an exaggeration. I know quite a few. They smoke dope all day, prefer darkened rooms, are scarily inarticulate and barely know how to use a knife and fork. Britain's increase in illiteracy, innumeracy, truancy, street violence, classroom violence, unmanageable schools, teenage mental illness and suicide (especially among boys) and the explosion of drug and alcohol abuse among school children rich and poor has coincided with what? With working mothers and child neglect.
I don't want to think this. I always wanted to have the same chances as any man to succeed. I don't underestimate the sacrifices involved for an ambitious woman. It is hard to give up success at the height of your powers, and to try to compete with one hand behind your back, and to know that you are losing, and wasting your abilities.
I agree that men should look after their children too, though I resent masculine bossiness in this last bastion of female power. But experience has convinced me that even if you have two people to bring up children together, you cannot have two demanding full-time careers.
My experience on the domestic front has also convinced me that it is boys who suffer far more greatly from neglect than girls.
My mother always used to say that boys were from the first much harder to look after than girls - much more sensitive, more prone to illness and anxiety. She also thought they also need much more careful socialising, for want of a better word. That seemed quite ridiculous to me, until I had children myself and found myself in the world of mothers and children. I now think my mother was right, and there is some scientific evidence to support her.
Girls seem to tolerate neglect much better, like cats. Boys, like dogs, seem more deeply to need constant attention and encouragement, and lots of physical activity, rushing around at high speed. Like dogs, and unlike cats, they need careful training, or socialising. They seem to lack girls' instinctive understanding of social and personal constraints. And without attention they grow wild, undisciplined, morose and very often fat.
Boys have been falling further and further behind, at school, in exams, in behaviour and in confidence; only in their problems do they outstrip girls. This is a recent change, and this, too, coincides with a huge increase in women working, both at jobs and in careers. As I say, I do not think it is merely a coincidence.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, December 15, 2002 | Comments (0)
Spouse's Rules to keep Cherie from temptation
The verdict of the media upon the prime minister's wife is that she is guilty of extreme lack of judgment. That is bad enough in Caesar's wife; in an aspiring High Court judge it is a disqualification. Judgment, like common sense, is one of those things everyone understands but nobody can define; it must surely have to do with wisdom, discretion and a respect for evidence.
In this foolish story Cherie Blair has shown none of these qualities. She has, apparently, even gone so far as to lie to the prime minister's press office. If so, that was even worse judgment; a legal career does not always survive lying.
The public must by now be tired of the dreary details of the Bristol story. Mrs Blair had every right to buy some property there and to try to get a good price. She has every right to choose her own friends, however flakey, shifty or new age, and to accept their help. If she wants to mess about with crystals, dowsing and the spirit world, that is her business, though devout Catholics are not supposed to.
She had no right to lie or to mislead, but the substance of this "misunderstanding" was apparently trivial. What's really wrong with her is that she seems to have very little idea of how to behave or of who she is.
It was quite eye-poppingly tactless of her, for instance, to buy a very expensive Bristol flat for her student son to live in at a time when her husband and his government are threatening to throw most students even more deeply into debt with top-up fees or some other charge. No rent for Euan Blair, then, while other students struggle to survive with massive overdrafts in nasty overpriced lodgings.
This coincides with the government's posturings about getting more working class children into university; it defies belief. One rule for Cherie's children - as with their top London state school - and another for the rest of us.
Of course that is entirely true in the nature of things in this vale of tears - some people are more equal than others, especially under new Labour - but you might think the silly woman had the wit or the tact to cover it up diplomatically. Buy a flat somewhere else. Just quietly pay Euan's rent.
This has received almost no attention, which is lucky. As public relations it was an astonishing blunder. It is just one of many examples of Cherie behaving badly or, rather, not knowing how to behave. It's clear she sees herself as very central to the new Labour imperium.
Of course, any prime minister's spouse will have great influence, if only pillow power. But being unelected, the spouse ought to wield that power very discreetly. However, discretion seems foreign to Cherie.
For instance she has, unless she recently dumped it, writing paper headed: "From the office of Cherie Booth QC, 10 Downing Street." In fact her home as Mrs Blair is at No 11 and her office as Cherie Booth is at Matrix Chambers. This is just a tacky little symptom of her inability to distinguish discreetly between her role as prime minister's spouse and her role as independent career woman.
I admit it is difficult. But her determination to have things both ways is damaging to the prime minister, as well as to her presentation of herself as a feminist.
I don't often feel the slightest sympathy for either of them. But I do think there has been a very rapid and confusing change in our idea of what spouses are for in public life. What is their function? Why have them at all? Why do you need a spouse for official entertaining, which is nothing to do with her? And why should an independently successful spouse put up with official entertaining at all?
For a start there is absolutely no need for grown-up men and women going about in public hand in hand, grinning at bystanders in a pseudo-sexual glow of aggressive connubiality, like the Blairs. I blame the Americans for this particular vulgarity.
There was a time, until recently and by contrast, when top people's spouses behaved as discreet, non-combatant adjuncts. Denis Thatcher provided an impeccable role model - "always present and never there", according to his daughter Carol. Spouses turned up when essential at functions.
I've had to take part, as someone's wife, in lots of business entertaining and I soon realised that most of it was completely unnecessary, though some of it was fun.
Norma Major, sensible woman, realised it wasn't often essential and stayed at home. Spouses kept their views to themselves, their heads down and their faces out of the papers. But things have changed radically.
A self-respecting woman will no longer put up with the tedious duties of being a public man's wife or with being defined by his role - she wants to do it her way. However, she may well, like Mrs Blair, want to do it his way as well when she feels like it, with all the perks and glamour of his success inflating hers.
Getting away with having things both ways is a highly refined art at the best of times. And these times are difficult for a spouse of poor judgment like Mrs Blair; we are in a period of rapid transition of the consort culture. For those who lack instinctive judgment or who have lost it in all the excitement, there must be rules. I think it's time for a clearly articulated set of Spouse's Rules for top couples. I have some suggestions:
* Do not be tempted to think you are a celebrity or to behave like one. The celebrity culture sends people mad;
* Do not draw attention to yourself (see above);
* Do not imagine you are sharing his (or her) job, or at least never give the impression that you do. Don't say "we";
* Do not do business at official residences;
* Avoid making speeches as far as possible;
* Avoid charities; most charities involve politics;
* Avoid doing anything you would not have been asked to do if you were not the adjunct. Be modest about this;
* Never accept freebies. This alienates those hacks who are not allowed to take them;
* Especially avoid freebies paid for by foreign taxpayers, or monopolising a public beach in Italy;
* Do not entertain party donors privately;
* In fact, keep private entertaining to an absolute minimum. Cut down on public functions - you are often very optional;
* Check the criminal records of everyone you entertain privately;
* Do not wave to the public, go walkabout or press the flesh;
* Do not expose your flesh, particularly not your bosom at funerals (if applicable);
* Observe public conventions, however silly, such as curtseying, whenever your spouse would do so. You must represent him (or her), not yourself, or stay at home;
* Avoid servants as far as possible. Having lots of flunkeys and flimflam leads to Red Carpet Fever, as in the royal family, to greed, delusions of grandeur and then to tabloid disclosures;
* Get a court jester to laugh you into a sense of proportion; hire Rory Bremner;
* Remember that if this seems tough, it won't last long and the rewards are staggering.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, December 08, 2002 | Comments (0)
Why do they make teaching reading harder than ABC?
Every child in this country who cannot read is a child betrayed. Illiteracy is a terrible handicap to inflict on anyone and it is quite unnecessary, because learning to read is easy. Almost everyone can do it. Teaching reading is very easy, too. Yet somehow the educational establishment has managed to make it difficult.
I write with conviction and experience; years ago my brothers and I taught our younger sister to read, even though she has a learning disability, then called a mental handicap. Our school had given up, but she became a brilliant reader. She can read and pronounce any word in English, whether or not she understands its meaning or its context, and without pictures.
That is because she and we learnt to read in the old-fashioned way, learning the sounds of letters and putting them together into words, starting with c-a-t and h-a-t. That's all we did. With the wonderful Cat in the Hat books it was fun.
We weren't taught to teach. We had no idea that we were following a simple system of "synthetic phonics", as it's now called, or "decoding" words. We didn't know that this system is the best and simplest for struggling readers, or for those with very little English - as research now shows. We just knew everyone did it and it worked for almost everyone.
That was then. A terrible wave of folly overtook British teaching in the 1960s. Parents were even told not to help children with their reading. It should be left to the "professionals". Meanwhile, the professionals got it all wrong, introducing a range of misguided methods and muddling them all up together.
Phonics was resolutely dumped as undesirable in favour of ill-considered guesswork experiments such as "look-and-say", "whole language" and "real books".
It remains a mystery why phonics became so ideologically unacceptable, though it worked, and why all these other methods gained favour from our progressive educational establishment, though they don't.
The results were all too predictable. Last week a Unicef study of 24 countries reported that the UK's adult illiteracy rate of 10% is "a statistic of shame". Last week an Ofsted report announced that 200,000 seven-year-olds (31%) cannot read properly.
Ofsted also said that a quarter - yes, 25% - of all 11-year-olds cannot read and write well enough to follow the secondary school syllabus. Naturally enough this goes on into adult life, with tragic results.
Our prisons are full of illiterates, for instance. The education minister talked of the 3m adults now in the workforce whose reading age is below 11.
What of our national literacy scheme (NLS)? What of our much vaunted national literacy hour, started four years ago? And didn't the men at the ministry promise to bring back phonics?
The truth is that the national literacy scheme has been a failure, and could never have been anything but a failure, because it was misconceived from the first. It was put together in the midst of a furious academic debate about reading methods. To accommodate different reading lobbies, it was bodged into an eclectic mix of several failed approaches and - crudely - phonics lost out, for all the lip service that's paid to it.
There were well placed experts who said so repeatedly, but they were largely ignored; such is the power of educational progressives. Ever more misguided demands have been made on exhausted teachers. "I'm all NLSed out" is a common complaint among teachers.
That is hardly surprising. They now have not just the main national literacy strategy to follow. There are also five extra catch-up programmes on top - starting with Pips, ELS, ALS and FLS and a key stage 3 literacy programme. These are Progression in Phonics for reception and year one; Early Literacy Support for children in year one who have failed in the Pips programme; Additional Literacy Strategy for children falling behind in year three and four and Further Literacy Strategy for children in years five and six who have failed on ALS. Then there is the key stage 3 literacy programme for those who didn't learn to read properly at primary school.
What's startling is that there is no programme at that stage to help those who are still not reading at all. Yet the NLS was started precisely for weaker readers. Why did the original scheme need this expensive tinkering? It defies belief.
Take ELS, which is extra time for struggling beginners for whom the daily literacy hour is not working. ELS has, in fact, very little to do with phonics. Learning bout letter sounds and letter shapes is crucial to a good start in reading, according to excellent research.
But only 3% of the extra ELS time is allocated to sounding out letters, the very basis of learning by phonics. Instead, 60% of the time is spent on shared reading and shared writing and other activities, which are no use at all to a child who hasn't yet mastered the basics.
If you feel confused and outraged, imagine what teachers feel. Add to that the problem that they are not properly taught how to teach reading. Ofsted also reported last week that at Cambridge University, one of the country's top teacher training courses, student primary school teachers still did not know how to teach reading at the end of a four-year degree course. In particular the teaching of phonics "left much to be desired" and was hardly touched on.
In other words, Cambridge graduates are not equipped to teach phonics or, therefore, the vaunted literacy hour - not, however, that the literacy hour has much to do with proper phonics. One can only guess how much worse things are at the bog-standard colleges.
At the root of this is an extraordinary ambivalence about phonics. Teachers themselves sometimes resist synthetic phonics. At other times they hardly know what it is. They are often under pressure to coach for reading tests with misleading results. Failure emerges only later. There are temptations, too. According to one teacher, there's a lot of helpful "pointy pointy" from teacher going on during early reading tests.
All this may have contributed in part to the failure of the national literacy strategy, but its real failure lies in its own resistance to the essentials of synthetic phonics. Simply put, a child must be able to decode a word for himself before he can comprehend its meaning. Being encouraged to guess what it is, by context, picture, total word shapes or beginning letters, as the NLS actively encourages, is counterproductive for the child and misleading for the teacher.
Much of the literacy hour consists of just this time-wasting stuff. According to the best research, synthetic phonics works and almost none of the other rival reading strategies do. How is it that ministers didn't know?
Perhaps something at last may be done. The government is panicking, publicly.
Privately I have heard that Tony Blair has sent a message to the national numeracy and literacy advisers that they have only a year left to get their act together or he will scrap the literacy (and numeracy) strategy. Wh-y n-o-t d-o i-t n-ow? It's that simple, really.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, December 01, 2002 | Comments (2)
