Here's the starting point for this article. For almost 100 years the Education Establishment has maneuvered, plotted, and schemed to eliminate phonics, and to make American children memorize sight-words. The pitch has always been sweeping: phonics can’t possibly work for a complex language like English, and sight-words are the only way to go. Teachers, students, and parents have been bullied relentlessly to embrace what phonics experts (such as Rudolf Flesch) assume is a fraud and a nonstarter. How does the ordinary citizen deal with this? Well, it's been rough because the professors at Harvard, etc. do not play games. They're trying, in my opinion, to dumb down the country in order to conquer it. They're not going to let you get in the way. In short, we have a perfect situation for testing what AI can do for us.

A lot of people have the feeling that AI is like a Magic 8 Ball or Ouija board. Some profound truth is brought to us from the Great Beyond.

Sorry, that's a false impression. AI scans the vast amount of information found on the Internet (databases, libraries, archives of any kind) and summarizes. In the case of reading methods, you have to realize that the Education Establishment has been flooding the education zone with claims that we need sight-words and more sight-words. It wouldn't surprise me if the bias is 90% for sight-words and 10% for phonics. (Please note that our Education Establishment has been hugely inventive, renaming and reinventing sight-words every five or ten years. For example, we had Dolch words, Whole Word, Whole Language, Balanced Literacy, and many others.) When a community starts objecting too strenuously, the professors withdraw one phony theory and introduce another.

During the 1920s, the Education Establishment maneuvered and probed: would it be possible to tell Americans to stop using what works, and do what doesn't work? In the Autumn of 1931, the Education Establishment went all-in on sight-words. Why then? The great stock market crash of 1929 and the resulting Depression convinced leftists that Marx was right. Capitalism was finished and Communism would prevail. The time to strike is now!

But the first call for war occurred even earlier, in 1919, when Stalin and Lenin created the Communist International. These people just finished defeating what was left of imperial Russia. They were ready to take on the United States, a smaller country. By 1921 the Communists (a.k.a. the Comintern) were infiltrating people into the media, education, foundations, cultural organizations, and so on. Where possible, the Communists jumped into local political campaigns at the state and local level. Thus began a 100-year civil war.

This recap was necessary because now you see how easily the anti-phonics campaign could seem stronger. In fact, the arguments are sometimes presented as almost offsetting. Or phonics is better. If you want your children to learn to read, please deal with this verdict.

One AI said: "Reading often depends on the individual…” But "phonics is fantastic because it teaches you how to decode words by understanding the sounds that letters and combination of letters make. It's like giving someone a toolbox to break down unfamiliar words and manageable pieces. Research shows that systematic phonics instructions helps most beginners build a strong foundation, especially for spelling and tackling new words, a huge validation of phonics.”

Another said: “Studies, like the 2005 National Reading Panel, report that phonics boosts decoding skills, especially for beginners and struggling readers. It’s foundational because English is alphabetic—knowing sound-letter patterns lets kids tackle new words independently.”

Still another said: “Evidence leans toward phonics as the stronger base—decoding is a transferable skill, while sight words are finite. The 2000s Reading Wars settled this somewhat meta-analyses (e.g., Ehri et al., 2001) found phonics-first approaches outperform whole-word methods long-term, especially for spelling and word attack skills.”

A personal note: after I've been studying this debate for many years, I often reminded myself that the whole word lunatics are trying to teach children about five words a week! Or at best, 100 words for the year!! Even if a few kids have a perfect memory, they never reach a few thousand words. But college students need 100,000 words, even 200,000 words. The whole dispute is ridiculous.

Here's the beauty, and the point of this article. Everybody has access to AI now.You can phrase the question different ways. You can ask different AI's and see what they say. You can look at all the evidence, neatly summarized. We can take this whole discussion away from the pretenders at Harvard. You will be the judge and jury. Please send this on to parents you know with young children. It's the kids we are trying to save.

(Bruce Deitrick Price’s new novel is a smart, emotional thriller titled “The Boy Who Saves the World.”)