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Washing their hands - of systematic phonics
I have often wondered why education leaders resist systematic phonics so fervently, despite the overwhelming research and empircal evidence in its favour. The only reason I have been able to come up with, until now, is that they are simply unwilling to admit they were wrong. Now I have a better explanation, courtesy of an interesting book entitled Brain Bugs: How the brain’s flaws shape our lives by Dean Buonomano. This excerpt is from the chapter “Unreasonable Reasoning” (pp. 142-143).
“In the 1840s, in some hospitals, 20 percent of women died after childbirth. These deaths were almost invariably the result of puerperal fever (also called childbed fever): a disease characterized by fever, pus-filled skin eruptions, and generalized infection of the respiratory and urinary tracts. The cause was largely a mystery, but a few physicians in Europe and the United States hit upon the answer. One of them was the Hungarian doctor Ignaz Semmelweis. In 1846 Semmelweis noted that in the First Obstetric Clinic at the Viennese hospital, where doctors and students delivered babies, 13 percent of mothers died in the days following delivery (his carefully kept records show that on some months the rate was as high as 30 percent). However, in the Second Obstetric Clinic of the same hospital, where midwives delivered babies, the death rate was closer to 2 percent.
“As the author Hal Hellman recounts: ‘Semmelweis began to suspect the hands of the students and the faculty. These he realized, might go from the innards of a pustulant corpse almost directly into a woman’s uterus.’ Sommelweis tested his hypothesis by instituting a strict policy regarding cleanliness and saw the puerperal fever rates plummet. Today his findings are considered to be among the most important in in medicine, but two years after his initial study his strategy had still not been implemented in his own hospital. Semmelweis was not able to renew his appointment, and he was forced to leave to start a private practice. Although a few physicians rapidly accepted Semmelweis’s ideas, he and others were largely ignored for several more decades, and, by some estimates, 20 percent of the mothers in Parisian hospitals died after delivery in the 1860s. It was only in 1879 that the cause of puerperal fever was largely settled by Louis Pasteur.
“Why were Semmelweis’s ideas ignored for decades? The answer to this question is still debated. One factor was clearly that the notion of tiny evil life-forms, totally invisible to the eye, wreaking such havoc on the human body was so alien to people that it was considered preposterous. It has also been suggested that Semmelweis’s theory carried emotional baggage that biased physicians’ judgments: it required a doctor to accept that he himself had been an agent of death, infecting young mothers with a deadly disease. At least one physician at the time is reported to have committed suicide after coming to terms with what we know today as germ theory. There are undoubtedly many reasons germ theory was not readily embraced, but they are mostly the result of the amalgam of unconscious and irrational forces that influence our rational decisions.”
In light of this amazing anecdote, I have formed a new hypothesis concerning educators’ unreasoning aversion to systematic phonics - namely that they are protecting themselves from the knowledge that their policies have resulted in misery and blighted lives for untold millions of people.