Hooked on Phonics (and Common Sense)

Some different fare: Britain's whole-word reading programs that were imposed by the government have been a disaster. Bring back phonics, says this editorial. Link to Telegraph. Excerpt:

The phonics-versus-whole-word teaching controversy mirrors the larger debate about education. Whole-word teaching descends from the general to the particular, and it is no coincidence that it depends for its dissemination on a centralised educational bureaucracy. Phonics teaching, by contrast, is bottom-up, working on the basis that words take their shape from their parts. This is the correct model for education overall.