After 40 years of teaching a patently stupid, illogical, and scientifically unsound method of reading instruction that condemned millions of Americans to functional illiteracy, the "whole language" movement has given up the ghost as Columbia University shutters the " Teachers College Reading and Writing Project" and sends its founder, Lucy Calkins, off on "permanent sabbatical." //

Whole Language was based on the insane presumption that elementary-age children could learn to read by essentially guessing at the pronunciation and meaning of words.

Gregory Shafer, a professor of English at Mott Community College, has claimed that "the seeds" of the whole language movement were "firmly rooted" in the theories of linguist Noam Chomsky.[31] In 1967, Ken Goodman had an idea about reading that he considered similar to Chomsky's, and he wrote a widely cited article called "Reading: A psycholinguistic guessing game".[32] Goodman set out to determine whether the views of Chomsky could serve as psychological models of the reading process.[33] He chided educators for attempting to apply what he saw as unnecessary orthographic order to a process that relied on holistic examination of words.[34] Whether Goodman was indeed inspired by Chomsky, neither Chomsky himself nor his followers have ever accepted Goodman's views.[35][36]