Pete Hegseth

None of this even has to do with reading and writing and arithmetic, which our kids can't do anymore.

Another example of that is, did you do, remember those commercials?

Hooked on Phonics worked for me.

Hooked on Phonics.

I remember as a kid, I was in school, I was like,

I would make fun, I'd be like, hook down phonics, for me, those guys must be so dumb.

And I'm like, and the further I get away from it, I'm like, that's me.

I never took phonics.

I don't know how to conjugate a verb.

I don't even know what a proper sentence structure looks like, because I wasn't taught that.

I taught to read on a whole word method.

It was the new fad of the educational philosophy, a whole word method.

So that phonics is how we taught kids to read for hundreds and thousands of years.

It worked really well.

The educational bureaucrats started to tinker with it, because that's what they do.

What happened after that?

Well, we actually got dumber.

Reading scores went like this.

When you teach kids phonics, they learn how to read the way they've always learned how to read, understanding our language, with roots in Latin and Greek and others that you add to.

I don't know any of that.