An educational controversy Let’s break it down, my swing dance instructor used to say. We learned more complex moves not by watching him and his partner perform them over and over at music speed and trying to memorize the whole. We learned the move by reducing their actions to component parts. Do this, then this, then that. Where to put your weight on which foot. When to shift it — more subtle stuff than the eye could catch. I’m old. I learned to read decades earlier the same way with phonics. But sometime between then and now, the “whole word” method took hold. It’s been controversial. Controversial enough that the Washington Post Editorial Board saw fit to address it in its Sunday editorial: The so-called reading wars have been raging for decades now, sometimes pitting teachers against publishers or publishers against academicians — and also sometimes, as too many things do these days, pitting progressives against conservatives or Democrats against Republicans. That’s unfortunate, because — as perhaps too few things do these days — the debate over how best to teach children to read lends itself to a conclusive answer. That’s phonics. There is some history behind the contest, and the Post lays it out in brief. In phonics, students learn a letter or a pair of letters at a time. That’s how most Americans learned to read. Slowly, letters add up to words. Eventually, through a process called “orthographic mapping,” some words will lodge themselves in a child’s memory so they’ll…