Greg Ashman is Winning the Battle but Losing the War - Part 1

 

The reading wars are full of loud voices, confident claims, and endless debates about “what works.” One of the loudest is Greg Ashman, deputy principal in Australia and champion of explicit teaching. His tweets and articles win applause from teachers who are tired of trendy distractions. But beneath the surface, something vital is being missed.

 

This two‑part series takes a plain‑English look at Ashman’s arguments — where he is right, where he is dangerously wrong, and why children keep failing to read despite all the research and rhetoric.

A Plain-English Breakdown

Greg Ashman, the Australian deputy principal who has become the internet’s loudest champion of “explicit teaching,” dropped two things this week that perfectly show what is going wrong in the reading debate:

 

A tweet (23 November 2025)

 

A long article called “Why Almost Everyone is Wrong About the Curriculum”

 

Both pieces hammer the same message:

 

Stop wasting time on fluffy, trendy teaching.

 

Teach knowledge directly and clearly.

 

The research is on his side.

 

He is half right. And that half is dangerous, because it lets him (and thousands of teachers who follow him) feel certain while children keep failing to read. Let’s walk through it slowly, in plain language.

 

Part 1 – The Tweet

Ashman wrote:

 

“Whenever explicit teaching is compared directly to ‘constructivist’ approaches, it is found to be more effective … Many proponents of constructivist maths teaching don’t even know this … When this is pointed out, they start claiming that explicit teaching is OK for ‘rote memorising procedures’ but constructivism is needed for some supposedly higher and more important outcome that conveniently cannot be measured. You will never convince these people …”

 

Translation

“I have the research. The other side is clueless or dishonest. Case closed.”

 

Although he was talking mostly about maths, his followers instantly apply the same logic to reading: “Explicit phonics beats everything else. End of story.”

 

Part 2 – The Article

In his longer piece, Ashman attacks the Australian Curriculum for being full of vague rubbish.

 

What He Gets Right

Children need rich background knowledge to understand what they read.

 

That knowledge should be taught directly, not left for children to “discover.”

 

Where It Goes Wrong

Ashman quietly assumes that the very first step—turning written letters into clear sounds—is already being done perfectly.

 

That is the fatal mistake. Without fixing the foundation of decoding print into sound, all the “explicit teaching” of knowledge on top of it collapses. Children cannot access the rich content if they cannot reliably read the words in front of them.

 

The Bigger Picture

Ashman’s confidence in explicit teaching wins him the battle of rhetoric. But by ignoring the cracks at the very bottom of the reading process, he risks losing the war. The danger is not in his call for knowledge, but in the blind spot that keeps thousands of children struggling to read while teachers feel certain they are “doing it right.”