Todd Tiahrt: “I think a good example is phonics versus word recognition. They went through the education system, they went through the…”

“I think a good example is phonics versus word recognition. They went through the education system, they went through the education bureaucracy that is controlled by the government, this concept that young kids just need to learn words. They don't need to learn phonics, they just need to learn words, and if they do that, they will have control of the English language. Now, that kind of experiment wouldn't have gone very far if we had a competitive system for education where parents had the ability to take their money and choose their own school, because most parents didn't believe that using something other than phonics would work. Now, this grand experiment about word recognition is gone now and we are back to phonics because it did not work. We have got thousands of kids across America that have a very difficult time reading. They have a hard time understanding new words, they have a difficult time pronouncing the words that they do know because they don't have a good grasp of phonics. Instead, they were taught under this archaic system that was forced on our kids by a bureaucratic, government-controlled system void of the free market. On the side of health care--and by the way, the Republican Party is for the free market, they are for a new concept in education and they are for accountability, and it is a contrast from the Democrats. Moving back to health care, what would it be like if you could go to a Web site and shop around for, say, a physical?…”