Victims of Dick and Jane? People stopped learning how to read when schools turned away from that method. When my kids were learning to read I went out of my way to go looking for Dick and Jane-style books to work with them. If I see them in a yard sale I still pick them up for Grandchildren.
My brother was a victim of some bizarre reading experiment in the 1970’s where they replaced the letters of the alphabet with a bunch of symbols. Those symbols made it easy to pronounce and read any word in their book and it made him a brilliant reader. Of course in the real world they didn’t use symbols and it took him many years of struggling to learn to read properly.
See Spot run. Run Spot run. See Spot get relpaced. See Dick turn into a semi-literate government dependent.
My brother was a victim of some bizarre reading experiment in the 1970’s where they replaced the letters of the alphabet with a bunch of symbols.
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I know someone who was subjected to that same “method”. She’s a brilliant woman and she eventually learned to read very well, but she can’t spell to this day because of that.
We taught our kids out of the old McGuffey’s readers and they were reading on officially a third grade level or higher when they started school. When we were chastised by the first one’s first teacher for making her job difficult we ended the public school thing altogether. Dick and Jane and Alice and Jerry were early fruits of the scientific determination that literacy in the masses is detrimental to social progress.
Look carefully at Dick and Jane. You will see that they were the very first books used to teach children whole words. Do you remember how repetitive they are? "Look!" says Jane. "Look!" says Dick. THAT is the point. By the end of the book the kids pick up one or two of the heavily repeated words, without really learning that L always sounds like the beginning of "look". Some kids will catch that, but many don't.