Posted on 02/14/2015 2:22:45 PM PST by BruceDeitrickPrice
Do you agree? Good, then please pass this little summary to everyone you know.
Or were you thinking, that’s crazy talk. Afraid not. It’s quite accurate, comparable to saying, “The sky is blue.”
Reading instruction in our country has been insane and/or a criminal conspiracy for 80 years.
The resulting illiteracy is a giant hemorrhaging wound. We cannot have a successful school system or a successful civilization unless children typically learn to read in the first grade or two.
This is the 60th year since Rudolf Flesch wrote his famous book explaining why Johnny cannot read. Everything Flesch said in 1955 is just as true today. Here is the essence: “Teach a child what each letter stands for and he can read. I know, you say, it can’t be that simple. But it is.”
The Education Establishment, for ideological reasons, has concocted many different counterproposals. These have names such as Look-say, Whole Word, Whole Language, Balanced Literacy, high-frequency words, Dolch words, sight-words, and so on. Here is the shocking truth. They are all the same proposal, differing only in superficial details.
The common lie is that children can memorize thousands of sight-words, i. e., English words memorized as graphic designs. Can you memorize hundreds of license plates, currency symbols, Egyptian hieroglyphics, famous buildings, faces? Not just memorize them but memorize them with instantaneous recall? Many children never get to 100 sight-words! But to be literate in English you need at least 50,000 words and perhaps 100,000 words. The whole thing is blatantly absurd.
If a child memorizes "the," the child will probably not realize that "THE" is the same word. Many children confuse "the" and "is." Basically, to a sight-word reader, all the little words look alike: toe, lie, the, man, pit, sat, win, try, die, guy, hit, key. (If you want to experience how overwhelming sight-words are for a child, look at a page of English upside-down in a mirror.)
In short, sight-words are the central gimmick, the central fraud, the central sophistry, the central lie, whatever term you like, that has created a literacy crisis in this country.
How do you recognize that you are in the same room with this nonsense? Here are some of the clues you might hear: guess; skip; picture clues; preread; word wall; cueing systems; word callers; reading readiness; context; reading for meaning; reading recovery, and so many more.
Reading means that you can convert the marks on the page to sounds. That’s it. Phonics, phonetic, and phonemic mean the same thing: sounds. Even young children have a working vocabulary of 5000 to 10,000 words. When children convert the printed symbols to spoken words, they usually recognize them. And if they don’t, they look them up in a dictionary. That’s what reading is and always has been in a phonetic language.
It is vitally important to our entire civilization that we fix the reading problem. Here are three items that you can easily check out in a total of 15 minutes, then you will know:
A four-minute graphic video that explains why “Reading Is Easy.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JV0tPGn-Ws
A six-minute graphic video that explains why sight-words are best eliminated from the schools. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w56H8WBcvUo
A good relevant article on American Thinker: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2014/06/reading_the_con_continues.html
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ADDENDUM: A better example of sight-words that look almost identical would be this sort of cluster: fate, hat, mate, hated, bate, heat, rate, dated, late, date, hats, later, hates, etc. A real reader can rattle these off in about 10 seconds with few or no mistakes. A sight-word reader will take longer and make many mistakes. And then the school will declare the child dyslexic!
They made us all bad spellers!
Chinese kids learn several thousand characters. Just sayin’.
Onomatopoeia is a category of words that sound like what they attempt to describe. There is no category of words that look like what they are attempting to describe.
What is the Chinese character for “boob”. (See earlier post)
Don’t forget Spot.
That would probably depend upon which definition of ‘boob’ you were talking about.
“Teach a child what each letter stands for and he can read. I know, you say, it can’t be that simple. But it is.”
Yea, verily! I was able to read about as well as anyone in my one-room country school on the day I first entered the building, because (1)I had been given a colorful alphabet book as a “toy,” and my grandfather (a proxy Dad in my case) satisfied my innate curiosity about the sounds represented by those letters; and (2) books were made available to me at least a year prior to my enrolling in a school, and Grandpa helped me as needed in my attempts to do what came naturally, read.
Much later, my own children, supplied with alphabet books and a mother that would sit down and read to them, at age 4-5 were trying to read the words on the Wheaties box at the breakfast table. Why is it so difficult to teach children something that they want to badly to learn, imitating what they see their parents do?
Possibly I just answered that question.
Here is Mr. Price’s prescription below. Who can argue with any of this except the Universities and Colleges who keep churning out people who have no clue how to teach children anything except SJW propaganda. This abject failure posing as “Formal Education” is a purposeful fraud. If I had a young child these days, he/she would be home schooled using this approach.
1. REAL READING. That means systematic phonics for several months until children learn to read. That means no Whole Word, no sight-words, no Dolch words, no high-frequency words. These gimmicks are all the same thing and the reason we have 50 million functional illiterates.
2. REAL ARITHMETIC. Schools use sensible, coherent programs such as Saxon Math, Singapore Math, or the like. (They do not use Reform Math in any of its forms— Everyday Math, Connected Math, TERC.) Children master basic skills, know the multiplication tables, and can find answers. No more spiraling, fuzziness, or dependence on calculators.
3. REAL LEARNING. It’s knowledge-based and fact-filled. Children learn basic information in the fields of Geography, History, Science, Literature, etc. Students advance in a logical way from the simple to the complex—which leads to genuine critical thinking.
4. REAL EDUCATION. It’s academically correct (as opposed to politically correct). The emphasis is on building study skills and scholarly character. Students know a great deal, and know how to learn more. They can do independent work. They understand that precision, rigor, and honesty are the same things.
They are more desirable in pairs.
Granted, the dialog (or logue) was immature, but the ability to READ was affirmed (imo) through Dick and Jane
Later in life I learned about the McGuffey readers and boy howdy, would I have LOVED them ... or those
Later in life I learned about Muff
We’re talking sight words and giving examples.
I wasn’t.
Creating failure in students by using destructive reading methods creates A LOT of union-dues-paying jobs to "fix" the problem they created. Just sayin ....
Muff?
How about Puff?
.
(wiseguy answer to my miss-remembrin')
Look Look O Look
Dick and Jane (and Sally and Spot...) were the genesis of my reading skills.
In fact, I just bought a good start on a full set for my granddaughter. She is to be home-schooled, and her mother knows the value of reading.
All three of our kids were reading before they ever entered school (thanks to my wonderful wife, Mrs. PubliusMM). They learned on Dick and Jane, too.
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