Posted on 12/01/2010 3:29:16 PM PST by BruceDeitrickPrice
1955 is a pivotal year in American history. This was the year Rudolf Flesch published “Why Johnny Can’t Read,” a book that explained the country’s illiteracy crisis.
The biggest crime in American history didn’t start that year; but Flesch exposed it and forced people to confront it. The crime actually began 20 years earlier...
Historically, most Americans could read; literacy rates went up and up, until about 1935. That was when progressive educators discarded phonics and forced Look-say into the public schools. (This method made children memorize the shapes of words, while ignoring the letters and their sounds.)
Meanwhile, the country was suffering through the Great Depression from 1930 to 1940, World War II from 1940 to 1945, and then the slow recovery from both. People were busy and distracted, not paying much attention to education.
However, even by 1945, there was mounting evidence that something horrible was unfolding. The US military had to reject almost a million young men due to poor reading skills.
In 1950, Paul Witty, one of the foremost Look-say experts, mused: "Why are there so many poor readers in our schools?...Is it true that one-third of our high school students can't read at the fifth grade level? That's what one magazine writer estimated in 1946. Other articles have painted almost as bleak a picture."
Rudolf Flesch in 1955 explained the problem, noting, “I’m not accusing the reading ‘experts’ of wickedness or malice...All I’m saying is that their theories are wrong and that the application of those theories has done untold harm to our younger generation.”
Flesch’s book became a bestseller, one of the most talked-about books of the century. So at this point everyone knew the problem; and they knew the answer.
The Education Establishment reacted in a surprising way.....CONTINUES BELOW
(Excerpt) Read more at rightsidenews.com ...
When my oldest son was in first grade his teacher called and told me he was having difficulty with his reading. Since they didn’t send homework home I stopped into his class one morning to see what was going on. In those days they would let parents into the classroom unannounced. Within about 60 seconds I understood the problem...whole word technique.
When the child got home that afternoon we immediately started our tutoring on reading that lasted almost every evening for 4 years. My mother had been a teacher so I had some very old textbooks. The boy learned very well.
Imagine my amazement one day when the older son was at school and the 2 1/2 year old brought in one of his story books and said, “Mom, I’m going to read this to you.” And, he did. He stumbled over the word “tow” pronoucing it as if it rhymed with “cow” but other than that got every word right. So, I got another book from a box that I knew he’d never seen or had read to him. Again, he read it almost perfectly. He’d picked up reading just by watching the tutoring lessons. I am a firm beliver in phonics to start. Whole word is fine once the reader has become more experienced.
I also learned to read whole words all by myself, dont know how. Started at 4 years old. My parents read constantly, house was full of books.
On the other hand, 1955 or thereabouts was when just about every household got a TV. My mother, who was a teacher, always blamed the downward trend on that, wouldnt have a TV in the house.
Very interesting article. All this nonsense makes a lot more sense once you understand that “public education” as we know it has never been about educating young people in this country.
But ...more to your point is the FACT that, their trying to no-longer teach Cursive "long-hand" writing or reading.
What better way to turn the United States youth into "Slaves" and destroy this country!!???!
I learned via phonics in the mid 50s, got in before the ship sailed.
We home schooled. Teaching phonics was easy. With very little effort our daughter (now 27) was reading at (public school) 12th grade level by age 11.
What turned out to be a sort of funny (unexpected) result was that she was able to read books quite well that were a lot ahead of her maturity level. It was a never ending stream of “Daddy what does (insert big word here) mean?” Finally we gave her a dictionary and asked her to look up at least some of the words.
It also meant we had to screen what she was reading because in order to get books that were on par with her reading ability, many times the *content* was somewhat ahead of what an 11 year old should be exposed to.
Schools in US vary quite tremendously, even neighborhood to neighborhood. I have to generalize.
Behind closed doors, many teachers saved people from Whole Word—perhaps you were one. And never forget: the smarter kids figure it out; the slower kids are destroyed.
The Terman-Walcutt book in 1958 studied school districts 25 miles apart that were doing opposite methods. Amazing. Even as Whole Word gained a stranglehold, there were always islands of sanity. But the IRA was able to pretend that phonics didn’t work. (If you want more, Google “30: The War Against Reading.”
To La Lydia,
Here is a sad report from a Canadian newsletter: “As a retired high school teacher, from time to time I chat with former colleagues who are still in the trenches. They tell me that it has come to pass that grade 12 teachers now have to present and defend a full report on any student who fails his or her course. There is no suggestion that the student should have to justify his or her being elevated to a passing grade. Needless to say, it is in the interests of a quiet life for teachers not to present any failures...”
Canada bought into all our stupid ideas and tends to stay a little ahead of us. So I’m not feeling optimistic.
Good for you.
She sounds like a wonderful young woman.
My teacher may have but that was 60 years ago. I now have to concentrate on remembering things like what I had for breakfast this morning.
I am now remembering that there was a "Sally" in that book also and "Zeke" who seemed to be always be raking leaves when the children stopped to chat with him.
The biggest crime in America was the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank.
Those were the books I used teaching in the mid-fiftes———and don’t forget Baby Sally.
There was something about Zeke I always found unsettling.
Looky-Sayey was there, it was just that your teachers had still learnt by phonics and were still instinctively applying those methods.
But "Dick and Jane" is the whole word system: Books structured to use only those words the child is scheduled to be "taught to recognise". You don't imagine any child would read those books for entertainment, do you?
I didn’t realize “Dick and Jane” was the whole-word method because my teacher obviously employed phonetics. And no, we did not read it for entertainment. We shortly reserved that To Edgsr Rice Burroughs and Mark Twain books, and many others, for this was the infancy of TV.
My friend’s wife quit the school system 3 years short of retirement just to get out of the maddness.
Yeah, I kinda suspected that he was the neighborhood perv.
I remember the look in his eye when he was talking to Dick.
Yes, I’ve heard that central banks are bad. But I don’t know where the damage shows up. Can you make a case that millions of individuals are physically, emotionally or financially hurt, as happens with Whole Word?
There’s an excellent chronology of research and publications
proving your claim at thephonicspage.org , “Reading History”
Brain imaging research is now feasible, that’s one recent
item. Rudolf Flesch’s update c. 1981 Why Johnny *Still*
Can’t Read is better than the original IMO. It has one
conclusive argument agains the whole word folks: Kurzweil
machines. These are the machines that read books to visually
impaired people. English has rather more rules, but reading
English is rule based. Machines can’t use intuition, they
need rules.
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