America, You've Been Punked

----On the one side, you had earnest, sincere people warning the country about the dangers of non-phonetic approaches (these were called Look-say, Whole Word, sight-words, and other jargon). The warning was always the same. Nobody can learn to read that way. It’s a hoax. Don’t do it! You’re being punked.

On the other side, you had patronizing professors of education saying the exact opposite. Phonics is old-fashioned. Dull and dreary. We’ve got the fun new way to learn to read. Kids think of words as graphic designs and memorize them. Easy. No problem.

Dr. Celia Stengler, one such professor, panned a phonics text this way: “One wonders whether the authors have ever had the thrill of seeing a group of children learn to read by the use of modern methods. The zest with which these children approach reading and the zeal with which they read will almost certainly be lost if we turn the clock back [to phonics].” Thrill, zest, zeal-–that’s what the professors promised in order to have their way with us.

“Modern methods” in this case means memorizing hieroglyphics just as the early Egyptians did. Easy? No problem? It’s a huge problem. Try to memorize even a hundred hieroglyphics and see how easy it is.

The condescending professors smugly claim that ordinary kids can memorize tens of thousands of graphic designs or even thousands of them. In fact, some children can’t memorize a few hundred. Many years later, the best you can say about millions of children is that they are semi-literate. The entire claim is a joke. America, you were punked.

So how could the professors pull off this charade? There were lots of faux-experts, thousands apparently. They were well organized. All the big names were making buckets of money selling useless books to children. Probably the main thing is that they were a cult and knew exactly what they wanted, namely, to pursue John Dewey’s dream of turning the US into a socialist country.

Some permissive souls give the Deweyites the alibi of incompetence. But the scam has gone on for more than 75 years. Generations of students have come and gone. But somehow the brilliant high-level PhD’s cannot deduce that their theories are false. One suspects they had figured it out from the beginning, which brings us back to our central tragedy: America, you were punked.

Starting around 1930 the professors forced Whole Word into classrooms. When Rudolf Flesch wrote his famous book in 1955 explaining Why Johnny Can’t Read, the professors counterattacked by forming the International Reading Association (IRA). Its whole purpose was to ridicule phonics and persuade Americans that they should use a reading method that did not work. America, stand still and be punked.

Frank Smith, a brilliant man and IRA hero, wrote a book called Reading Without Nonsense (1973) which was entirely devoted to convincing people they could read with nonsense. In his book he said a most remarkable thing: ordinary humans can easily memorize 50,000 sight-words. Completely absurd but they made it stick. Punk you very much.

Ken Goodman, the other brilliant man in this game, alleged that there are four "cueing systems" for reading: graphophonemic; semantic: syntactic: pragmatic. A theoretical edifice always in the process of toppling. But ed schools taught it; young teachers believed in it; students were victims of it. This edifice should perhaps have been called “punking systems.”

As Dr. Samuel Blumenfeld has mordantly noted in The Victims of Dick and Jane, “The International Reading Association...is perhaps the only organization of such size in which a form of educational malpractice has been enshrined as the highest pedagogical good and its practitioners awarded prizes for their achievements....The vast majority of American children are trapped within a system that is turning their brains into macaroni."

This theme–-the utter disaster of using sight-words to learn to read-–has been emphasized over and over by phonics advocates. Siegfried Engelmann stated in 1992: "The system panders and plays games because it is thoroughly incompetent at the top....At present, there are strong advocacy groups for the spotted owl, the killer whale, the Alaska fur seal, and hundreds of other ‘endangered species.' Paradoxically, millions of our kids are endangered. They will fail in school. They will suffer a very real form of child abuse. Yet these kids have far less real advocacy than the spotted owl does." (War Against the Schools' Academic Child Abuse, 1992)

Blumenfeld and Engelmann are singing the same song: America, you’ve been thoroughly punked

But these few smart sincere critics were no match for the organized horde of the International Reading Association and this country’s Education Establishment. These commissars wanted you to believe that ordinary children could memorize sight-words with automaticity. That’s a technical term for instant recall and pronunciation. Reading speed is fast--three or four words a second. Almost nobody can name sight-words at that pace. But these alleged experts pushed this fantasy with total ferocity; and they still do.

Here is a wonderfully stark summation of the current situation by reading guru Don Potter: “The situation across the nation is dramatically worse that anyone can possibly imagine. When I ask the teachers why they teach sight-words, they inevitably tell me because their students are going to be assessed on them. They are totally unaware that sight-words are positively harmful. They consider sight-words part of a good reading program that includes some phonics, not realizing that sight-words create a reflex that interferes with phonics instruction. Sight-words are an obstacle to reading, not an aid.”

(For more on the Reading Wars, see "42: Reading Resources."/Improve-Education.org)

So, even if you are trapped with a teacher who insists on using "modern" methods and your kid is falling behind, a few minutes with Bob each night is the cure.

What you are doing is "after-schooling", and a lot of folks who can't afford the time off work to homeschool their young children do this all the time.

Read to your child every night before bedtime. There are books available that have stories for every day of the year.
If you do that, I guarantee that your child will be reading to you before he/she starts school.
I and my wife did that, and it works. Plus, an unbreakable bond is developed between you and your child.

SO very true!! It also opens up the whole world for them, because being able to read means they can teach themselves anything they want to learn.

We continued reading to the kids well into their early middle school years. Hubby read "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings" to the older boys. Both of them got and stayed interested in the fantasy genre for years.

When the younger two came along, and got to be that same age, I read the "Redwall" series to them. It was a fun time, reading to them each night, and they enjoyed it because I would take on the varied British accents in the book; the moles and voles spoke in a Cockney accent and the hares had a British military, 'what? what?' pattern of speech. Both of them turned out to be voracious readers, as well.

It is extremely frustrating to have to do this. My wife taught my kids math and I taught them reading, science and history. Most teachers seem to leave the real learning to "homework" where they know Mom and Dad will have to teach the day's lesson.

My youngest is now in a wonderful charter where we don't have to do this drill. They teach the subject in class and give out their cell numbers to call for homework help. They check every day that homework is done and if it isn't the kid stays late to do it. No more finding out at parent-teacher night that your kid has a bunch of missing homework that it is too late to make it up. They test every six weeks and adjust to focus on where the kids need extra attention. It's great to have teachers who teach so we don't have to.

Thanks, Bruce, for another well-researched article on reading. And just in time for school starting this fall.

How does a parent know if their first grader may be developing a reading problem based on lack of phonics? Here’s a checklist:

He guesses constantly.

He confuses “a” and “the.”

He can usually sound out the first letter and the last letter but the middle of the word is a mystery.

He looks at the pictures first and does a lot of his guesswork based on the pictures.

A word list to memorize appears in his homework, sometimes with instructions for him to call out the words as quickly as possible. (Speed is stressed rather than accuracy.)

If readers come home, they contain a high volume of irregular words that are difficult to sound out.
(Phonetic readers have very few irregular words.)

If you suspect your child is failing to learn to read, research the Internet and find a compatible phonics program to help you teach him.

Or hire someone to tutor him.

Reading is the most important thing he will ever learn in school and his future depends on it.

You are correct, and thank you. They range from Gunner Anoreth, USCG, age 22, to Kathleen, the Pink Pet, age 1-1/2. The first two boys are in their late teens, and then there’s the pack of “byos,” who are 11, 9, 7, and 4.

I’ve learned a lot about education the hard way. Tom (16), Pat (11), and Vlad (7) are the instant-readers, while Bill (19), James (9), and Frank (4), are the ones who had to be taught. Frank can’t read yet, and he’s hit-or-miss on recognizing letters and numbers. We were looking at flash cards this afternoon, and he’s quite unclear about 6, 8, and 9!

When I was in lower elementary school, our library had a *Bookworm* program each summer. We were allowed 10 books a week. I always checked out the maximum, read them and was able to give an oral report on each one. By the end of June, the librarian just gave me the weekly sticker, saying:”We know you read them and we know you understand them.”

By 5th grade, I was totally bored with the kids section. My father gave me his library card and I began a lifelong love of science fiction. At first, the librarian would call my father to check that I was allowed to use his card. He told her I could read anything in the library. I think that happened twice. My mother was afraid I was reading *inappropriate* things, but I was able to convince her that I had already finished all the children’s series, the teenaged series and the biographies and if she stopped me from reading adult books, I wouldn’t have anything to read at all except romance novels begged from the babysitter. She relented.

I’m no genius. I suck at math. I understand scientific concepts, but not the equations that support them. I learned to use a dictionary on my own and an encyclopedia. Reading is a gateway to knowledge and understanding of the world. I do not understand illiteracy being sanctioned anywhere.

Reading is a gateway to knowledge and understanding of the world. I do not understand illiteracy being sanctioned anywhere.

Amen to what you said. Illiteracy is being sanctioned because illiterate people are less likely to think about new ideas they encounter in non-pop-culture venues. Readers start thinking about things that make the status-quo uncomfortable. We also don't want those kids who do read and who do get it to make those kids who don't read feel bad about themselves. Nor do we want people to question well established systems that are intent more on self-preservation than they are on their stated purposes.

And yet, the Hunger Games trilogy was/is amazingly popular with teens and I have read of it being used in public schools.

The possible answer is that the Surveillance State is not yet complete, so some things can still sneak through.

RE: “He guesses constantly. He confuses “a” and “the.” He can usually sound out the first letter and the last letter but the middle of the word is a mystery. He looks at the pictures first and does a lot of his guesswork based on the pictures...”

This is a great list. Everybody in the country should see it. The striking thing is how clear-cut the signals are. The kid is doing these things or not doing them. If he is doing them, he is the victim of bad reading instruction.

Look here, literacy used to be important, because it led to a society capable of figuring out everything about the universe. Now, knowledge is complete, the debate is over, and there’s only one valid opinion about any subject.

Thanks BruceDeitrickPrice.

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