Posted on 02/13/2011 4:44:10 AM PST by IbJensen
-six years ago, in 1955 to be exact, the most significant book about American education was published and, with very good reason, caused quite a stir. It was written by Rudolf Flesch, who had come to America to escape the Nazis in Vienna, became highly fluent in English and got a Ph.D in English at Columbia University. The book was entitled Why Johnny Can’t Read. It became a best-seller and rankled the entire education establishment. In it Flesch explained why so many children in American schools were having such a difficult time learning to read. He wrote:
“The teaching of reading - -all over the United States, in all the schools, and in all the textbooks - -is totally wrong and flies in the face of all logic and common sense.”
He then went on to explain how, in the 1930s, the professors of education changed the way reading was taught in American schools. They threw out the traditional alphabetic-phonics method, in which one learns how to sound out new words, and replaced it with a new sight, whole-word, or look-say method that teaches children to read English as if it were Chinese. He said that when you impose an ideographic teaching method on a phonetic reading and writing system you get dyslexia, or reading disability.
Flesch’s book was the first salvo in the Reading War, which is still going on over a half a century later. The progressive educators, who had introduced the new reading programs, were not about to give up their crusade to use the schools to create a socialist America. Their view, as first stated by their leader John Dewey, was that traditional phonics produced independent, individualistic readers who could think for themselves, while the new whole-word approach produced readers dependent on the collective for meaning and interpretation and were thereby easier to collectivize and control. And anyone who has visited a public school lately will become aware of how socialistic the curriculum has become.
In this socialist crusade, behavioral psychology would play an important role. For example, Dr. Paul Witty, professor of education and director of the psycho-educational clinic at Northwestern University, was interviewed by Nation’s Schools in July 1955. Flesch had singled out the professor as one of the whole-word gurus. So the magazine prefaced the interview with this paragraph:
“How does one tell a gullible public that it is being exploited by a biased writer — as in the case with Rudolf Flesch and his book Why Johnny Can’t Read? It will take time and patience for parents to learn that Mr. Flesch has mixed a few half-truths with prejudice to capitalize on two misconceptions. The first is his superficial notion as to what reading really is. The second is his misrepresentation as to how reading is taught.”
By now we know exactly what the progressives mean by “what reading really is.” The word method is now called Whole Language, and in 1991 three Whole Language professors wrote a book, Whole Language: What’s the Difference?, in which they defined what they mean by reading. They wrote:
From a whole language perspective, reading (and language use in general) is a process of generating hypotheses in a meaning-making transaction in a sociohistorical context. As a transactional process reading is not a matter of “getting the meaning” from text, as if that meaning were in the text waiting to be decoded by the reader. Rather, reading is a matter of readers using the cues print provide and the knowledge they bring with them to construct a unique interpretation.…This view of reading implies that there is no single “correct” meaning for a given text, only plausible meanings.
This is the kind of pedagogical insanity that now reigns in our colleges of education and has filtered down to the classroom teacher. Most parents assume that our educators are sane human beings who use common sense in their classrooms. Unfortunately, few if any parents have access to the writings of these so-called professors of education, and so are totally ignorant of the kind of crackpots who are educating their children.
Of course, back in 1955, the educators had every reason to denounce Rudolf Flesch because he put in jeopardy all of the new programs that were created to deal with the reading problems children were having as a result of the new teaching methods. An article in the May 1953 issue of High Points had described the new world of remedial reading which had come into existence:
Nearly every university in the United States now operates a “reading clinic” staffed by psychiatrists, psychologists, and trained reading technicians, and equipped with novel mechanical devices such as the metronoscope, the ophthalmograph, and the reading rate accelerator…. In addition, an entirely new professional group of private practitioners has arisen, whose specialized training in the field justifies their hanging out their shingles as “reading counselors” and rating large fees for consultation and remedial treatment.
So in addition to the education establishment and the new basal textbooks they wrote promoting the new teaching method, a whole new field of psychological therapy had developed to take care of children’s reading problems. Indeed, as early as 1944, Life magazine was writing articles about the epidemic of dyslexia among American children. The article stated:
Millions of children in the U.S. suffer from dyslexia which is the medical term for reading difficulties. It is responsible for about 70% of the school failures in the 6- to 12-year-age group, and handicaps about 15% of all grade-school children. Dyslexia may stem from a variety of physical ailments or combination of them-— glandular imbalance, heart disease, eye or ear trouble — or from a deep-seated psychological disturbance that “blocks” a child’s ability to learn. It has little or nothing to do with intelligence and is usually curable.
The article then went on to describe the case of a little girl with an I.Q. of 118 who was being examined at the Dyslexia Institute of Northwestern University. After her tests, the doctors concluded that the little girl needed “thyroid treatments, removal of tonsils and adenoids, exercises to strengthen her eye muscles.” No one suggested teaching her to read with phonics.
No wonder Flesch’s book hit a sensitive nerve among the educators, psychiatrists, psychologists and “reading specialists.” They all had an economic stake in the continued use of teaching methods that produced these thousands of affected children.
The result of Flesch’s book is that it awakened many parents who then began to teach their children to read at home. But the public schools continued to use the teaching method that continued to produce reading disability. And by now the full story of the deliberate dumbing down of the American people has been fully documented by such books as Charlotte Iserbyt’s the deliberate dumbing down of America and John Taylor Gatto’s monumental, The Underground History of American Education.
And yet most American parents continue to put their children in the government schools where the dumbing down curriculum is still in place and does its job of destroying their children’s ability to become good readers and successful human beings. And yet, the idea of reforming the public schools still resonates among the public who constantly approve of the government’s efforts of reform by throwing billions of dollars at the educators.
But Flesch knew how difficult the job of reform would be. He wrote:
It’s a foolproof system all right. Every grade-school teacher in the country has to go to a teachers’ college or school of education; every teachers’ college gives at least one course on how to teach reading; every course on how to teach reading is based on a textbook; every one of those textbooks is written by one of the high priests of the word method. In the old days it was impossible to keep a good teacher from following her own common sense and practical knowledge; today the phonetic system of teaching reading is kept out of our schools as effectively as if we had a dictatorship with an all-powerful Ministry of Education.
And the situation today is about the same as it was back in Flesch’s day. My contacts in the teaching field tell me that not much has changed since 1955, despite the fact that many books have been published since then corroborating Flesch’s findings. But it seems that only the homeschoolers have bothered to read them.
Back in the 1970s when I became aware of what was going on in the schools, I decided to write a phonics reading program that could easily be used by any parent to teach their child to read at home. I eliminated the use of any pictures and simply taught the student our English alphabetic system in a rational, systematic way. Its title is Alpha-Phonics. By now it has been used by thousands of homeschooling parents quite successfully, proving beyond any doubt that we can restore high literacy to this country if the will to do so is there. Unfortunately, it isn’t among the educational establishment.
Meanwhile, just about everyone who reads a newspaper knows that we still have a severe reading problem, which is not helping our country compete with all of those students learning English in China, South Korea, Japan, and India.. Indeed, the National Endowment for the Arts was so concerned about our declining literacy that they conducted their own survey which was released in November of 2007 entitled “Reading at Risk.”
According to the Report, the number of 17-year-olds who never read for pleasure increased from 9 percent in 1984 to 19 percent in 2004. About half of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 never read books for pleasure.
Endowment Chairman Dana Gioia stated: “This is a massive social problem. We are losing the majority of the new generation. They will not achieve anything close to their potential because of poor reading.” The survey found that only a third of high school seniors read at a proficient level. “And proficiency is not a high standard,” said Gioia. “We’re not asking them to be able to read Proust in the original. We’re talking about reading the daily newspaper.”
Well, as you can imagine the Report had as much influence on our educators as Flesch’s book of 1955. By the way, Flesch wrote a new book in 1983, Why Johnny Still Can’t Read. That book was totally ignored by the educators, who had so completely solidified their control over reading in the schools, that they couldn’t have cared less about what Flesch had to say in his new book.
I remember when I learned to enjoy reading, and it was whn we were assigned “The Martian Chronicles” by Ray Bradbury. What an exciting thing to open up cpmpletely new worlds in your imagination? I then went week after week to the school library until I had read every Bradbury book they had...”R is for Rocket” “S is for Space” “Something Wicked This Way Comes”, all of them. After Bradbury I moved on to Asimov, Niven, and Heinlein and never looked back.
Kudos to the teacher who exposed me to science fiction.
I’ve always found it to be interesting that we’re able to recognize misspelled words and read over them as if nothing is wrong.
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
Agreed, plus lack of punctuation AND the butchering of headlines etc.
One gets ‘tired’ of pointing them out and you also get labeled as being picky etc....
Sometimes it ‘hurts my eyes’ to read what is posted....
I learned to read by the phonics method, in the classroom and at home where my mother was a teacher and elementary principal who’d always taught the phonics method.
I’ve yet to read a description of the “whole language” approach that makes any sense. All it seems to be is memorization, or kids just learn to memorize “whole” words rather than being able to look at the letters and syllables that make up the word, and then pronounce and discern the meaning or new words, or use a dictionary.
Of course, once a kid has looked at the letters and syllables and learned a new word, I guess they read the words they’ve learned on a “whole word” basis afterward. But being able to look at the letters and syllables that make up a word seems like a far superior method of learning to read and spell, and to learn news words throughout life.
He meant 60 years ago in 1955.
This was a great article. I recall my parents had the book in the home when I was a child.
Thank you for posting this interesting and informative article.
The goal of almost every college professor is tenure - aka near absolute job security that continues until you want to retire. A family example is my Uncle who wrote a text book in the mid 1970s at age 40ish, gained tenure, and is still teaching at 72. Most, if not all of this is based on that 1976 era text book and its reprints.
To gain tenure you have to publish. This normally means text books. Since you have your textbook on the subject you are teaching all of your students have to buy your textbook. At 20-50 students a session, 2-3 sessions a year, this gets into some real money after a decade or three.
So what happens to this market logic if you don't come up with something new every generation or so?
There is no money or tenure in teaching something cast in concrete - see the collapse of the classical (Greek and Latin) based programs in our university systems along with the explosive growth in gender/racial based programs.
don’t schools get extra $$/grants/aid/tax money for “special” programs for kids? I’d say follow the money when it comes to schools...they probably have a certain percentage that they must reach in order to get more $$$$$ “for the children”.
Cincinnati Public Schools calendar...the February page says, “We Practice the 3 R’s...reduce, reuse, recycle”...children in photo holding a green globe. Wonder why Johnny can’t read? Our tax money is spent on these 3 R’s training them to be green nazis and the 4th R, feel good anytime about reproduction.
Americans...
As almost always, Donald Trump is Right on the money!
Schools has been used to create social illiterates for America. The result being now you do have an illiterate President among a flawed Congress.
The solution is simple, END FEDERAL SCHOOLING SYSTEM (DOE), and give parents the right to choose for their children.
Send all this commies under disguise teachers to serve gas stations!
I attended a Catholic school. We had alphabet letters with lower case and caps all the way around the room. Also had pictures, A is for apple, B is for banana etc. It was painless learning. Every afternoon the nun would read to us, usually from some children’s storybook...it made us want to read our own storybooks. It was joy to learn in that atmosphere. No stress, just enthusiasm and a desire to learn faster and read more. And so very simple.
bookmark
I started reading well before Kindergarten (1956) also. One day in class, one of the kids told me I couldn’t read. So I picked up a book and began reading to the other kids to prove I could read. The teacher saw me. Well, it ended up that my parents tried to get the school to let me “skip” a grade. I spent a lot of time reading to the principal, doing math, etc. Although I was learning at a higher level (I don’t know what level) they would not let me skip a grade simply because of my “age.” However, what they DID do, was call me in to read to the classes whenever the teachers had to leave the room for some reason. That happened all the way through the 6th grade. I would be asked to leave my classroom and go to another and read to the class. They actually used my skills for their benefit, but wouldn’t let me move forward because of my “age.”
I had a similar experience with my daughter back in the early 70s.
I/we had taught her to read prior to kindergarten.
We went to 'Meet the Teacher' night just before the start of my daughter entering kindergarten. I told the teacher, rather proudly, that Jeanette knew how to read. She jumped me with both barrels, accusing me of using the wrong method and my daughter woud be ruined for life.
That's when I knew gov. education was in the toilet.
My daughter was in honors classes throughout.
But even there the curriculum sucked.
My daughter would bring home papers in science , for instance, with poor capitalization, punctuation. But they were graded 'A'. When I pointed out the mistakes she told me in Science class punctuation, etc. was ignored. Only English class graded on it.
Then there was New Math. Another totally worthless endeavor.
One of the problems is these 'educators' trying to justify their jobs by thinking up new ways to teach.
Then there's discipline, no family unit, uneducated parents. The list is long but the first step is Get rid of the Dept. of Education.
It's pretty simple stuff and the best way for kids to learn how to read. This "historical context of words" bullsh*t that these wacko teachers spout is EXACTLY why Johnny not only can't read but has absolutely no interest in doing so.
How DARE you!!! Just who do you think you are? ;-)
I have another thought to share...
If Americans can´t read, they ought to relay on TV or Films for information, and this is the COMMUNIST PROPAGANDA PARADISE!
When I was eight, I was rounded up by one of the staff at my hometown's Carnegie Public Library and "charged with:
1. leaving the juvenile section that occupied the basement
2. having the nerve to try and check out William L. Shirer's "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich"
3. thwarting an impromptu "literacy test" by reading a line from the book at random.
It took the intervention of my mother (who had taught me to read phonetically despite her being a teacher in the public schools) to eventually obtain the book, and the woman at the desk was adamant that it would be checked out to my mom and NOT to me.
The episode did little more than confuse me, but it outraged mater.
Mr. niteowl77
As for me, I don't remember whether I learned by phonics or the look-say method. The school taught phonics-phonics-phonics, but I could read before first grade. Math had way too many of the new math "set theory" topics, but I do remember lots of addition and multiplication drills.
>>”-six years ago, in 1955 to be exact”
>
>Apparently he can’t do math either...
>
Really? You can’t extrapolate from the hyphen in front of the word “six”? I find that interesting.
I have not had that particular experience but have had similar ones where it seems you are talking to a machine that is programmed to stay quiet and calm until you finish speaking and then repeat the same phrase over and over. It truly is maddening. I have never understood how people can arrive at such a state.
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