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.
Thanks for the suggestion. Pat is working on Greek and Latin now, but maybe he could try Hebrew as well. I’m sure there’s an elementary-level Biblical Hebrew course somewhere, on the order of “Hey Andrew, Teach Me Some Greek!”
What percentage of kids coming out of grammar school can’t read, and where are they from? I’ve read a number of these screeds concerning the supposed failure of American kids to be able to read for decades, and I’ve always wondered where they were. I’m in my sixties and went to parochial schools 1-12. I didn’t know anyone who couldn’t read. Obviously, there were some kids who had trouble with all aspects of learning. They were called slow learners. But even the slow learners I knew could read. So my question is still this: how many kids coming out of grade school have trouble reading, and where are they located?
The public schools are the front line of the State’s war against society.
If only the survivors would talk!
Instead, they mostly move along, having absorbed the most important lessons: that Authority knows what’s best; and that even when Teacher is wrong, you’d best just go along to get along - you can never beat the System, anyway.
Welfare dependency is Stage II.
At the end of the day, either the State will win, and the population will be dealt with as it was in the USSR, China, and Cambodia; or human society will win.
Throughout history, the State always wins, and then, having severed it’s living roots, perishes.
1. You can't fix stupid.
2. Our parasitical Ruling Elites do not want a population of independent thinking, self sufficient adults that have a deep understanding of their history and of their God-given natural rights. The US education system is not broken or failing but it is working exactly as it is intended to.
I figured TPTB took the Mr Carnegie's name off because they thought (probably correctly) that no one knew who he was any more.:-(
My inclination towards laziness didn't help matters, and to this day I am ashamed at my lack of mathematical prowess.
College junior reading comprehension at age 9...Pretty much innumerate, and could barely get though Introduction to Algebra. I know where you're coming from : I learned to add , subtract, multiply, divide, and fractions, and that's pretty much IT. I never to date have needed to know more that that...But maybe my career choices and need to know more advanced mathematics would have been different had I forced myself to excel in them.
I still like to read though!
When I was much younger , I had so many books I literally caused the flooring of a single wide trailer to collapse! They had to get in with floor jacks and cement blocks to reinforce the flooring from the weight of my library, and the 2x6 shelving we made to accommodate said library.
Later we moved to a small site built home. The living room was the biggest room in the hose, and three of the walls held my library. The other wall held our TV and other electronics, and 300-400 VHS tapes . Everyone who came into our house said the same thing, after looking around our living room:
"Wow, you guys sure have a lot of movies!"
300-400 VHS tapes : Worthy of note. 1200-1300 books : Not worthy of note.
Sigh.....
Today I live in a larger house with a full basement. My library is gaining on 3000, mostly HBs or at least TPBs. (I hate mass markets PBS-too small, badly printed, and too often the text runs down into the spine-margins are way to small. I have mass markets ONLY where the book is available in no other form.) My library is distributed between the living room, the computer room/office, two bedrooms, and most of the basement/home theater . The house is on a cement foundation, so the floor shouldn't collapse this time! :-)
The guy on the youtube video basically has it.
So?...Where are these illiterate kids found?
They are found here in my county. We live in one of the reddest rural ( becoming suburban) counties in one of the reddest states. It is found among both the white and immigrant Latino kids.
I know because I am a cub scout leader and ( until I couldn't stand it any more) I was an after school tutor for our church. It is shocking how poorly these kids read. Unbelievable really! Most are innumerate.
The Latino parents **wrongly** believe that the same teaching methods they enjoyed in their mud hut schools are the methods being used in the U.S. schools, therefore, they foolishly think U.S. schools are doing their jobs. Some smart and aggressive Latinos have the government schools figured out and have sought tutoring help from friends, neighbors, and relatives. Their kids are doing Ok.
Among the white parents, the parents, themselves, have been so poorly educated by our county schools that they are now utterly incapable of afterschooling their kids.
The **ONLY** children who are getting an education in our county are those parents who are vigorously afterschooling and homeschooling their kids and/or aggressively finding informal or formal tutoring. ( I **seriously** mean this!)
If our government schools in this county closed tomorrow the same kids who are getting an education today would get one tomorrow, because it certainly isn't happening in the government schools.
By the way,...I, too, attended Catholic schools in the 50s and 60s. I **know** that of the 70 (plus) kids in my class that **all** of them could read. In those days, the nuns didn't give a twit about self-esteem and we were all required to read aloud in class .
What I have noticed is that the teachers’ colleges don’t seem to be teaching about learning disabilities, at least not in WA state. I think that you would be hard pressed to find 20% of the teachers who could identify the three main types of learning disabilities, dyslexia, dysgraphia and dyscalculia.
If the teachers have no understanding of the problems, they cannot hope to work around them, and frankly they just don’t want to deal with it. They would rather spend their time with the gifted students.
I think that dyscalculia is what you are calling innumerate. I hadn’t heard that term before. What it means is that numerals have no meaning to the children. They must touch each object as they count and even then, they often get lost. It’s like a short circuit in the brain, regarding numbers. Getting around this disability requires early intervention using dots instead of numerals. Even then, it is only a minimal fix. These kids will be ever dependent on a calculator.
The sad part about it, schools on the East Coast have been on top of this for years.
His is a reasoned, logical argument against the system which was imposed on the nation's children by its government, both from a learning-performance-of-children, as well as a citizenship- training perspective.
His voice was drowned out by those who differed with his views, but the consequences discussed in this article and on this thread may parallel his observations.
"Poison drops in the federal Senate: the school question from a parental and non-sectarian stand-point: an epitome of the educational views of Zach. Montgomery on account of which views a stubborn but fruitless effort was made in the United States Senate to prevent his confirmation as Assistant Attorney General (1886)"
Author: Montgomery, Zachariah
Subject: Education -- United States; Education and state
Publisher: Washington, D.C. : Gibson Bros., printers
Possible copyright status: NOT_IN_COPYRIGHT
Language: English
Call number: AXU-5456
Digitizing sponsor: MSN
Book contributor: OISE - University of Toronto
Collection: toronto
Here is a sample excerpt of the wisdom of Senator Montgomery, but in the report, he uses Census data and other government records to document his claims and fears about the potential results of what he called an "anti-parental" system of education.
Although his treatise dealt primarily with the public school question, these excerpts also might be helpful to those who, today, consider themselves as TEA Partiers, or Taxed Enough Already candidates advocating for liberty on a plethora of issues. Whether they win or lose, they will know that they have taken a stand for liberty.
Some words from Zacharias Montgomery:
"My countrymen, disguise the fact as we may, there is in this country to-day, and in both the political Parties, an element which is ripe for a centralized despotism. There are men and corporations of vast wealth, whose iron grasp spans this whole continent, and who find it more difficult and more expensive to corrupt thirty odd State Legislatures than one Federal Congress. It was said of Nero of old that he wished the Roman people had but one head, so that he might cut it off at a single blow. And so it is with those moneyed kings who would rule this country through bribery, fraud, and intimidation.
"It is easy to see how, with all the powers of government centered at Washington in one Federal head, they could at a single stroke put an end to American liberty.
"But they well understand that before striking this blow the minds of the people must be prepared to receive it. And what surer or safer preparation could possibly be made than is now being made, by indoctrinating the minds of the rising generation with the idea that ours is already a consolidated government ; that the States of the Union have no sovereignty which is not subordinate to the will and pleasure of the Federal head, and that our Constitution is the mere creature of custom, and may therefore be legally altered or abolished by custom.
"Such are a few of the pernicious and poisonous doctrines which ten millions of American children are today drinking in with the very definitions of the words they are compelled to study. And yet the man who dares to utter a word of warning of the approaching danger is stigmatized as an enemy to education and unfit to be men tioned as a candidate for the humblest office.
"Be it so. Viewing this great question as I do, not for all the offices in the gift of the American people would I shrink from an open and candid avowal of my sentiments. If I have learned anything from the reading of history, it is that the man who, in violation of great principles, toils for temporary fame, purchases for himself either total oblivion or eternal infamy, while he who temporarily goes down battling for right principles always deserves, and generally secures, the gratitude of succeeding ages, and will carry with him the sustaining solace of a clean conscience, more precious than all the offices and honors in the gift of man.
"History tells us that Aristides was voted into banishment because he was just. Yet who would not a thousand times rather today be Aristides than be numbered amongst the proudest of his persecutors.
"Socrates, too, in violation of every principle of justice, was con demned to a dungeon and to death. Yet what name is more honored in history than his? And which of his unjust judges would not gladly, hide himself in the utter darkness of oblivion from the with ering scorn and contempt of all mankind ?
"From the noble example of Aristides and of Socrates let American statesmen learn wisdom, and from the undying infamy of their cow ardly time-serving persecutors let political demagogues of today take warning."
Phonic work for SOME people, not all. Dyslexics cannot learn phonics. There brains don’t associate letters with sounds. It’s like a short circuit. There is no one type learning that works for everyone.
Heck, my two year old grandson can read every word that he can say, but he doesn’t know his alphabet, yet.
I’m hesitant to attack teachers, because I have met some conservative ones who are five star, and motivated kids compete to get in their classes.
And from what I’ve seen of those classrooms, they are intense. There are few college classes that can produce that kind of intensity. And I noted that these were regular curriculum, not magnet or special classes. Required teacher pre-approval to attend a high school class? Yow.
I also noted that there were zero discipline problems. The kids walked in, sat down, and started to work. A good indicator—high school boys who regularly wear neckties, but are in no way required to do so.
at that point you demanded he be switched to another class,correct?
all my sons have since graduated from high school, some from college, and are living their lives...yes, I did that, and then some...but, it did not matter..this son had 1 good teacher in 12 years of public school...he took the test for mensa, along with me and my middle son... I scored in the 97th percentile ( 98 is needed for consideration for admission ) he scored 95th, and middle son scored 88th...the son with 95th got out of the public schools with a 1.99 gpa....these people ruined a potential genius, and I could fill a book with the battles I fought over 17 years of my kids in public schools...but, I did fight the battles, and won most of them...the ones I lost were not because I was incorrect, but because the schools are nothing but indoctrination centers run by “I don’t give a shit, i get paid” union type a$$holes....I even stood up in a high school conference, and called a teacher an “Ignorant A$$hole” in front of the entire school...I have little to no respect for teachers, and the ones I do have respect for now work at other districts..
Well, there is something known as "closure" where the brain can "fill in" gaps or make minor corrections for us so that we interpret rather than see things as they really are.
That aside, I believe that the majority of people are now so poor at spelling and grammar that they don't even recognize when a word is spelled (or used) incorrectly.
Living in a digital world doesn't help - typos happen, even to the best of spellers.
I hope you removed your son from the influence of this “teacher” asap.
When I started school, my mother worked (my dad had left). When I got out of school, I would walk to the library on the next block and wait there for her to get off work. There was nothing to do there but read. I started with the little kids books and worked my way around. I eventually found the science fiction section and stayed with it until I pretty-much read it all. By 5th grade I was weirding out the librarians by checking out adult books on nuclear physics.
The way to get good at reading, is to read.
Bingo! And anyone who tells you this was not purposefully crafted to produce the outcome that we have now is fooling themselves.
“One started learning Greek when he was 4.”
Wonderful! How did this come about?
>>>Phonics is a learning tool only, like training wheels. Taking in whole sentences at a glance is the end state of the highly literate. Many people who are ‘eulexic’ skip the phonics part almost entirely, and jump to the end state.<<<
Studies done with readers who have no problem understanding text show that each eye sees each letter individually - with the right eye a few letters ahead of the left eye. (The extraoridinary part of that study is building a machine to track eye movements that precisely.) In any case, people don’t “skip” the phonics part. They’ve been trained so long and so effectively in phonics that it has become purely automatic for the reader. At that point, to the reader, it feels as if they’re simply scanning the sentence and focusing on content. However, the process of creating meaning out of sound patterns continues in the reader’s brain.
A good metaphor here is driving. After many years and many miles behind the wheel, we can travel down the road and quickly and effectively read signs, see wildlife, and watch out for hazards without thinking about where our hands are on the steering wheel and what our feet are doing with the pedals. Our brains aren’t skipping thoughts about those driving movements, though, while we’re looking at the moose in the willows.
>>I’m hesitant to attack teachers, because I have met some conservative ones who are five star, and motivated kids compete to get in their classes.
And from what I’ve seen of those classrooms, they are intense. There are few college classes that can produce that kind of intensity. And I noted that these were regular curriculum, not magnet or special classes. Required teacher pre-approval to attend a high school class? Yow.
I also noted that there were zero discipline problems. The kids walked in, sat down, and started to work. A good indicator—high school boys who regularly wear neckties, but are in no way required to do so.<<<
Don’t mean to brag, but you’ve described my classroom for freshmen and sophomore English. I’m here at 8:50 a.m. on a Sunday morning to prepare those classes. My contract says I work 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday, and I tell the representative of the Union Which Supposedly Represents Me that the last time I had a job where I punched a clock I was delivering pizzas. I’m also the guy in the room who yells for merit pay and elimination of tenure every year at contract negotiation time.
There are some very poor teachers out there. It is a crying shame that they can’t get the boot. There are excellent teachers out there, and many of them are conservative, although I understand correlation is not causation.
I wear a tie every day. My students are always expected to sit up straight and remain focused on their job, which is learning. I tell them point blank that the two things in life which matter most are hard work and honesty, and I expect both in my classroom at all times. I sometimes get unnecessary crap from more liberal colleagues but never from parents and students. I go out of my way to be a hard-nosed guy. Students write at least 250 words per class. Spelling and grammar are a major focus, since, using a line from a commercial I’ve heard on talk radio, “people judge you by the words you use.” (No message is more powerful to a 15-year-old than telling them they’ll look good if they do something - and it’s not a line to say that excellent spelling and grammar make you look good as an adult.) Not surprisingly, there’s a line to get into my classes.
Thanks for your support. God bless you. Got to get back to class prep for the week and grading papers.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.