Posted on 12/14/2022 3:47:21 PM PST by BruceDeitrickPrice
Episode 76: Dyslexia is a Fancy Word for Sabotage =======================================
Ladies and gentlemen…
1: INTRODUCTION: every year our public schools spend more billions to help children become readers. But nothing works. Scores remain flat. The majority of children do not learn to be good readers Common sense tells you that your school officials do not know what they're doing. Don't let your children be sabotaged. Insist on phonics.
The official story is that a fifth of all children suffer from a brain disorder which they have named dyslexia. In fact, the phonics people say that so-called dyslexia is usually not real, being a side-effect of faulty reading instruction.
2: WHY SO MANY KIDS CAN’T READ: One of the most disturbing books in my local Kroger grocery store is called The Jumbo Book of Sight-Words. It’s big: 432 pages, roughly 8-1/2” by 11”. It’s expensive: about $18. It’s a toxic boondoggle, and a tragic monument to the decline and fall of K-12 education..
In 1955, Rudolf Flesch wrote his famous book attacking sight-words: Why Johnny Can't Read. This was a devastating deconstruction of the most dangerous method used in the public schools.
The US had almost universal literacy by 1920. Public schools introduced sight-words in 1931. Hardly more than 20 years later, the country was plunged into an illiteracy crisis that continues to this day.
3: THE BIG PROBLEM: only children with photographic memory can read with sight-words. The great majority of children can master only a few hundred sight-words. Some of the words can be identified only after a delay of several seconds while they drag the word up from memory). This slow process does not count as genuine reading. Real reading is at least two or three words per second.
Optimistic wisdom on the Internet dictates that fourth graders should know 500 sight-words or even 1000. Two problems. Only a tiny percentage can reach such levels, and even that is a huge struggle. Meanwhile, even by their own projections, most children will still be far from literate. Historically, children in fourth grade could read simple books intended for children. But American students are already moving into the category of functionally illiterate. They cannot read the books written for children to read.
4: PUT YOURSELF IN THE CHILD’S PLACE: you don't know the alphabet. You don't know the sounds of the alphabet. But you're supposed to remember graphic designs such as: their, yellow, pilot, brother, worry, and so on through the vast vocabulary of the English language, thousands and thousands and thousands of so-called sight-words.
English is a phonetic language and must be learned by sounds. But sight-words want you to learn by SHAPES. Truth is, all English words are remarkably similar, lots of little scratchy designs with circles and lines. Reflect for a few minutes on son, bit, lib, jot, lob, rib, lab, but, big, sub: can you memorize these with instant recall? You will surely confuse these with the next 10: joe, web, sit, bug, hat, sob, mob, not, cog, tub. Now consider that upper case and lower case are very different: compare the design details of and / AND. They are so different they seem to be from another language. (Bottom line: for kids learning sight-words, all the small words look pretty much the same. Teachers report third and fourth graders confusing to and the.
5: THE OFFICIAL LIES The sight-word deception, as I call it, depends on thousands of education experts insisting that sight-words are easy to memorize. But if you listen to the teachers discussing the problems they have with their students, you realize it's a nightmare for everyone—parents, teachers, and kids. Have you realized that Fauci and his people exaggerated the danger of Covid and made the disease look worse than it was.. There was definitely some cooking of the books at the very top.
We have the equivalent situation in our schools, where the professors of education somehow manage to find the worst methods.
6. NO DYSLEXIA. In 1981, Flesch published a second book called Why Johnny Still Can't Read. Flesch Interviewed a Manhattan expert on reading problems. This expert insisted that after decades of dealing with many different problems, it was clear to him that only a tiny fraction of people (less than one percent) had genuine inborn dyslexia. All the others were false positives generated by bad instruction. Use phonics and you won't have this problem.
In general, my research suggests that ALL the problems in our public schools are generated by so-called experts who just happen to be socialist ideologues. They won't do what has the best chance of working. No, they insist on using bogus theories and methods. Dishonest and disgusting, don't you think?
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Send this to everyone in the school system. Also send it to parents.
Also see video titled "The strange truth about dyslexia” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeFLLnRWROQ
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Sobatega?
You also are one of the 1%.
Phonics used to be called phonetics.
The whole word movement among educators was driven by the self-avowed Marxist, John Dewey. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dewey
I know a number of children who have dyslexia despite having been taught phonics. It was so severe in Woodrow Wilson (whose predates Dewey) that he had to make up his own code as a workaround.
Dyslexics untie!
Very interesting. Thanks for posting your essay.
Dyslexia is real, but sight-word reading may be skewing the real dyslexic numbers upward because children might not know how to convey that the letters are in the right places but that they simply are having trouble memorizing how the letters are arranged. Sounding out the letters is a tool, but they have no tool to work with.
“In general, my research suggests that ALL the problems in our public schools are generated by so-called experts who just happen to be socialist ideologues. They won’t do what has the best chance of working. No, they insist on using bogus theories and methods. Dishonest and disgusting, don’t you think?”
Totally agree, both on the facts you’ve laid out here, and on your judgment/condemnation. Children have been being brutally sacrificed, physically, intellectually, spiritually, and every other kind of way, in this country, by these kinds of cretins. The job seems sysyphian at this point, but we have to find some way to stop them.
Phonics is a reading system. Phonetics is a pronunciation system, which does not require literacy.
You mean “lysdexics untie!”
No poetry from this bunch.
Ok haven’t fully read it.
But I read Johnny Can’t Read when I was a teen, and I’ve had a few more experiences since then.
I agree phonics MUST be taught. My mom the teacher is adamnant on this.
However, English is weird and LOTS of words are “sight reading”.
In fact, my mom got my son the old Dick &Jane classics. He was about 4. He loved us reading it (reading to him was common since a baby) and the next thing you know, he is reading well himself!
It really was incredible.
We learned to write the letters. Then we learned the sounds of letters. Then we learned how to put the letters together to form words and we learned to read the words by “sounding out” the letters. After enough of that we started practicing to read in class in smaller groups with the teacher using the Tom, Betty and Susan books. We got pretty good at it. In 3rd grade I read Winston Churchill’s My Early Life. By 4th grade most of us could read fairly well.
That's what I used to think.
I read that the American literacy rate - the ability to read and write well - was 98% in 1890.
When we started homeschooling I realized this, since I have a complete collection of bound Harpers magazines from number 1 on the 1840s to 1900, when the magazine began its' slide into liberal trash.
From that magazine and other books and magazines I figured Americans were the most literate in the mid to late 1800s.
Realizing that the influence for this must have come in the early to mid 1800s I began collecting more school books from that era.
The reason for the success appeared quickly.
I was taught to read in a one room school in Vermont before the effects of the invasion by the NY, NJ and CT trust fund hippies detroyed the state.
We were taught by an excellent, old rogue teacher who used the phonics she knew. This consisted of the single letter sounds, dipthongs and tripthongs (2 and three letters sounded together).
She (and I) believed there were a lot of words in english you couldn't read using phonics.
There were two sets of phonics rules that fell by the wayside and have been forgotten since the 1840s to 1850s. Those are the silent letter rules and the substitute letter rules.
By using these rules, our younger daughter, who wasn't infected by the public school system was reading at above second year college level at 3rd grade.
This isn't unusual as once you know the rules and have a 1930s or earlier dictionary, you can read anything.
I've had many discussions with so called teachers who use this ridiculous "whole word" program to "teach" reading.
Except for the few rogue teachers, this is a waste of time.
Most are so completely indoctrinated with the propaganda from the colleges that there is no way they will even consider listening to anything a lay person has to say.
There are two books, by Rudolf Flesch, "Why Johnny Can't Read - and what You Can Do About It" in 1955, and "Why Johnny STILL Can't Read" in 1981 that document and explain the sordid money trail that keeps the farce of the whole word program going.
The Whole Word system has kids memorizing 20,000 words like Chinese characters. They are taught to guess at words they don't know by the surrounding context.
Few people are going to remember 20,000 of anything they try to memorize.
When these crippled students hit math, history and science, there are many words not included in the 20,000.
The ignorant reading teachers scoff at phonics as "rote learning". They just look at you like a deer in the headlights when you ask them, well, which would you rather memorize, 20,000 of ANYTHING or 120? There are roughly 120 phonics rules which enable you to read almost ANY word in the English language.
An older dictionary allows you to comprehend it.
I have the complete set of rules in "cheat sheet" form to print out.
Who wants to bother memorizing even 120 of anything?
You begin to remember the most used rules as you use them. When you hit a word with a seldom used rule, that's why you have a cheat sheet!
Eventually you pretty much forget you are using the rules, it's just automatic.
The speedy "sight reading" just comes naturally as time goes on.
Many people learn enough phonics from different sources such as Montessori, reading the Bible (an older copy), re-incarnation from a soul that was alive in the 1800s or just figure it out on their own. The rest are out of luck.
The inability to read unknown words is what causes many people to have to go to classes to learn just about anything new.
They are unable to read the information they need to figure out things for themselves.
This was particularly obvious when computers were being introduced to our school system.
Almost all the teachers were saying they needed classes on how to operate and use computers.
Several of us asked why they didn't just read the manuals and figure it out like we did?
The response was that they couldn't learn that way. Translation, they were unable to read and comprehend the manuals because there were many words they couldn't read.
If enough folks bypass this mess by homeschooling and properly teaching reading, our country may survive.
If not, watch the movie, "Idiocracy". Don't rent it, buy it, you're going to want to watch it several times to catch all the nuances and to show to others.
If K-12 schooling were open to free-market competition, ( vouchers), do you believe this educational malpractice would continue?
Don't rely on the sad schools to prepare your children for life.
Hmm well I’m old and we used phonetics to read as I recall (back in the early 60s)
Dyslexia is definitely real. I know a few, all avid readers once they learned to deal with it.
Because English is a largely stolen language created by illiterate there’s not really one good way to learn in, because it’s really a loose collection of exceptions. My favorite Gallagher bit is about that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mfz3kFNVopk
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