I have twin girls that are now 34 years old. I had always done well in school and trusted that the public school would do as good a job with educating my children as they had me. I was taught to read phonetically and assumed that my girls were being taught the same way because they brought home worksheets using phonetics concepts, yet they had problems learning to read. I discovered the above book when they were in third grade, as well as the sequel that was written 20 years later Why Johnny STILL Can't Read
I was shocked to find that my girls had no idea that, for ezample, "ph" is pronounced "f" and that they were completely unfamiliar with any of a number of simple rules that I had learned long before I was their age. I realized then what a terrible fraud had been perpetrated on the public school children of America! Phonetics had become passé, boring, and old-fashioned and the new "look and say" method was considered to be far superior. The schools of education and the textbook companies had staked their careers and their fortunes on the success of that flawed method. Even though they knew it was not working, they refused to abandon it. The result was the explosion of dyslexia and remedial reading classes that we have today.
Around that same time, I remember reading an article that was written by a young mother who had always thought she was "dumb" because she had problems with reading. Imagine her surprise when she took a foreign language and learned it with no difficulty because she first learned the sounds the letters made and to read each word from left to right. The "look and say" method teaches a child to "decode" a word any way they can. To be successful, children are required to memorize a large number of words rather than simply how to pronounce the letters as they are. Children "trained" to read using one set of textbooks often had trouble reading if they switched to another publisher's textbooks. Those who had been taught to read phonetically could read The New York Times even though they did not always understand the content.
I could go on and on because I feel so strongly about this issue, but I will get off my soapbox. I will say that, as terrible as this was, what the powers that be in education are doing to try to "brainwash" our children by giving them a distorted view of American history is even worse!
BTTT!