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Rudolf Flesch published “Why Johnny Can’t Read” in 1955. It was a big success and remains one of the best-known books in American history. In that book Flesch explained the illiteracy crisis in the United States. Had the people in charge of education listened, he might have faded into history. Ironically, the fact that our Education Establishment tried to defame and ignore Flesch is precisely why he remains a cultural icon. The anti-phonics cartel was so entrenched that Flesch felt compelled to publish a second book 25 years later, “Why Johnny STILL Can’t Read” in 1981. This second book has...

Think of this as a nice little time capsule from 50+ years ago....A review of "Reading: Chaos and Cure" just placed on Amazon: A wonderful and informative book I can heartily recommend to any parent or teacher. You learn a great deal about reading, for example, why Sight Words are a hoax, why phonics works. The authors state: "It is absurdly easy to teach a child to read with the proper method. Most of the children in America could be taught in a few weeks or months at the age of five. We shall tell you about various schools, now...

At the start of WWII millions of men showed up at registration offices to take low-level academic tests before being inducted.1 The years of maximum mobilization were 1942 to1944; the fighting force had been mostly schooled in the 1930s, both those inducted and those turned away. Of the 18 million men were tested, 17,280,000 of them were judged to have the minimum competence in reading required to be a soldier, a 96 percent literacy rate. Although this was a 2 percent fall-off from the 98 percent rate among voluntary military applicants ten years earlier, the dip was so small it...

The following LETTER is from a 62-year-old grandmother who is now a full-time college student...If you already know the value of phonics, this account could still be passed on to inspire someone else...For those still not clear about phonics versus whole word, this account explains some complex issues in a personal way:---- “I started school in 1953, in the height of the ‘Dick and Jane’ era. I loved books from what my mother tells me, but by the time I was being taught to ‘read,’ it was whole-word and word association (picture has a name). As the books got harder...

Several earlier posts have evolved into “50: Leading Boys To Reading,” a new section on Improve-Education.org. It’s of interest to parents who have a boy in school. There’s a list of books that most boys would like; some simple diagnostics to use when someone is avoiding books; and a column that first appeared on CanadaFreePress titled “Our Schools Are Skilled at Keeping Boys From Reading.” (The Left’s greatest victory may be that they were able to undermine reading so successfully for so many decades. Almost nobody can learn to read using sight-words, but that has been the official technique since...

A teacher in New Jersey sent me a letter which will tell you, in a few minutes, more than you can stand to know about the idiocy loose in the public schools:----- “I am an ESL teacher for 29 years. This school year, I was asked by my principal to ‘push in’ to the classrooms where my students were, instead of pulling them out for regular ESL classes. Although I wasn't very happy about doing this, I learned a lot from this experience... They are teaching reading using the whole language approach. This method was introduced into my school system...

When you make a list of all the stupid ideas enshrined in the public schools, there will be many contenders for Stupidest Idea Of All. It’s tough to pick the absolute worst but let me mention for your consideration the common practice in public schools of teaching children to GUESS what words mean. This is the central gimmick in whole-word or sight-word reading. But here’s the good news. Guessing is a clear signal that a child cannot actually read. It is thus the quickest diagnostic we have. If a child looks at “car” and reads “house,” you see immediately that...

I like it when the New York Times agrees with me. Nicholas Kristof’s recent column “Boys have fallen behind” (April 4) is an exact echo of my column on CanadaFreePress several weeks earlier (March 15). My piece was titled “Our Schools Are Skilled At Making Sure Boys Don’t Read." It’s longer, more aggressive, with more suggestions on how to deal with this very huge problem, namely, that boys don’t read well or they don’t read at all. If boys not reading is an aspect of your life, please see this article. [Link at end.] Now I want to mention the...

In a surprising, yet reassuring turn of events, Pope Benedict XIV, the head of the Catholic Church has announced that he is willing to excommunicate any and all Catholic Priests who have been rightfully accused of pedophilia while in service to the Catholic Church. "It is my sworn duty to uphold the tenants of the faith which rest securely on the never changing, holy scripture, which speaks succinctly, yet passionately, against sexual sin within the body of Christ." Pope Benedict wrote in a letter addressed to "Fellow Catholics, Christians, and citizens of this great planet." ...

"Last week I posted background on FreeRepublic about a column published months earlier titled “Education as Neurotoxin.” This column tries to explain why the US has 50 million functional illiterates and 1 million dyslexics. Were these people born this way? Or had bad education methods caused the impairments? (In which case, our enemies never needed to put fluoride, etc., in the water as our public schools were already harming the nation’s intelligence.) Someone left a half-dozen bitter comments insisting I was “delusional,” “illogical,” “irrational,” “nonsensical,” etc. I’m not sure which part offended him most, that sight-words cause mental problems; or...

Boys and Reading: Not to worry. Our top educators have pretty well got this thing figured out. It’s a two-punch combination, researched-based, that almost always works. Bingo, you don’t find American boys wasting precious time inside the pages of a book. First of all, you want to make sure they don’t hear much about the alphabet (shhh!), letters, sounds all that right-wing nonsense. They have to learn to read with sight-words, Dolch words, whole words (all the same thing). And you want a whole lot of hoopla, thousands of brightly colored books lying around, and constant chatter about literacy and...

Why do we have so many problems in the public schools? I’m always trying to boil the answer down to the essentials. This try is less than 600 words. Here's how it starts: ---------- "Simply judging by appearances, you might suspect that the American Education Establishment is hostile to Knowledge, Kids and the USA. When you look closer, you are sure. What do Knowledge, Kids, and the USA have in common? Here’s the common denominator: the (American) Education Establishment is contemptuous of all three. Do you think I jest or exaggerate? Not at all. The truth is straightforward, and easy...

Oh this truly is sad. Image at link.

To save the country and the economy, we first have to save the schools. To do that, we first have to save reading.

Donna M. Beegle, PhD, is spending her career explaining to audiences that there is poverty in America, that the solution to poverty is education, and that too often poverty prevents people from getting educated. A few weeks ago I heard Beegle speak at the high school where I work. While the impact of most motivational speakers lasts only a few days, this one was different. You can get an idea of her qualities as a speaker from excerpts available on YouTube, and from a trailer for "Invisible Nation," a one-hour documentary about Beegle and her family that is in the...

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis student Keith Sampson was charged with “racial harassment” when he was spotted reading Todd Tucker’s “Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan” while on break from his job as a janitor. The charge, since dropped after being widely criticized as “idiotic,” was filed by Affirmative Action Office of the university. The affirmative-action officer, who asked that her name be withheld, explained her action. “The fact that the book may have been anti-racist is not the point,” She said. “The fact that he was reading in itself is what is...

One in four Britons don't believe wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill existed, according to a recent survey. Churchill is compared to Florence Nightingale and Sir Walter Raleigh, seen by many survey respondents as a mythical person, the London Daily Mail reported Monday. The survey, conducted with 3,000 respondents to test their general knowledge, reported other historical figures such as Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi, Cleopatra and the Duke of Wellington were made up for books and films, the Mail reported. The survey, by UKTV Gold, also found that Sherlock Holmes was a real person.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison did relatively well in a 50-college test of how much students learned about history and economics during four years of college, but students in Wisconsin and nationally knew little when they came in and not much more when they left. No college did better than a D-plus on the Civic Literacy Test released Tuesday by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a nonpartisan conservative educational organization that stresses the values of a free society. The national average was F.The test of 14,000 randomly selected students revealed that some of the most expensive Ivy League universities, with the highest-paid...

An official state inspection of Arizona public schools reveals that many students are being taught English by Spanish-speaking teachers whose command of English is so poor that the officials can barely understand them. The recent inspection revealed teachers providing instruction in Spanish instead of the legally required English, students unable to answer questions in English, and teachers' instructions such as "Sometimes, you are not gonna know some." The results of the inspections were reported by the Arizona Republic, which concluded hundreds of students in the state are trying to learn English from teachers who don't know the language. The inspections...

FORT WORTH — Students who had been planning to walk across the stage at graduation ceremonies this weekend were instead walking a picket line Thursday morning. The Trimble Tech High School seniors marched in front of Fort Worth Independent School District headquarters to protest Wednesday's decision by trustees to bar students who failed the TAKS test from commencement exercises. About a dozen young people, carrying signs and chanting, began picketing at 8:30 a.m. Thursday. They represent the 613 Fort Worth seniors who did not pass the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills exam