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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...

Emily Hanford became famous over the last several years for talking constantly about the Science of Reading. That's where children learn to read in the simplest, most efficient way and go on to enjoy many hundreds of books. Long story short, what she means by the Science of Reading is phonics — nothing less, nothing else. The problem is that the left in our country forced phonics into oblivion starting in 1931. So what was going on for those 90 years from 1931 to now? A titanic and quite stupid con, that's what. Basically, the professors of education at Harvard...

Why would a country undermine phonics? One of the most startling queries I ever received came from a teacher in Israel. Here is the entire communication: I watched some of your youtube videos with thirst and feel the frustration that I feel when I tutor private elementary students, who come without any clue as to how to read English, as if for 5-6 years all they had done was filling workbooks and learning word lists. Older students keep telling me their teachers insist on guessing from texts and looking for clues when words are unknown, and they fear to use...

Cursive has been controversial for years. The striking thing is that the Education Establishment feels really, really strongly about cursive. They hate it! But why are they so emotional? One professor of education stated emphatically: "Teaching cursive handwriting is an outdated waste of time." A second professor of education, quoted in the New York Times, was equally dogmatic: "Districts and states should not mandate the teaching of cursive. Cursive should be allowed to die." You are hearing the imperious voice of an impatient Education Establishment. They do not want to discuss pros and cons. They want to have a funeral...

Important Ed News /// Phonics is winning, finally, at long last, after 85 stupid years, after 50 million functional illiterates, after one of the most stubborn subversive schemes against common sense ever to brutalize a country. Finally, the one correct way to teach reading is again embraced as the one correct way to teach reading. Go ahead, shout "OMG." The fix has been in for so many dumbed down decades that many people may have given up hope. You may think this is now crazy optimism on my part. But I will show you some signs that things have suddenly...

(More about reading): The biggest promises in K-12 involve reading and sight-words. Children are told: Learn your sight-words and you will be good readers! There is a strange tautology in sight-word instruction. When you learn to be a successful reader, you will be a successful reader. That's the weird boilerplate found throughout K-12. Suppose you tell a bunch of six-year-olds that tight-rope walking is easy. Put one foot in front of the other; don’t look down; smile confidently and walk. Children, you stress, cannot enjoy fun on the high wire until they have learned to walk comfortably on the high...

[TEACH A CHILD TO READ THIS SUMMER. MORE INFO.] No less an authority than Robert Sweet, President of the National Right to Read Foundation (NRRF), said there are a dozen good phonics programs and which one doesn’t matter that much. This answer is reassuring; it furthers my resolve not to pretend I know which one is best. My goal is to make sure everyone understands why phonics is superior, and that phonics offers a lot of variety and creativity. Search Google or YouTube, you’ll find there is a mountain of good phonics material. One popular homeschooling site lists more than...

Subtitle: Fix reading and half of our education problems disappear--It's a common problem in the US. Children in the second and third grades, even the fourth and fifth grades, are struggling readers. They guess; they skip ahead; they search for clues from context; they look at pictures to read words. Did I mention they guess? Typically, these children are unsuccessful in most school subjects and very unhappy. The school may think this slow progress is fine. But perhaps you as a parent know younger children who've already learned to read. You worry that your child Is falling behind. You are...

“There is one question I'd really love to ask (One Heart!): Is there a place for the hopeless sinner, Who has hurt all mankind just to save his own beliefs? Bob Marley The people in charge of literacy in most English-speaking countries are literacy’s worst enemies. This counterintuitive turn-about has to be one of the planet’s more bizarre stories. The official experts praise a method, often called Whole Language, that doesn’t work. They insist that young teachers use this useless method. The teachers in turn force their students to embrace the method, and they make the parents tolerate the method....

(Speech delivered by the writer to Pensare Oltre in Milan on Oct, 21, Details at end.) The Education Establishment promises to teach X, Y, and Z but, clearly to everyone, the children don’t learn much X, Y, and Z. The goal is to give the appearance of education, the illusion. Wheels turn, motors hum, children lurch about with 60 pounds of books on their backs. But finally it seems to be make-believe. If we count up all the knowledge and facts that children learn, schools are doing a poor job. I have to interject something here. Looking at my notes...

Parents with children in elementary school should take a look at this short video. At this moment, tens of thousands of public schools are making millions of little children memorize sight-words. This malpractice will retard their education and cripple their reading ability. This four-minute video explains why. Sight-words are, of course, the problem that Rudolf Flesch wrote about in 1955 in his famous book "Why Johnny can't read." Our Education Establishment is relentless in pretending that phonics is no good and must be replaced by various "modern" methods. These methods had many names over the last 80+ years. But it...

Welcome to the land of the giant hustle... I saw my first exhibition of three-card Monte on Manhattan's Upper West Side, a dozen blocks from Columbia's Teachers College. There's a connection. A young man shuffled three cards side to side on a cardboard box. Red queen, red king, black ace, something like that. Pick the ace and win $20 for a $10 bet. A half-dozen people clustered around, betting, figuring out the game. New people walked up, others left. Some happy tourist won $20. Easy money. Sometimes the dealer bent one of the cards on the corner. You knew you...

We must eliminate sight-words from the public schools. That's the only way to save reading, and the only way we're going to save the schools themselves. The Education Establishment is great at creating jargon, convoluted theories, propaganda, lies, fake research, and new packaging for failed ideas. Average parents don't stand a chance of understanding all this nonsense. So here is a little video, 7 1/2 minutes, that explains almost everything you need to know about phonics, sight words, Dolch words, high frequency words, dyslexia, and how they are all connected. There is some very intense music which I still love;...

Quora, a discussion forum, posed the question: what are the biggest scams/cons in modern history? Dozens of smart, entertaining answers have been left: sale of the Eiffel Tower, bottled water, Scientology, military deceptions, Madoff, the diamond engagement ring, etc. One respondent says the central banking system is a huge con, which may be true. Trouble is, financial matters are very difficult so the con may not be obvious even after the matter is explained. So that leaves one clear winner. The biggest con is making 50 million Americans totally or partially illiterate by using a method known not to work....

If you want to create an illiteracy crisis such as the one we are living through, you have to do two things. First of all, adopt ideas that do not work. Second, you have to brainwash young teachers into thinking these flawed ideas actually do work. In this way, you can manipulate your teachers into doing a bad job but they never know it. A public school teacher sent me this brief history of her decades in the classroom: "I began to notice students in the intermediate grades intermixing sight words. They would read words like ‘is’ as ‘the’…If I...

If you want to create an illiteracy crisis such as the one we are living through, you have to do two things. First of all, adopt ideas that do not work. Second, you have to brainwash young teachers into thinking these ideas actually do work. In this way, you can manipulate your teachers into doing a bad job but they never know it. They remain gung-ho on the side of illiteracy. A public school teacher sent me this brief history of her decades in the classroom: 'I began to notice students in the intermediate grades intermixing sight words. They would...

Private school kids can read. Classical academy kids can read. Montessori school kids can read. Homeschooled kids can read. Spot the pattern? It’s only kids in public schools who can’t read. Why is that? You would think our education professors would figure out what the schools are doing wrong. In fact, they have not figured out very much in the last 80 years. Our professors seem mainly concerned with perpetuating the wrong ways to teach reading. And so the crisis continues. Truth is, reading is easy to teach and easy to learn. All the phonics experts agree: reading is no...

This short graphic video explains why phonics is what matters, and almost everything else they add in the public schools is a waste of time. When possible, the Education Establishment will banish phonics on the grounds that it is irrelevant and doesn't work. But even when they admit some phonics into the schools, these malevolent ideologues will try to encumber the whole learning process to such a degree that children learn at half-speed, if they learn at all. All the phonics experts say they can teach almost all children to read in the first grade. That should be the gold...

When states are ranked for their intelligence or lack of it, Georgia usually ends up in the bottom 10. What is the Peach State doing wrong? A lot. We are confronted here by a confusing swirl of lies and scandals, so let’s start with a quick summary. Georgia officials insist on using the worst theories and methods. Predictably their schools get bad results. To cover up the embarrassing results (of course, the officials would not think of adopting better methods), the schools create elaborate cheating mechanisms. This works until the truth leaks out. Scandal ensues. Cheating scandals occur throughout the...

A funny thing happened in school today. Not funny ha-ha but funny as in bizarre and unexpected. Funny as in funny money. And not just today. Yesterday. Tomorrow. Every day. Every time a school teaches reading in a way that doesn't work. That's funny, right? You teach reading but somehow nobody learns to read? How funny can you get? And not just in any one school. No, this epic lack of progress is happening everywhere. Point to a school and you're probably looking at a dead zone literacy-wise. That's funny, right? A school's first job is to teach kids to...