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The Look-Say method, originally sold as progress, was a huge step backward. It's a very ancient trick for the scribes in a social order to foster illiteracy through advancing idiosyncratic hieroglyphic - essentially a 700 to 7000 letter vocabulary - over the Phoenician alphabet. It keeps the scribes better paid and the ruling class dependent on them. The alphabet was as liberating and revolutionary as the printing press.

Two other developments, now nearly lost in the mists of time, that led to the collapse of genuine literacy by sixty years ago was the universal adoption of the Prussian design for primary and secondary schooling and then the adoption of one flavor of but one philosophy of education with the emotive label "progressive education" as the only legal philosophy of education throughout the U.S.

Both these developments were originally thoroughly alien to American culture and even language. It isn't possible to get a teaching certificate in the U.S. today unless one is willing to sign-off on progressive education as the only possible philosophy of education.

The origins of these adaptations of experimentalism are horrible to contemplate. It was a deliberate attempt to adapt children to assembly line work, the drudgery the elites at one time believed would dominate their near future.

But if you want to deal a death blow to the unholy alliance between the chattering and meddling classes, the education establishment, the mandarin class and its orthodoxy needs to be attacked head on.